Warning: This story contains details readers might find distressing
A cult member who beat her two-year-old daughter to death over her failure to properly complete chores in Australia has been sentenced to nine years in jail.
Tillie Craig disappeared from the Ministry of God farm in 1987, sparking a decades-long search by her father, who was told she’d been adopted.
In reality, Tillie had been killed with a plastic pipe. Her remains were then allegedly burned by the sect’s leader and scattered at the commune in regional New South Wales (NSW).
Ellen Rachel Craig, 62, was charged with her daughter’s murder in 2022 after a tip-off to police. She later pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter.
When sentencing Craig on Wednesday, Justice Natalie Adams accepted that Craig had not intended to cause serious harm to Tillie, but said calling her death a tragedy would be “a gross understatement”.
“She died at the hands of someone whose role it was to protect her,” she told the NSW Supreme Court.
According to the agreed facts read in court, children at the commune were required to do chores, regardless of their age, and were often disciplined with a piece of black pipe.
On 7 July, 1987, Tillie had been sweeping when her mother – “unhappy” with the quality of the work – beat her to death.
Craig, who was 25 at the time, later brought her daughter inside and said, “She’s stopped breathing” and “Oh no, no she’s gone”.
The court heard she laid Tillie in a bathtub and waited for the cult leader – known as Alexander Wilon or “Papa” – to return, at which point he prayed for the resurrection of the girl.
Wilon is then accused of cremating Tillie before scattering her ashes and forbidding the cult members from speaking of what happened.
He was charged with being an accessory to murder – and later over separate sexual assault allegations – but the terminally ill man has since been declared unfit to stand trial.
Craig was expelled from the cult by November 1987 and travelled to her home country of New Zealand, where she lived under several aliases until her arrest and extradition in 2021.
In a segment of a letter that was read to the court Craig apologised for her crime, claiming “something happened” to her as a mother at the farm.
“My actions were horrible, terrible, horrific.”
“I will never forgive myself for what I have done,” she wrote, adding that she wanted “justice” for her daughter and was “at peace” with her imprisonment.
Tillie’s father, Gerard Stanhope – who visited the cult several times during his desperate search for his daughter – did not know she had died until his ex-partner was arrested.
“I spent years… waking up every day with the hope in my heart that I would find her, and going to bed devastated that I was unable to do so,” Stanhope said in a victim impact statement read to the court, as reported by SMH.
“I didn’t find out until more than 30 years later that my daughter was already gone.”
Craig will be eligible for parole after six years in custody, in November 2027.
