A torture worse than any other

KARMEIN and Sheree. Names forever etched in my mind. Any time I hear those names, I’m gripped with horror. It might be innocent, an introduction to a new girl in the office, or the waitress who has the name on her lapel.

And now, sadly, we can add Cleo.

Her mother’s wrenching words have been running on a loop in my mind since she made her impassioned plea to the public this week about her missing four-yearold daughter’s whereabouts.

“Because if I think about her being taken … a million other things cross our mind,” Ellie Smith said.

Days have now passed since wee Cleo vanished from the family tent at a remote West Australian campsite.

Every parent’s nightmare is a cliche. But a missing child is the stuff of nightmares.

The lost or snatched child taps into our primal fear. Childhood fables played on this terror.

Not the fairytales sanitised by Hollywood, but the tale of Hansel and Gretel, the Babes in the Wood, or Red Riding Hood, where a big bad wolf is always lurking.

The woods in the Brothers Grimm fairytales represent an inner darkness, a mysterious, foreboding and evil wilderness.

In Australia, that wilderness is the quiet bush and the empty Outback. The disappearance of Cleo Smith brings back the fear and obsession around little lost Azaria and her finally-found matinee jacket.

Growing up, everyone had an opinion about Lindy Chamberlain. Especially so after Meryl Streep and her Aussie accent relived the mystery in Evil Angels.

Tales of lost and kidnapped children stay to horrify us.

An earlier generation would begin to lock their suburban doors at night after the kidnapping of 13year-old Karmein Chan from her Templestowe bedroom by Mr Cruel. Just months later, six-yearold Sheree Beasley was taken in broad daylight.

The freckly-faced girl with a cheeky smile was riding her pink BMX on the way to the local milk bar when she was plucked off the street and bundled into a car.

My father was covering Sheree’s disappearance for the Herald Sun. One of the locals Dad spoke to remembered seeing a frightened-looking girl wearing a bike helmet as she passed in a car travelling south out of Rosebud.

Her body was found months later in a stormwater drain. The small detail of Sheree’s bike helmet jogged the memories of others and helped piece together a horrifying chain of events that led to pedophile Robert Lowe being imprisoned for life for her rape and murder.

I was roughly the same age as 13-year-old Karmein when she disappeared, her body found buried in a shallow grave a year later in Thomastown.

With Cleo Smith’s disappearance already in my mind, binge cult Aussie drama Mr Inbetween showed an episode of ordinary-bloke-come-hitman Ray losing his friend’s child in a shopping centre.

Many have surely shared that stomach-lurch; for me, a tingling rush of blood down the forearm, after a quick search around Kmart has proved fruitless.

The bored kid has done a bolter while you were lurking around the kitchen appliance section.

You look around, do a few furtive eye glances down the aisles, head to the kids’ section, and then start to completely freak out. Hollering your child’s name, you start a slow jog amid relieved looks from other harried parents that their kid is still with them.

You look almost jealously at their snotty toddlers hanging on to the legs of loaded trolleys.

An eternity, that is in actual fact a minute, and a flood of relief follows the adrenaline rush as you find your child milling around the Nerf blasters. You vow to never step foot into Kmart again.

Because during that long fretful minute, just like Cleo Smith’s mother, a million other unthinkable things have crossed your mind.

Someone knows what took place after Cleo Smith’s mother last saw her in their tent in the WA outback at a campground.

The grim realisation that she was taken from where she was sleeping came when police revealed she could not have reached high enough to undo the zipper on the tent flap.

Little things. There was also the screech of tyres in the night.

Parents will think of this when they put their children to bed.

Where is this little girl lost?