Fresh details have emerged about how close Terence Darrell Kelly, the abductor of Cleo Smith, came to slipping through the net.
A single ping to a phone tower, that was only built in 2018, led detectives to him 18 days after the four-year-old was snatched from the family tent at the Quobba Blowholes campsite on Western Australia’s midwest coast, in October 2021.
Kelly, 37, was sentenced in April to 13 years and six months in jail.
But Cleo’s parents have revealed the lingering effects the ordeal had on their family.
“She still has her sad nights, her nightmare nights ... [it is] something she just can’t explain,” Cleo’s mother Ellie Smith told Channel Nine in an interview broadcast on Sunday night.
“She doesn’t have the words to explain what she’s sad about, she just knows that’s how she feels, so they’re just sad nights. Her nightmare nights are the worst nights.”
Smith said Kelly’s motives for stealing Cleo were “disgusting” – a psychologist report had said Kelly felt euphoria for fulfilling his idealised fantasy of having a little girl he could dress up, play and be with.
Eighteen months on, Smith says Cleo still suffers weekly with nightmares and that Ellie and stepdad Jake Gliddon feel an anger towards Kelly that will never go away.
But Cleo may never have returned had it not been for that solitary ping to the mobile phone tower at 3.05am on 16 October 2021.
The WA police minister, Paul Papalia, said it was “striking” how crucial that one tower was in solving the case.
“This tower was the site that recorded thousands of phones, hundreds of thousands of data sets and in that captured one bit of information that led to the investigation of Kelly, as the suspect,” Papalia said.
While there were other suspects, Papalia said Kelly’s name quickly rose to the top of the list and within hours of him being identified as the prime suspect, detectives pounced.
At 11.24pm on 3 November 2021, police pulled Kelly over as he drove his car not far from where Cleo was being held captive.
They pinned him down and arrested him before rescuing Cleo from a nondescript community housing duplex in Carnarvon – 75km south of the Blowholes campsite.
Papalia said the arrest was planned to happen the next day. “But it was brought forward because of the erratic nature of his [Kelly’s] behaviour. He was driving erratically.”
Police did not know when they arrested Kelly where Cleo was, or if she was dead or alive.
Last week, Kelly appealed against the 13 year and six month jail sentence that state district court judge Julie Wager had handed down about a month earlier, on 5 April.
The disturbing facts of Cleo’s 18-day ordeal were revealed during the April sentencing, alongside the details of Kelly’s deprived childhood and methamphetamine addiction.
Kelly went to the campsite high on drugs to steal handbags, but after finding a sleeping child, made off with her instead, the court heard.
He turned his phone off and took a dirt track back to his Carnarvon home. It was just 3km from Cleo’s family home. Crucially, he turned the phone back on again as he journeyed home.
Ellie says it pained and angered her to hear in court that Cleo had been roughed up, tied to a chair with sticky tape and was crying out for help, while she couldn’t be with her daughter.
“Obviously, we’re still sad, hurt, scared, angry, terrified, but we, we try not to let it rule our life,” Smith says.
“So, it is hard talking about him and what happened because we don’t want that to be our sole purpose of our emotions.”
Since the ordeal, the family have spent part of the $2m they reportedly received in exchange for interviews with Channel Nine on a four-month road trip in Australia.
The Smiths have moved away from their hometown of Carnarvon, where Kelly was also brought up, and say their focus now is on family – not what happened.
“She loves her school, she loves ballet, she’s just starting tap and she wants to do horse riding,” Smith says about Cleo now. “She’s five and she’s such a vibrant little soul.”
