A woman has been jailed for nine years for fatally beating her two-year-old daughter after becoming upset at her chores on a property west of Sydney owned by cult The Family.
Ellen Rachel Craig, 62, pleaded guilty to manslaughter, admitting she had killed her daughter Tillie Craig on a property near Oberon in central NSW on July 7, 1987.
After becoming unhappy with the way the toddler was sweeping a path, she grabbed some plastic irrigation tubing and beat the girl across the arms, legs and body until she was no longer moving.
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At the time, both mother and child were living on a rural property in Porters Retreat which served as the headquarters of the cult The Family or the Community of Eden.
Informing leader Alexander Wilon of the death, Tillie’s body was cremated in a 44-gallon drum, her ashes spread out over the property and the drum thrown in a nearby river never to be found, agreed facts filed with the court say.
Craig moved back to her birth country of New Zealand in November 1987 where she changed her name to Jowelle Tenzing Smith.
She continued to lie about the toddler’s death until she was arrested and extradited back to Australia to face trial in November 2021.
‘Tragic is an understatement’
While Craig was under the influence of Wilon, who had previously disciplined Tillie, her assault on her daughter was far more extreme, Justice Natalie Adams said on Wednesday.
“To say that the circumstances of Tillie’s death are tragic would be a gross understatement,” the judge said.
“She died at the hands of someone who was meant to protect her.”
According to the agreed facts, Wilon tightly controlled the lives of those living at the property, including beating them when they did not obey him and making them have sex with him in ‘Papa’s Room’.
He told his followers that their egos “must be completely destroyed” if they wanted to remain with him.
Craig was sentenced to a maximum jail time of nine years for the death of her daughter, with a non-parole period of six years.
Justice Adams found the 62-year-old had expressed remorse for her actions both towards her daughter and to Tillie’s father Gerard Stanhope who had searched for the toddler for decades without success.
“I took away her potential. I took away her right to a happy life,” Craig wrote in a letter to the court.
“My actions were horrible, terrible, horrific.”
Craig said she now welcomed her prison sentence, wanting justice for her daughter.
“I know, understand and am at peace with the purpose of my imprisonment.”
In a victim impact statement, Stanhope described the indescribable pain of finding out what had happened to his child.
He said he was haunted by the memory of taking his struggling, crying and terrified daughter to a van where Craig waited to take her back to The Family’s property in January 1987.
That was the last time he saw the two-year-old.
“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,” he wrote.
Adams took into account Craig’s physical health issues, her struggles with mental health, drugs and gambling, and the more onerous conditions in jail where she remains under protective custody.
Craig told her psychiatrist she enjoyed the simple life of prisons as she believed it could bring the kind of monastic life she had been looking for.
The 62-year-old held her head down for most of the sentence as she watched by an audio-video link from Dillwynia’s woman’s prison.
The maximum penalty for manslaughter is 25 years.