The man who abducted a four-year-old from her family’s tent at a remote Western Australian campsite has been sentenced to 13 years and six months in jail.
Terence Darrell Kelly, 37, was found to have a severe and complex personality disorder and had injected methylamphetamine on the night he stole four-year-old Cleo Smith.
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.
When Cleo's parents woke the morning at Quobba Blow Holes campsite, they discovered their daughter was missing, along with her sleeping bag.
The zip on the tent was also wide open.
Horrifying detail from the court heard how Cleo noticed her name mentioned on the radio and said to Kelly: "They're saying my name".
Kelly said he had tried to tie up Cleo first with sticky tape, but that did not work so he tried to tie her to a chair, but he said: "She was a bit of a fighter."
The young girl was held captive at Kelly’s state housing duplex 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 severely hurt her.
Western Australia District Court Chief Judge Julie Wager described Kelly's actions as being "at the highest level of seriousness".
She said Cleo and her family's life had been "permanently impacted" - something she said would never go away.
"This isn't a case of luring a child away, that would be serious enough, but the taking of a little four-year-old girl from the zipped-up family tent in the middle of the night when her parents assumed she was safe is even more concerning," Judge Wager told the 37-year-old.
At about 1am on Wednesday, November 3, 2021, police stormed Kelly’s locked apartment 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 added that the time Cleo was held captive must have been extremely distressing for her as a young child.
"Being separated without any explanation is distressing for a four-year-old child," Judge Wager said.
"But 18 days without contact or explanation, and with hours totally on her own and no access to the outside world would have been very traumatic.
"In the world of a four-year-old, a day is a long time … [and] 18 days is a very, very, very long time indeed."
The court heard Kelly had created what the chief judge described as an "idealised fantasy world" which protected him from the "depressing" real world.
His fantasy world included his liking of Bratz dolls, and that he had a number of imaginary children he had created social media pages for.
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.
She said: “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.
“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.”
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.
