When Terence Darrell Kelly went to the remote Western Australian Blowholes campsite in the middle of the night, he was looking to steal a handbag. But he ended up taking a child.
The crime was as audacious as it was opportunistic.
Emboldened by the methamphetamine in his veins and masked by the din of crashing waves and clanging metal shacks, Kelly unzipped the front of a family tent some time between 2.40am and 4.40am on 16 October 2021. He scooped up four-year-old Cleo Smith, sleeping bag and all, and vanished into the night.
It wasn’t until mum Ellie Smith woke at 6am that the horror set in – the tent was wide open and her daughter was missing.
Within hours, one of the nation’s biggest ever search operations had begun from a remote campsite on the state’s midwest coast, about 10 hours’ drive north of Perth.
Horses, helicopters and drones were deployed while an army of police and rescue personnel spent days and nights scouring inhospitable terrain.
Behind the scenes were teams of detectives searching through phone, satellite and CCTV data.
But it would be 18 days before Cleo would see her family again.
At Kelly’s sentencing on Wednesday, a Perth court heard, for the first time, the extraordinary details of Cleo’s abduction and laid bare the dysfunctional life of her kidnapper.
‘Never heard of a case quite like it’
Most child abductions, especially ones perpetrated by a stranger, don’t end like this one.
As time ticked on, hope was fading that Cleo would be found alive. Abduction experts say that typically, children taken by strangers are killed within days, if not hours.
But Cleo was found looking healthy, in a house filled with dolls and not far from her own home in Carnarvon.
“I was frankly astonished. It is an outlier in my experience – I’ve never heard of a case quite like it,” University of Newcastle criminologist and associate professor Xanthe Mallett says.
Three-quarters of child abductions are carried out by family members. When an opportunistic stranger takes a child, the perpetrator wants to quickly dispose of the evidence, Mallett says.
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Criminologists tend to refer to unique or surprising cases that don’t fit the mould as “black swan events”. Such events, while rare, also come with huge consequences for those affected – in this case, the Smith family.
“As a parent you want to make sure that they stay as a child for as long as they can,” Ellie Smith told Channel Nine in the aftermath of Cleo’s ordeal. “She lost that; that was taken from her.”
“The first week [after she returned home] it was probably the worst. We had to have all the doors open and all the lights on just for her to go to sleep, and even then, she would wake up screaming.
“Nightmare after nightmare, after being through the nightmare.”
The court heard that for nearly three weeks, Cleo was held captive at Kelly’s nondescript state housing duplex.
Locked in a room with a mattress on the floor, her captor would turn the bathroom radio on loudly to drown out her cries.
Despite her young age, Kelly left Cleo alone in the house for hours. He took part in meetings, went shopping, attended arts and crafts activities, and visited relatives.
When he was home, Kelly said during his police interview that there were times when he smacked Cleo or “roughed her up” for being “bossy” and asking for chocolate – but that he had not wanted to hurt her badly. During interrogation, Kelly told police that he tried to restrain Cleo’s hands, feet and mouth with sticky tape and to tie her to a chair. He said his attempts failed because “she was a bit of a fighter”.
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On social media, while Ellie Smith made anguished calls for her daughter’s safe return, Kelly cruelly befriended the frantic mother on the same platform.
“The fear and distress caused to them [Cleo’s parents] over those 18 days was immeasurable,” WA district court chief judge, Julie Wager, said during sentencing.
“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. They stayed at the place that caused them so much pain, hoping their little girl would be located,” Wager said.
A childhood cataloguing disadvantage
Born on red-earth Ngarluma country in the Pilbara town of Wickham, Kelly is a Yamatji man who grew up in WA’s midwest.
He will now spend at least the next 11 years and six months isolated in Perth’s maximum-security Casuarina prison, before becoming eligible for parole.
His sentence is well short of the maximum 20-year penalty for child abduction in WA.
Kelly’s early guilty plea, coupled with his own traumatic upbringing, were factored into his 13-year, six-month jail sentence, which includes the time he has already served.
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“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.”
WA has the nation’s highest rate of Indigenous incarceration, at 3,662 people per 100,000, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
The numbers are equally disturbing for Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander youth, with the national detention rate 22 times higher than among the non-Indigenous population and suicide rates twice as high. A 2018 study found almost every child in detention was “severely” impaired in brain function.
If these statistics are not stark enough, the details of Kelly’s own upbringing make for harrowing reading.
At two years old, Kelly was abandoned by his alcoholic, drug-addicted parents and handed to his maternal aunt Penny Walker, the court heard this week.
Child Protection reports reveal Kelly had speech and hearing issues and was given alcohol in his baby bottles before being placed in Walker’s care.
Despite the social isolation caused by hearing loss, Kelly refused to wear hearing aids because the other kids would bully him.
He grew up surrounded by violence and trauma and feared his uncles. By 12, Kelly was bedwetting, suicidal and hospitalised. He was expelled from high school for disruptive behaviour and beaten by his father when he returned briefly to live with him.
Now 37, Kelly’s psychiatric report reads like a catalogue of social disadvantage. He is a paranoid schizoid with “significant” borderline and narcissistic traits, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and possibly foetal alcohol syndrome.
Mallett says locking up people with foetal alcohol syndrome disorders further disadvantages them because they struggle to manage their emotions or behaviour.
“People with FASD don’t necessarily understand the processes of what’s happening, they don’t understand the consequences of their actions.”
But while the judge said in sentencing that she accepted that Kelly wanted a real child of his own, she believes it was drugs – not delusion – that caused him to steal one.
“But for the use of illicit drugs impacting on your complex personality dysfunction and neurodevelopment issues, you would have been far less likely to have ever stolen a child,” Wager said.
Coastal playground
Carnarvon is a coastal community that is home to 5,500 people at the mouth of the Gascoyne River, and the Blowholes campsite is its seaside playground.
Cleo’s mother and stepfather Jake Gliddon both spent their childhoods swimming in the fish-filled lagoon there.
At 7pm on 15 October 2021 and with their young family and a new tent in tow, they set up camp, had dinner and headed to bed.
Now, they say they could never return to the spot.
Instead of happy memories, a stranger’s DNA and footprint were left behind in the tent.
It was another piece in a kidnapping puzzle that was eventually solved when overlapping pieces of data revealed their suspect’s location.
At 11.24pm on 3 November 2021, nearly three weeks after Kelly’s car was heard screeching away from the Blowholes, police found their man.
Less than two hours later, detectives would storm Kelly’s home to rescue Cleo, finding her alone and locked in a room, playing with a toy car.
That moment – and her first words to detectives, “My name is Cleo” – was captured on video by police and went viral around the globe.
A psychologist report read out in court this week said that Kelly felt euphoria when he took Cleo because he could fulfil his fantasy of having a little girl to dress up and play with.
One and a half years on, that little girl is back playing where she should be, and her parents are now making a different plea.
In a victim impact statement provided to the court, Smith and Gliddon said they want privacy, space, and “an opportunity for their little girl to do whatever it takes to be able to lead her best life in the future”.
