Collecting evidence to show four-year-old Cleo Smith was held against her will in a Carnarvon home is only part of the ongoing work for police investigators.
Cleo Smith being rescued by police in Carnarvon, Western Australia. Photo: AFP / Western Australian Police Force
They also continue to gather evidence to help prosecutors try to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Cleo was taken from her family's tent at the Blowholes campsite, 70km north of Carnarvon, on 16 October.
Members of the 140-strong police team that painstakingly pieced together where she was and freed her on Wednesday morning will be there for weeks to come.
Terence Darrell Kelly, 36, appeared in the Carnarvon Magistrates Court yesterday charged with forcibly taking a child under 16, and one other charge.
But for police, that is not the end of the matter.
Dozens of police officers, including homicide detectives, forensic officers and drone pilots, remain in Carnarvon to find out what happened in the 18 days that she was missing.
"Importantly for the police now the focus is no longer on Cleo," Acting Police Commissioner Col Blanch told ABC Radio Perth shortly before the court appearance.
"The focus is on doing an investigation into who did this," he said.
"From the police perspective, we're backing away from the conversations around Cleo and really focusing on how did this happen, who was involved, what happened in those 18 days and what evidence do we have from each and every one of those 18 days forensically.
"There's a real huge investigation going on with the same taskforce members and that is to retrace those steps that led to that house and where we found Cleo."
That investigation involves interviews with Cleo herself by specialist child interviewers, and interviews with Kelly, which began yesterday.
But it also involves continuing to work with the Carnarvon community, in particular with neighbours who may have observed something.
Police have also renewed their call for CCTV footage from businesses, homes or anywhere else, broadening the appeal to between Friday, 15 October and Tuesday, 2 November.
They will also continue to analyse hundreds of calls to Crime Stoppers, witness statements from more than 100 people at the campsite, and information from existing data seized from CCTV footage and phones.
"We're going to have to put together a very comprehensive timeline of what we say we have evidence to prove has occurred over those days," Blanch said.
"If we're looking for something that's occurred at the Blowholes, it's information that would be relevant to that," he said.
"So if we can track, if we can put people in certain locations at certain times that's what we look to identify and obviously from that we can build a picture of who was there, who shouldn't have been there and led to us identifying this person."
The maximum sentence for forcibly taking a child under 16 is 20 years imprisonment.
- ABC
