New details have emerged concerning the kidnapping of Western Australian child Cleo Smith
During an interview on 60 minutes, Cleo’s mum Ellie Smith and stepdad Jake Giddon revealed the lie that lured her out of the tent.
Ms Smith said Cleo had blocked out most of her experience but remembered “why she was taken”.
Cleo had told her mother that Terence Darrell Kelly, the man who pleaded guilty to forcibly taking her, had convinced Cleo that her baby sister was sick and she needed to be taken away to allow her parents to help her sister.
Ms Smith says the attack was not targeted, but instead was an opportunistic crime.
She says “Cleo had a bike at the front which indicated we had a child in that tent and that was all he needed to know”.
Once returned, Cleo’s mother also noticed that her daughter’s hair had been cut and dyed during her nearly three weeks away from home, amongst other changes.
About the experience, Cleo told her mother that she was locked in a room and scared that she didn’t know the whereabouts of her family.
The four year old was taken from her tent in the middle of the night while camping with her family at a campsite only 75 kilometres from her hometown of Carnarvon.
Cleo was missing for 18 days before she was found by police in a house just minutes away from her home.
