When the little girl looked into the eyes of the strange men in uniform and said, “My name is Cleo,” the police officers were moved to tears. This is what the deputy chief of police Col Blanch said in an interview with the local radio station 6PR. Even seasoned investigators could hardly hide their relief. The officers had previously broken into a locked house in the middle of the night and freed the four-year-old from one of the rooms. Not only the worried parents, half of Australia now seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. “Our family is complete again,” wrote the mother, Ellie Smith, on Instagram. On breakfast television, the presenters spoke in a broken voice as they reported the good news. A miracle happened.
Cleo had disappeared from a campsite in Western Australia at night 18 days earlier. The family – Ellie Smith, her partner and two daughters – were out with the tent and wanted to spend a few carefree days at the Blowholes. These sea caves, from which the surf splashes, are a popular destination on the Indian Ocean and are located about 75 kilometers north of Carnarvon, where Cleo’s family lives.
The tent zipper was open suspiciously
On the morning of October 16, the mother woke up at six in the morning, as she later told, to find that Cleo had disappeared from one of the two rooms of the family tent. Her daughter slept there next to her little sister. The girl’s sleeping bag was also missing. And: The tent zipper was opened to a height that the four-year-old could not have reached herself. The child has not been seen since.
The police set up a 100-person special commission. The only trace is the testimony of witnesses who saw a car drive away from the campsite the night Cleo went missing. But neither the make of the car nor the license plate are known. For the parents and many observers, there was only one plausible explanation: Little Cleo was kidnapped. Again and again they turned to the public with desperate appeals – in the hope of convincing the perpetrator or perpetrators to release the girl. “It is a remarkably bold and shocking thing to go to a campsite, put up a tent and take a little girl with you,” Western Australia Prime Minister Mark McGowan said on Wednesday. “It is unbelievable that someone would do something like that.”
The government of the state of Western Australia finally offered a reward of one million Australian dollars (around 650,000 euros) for clues leading to the girl’s being found. By the weekend, around 200 reports had already been received and large amounts of video material from surveillance cameras had been uploaded, the police said at the weekend. The family is not suspected, it is suspected that Cleo was kidnapped by an “opportunistic” perpetrator, as the Australian news agency AAP reported.
A 36-year-old was taken into custody
The sympathy was huge after the girl’s disappearance – not only in Australia. On Instagram, people from Scotland, the USA and Germany, among others, tried to encourage the family. Probably also because the case was reminiscent of the then three-year-old British Madeleine McCann, who disappeared from an apartment complex in Portugal on May 3, 2007 without a trace. The girl’s unexplained fate continues to make headlines today. When investigators surprisingly announced last year that a German was suspected of murder, at least hope for late certainty arose. So far, however, there has been no breakthrough in the investigation.
Not so with Cleo. She was physically intact and now back home with her parents, the investigators said at a press conference on Wednesday. The fact that she was found in the house in Carnarvon, around 900 kilometers north of the regional capital Perth, after almost two and a half weeks, “was persistent, methodical police work,” said Police Commissioner Chris Dawson. Investigators have collected thousands of forensic exhibits, data and information from the community and carefully examined every clue. He did not reveal which one ultimately led to success.
And the biggest question is still open: Who kidnapped Cleo? A 36-year-old from Carnarvon, who has no family connection, was taken into custody and questioned, the police said. According to the Australian Sender’s ABC he was the resident of the house in which Cleo was found alone. The building is only three kilometers from the family home. A neighbor reported seeing the man recently buying diapers in the supermarket. He wondered about that.