Gerard Stanhope spent 35 years looking for daughter Tillie who was killed in Australian cult

New Zealand mother Ellen Craig beat her own daughter to death in an Australian cult in 1987. She then moved to New Zealand, where she hid for nearly 35 years before her secret was exposed. This week, she was sentenced to nine years in prison for manslaughter. Jeremy Wilkinson speaks exclusively with the toddler’s father, who searched tirelessly for years, not knowing his daughter Tillie was already dead.

Gerard Stanhope is haunted by two things.

The first is that he saw the bruises on his 2-year-old daughter’s body while she was visiting him but he still let her leave his home with the woman who eventually beat her to death.

New Zealand mother Ellen Craig beat her own daughter Tillie to death in an Australian cult in 1987.

The second is imagining the pain and terror Tillie Craig would have felt in the last few minutes of her life before she “mercifully” died.

“I do regret that night, and I do give myself a bit of a hard time about it because I should have recognised the signs,” he told NZME.

“My instincts obviously weren’t working as they should have because I should have just told Ellen to f*** off when she came to get Tillie the next day.

“Maybe then she would still be alive today.”

Tillie Craig with her father Gerard Stanhope in the 1980s.

Stanhope says that when he questioned Craig about their daughter’s bruises she said Tillie had been playing rough with the dogs at the cult in the Blue Mountains where she’d moved to a few weeks earlier.

It was the last time Stanhope saw his daughter but far from the last time he thought about her.

He spent years looking for Tillie, even going to several newspapers and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which made a documentary about the cult known as the Community of Eden in the late 1980s.

He won a court order preventing Craig from removing Tillie from New South Wales and an airport watch was put in place. He visited the cult several times and was eventually granted custody – but it was all in vain. The toddler was already dead. He just didn’t know it.

Tillie was killed at the hands of her own 25-year-old mother on July 1, 1987.

Craig then lied to her friends, family and Stanhope about where the girl was for nearly 35 years.

In one lie, she claimed she’d given Tillie away to a couple she’d met on holiday. Other times, she would claim the girl was alive and well.

Stanhope said he wouldn’t find out for sure until around 2020, when Craig was finally arrested, that all his years of searching had been in vain.

“I had come to terms with the fact that she wasn’t with us anymore a long time ago,” he told NZME in an exclusive interview.

“Ellen’s story was so unbelievable, right from the start.”

Ellen Craig pictured with her daughter Tillie in the early 1980s.

It was these lies, and stringing Stanhope along with the cruel hope that his daughter was still alive, that Craig herself regrets almost as much as the crime itself.

“It must have been terrible for him to be looking for her with so much hope when she was already gone,” the now 62-year-old wrote in a letter that was read out in the Supreme Court of New South Wales earlier this week before she was sentenced to nine years in prison for manslaughter.

“I will never forgive myself for what I’ve done.”

The Community of Eden

Italian-born Alfio Nicolosi started what he called the Community of Eden, or The Family, in the late 1980s and ran his small group of devotees out of a farm near Porter’s Retreat in the Blue Mountains of rural Sydney.

He directed his followers to call him “Master Wilon” or “Papa” and ordered his followers to meditate for up to four hours a day. He claimed to be able to read their minds using crystals and said he received visions from a spiritual guide called “Monet”.

Wilon beat members of The Family when they disobeyed him, controlled their finances and whom they spoke to and had sex with many of the female devotees.

He also wrote a manifesto called the “Community of Eden” which outlined the consequences of not following his rules such as being expelled from the community and physical punishment. The manifesto also discouraged mourning and barred funeral ceremonies in favour of cremation.

Alfio Nicolosi in 1988. Photo / Channel 10, ABC

Members of the community were also encouraged to physically discipline their children and Wilon would personally beat Tillie with a wooden-backed brush on a daily basis.

However, Wilon wasn’t at the property on the morning when Tillie was ordered to sweep paths between the houses.

Apparently, unhappy with the way the chore was being done, Craig took up a piece of plastic irrigation piping and began to beat the toddler with it. She continued hitting, even as Tillie lay on the ground, before another member of The Family heard her say: “Oh no, no she’s gone.”

Instead of calling for help, the pair laid Tillie in a bathtub and prayed and meditated while they waited for Wilon to return. He then burnt Tillie’s body in a steel drum and then scattered her ashes before forbidding anyone to talk about it.

Tillie Craig was beaten to death by her mother Ellen on July 1, 1987.

And for nearly 35 years, no one did.

In 2020, a member of The Family went to the police and told them what had happened.

Joint raids were conducted at the property in Porters Retreat and Nicolosi, now going by the name Alexander Wilon, was arrested. So was Craig, who had fled home to New Zealand and was living in Palmerston North.

Craig was extradited to Australia, where she spent nearly three years in custody facing charges of murder before making a plea deal to a lesser charge of manslaughter earlier this year.

For Stanhope, it pains him to know that he’d come so close to Tillie after driving out to the secluded cult on August 1 – a few weeks after she’d already been killed.

What Stanhope didn’t know was that Wilon had ordered Craig to hide in the meditation room. Meanwhile, Wilon told Stanhope: “Tillie isn’t here and don’t come back for her”, before calling the police and kicking the distraught father off the property.

Those police officers came close to finding Craig, who was hiding under a bed.

Detectives raided the house at Porters Retreat and combed it for evidence. Image / NSW Police

A week later, Stanhope won a court order preventing Craig from removing Tillie from New South Wales and an airport watch was put in place.

Stanhope again drove out to the farm hoping to camp out in the bush and see a glimpse of Craig, or their daughter, but was scared off by dogs and men with rifles.

The following month he was also granted custody of his daughter, but she couldn’t be located.

Extradition

In November of that year, Wilon expelled Craig from the cult and she fled back to New Zealand, where she changed her name and somewhat ironically began working with victims of domestic violence at the Women’s Refuge in Palmerston North.

Colleagues remember her as “defensive and paranoid” and she was ultimately fired after being caught stealing from the organisation. Craig also gambled heavily and was addicted to methamphetamine. She lived in a state house and did not work after 2009.

Her parents lived locally and she had siblings scattered throughout the country.

Murder accused Ellen Craig arrives in Australia after being extradited from New Zealand. Photo / Daniel Sutton, Network 10

One of those was Isla Craig, who said she’d asked her sister about the whereabouts of her niece on multiple occasions.

“She told us she’d fostered her away … but something about it didn’t ring true,” she said.

Isla said she saw Craig intermittently and would occasionally bring up Tillie.

“She would just shut you down, she didn’t want to talk about it,” she said.

“Of course I was suspicious, but I never would have imagined Tillie was dead.”

The same lies were echoed to a former cult member and fellow Kiwi called Margaret*.

“I’d call her mother every six months or so and I’d ask about Tillie. Her story would change every time,” Margaret told NZME.

“I finally managed to get hold of Ellen and ask her about it and she got really, really angry that I’d texted her. She said I should have called instead. Then she withdrew and I never heard from her again.”

Stanhope also spoke with Craig over the years. She always strung him along, letting him think Tillie was alive and well or off living with a couple she’d given her to. Sometimes she just fobbed him off.

Ellen Craig and Gerard Stanhope.

He kept a diary over the years which he wrote in almost daily, a record that aided him in giving statements to police three decades later.

“I started writing it because I thought that one day, Tillie might find me, and I would be able to show her this and tell her what happened and what went down and why I wasn’t in her life,” he said.

Despite everything that happened, Stanhope doesn’t hate Craig.

“I’m not angry with her. It’s more, I suppose, that I pity her,” he said after the sentencing.

“Hate and revenge have never been a part of what I felt about her at all.”

But he does hate Wilon.

“I want him to suffer ... to be fully cognisant and suffer for the rest of his life,” he said.

However, it’s possible Wilon won’t ever be sentenced for his part in disposing of Tillie’s body after being found mentally unfit to stand trial earlier this year following a stroke.

NZME understands the Australian Director of Public Prosecutions will make a call about whether further proceedings will be taken against him.

For Stanhope, the arrest and sentencing of the mother of his child just bookends what he already knew in his gut; Tillie, who would have been 40 years old by now, was ash in the wind many decades ago.

He would like to sit down and have a conversation with Craig at some point but concedes that’s unlikely to ever happen.

“She couldn’t even look me in the eye on the day of the hearing, not once.”

Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.