True Crime with Rachel Shannon
HORROR Unfolded at Family Campsite: The Harrowing Survival Story of 4 Year Old Cleo Smith
24 Feb 2025
Today’s case is one that puzzled investigators from the start. Its bizarre beginning lead to one of Australia’s largest scale searches ever, yet still, it was like finding a needle in a haystack.The disappearance of this little girl gripped the nation, with everyone doing their part to find her. Yet it was a stroke of luck and 1 small piece of evidence that lead to the harrowing discovery of what happened to 4 year old Cleo Smith.
Full Episode
Today's case is one that puzzled investigators from the start. Its bizarre beginning led to one of Australia's largest scale searches ever.
Yet still, it was like finding a needle in a haystack. The disappearance of this little girl gripped the nation with everyone doing their part to find her. Yet it was a stroke of luck and one small piece of evidence that led to the harrowing discovery of what happened to four-year-old Cleo Smith.
Cleo Smith was living with her mother, Ellie Smith, and her stepfather, Jake Glidden, and her little sister in Carnarvon, Australia. Carnarvon is a coastal town with a population of about 5,500 people. This is where both Ellie and Jake grew up, spending their summers swimming in the lagoons at the Blowholes Campground in Western Australia.
This is a popular destination for tourists and campers attracted by the blowholes, a natural phenomenon where ocean swells force water through the sea caves and up out of the holes in the rocks. So it's no surprise that as adults, Ellie and Jake wanted to take their kids there to experience the same things that they got to as kids.
By Friday, October 15, 2021, they packed their camping gear, and Ellie, Jake, then-4-year-old Cleo, and her sister, 7-month-old Isla, made their way to the Blowholes campgrounds. The drive was only about an hour, and they arrived by 6 p.m. that evening. They set up camp in the sandy grounds as they watched the sun set before making dinner and heading to bed.
The family all shared one tent, but there was a divider on the inside so that Ellie and Jake were sleeping on one side and the girls were sleeping on the other. By around 1.30am, Cleo woke her parents up asking her for some water, which Ellie gave her, before tucking Cleo back into bed.
From there, the family of four slept peacefully as they listened to the waves crashing and the sound of nature buzzing. By 6 a.m., Ellie woke up once again, knowing that baby Isla would be up and hungry for her bottle. She opened the internal divider to look into the other side, where she saw Isla in her cot where she had been asleep all night next to Cleo's mattress.
But Cleo herself was not in her bed, and neither was her sleeping bag. Not only that, but the zipper that led outside the tent was left unzipped about three quarters of the way open, and there was a mysterious footprint just outside the tent. Of course, this immediately startled Ellie, who woke up Jake so they could start searching for Cleo.
They were absolutely panicked right off the bat because not only did they not hear anything, but they knew that there was no way that Cleo would have walked off on her own. Not only that, but they quickly noticed that there were no drag marks from her sleeping bag. Cleo was a four-year-old little girl.
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