Locals described how they would often see Kelly walking to and from the local grocery store, 'keeping his head down and talking to nobody'.Īnother neighbour said Kelly was a loner who 'kept to himself' and was not the type of person anyone else in the street would 'have a yarn with' despite being a long term resident. 'Going on three weeks, she is straight across from us. Mr Dodd added: 'I just can't believe it and get over the fact that she is just the house down from us and locked up here for a couple of weeks. 'He doesn't have his dogs at the front, he has his dogs out the back, but through this week he had his dogs out the front and he has been acting weird.'
'He will get in his car, drive that fast. 'He's been acting a bit strange lately,' Henry Dodd told Nine News.
Ms Milly-Milly remarked that Kelly 'never let anyone into his house' even though they had been neighbours for a long time.Īnother neighbour told Nine he had spotted the suspect behaving bizarrely in recent days, hooning through the streets with his dogs in the front seat of his car.
'He was in the car and he just kept staring at me,' she said. Pricilla Milly-Milly said she saw him at the hardware store Bunnings just last week, Perth Now reported. 'I have to be very careful about that,' he added.Ĭarnarvon baker Donald said he waved to the accused kidnapper in a polite exchange on the street a day before Cleo was found.ĭonald told 6PR Radio he 'couldn't have imagined anything like this.'Ī neighbour who has lived across the street from Kelly for years recalled how she also had her own bizarre interaction with the man. Detective Wilde said he is not known to Cleo's family and is not a registered sex offender, but is 'known to police'. The suspect was not at the house when Cleo was found, officers added, but was arrested a 'short' distance away.
They are not looking for anybody else.Ĭleo was discovered by detectives at around 1am on Wednesday alone and playing with toys inside the bedroom of a rundown and locked house in Carnarvon - a rural town 47 miles from the campsite where she vanished on October 16, and just two miles from her family home.ĭetectives had used crowbars and battering rams to kick in the door and free the little girl at about 12.46am local time on Wednesday. Another reported hearing a girl crying at night in recent days, but said she thought nothing of it at the time.Ĭops said the 36-year-old, who has undergone a psychiatric assessment after being deemed mentally unstable, was only identified as a suspect on Tuesday, and is now being questioned over a suspected abduction. Neighbours earlier described the suspect as 'a loner' who had been behaving 'weirdly', including one who saw him buying nappies in a nearby supermarket despite not having children. Officers had pulled over the alleged kidnapper and bundled him out of a car just after midnight before police executed a search warrant at the nearby home and found Cleo inside a locked property. He is a big bloke but he really copped it'.Ī spokesman for Western Australia Police said they would not be commenting on the woman's claims.Įarlier today Kelly was seen being loaded into an ambulance outside the police station and taken to hospital for treatment with a large white bandage wrapped around his head. 'I tell you what, he (Kelly) got a real hiding.my son had to be taken out in shackles, and he (Kelly) was taken for treatment.he was in a bad way. She said: 'As soon as he heard this bloke was arrested over that little Cleo, he blew up, beat him black and blue.
Today, the prisoner's mother said her 'furious' son 'blew up' and beat Kelly 'black and blue' when he discovered that he had been arrested over the four-year-old's abduction. The suspect had only been at Carnarvon police station for a few hours on Wednesday when he was allegedly set upon by a prisoner. Terry Kelly, 36, was arrested by police over the disappearance of Cleo, dubbed 'Australia's Madeleine McCann', before officers rescued the little girl from a house in Carnarvon, Western Australia, 18 days after she went missing from a remote campsite. The suspected abductor of four-year-old Cleo Smith who sustained a heady injury in custody after his arrest was beaten 'black and blue' by another prisoner inside a police holding cell, the inmate's mother has claimed.