What Cleo case can tell us about missing High Country campers

There are a few people who should be rattled by the Cleo miracle — those behind the disappearance of Victoria’s high country campers.

When the news broke that Cleo Smith had been found, strong men cried. So did strong women.

The relief for Cleo’s parents was shared with millions of strangers spread across Australia and the globe as early bulletins aired one of the most moving news stories since the Beaconsfield mine rescue.

But there’s one person, maybe two or three, who should be rattled by the Cleo miracle.

That would be the person or people behind the sinister disappearance of the Wonnangatta campers, Russell Hill and Carol Clay, in Victoria’s high country early last year.

There’s no literal link between two cases separated by 20 months and 4000km. But there is a connection between the way Cleo’s abduction has been investigated and the way Victorian detectives have combed data to identify potential offenders who were at Wonnangatta the week the campers vanished.

Cleo Smith with mother Ellie Smith and stepfather Jake Gliddon. Picture: Colin Murty

Cleo’s rescue is a textbook example of modern investigation — for a textbook still being written. After getting so many big cases wrong, the West Australian police have excelled by getting this one so right.

The fact the little girl was alive and well is not all down to excellent police work, of course. Her welfare has more to do with the motives and mental issues of whoever abducted her, something a court will determine when a man in custody faces court.

But it’s clear that the tracing of Cleo to a rundown house in Carnarvon is a blueprint for police handling future abductions. And similar techniques to those used there will have also helped identify suspects for the Wonnangatta mystery.

There is, of course, a fundamental difference between the two cases that explains why Cleo’s disappearance was tackled so much more urgently than the other.

Because Russell Hill and Carol Clay were pension-age adults camping in a remote area, their disappearance wasn’t immediately treated as if it were sinister.

It was reasonable to assume at first that they might be lost. But when a child as young as Cleo — or William Tyrell or Daniel Morcombe — vanishes, it demands attention and sparks instant and intelligent action. Or it should.

No one can look at the parents of a missing child and not see the unspeakable anguish, the mixed grief, fear and desperate hope. We saw it after Cleo vanished overnight from a tent at the Blowholes campsite north of Carnarvon three weeks ago.

Russell Hill. Picture: Victoria Police

Carol Clay. Picture: Victoria Police

It had shades of Azaria Chamberlain, the baby snatched from a tent by a dingo in 1980. And of the world-famous Maddie McCann case, in which a little girl was abducted from a Portuguese hotel in 2007.

Police immediately suspected this wasn’t simply a lost child. The tent zip had been undone to a height higher than she could reach. And her sleeping bag was gone, seeming proof she had been carried away.

It was a race against time and an unknown abductor. While local volunteers and emergency services threw themselves into a painstaking search, detectives first set about eliminating relatives as suspects, as they must, without ignoring the possibility it was a random, opportunistic act.

The fact the state government announced a million dollar reward underlined the sense of urgency.

The big reward showed the authorities were totally invested from the first vital hours — instead of being years behind in trying to find someone hiding information.

A task force was created almost overnight. Its members identified potential leads by using every method to establish who was anywhere near the campsite that night — then establish why they did not come forward to clear themselves.

Graeme Thorne.

The Cleo case stands out because so few abductions end well.

Statistically, of course, children are like the rest of us: far more likely to be harmed by someone they know. But the spectre of random abduction looms large for parents, partly because television captures compelling images of innocent victims and their tormented families.

The first kidnapping for ransom in Australia was that of Graeme Thorne in Sydney in 1960. There was no good reason for the kidnapper Stephen Bradley to kill the boy, whose parents had won the Opera House lottery, but he did anyway.

Any effort to disguise himself would have been enough reason to leave the boy alive to be released after the ransom was paid.

The Beaumont children, Jane, Arnna and Grant, vanished from Adelaide’s Glenelg Beach in January 1966. That shocking crime still haunts us because no sign of the children was ever found and none of the various suspects was arrested for it.

The uncomfortable truth is the investigation was handicapped from the start because most detectives on that long weekend were either on leave or drinking at Australia Day barbecues.

Police admitted later that the sketch artist who drew a supposed likeness of a suspect (a thin, blond young man seen with the children) was so drunk the drawing looked like a weird caricature.

Investigation of many other abduction cases has been hampered because local police did not take another “lost kid” or “runaway” seriously until it was too late.

he three Beaumont children disappeared on Australia Day 1966.

The list is long but some names stand out.

There are the Mackay sisters, abducted and murdered in Townsville in 1970. Their bodies were found but the killer was not until 1998, when a tip-off led to a wiry old man named Arthur Stanley Brown, who avoided charges after astutely taking legal advice that he was too demented to plea.

Some believe that Brown, who had regularly travelled interstate by himself, matched the description of the thin man wearing a hat who was seen dragging Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon away from the Adelaide Oval in 1973. The two girls were never seen again.

In Melbourne, the disappearance of Bung Siriboon as she walked to school in June, 2011 has never looked like being solved. Because Bung was a teenager, local police initially dismissed her as a runaway.

But Cleo is only four, not 14, and when she vanished only metres from where her mother and stepfather were sleeping, it was enough to alarm the most sceptical police.

Siriyakorn “Bung” Siriboon vanished in June 2011.

The scene was quarantined properly for forensic experts and Taskforce Rodia investigated as thoroughly as if they had a serial killer to catch, not just another “lost kid”.

Such swift and precise action is not how it happened in most cases that stick in our memories. To be fair, of course, modern police have far better tools than their predecessors.

Once, if there were no eyewitnesses or fingerprints, investigators had little to go on but tips, hunches, door knocking and aggressive interview tactics with possible suspects.

Rewards, if and when posted, were nearly always too little and too late. But this time the West Australians played the big reward card early, no doubt calculating a million bucks could loosen the tongues of people who might normally avoid talking to police at all.

But there are other tricks in the police kit — and not the underhand sort that have led to at least three innocent men being wrongly jailed for murder in Perth over several decades.

They used mobile phone records and tracking, “dashcam” and security cameras, cashless electronic transactions, even litter that could be examined for DNA, fingerprints and identifying branding or serial numbers.

Abductors can run but they find it harder to hide from 21st century policing.

As a senior WA police officer said this week, basking in a well-deserved glow, “It’s a matter of piecing it through, working out who was where at the wrong time...”

Who was where at the wrong time.

The smart money says that is how the Wonnangatta mystery will be solved. But the odds are against another happy ending.