Terence Darrell Kelly, 37, the man who abducted four-year-old Cleo Smith from her family’s tent at a remote Western Australian campsite, has been sentenced to 13 years and six months in jail.
Kelly pleaded guilty in January 2022 to the single charge of abducting Cleo, and will have to spend at least 11 years and six months in prison before he is eligible for parole.
The extensive 18-day search for missing Cleo captured global headlines in October 2021 after the girl vanished in the dead of night from a tent shared by her parents and younger sister at the Blowholes campground.
The chief judge of the WA district court, Julie Wager, told a court in Perth on Wednesday that Kelly has a severe and complex personality disorder and had injected methylamphetamine on the night he stole the child.
The court heard that during the weeks Cleo was held captive at Kelly’s state housing duplex in Carnarvon, she was locked in a room that had a mattress on the floor.
After his arrest, Kelly said in his police interview that Cleo had cried when left alone and he had “roughed her up a few times” and smacked her for being bossy and asking for chocolate, but that he had not wanted to hurt her badly.
Kelly also told police that he had tried to tie up Cleo’s hands, feet and mouth using sticky tape and tried to tie her to a chair, but both failed because “she was a bit of a fighter”.
The court heard on Wednesday that Kelly burned the onesie, underwear and sleeping bag that she was taken in.
Kelly befriended Cleo’s mother Ellie Smith on Facebook after taking the girl.
Smith woke at 6am to find the tent zipper opened until 30cm from the top – higher than the four-year-old could reach – and Cleo and her red sleeping bag missing from the Blowholes campground, 10 hours’ drive north of Perth.
Within hours, police launched one of WA’s biggest search operations, scouring inhospitable terrain, rugged cliffs and rough ocean.
Thousands of missing child posters were plastered across WA, the state government offered a $1m reward and Cleo’s mother and stepfather Jake Gliddon made an emotional television plea for their daughter to be returned.
About 1am on Wednesday 3 November 2021, police stormed Kelly’s locked housing commission duplex in nearby Carnarvon and found the girl playing with toy cars alone in a bedroom.
She was being held just a few kilometres from her family home, about an hour south of the wilderness campsite where she was kidnapped.
The judge described how Cleo would be permanently affected by the abduction, which ripped her family apart.
“The fear and distress caused to them [Cleo’s parents] over those 18 days was immeasurable,” Wager said.
“The child’s life and that of her family has been permanently impacted, and that impact will never go away.
“Her parents were sad, scared and confused. They described being too fearful to sleep, watching the same space at the blowholes each day while feeling completely empty and broken.”
During sentencing, the judge acknowledged Kelly’s turbulent upbringing, his prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol and a life surrounded by violence as contributing to his offending.
Kelly was removed from his drug-addicted mother at age two and placed with his maternal aunty Penny Walker, who was like a grandmother.
Walker told community workers that there was alcohol found in Kelly’s baby bottle when he came to her.
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The court heard that Kelly is emotionally unstable and delusional, and living in a fantasy world to escape the isolation, depression and complex post-traumatic stress disorder he suffers from extreme childhood neglect.
“No child in Western Australia should have suffered the neurodevelopmental difficulties, the trauma, the grief and the neglect that you suffered as a child and as a young person,” Wager said.
“Sadly, in Western Australia, many Aboriginal people have suffered the adverse impacts of colonisation. I fully accept that you’re one of them and I accept that you’ve turned to drug misuse because of the pain and trauma that you’ve suffered throughout your life.”
The significant interest that Kelly had with Bratz dolls was “consistent with his fantasy family life”, the court heard.
Images posted to social media show Kelly had devoted a room in his house to dozens of dolls, many still in their original packaging.
Kelly told police after arrest that he knew it was wrong to take the child, but that he wanted to hold onto her.
A psychologist report said that Kelly felt euphoria for fulfilling his idealised fantasy of having a little girl he could dress up, play and be with.
“I wasn’t planning to keep her forever, you know. Like, I was getting guilty every day, and it was just more weight on my shoulders,” Kelly told police.
Kelly has been held at a Casuarina maximum security prison in Perth for nearly 18 months. The sentence will be backdated to take this time served into account.
Wager said that Kelly’s had received a 25%, or five-year, sentence reduction from the maximum 20-year penalty for child stealing because of his early guilty plea, which averted a lengthy trial and the family having to relive the ordeal.
Kelly will be kept in a special part of the jail, where at-risk offenders and former police officers are housed for their own protection.
Police commissioner Col Blanch said the girl’s rescue was “the greatest moment of WA police history”.
In the victim impact statement to the court, Cleo’s parents pleaded for privacy and space “for an opportunity for their little girl to do whatever it takes to be able to lead her best life in the future”.
