WARNING: This story contains details that some readers may find disturbing.
A cult member who beat his two-year-old daughter to death in Australia for not doing her chores properly has been sentenced to nine years in prison.
Tilly Craig went missing from God’s Work Farm in 1987, and her father searched for her for decades after hearing she was adopted.
In fact, Tilly was murdered with a plastic pipe. Her remains were reportedly burned by the sect’s leader and scattered across communities in regional New South Wales (NSW).
Ellen Rachel Craig, 62, was charged with her daughter’s murder in 2022 after reporting it to police. She later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of murder.
Sentencing Craig on Wednesday, Judge Natalie Adams accepted Craig had not intended to cause Tilly serious harm, but said calling her death a tragedy was a “gross understatement”.
“She died at the hands of someone who was supposed to protect her,” she told the NSW Supreme Court.
According to the agreed facts read out in court, children in the community were required to do chores regardless of their age and were often disciplined with a black pipe.
On July 7, 1987, Tilly was beaten to death while cleaning by her mother who was “dissatisfied” with the quality of her work.
Craig, then 25, later brought his daughter into the house and said, “She stopped breathing,” and she said, “No, no, she’s dead.”
The court heard she placed Tilly in the bathtub and waited for the cult leader (known as Alexander Willon, or “Papa”) to return, at which point he prayed for the girl’s resurrection.
Willon was accused of cremating Tilly’s remains before scattering them, and was forbidden from telling cult members what happened.
He was charged with accessory to murder and later indicted on separate sexual assault charges, but the terminally ill man was subsequently declared incompetent to stand trial.
After being expelled from the cult in November 1987, Craig returned to his native New Zealand, where he lived under various aliases until his arrest and extradition in 2021.
In part of the letter read out in court, Craig apologized for his crimes and claimed that as a mother on the farm “something happened”.
“My actions were horrible, horrible, and terrifying.”
“I will never forgive myself for what I did,” she wrote, adding that she wanted “justice” for her daughter and that she felt “at peace” with her imprisonment.
Tilly’s father, Gerard Stanhope, visited the cult several times in his desperate search for his daughter, but did not learn she was dead until his former partner was arrested.
“For years I woke up every day with the hope that I would find her, but then went to bed devastated when I couldn’t,” Stanhope said in a victim impact statement read to the court, SMH reported.
“It was only after more than 30 years that I learned that my daughter had already passed away.”
Craig will be eligible for parole in November 2027 after serving six years in prison.
