A man who kidnapped a four-year-old daughter from a camping in Western Australia will serve 13 years in prison.
In the past, 37-year-old Terence Kelly has acknowledged stealing Cleo Smith from her family’s tent in October 2021.
She was located 18 days after going missing, not far from where she went missing, in a house by herself in Carnavon.
After getting a tip from worried neighbors, police forced their way inside the locked house.
Cleo was later reunited with her family and her mother, Ellie, said ‘our family is whole again’.
Kelly pleaded guilty to the abduction during a brief court appearance in Carnarvon last year.
This week, a court was told how he took Cleo ‘in relative silence’ between 2.40am and 4.40am on October 16, 2021, from her family’s tent.
He then kept the young girl at his house in a room modified to be locked from the outside.
Cleo would routinely plead for her mother, but Kelly simply turned up the radio to drown her out.
Kelly will serve more than 11 years behind bars before being eligible for parole.
The BBC reports he felt guilty for taking Cleo, and had not been planning to keep her.
He suffers from a neurological impairment, the court heard, and was exposed to severe trauma as a child.
Kelly’s father was ‘violent and abusive’ while his mother ‘drank heavily and used cannabis’.
As a result, he was said to have created a ‘fantasy world’ to protect himself from reality.
WAtoday reports that Kelly had told police he had a number of children.
Chief Judge Julie Wager told the court: ‘These family members are, I find, fictitious.
‘However, they are very real members of your family to you. You’d opened Facebook pages for your fantasy children and communicated with them.
‘You also had a significant interest in Bratz dolls and owned many of them, and this hobby is consistent with your fantasy family life.’
Kell had wanted to dress Cleo up and play with her, believing he was a father, the court was told.
Chief Judge Wager added: ‘I also fully accept your background of deprivation.
‘You’re not to be punished for it. 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.’
Speaking last year, Cleo’s mum Ellie said her daughter woke up screaming during her first days back at home and needs all the lights on in the house to fall asleep.
When asked if Cleo remembered the horrific experience, the mother said she recalled ‘why she was taken’.
‘She tells us that she was taken because her baby sister was sick’, she told 60 Minutes.
‘And so she needed to be taken away from us so that we could help her baby sister. She just knows a reason as to what he’s told her.’
Cleo was ‘found with cut and dyed hair’ playing with toy cars in Kelly’s house, which was packed out with Bratz dolls.