Ellen Craig arrives in Sydney, Australia after being extradited from New Zealand. Photo / Dan Sutton
“I’m here today 35 years after the unthinkable,” the father of a murdered toddler told a courtroom.
“My daughter was taken in the most horrible and senseless manner imaginable at the hands of her own mother.”
Gerard Stanhope spent 30 years thinking his daughter Tillie Craig was still alive and was desperate to track her down after her mother took her to live at a cult in rural Sydney.
He last saw Tillie a few months before her death but was told she was alive and well by her Kiwi mother Ellen Craig.
“The reality is that Tillie was violently murdered by the person she should have been able to trust, to protect her the most,” Stanhope said.
“It’s a wound that never fully heals.”
Today Craig was sentenced at the Supreme Court of New South Wales to nine years’ imprisonment for the manslaughter of her 2-year-old daughter on July 7, 1987.
Craig, who was born in New Zealand, was extradited to Australia in 2022 after she was arrested in Palmerston North in 2021, where she’d been living since fleeing the cult in the late 1980s.
After being extradited Craig pleaded not guilty to a charge of murder, however, she was offered a deal earlier this year and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
The head of the cult she’d joined in the late 1980s, Alexander Wilon, was also facing charges for helping Craig dispose of the toddler’s body by burning it in a barrel and dumping the remains in a creek. However, earlier this year he was declared mentally unfit to stand trial.
It’s taken nearly 35 years for Craig to be arrested and another three years in custody before she was finally sentenced.
But for Stanhope, it all boils down to a few minutes.
“I only slept for a few hours last night…my mind went back to the last few minutes of her [Tillie’s] life and what that must have been like,” he told the court.
“…the pain and the terror she must have felt before she mercifully died.
“In passing a sentence, I would ask you to consider the last few minutes of her life and perhaps imagine it was a child of your own.”
Justice Natalie Adams said that being under the influence of the cult may have partially explained what Craig did, but the whole incident couldn’t be put down to simply brainwashing.
“Although Ms Craig assaulted Tillie in the context of discipline in the context of being a member of a cult, rather than gratuitous cruelty, it remains a serious case of manslaughter,” she said.
“To say the circumstances are tragic would be a gross understatement.
“After killing her daughter she failed to summon any medical assistance, and then continued to conceal it for 35 years.”
Justice Adams said that while children were often beaten by the cult’s leader, Craig’s assault went far beyond what Wilon ever did to Tillie.
Craig’s sentence of imprisonment starts from November 2021 and she will become eligible for parole in 2027.
According to the summary of facts the cult’s leader, then going by the name Alfio Nicolosi, started what he called the Ministry of God, the Community of Eden or The Family at a rural property in the Blue Mountains sometime in the mid-to-late 1980s.
He would direct his followers to call him “Master Wilon” or “Papa” and would order his followers to meditate for up to four hours a day.
When members of The Family disobeyed him, the summary states he would beat them either with his fists or with a piece of plastic pipe.
Wilon would also allegedly have sex with the female members of his cult, sometimes taking several of them into “Papa’s Room” at once, where they would engage in sexual activity.
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 or funeral ceremonies in favour of cremation.
Members of the community were also encouraged to physically discipline their children.
Wilon would personally discipline Tillie, dragging her off almost daily into the bathroom where he would beat her with a long wooden-backed brush.
Children were required to do chores at the property regardless of their age and on the morning of July 7, 1987, Tillie was sweeping the pathways between the cottages.
Unhappy with Tillie’s sweeping, Craig began yelling at her and started hitting her with a piece of black, plastic irrigation pipe.
Another member of The Family observed Craig hitting Tillie while the child lay face down on the ground before coming inside and saying: “She’s stopped breathing.”
Tillie wasn’t moving or breathing as Craig picked her up and said to the other woman, “Oh no, no she’s gone” before attempting to resuscitate her.
After this Craig and the other woman took Tillie inside, laid her in the bathtub and waited for Wilon. Instead of calling for help or seeking medical assistance they prayed and meditated until he returned.
In accordance with his own manifesto, Wilon allegedly burnt the body, feeding the flames with motor oil, wood and old clothes for several hours.
Another member of the cult said Wilon spoke about “God’s laws, not man’s laws” applying to The Family at the property, and that he was protecting Craig as a child of God.
According to the summary, when the ashes had cooled, Wilon took a sieve to them to make sure nothing had remained unburned, then scattered them and threw the drum in the river.
After Tillie’s death, Wilon prohibited his followers from talking about what happened. He said if anyone asked after Tillie, they were to be told that she was given up for adoption.
Craig fled back to New Zealand shortly after killing her daughter, changing her name and telling Stanhope differing stories about where Tillie was; in one lie she said she’d given Tillie to a South African couple she’d met at a resort, another time she simply said she was safe and for him not to worry.
Stanhope continued looking for his daughter throughout 1988, appealing to newspapers and even the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which filmed a documentary about The Family.
In court, Stanhope said he wouldn’t find out until around 2020 that all his years of searching had been in vain.
“I would wake up every day with hope in my heart and go to bed shattered,” he said in reading his victim impact statement.
“I didn’t find out for more than 30 years that Tillie was already gone.”
It wasn’t until 2021 that following a tip-off Australian and New Zealand police carried out concurrent raids at the Porters Retreat property where the cult was run and Wilon still lived, and at a state house in Palmerston North where Craig was living.
After being arrested Craig told police she was naive and had been influenced at the retreat.
“I think something happened … I don’t know. But I was, something was, I was not, I was completely out of my, myself, my character … I completely, I don’t know what I was doing,” a transcript of her interview reads.
When asked to talk about Tillie she said: “I don’t think I can at the moment. I want to say all of these things … but I just … I don’t …” After being asked again what happened with Tillie, Craig said: “I can’t, I don’t, I can’t, I, I … I don’t know what happened. I can’t tell you … what happened.”
Since that interview, Craig has spent nearly three years in prison in Australia where she was allegedly assaulted by another inmate as she awaited trial.
In a letter written to the court, Craig said she often thought about the day Tillie died.
“I have thought about her dying and the horror of that for her, my actions were horrible, terrible, horrific,” the letter reads.
“She would have been 40 this year, but I can only picture her as a baby and a 2-year-old.”
Craig wrote that she was especially sorry that she’d let Tillie’s father believe his daughter was still alive for more than three decades.
“It must have been terrible for him to be looking for her with so much hope when she was already gone,” she wrote.
“It was in my power to alleviate it and I never did it.
“I will never forgive myself for what I’ve done.”
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.
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