The exhausted police officers, detectives and data analysts had earned their pints. After a gruelling investigation they had done what many experts no longer believed was possible: they had found Cleo Smith, the four-year-old girl who had vanished from a remote campsite in Western Australia 18 days earlier.
Reports of her dramatic rescue and the confirmation of the arrest of a suspected kidnapper were already spreading joy around the world. The 50 members of the task force decided to celebrate with a drink; they walked into a pub and locals stood up to applaud them.
It was a rare expression of communal support for the police in a town scarred by tensions between white Australians and a closeknit Aboriginal community.
“Police get a lot of abuse around here,” said Phillip Braun, who runs the Mar e Sol café bistro in Carnarvon, a town of 4,000 residents a ten-hour drive from Perth. “There are a lot of burglaries, often by juveniles, who can’t go to prison.”
Braun added: “Some people complain the police don’t do anything, but now people are going up to officers and thanking them. Finding Cleo alive has been such a relief.”
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Right up to the moment early on Wednesday when police radios crackled with the thrilling message from a dilapidated council house on the northern edge of town — “We’ve got her! We’ve got her!” — the authorities had been braced for the worst.
“We didn’t know what we were going into,” explained Detective Senior Constable Kurt Ford, one of the first policemen to go into the house.
Ellie Smith, Cleo’s mother, and Jake Gliddon, her stepfather, were not told about the final stages of the rescue operation for fear of raising expectations that could so easily have ended in grief. For days criminal psychologists had warned that children taken by strangers were typically killed within the first three hours of abduction. One of them publicly predicted that there was “one in a gazillion chance” of finding Cleo alive.
Then, suddenly, the ordeal was over, in the most unexpected manner. Police broke down the door of the house shortly before 1am and found Cleo playing happily with dolls. She appeared physically unscathed and the whole of Australia rejoiced.
“The police have performed magnificently,” said Paul Papalia, the Western Australia police minister. “They were beautifully tender with [Cleo], wonderful servants of the public, and we should all be proud of them”.
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Yet as the week wore on, some of the festering hostility returned. An Aboriginal man named as Terence Kelly, 36, was charged with Cleo’s abduction. Fears of racist reprisals prompted the deployment of police reinforcements to Carnarvon, which a century ago was involved in the forced removal of hundreds of Aboriginal people from the mainland to effective exile on nearby islands.
The investigation had begun last month with a chilling echo of one of Australia’s most notorious child abduction cases. Cleo was seized from her family’s tent in the early hours of October 16 at the Blowholes campsite, on a barren stretch of the coast 50 miles from Carnarvon.
In the subsequent rush to judgment, the lessons of the “dingo baby” incident that shocked the world in 1980 were ignored. In that case Azaria Chamberlain, a nine-week-old baby, went missing from her family tent at Uluru/Ayers Rock and her mother, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton, was jailed for murder despite her claim that a dingo had carried off her child.
When human bones were found in a dingo lair three years later, the conviction was quashed and a 2012 inquest concluded that Lindy’s much-mocked cry — “a dingo ate my baby” — was exactly what had happened. Forty years on, Smith and Gliddon suffered a similar wave of suspicion, this time magnified by social media. Trolls and amateur sleuths came out in force, claiming to have noticed discrepancies in their accounts of Cleo’s disappearance.
Police insisted that Cleo’s mother and stepfather were not suspects, but the poisonous suppositions continued.
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Mark McGowan, premier of Western Australia, lamented: “I just don’t get why some people when they get a keyboard say the most horrible and shocking things that they would never say otherwise.”
When Kelly was arrested and Cleo was found unharmed, Ben Harvey, a local journalist, issued an embarrassed apology: “A few of us would be feeling a little sheepish, I think. Didn’t we rush out too quickly to point the finger at the parents? We all quietly thought it at some point.”
Blaming the parents whatever the evidence seems to be a global phenomenon, as Kate and Gerry McCann, the parents of Madeleine, who went missing on holiday in Portugal in 2007, might testify.
The truth of the Cleo case, Papalia noted, was that “hard police grind” led officers to the suspect’s door. Local reports said that phone data had allegedly placed Kelly at the campsite at the time of the abduction.
“I just saw a little girl sitting there and didn’t think about anything else than picking her up,” said Ford, who broke into Kelly’s house with three colleagues. Ford had to ask three times for the girl’s name before she replied, simply but unforgettably: “My name is Cleo.” To which Ford replied: “You’re all right, bubby.”
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“If you feel the need to thank God today, thank God for the Western Australia police force,” Papalia said. Soon McGowan was joking about which Hollywood stars might be in the film about the rescue.The politicians had reason to be both proud and relieved but the hard part may only be beginning for prosecutors as they try to build a case against Kelly.
Scrutiny of social media accounts that he allegedly used suggested he was a collector of Bratz dolls, an American brand popular with fashion-conscious girls.
The shelves of his home are said to be lined with hundreds of the dolls, many still in their packaging. He apparently opened social media accounts in fake names and is alleged to have written: “I love taking my dolls for drive arounds and doing their hair and taking selfies.”
Kelly’s behaviour since his arrest has been erratic, with outbursts against the media and the public in court, and reports that he was attacked in detention by other inmates and then tried to harm himself. The main witness against him is Cleo, whose parents have been asked not to question her too closely in case her evidence becomes tainted.
The risk for everyone in Carnarvon is that the happy ending to Cleo’s ordeal ends up deepening racial friction. Police have already held an emergency meeting with Aboriginal elders in the hope of easing tensions. Kelly is being held in a maximum security prison in Perth and is expected to return to court next month.
