Terence Darrell Kelly pleads guilty to abducting Cleo Smith
The 36-year-old has admitted he abducted the four-year-old in the remote Gascoyne last year while she was camping with her family.
At the vet where Terence Kelly took his dogs, he liked to be billed as Mr DeLuca. He told people he was Italian.
This came across as unusual but benign in a small town where getting along depends on letting people be.
It turns out Bratz DeLuca was Kelly’s online nom de plume, the central character in a fantasy world of linked accounts that fetishised dolls and created the illusion of a family.
While Kelly had no close relatives in Carnarvon and was increasingly isolated after the death of the woman who raised him, things were different on Facebook. There he was a dad from Cronulla with kids who talked to him.
Kelly on Monday admitted in court that he snatched four-year-old Cleo Smith on October 16, 2021, but why he did it is yet to be explained in court. If a reason is forthcoming, it is likely to be at his sentencing sometime after his next court appearance on March 25. Other charges will be dealt with separately.
The known elements of the story beggar belief. It was no overreaction for WA Police to dispatch the homicide squad from Perth to the remote Blowholes Campsite just hours after Cleo vanished from the family tent.
They knew almost immediately this was a crime scene because her sleeping bag was missing and the tent door had been zipped to a height she could never have reached. Even junior police know that when a child is abducted, they are usually dead within hours.
For 18 days Cleo’s mother Ellie Smith and stepfather Jake Gliddon clung to hope. Their pleas for information were met with scepticism from armchair detectives who advanced their own theories.
Each time police stated categorically that Cleo’s parents were not suspects and that they had been co-operative, there were plenty of online sleuths saying: “that is what police want the parents to think”.
Then on the morning of November 3, Australia woke to the news that police had found Cleo alive in a run-down public housing duplex just a few streets from her family home. Detectives who stormed the house just before midnight found her in a locked room with the lights on, playing with toys. In a now-famous audio recording of the pre-dawn raid, Cleo tells Detective Cameron Blaine: “My name is Cleo” before she is carried out of the house and reunited with Ms Smith, Mr Gliddon and her baby sister.
Kelly was silent when he appeared at the courthouse in his home town by video link from Perth’s Casuarina Prison on Monday, except when magistrate Ben White asked him to plead to one charge of child stealing.
He said: “Ah, guilty”.
Esther Mingo, who watched Kelly grow up as a neighbour, is certain there is more to the story.
She thinks Terence had help during the 18 days when Cleo was missing and has repeatedly told reporters “he needs to start singing”.
“Everybody always said that he wasn’t alone but Terence needs to talk. He needs to open his mouth up,” she said outside court on Monday.
As if the known facts of Cleo’s disappearance and rescue are not astonishing enough, jaw-dropping theories have continued to flourish. Among them: a second child was in the room when Cleo was found but police were keeping that quiet. At a series of press conferences immediately after Kelly’s arrest, detectives dispassionately batted the stories away.
One of the most persistent questions is whether anyone else will be charged over Cleo’s disappearance. While police have said they cannot rule that out, they have revealed nothing to contradict their early statements that they believe Kelly acted opportunistically and alone when he took Cleo from her family’s tent sometime between 3am and 6am that spring morning.
Kelly was taken in as a toddler by one of the most respected Aboriginal women in the Gascoyne region. Penny Walker considered him “a gift from God”.
In an oral history recorded in 2019, the year before her death, Ms Walker volunteered that in her youth she had been a heavy drinker, a domestic violence victim and her own six biological children had been taken from her. She was 44 years old with no children living at home when she said Terence’s mother, an Aboriginal woman whom she described as a drug addict, asked her to raise him.
“This little boy, God was giving me something back into my life, what the welfare took off me, my children,” she said. “So I had this little boy. Beautiful boy, Terry, two-year-old jet black curly hair.”
Kelly was not immediately in the sights of the 140-strong police team searching for Cleo. The first sweep of locals focused on convicted sex offenders. He did have a criminal record, however, that put him in a broader group of “persons of interest”. He was thought to be a small time cannabis distributor who had been to the Blowholes at least once to deliver drugs to backpackers. Police have acknowledged data from one of three mobile phone towers installed at the campground just a few years ago was important to their investigation. The Australian has been told it was the piece of evidence that put them on Kelly’s case late on the afternoon of November 3. By midnight, she was in a police car that took her to her mother.
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