The mother of a little girl who was brutally murdered on a cult property west of Sydney forty years ago has welcomed a long prison term for the heinous crime.
After admitting that she had murdered her daughter Tillie Craig on a property near Oberon in central New South Wales on July 7, 1987, 62-year-old Ellen Rachel Craig pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
The mother became enraged with the toddler’s path-sweeping technique and proceeded to strike the girl repeatedly across the body with a piece of plastic irrigation tubing.
The girl was eventually rendered motionless.
A rural property in Porters Retreat, which was the headquarters of the cult The Family or the Community of Eden, was where the mother and kid were living at the time.
After notifying leader Alexander Wilon of Tillie’s demise, the body was incinerated in a 44-gallon drum.
Her ashes were then scattered throughout the land, and the drum was discarded into a nearby river, never to be recovered, according to the facts that were agreed upon and given in court.
In November 1987, Craig returned to her birthplace of New Zealand and changed her name to Jowelle Tenzing Smith.
Until her arrest and extradition to Australia to stand prosecution in November 2021, she maintained her false story regarding the toddler’s death.
Justice Natalie Adams ruled on Wednesday that Wilon, who had previously reprimanded Tillie, was the influence that made Craig’s assault on her daughter far more severe.
“To say that the circumstances of Tillie’s death are tragic would be a gross understatement,” according to the judge.
“She died at the hands of someone who was meant to protect her.”
Consensus exists that Wilon exerted extreme control over the lives of the property’s occupants, going so far as to beat them for disobedience and force them to engage in sexual relations with him in what he called “Papa’s Room.”
According to him, his followers “must be completely destroyed” of their egos if they were to stay with him.
With a six-year non-parole period, Craig faces a maximum of nine years in prison for her daughter’s death.
The 62-year-old mother had apologised to her daughter and Tillie’s father, Gerard Stanhope, who had looked for his daughter for decades with no luck, according to Justice Adams’ findings.
“I squandered her opportunity. “I deprived her of the opportunity to live a joyful life,” Craig told the court in a letter.
“My actions were horrible, terrible, horrific.”
Craig said that, after seeking justice for her daughter, she had come to embrace her prison term.
“I know, understand and am at peace with the purpose of my imprisonment.”
Stanhope detailed the unbearable anguish he felt upon learning his child had disappeared in a victim impact statement.
He claimed that the recollection of bringing his distraught, terrified, and struggling daughter to the van where Craig was waiting to return her to the family’s farm in January 1987 tore at his soul. He had no further contact with the toddler after that.
“To this day, I carry a sense of guilt that I didn’t listen to what she was trying to tell me in the only way she could,” said he.
Justice Adams considered Craig’s physical and mental health problems, as well as her challenges with substance abuse and gambling, as well as the harsh conditions in the prison where she is currently being held in protective custody.
Craig confided in her doctor that she yearned for a monastic life and found solace in the austere lifestyle of prisoners.
From her vantage point in Dillwynia’s women’s prison, the 62-year-old witnessed the entirety of the punishment with her head lowered.
The maximum term for manslaughter is twenty-five years in prison.
