Cleo Smith suspect Terence Darrell Kelly ‘claimed room of dolls was for his daughter’

A tradesman who worked inside the home of Cleo Smith’s alleged abductor has told police that Terence Darrell Kelly claimed he had a young daughter.

Investigators are interested in a lock on an internal door that Terence Darrell Kelly may have ­installed himself in his home.

A tradesman who worked inside the home of Cleo Smith’s alleged abductor has told police that ­Terence Darrell Kelly claimed he had a young daughter.

The man who painted the Homeswest house for Western Australia’s public housing department said Mr Kelly had told him he had a daughter after the painter had seen a room that looked like it was decorated for a little girl, with shelves that were lined with dolls.

The man is among the people interviewed by police since Mr Kelly’s arrest on Wednesday.

Investigators are particularly interested in a lock on an internal door that Mr Kelly may have ­installed himself. While the state government has a policy of not installing locks on internal doors for safety reasons, at least one of the rooms in Mr Kelly’s rented home can be locked from the outside.

Mr Kelly’s apparent fixation on dolls is now public and so is the elaborate online fantasy the 36-year-old built as Bratz DeLuca, a name appropriated from one of his favourite brands of dolls.

Police have been clear they do not believe Cleo’s abduction was planned. They are investigating a theory that Mr Kelly came across Cleo by chance when he visited the Blowholes Campground to either sell drugs or look for opportunities to steal from campers or both.

A room inside Mr Kelly’s home.

Sources close to the investigation have told The Australian that Mr Kelly came to the attention of profilers working on the case ­because police in his hometown of Carnarvon suspected he was a petty thief and a small-time distributor of cannabis who occasionally went to the Blowholes Campground. They suspected he had been to the campsite at least once to deliver cannabis for the personal use of backpackers.

Mr Kelly was not an obvious person for investigators to focus on as they began the work of finding the person who abducted Cleo.

He is not a registered sex ­offender nor was he a frequent visitor to the campground where Cleo vanished in the early hours of October 16.

Police forensics search the house in Carnarvon, Western Australia, where Cleo Smith was found. Picture: Colin Murty

Being known to police, however, put him in a relatively large group of people identified through profiling. The investigation began to focus intently on Mr Kelly when detectives received information that they will say shows one of three mobile phone towers close to the campground detected a phone registered to Mr Kelly at 3am on the day Cleo was abducted.

The Point Quobba phone tower was installed just over a year ago as part of a national phone black spot program.

Police believe it was Mr Kelly’s phone that pinged the tower about 90 minutes after Cleo’s mother, Ellie Smith, last saw her – when she gave her eldest daughter a drink of water in the tent at 1.30am – and around the time police say a motorist on North West Coastal Highway saw a car leaving the campground road and turning right towards Carnarvon.

A source familiar with events in the hours before Mr Kelly’s ­arrest said the mobile phone data was important but detectives soon found other things they ­believed implicated Mr Kelly. Police have not said what they are.

For example, when Mr Kelly was arrested, the driver of the mystery car had not come forward despite two weeks of public pleas from investigators. On Sunday, police had still not ­revealed if they believed it was Mr Kelly driving that car or if Cleo was in it.

Forensics officers have been at Mr Kelly’s two-bedroom rented duplex in Carnarvon since Cleo was rescued there at 12.46am on Wednesday. They are expected to continue their work for at least three more days.

On Sunday, they took items including a large clear plastic tub into the backyard of the property and tested each item for fingerprints. On Saturday, they removed carpet from inside.

Police have stopped commenting on the case since Mr Kelly was charged with abduction on Thursday. On the day of Mr Kelly’s arrest, Inspector Rod Wilde – who leads the investigation – told reporters that police believed the crime was ­opportunistic and that Mr Kelly acted had alone.