What I wonder about the missing Cleo Smith

There are those stories that make us all hold our breath. Of course with Madeleine McCann, the girl who disappeared from her parents‘ apartment during a vacation and was never seen again. Or that terrible story of the little boy Julen who fell into a 110-meter deep well. When he was found days later in his red-blue tracksuit, we were almost ’relieved' that it turned out he had died quickly from the fall and did not have to wait all those days in fear and loneliness for his death. A nightmare of the darkest kind.

I can imagine that the parents of Cleo Smith must have had such terrifying images as well. When I lose my daughter in the supermarket (I usually find her after a few minutes running panicked through the aisles for the magazine rack where she has taken the Peppa Pig figurines out of the seal of the Zappelin magazine, which forces me to buy it), but in the meantime, I have already written a funeral speech and thought about how I will bring this news to my husband. But when your child is really missing, just gone, not at the slide of the campsite playground, not at the toilets, not with the dogs of the campsite owner. Just gone. A day later still nothing. After helicopter searches still nothing. A million promised to the finder doesn't help either. How do you sleep then? Is that possible? And then, there’s that phone call from an officer, who says: “There is someone who wants to speak to you...”

In the meantime, Cleo is home, seemingly very smoothly. She is playing in the backyard again, her mother posts on Instagram that the family is complete again. But something is gnawing.

What happened? There is a suspect. The obsessive doll collector Terence Darrell Kelly who likes to take selfies with his dolls on Instagram or Facebook and enjoys lining them up.

Why did the suspect specifically target Cleo? And what did they do during those weeks? I really hope it was just playing with dolls...