Warning: This story contains details that readers may find disturbing

A cult member who beat his two-year-old daughter to death in Australia because she did not do her homework properly has been sentenced to nine years in prison.

Tillie Craig disappeared from the Ministry of God farm in 1987, sparking a decades-long search by her father, who was told she was adopted.

In reality, Tillie was killed with a plastic pipe and her remains were allegedly burned by the cult leader and scattered around the commune in regional New South Wales (NSW).

Ellen Rachel Craig, 62, was charged with the murder of her daughter in 2022 after she tipped off police. She later pleaded guilty to the less serious offense of manslaughter.

In handing down the verdict on Wednesday, Judge Natalie Adams acknowledged that Craig had no intention of causing serious harm to Tillie, but said to describe her death as a tragedy would be “a gross understatement.”

“She died at the hands of someone whose job it was to protect her,” she told the New South Wales Supreme Court.

According to the facts read out in court, children in the commune had to help with household chores regardless of their age and were often punished with a black pipe.

On July 7, 1987, Tillie was sweeping when her mother, “unhappy” with the quality of her work, beat her to death.

Craig, who was 25 at the time, later brought her daughter in and said, “She’s stopped breathing” and “Oh no, no, she’s gone.”

The court heard that she put Tillie in a bathtub and waited for the cult leader – known as Alexander Wilon or “Papa” – to return and pray for the girl’s resurrection.

Wilon is accused of cremating Tillie and scattering her ashes. He also forbade cult members from talking about what happened.

He was charged with aiding and abetting murder – and later also with sexual assault. However, the terminally ill man has since been declared unfit to stand trial.

Craig was expelled from the cult in November 1987 and traveled to her home country of New Zealand, where she lived under various aliases until her arrest and extradition in 2021.

In a section of a letter read to the court, Craig apologized for her crime, claiming that “something happened” to her as a mother on the farm.

“My actions were terrible, horrible, horrific.”

“I will never forgive myself for what I did,” she wrote, adding that she wanted “justice” for her daughter and had “made my peace” with her imprisonment.

Tillie’s father, Gerard Stanhope, who had visited the cult several times during his desperate search for his daughter, only learned of her death when his former 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,” Stanhope said in a victim impact statement read to the court, SMH reports.

“It was only more than 30 years later that I learned that my daughter had already died.”

Craig will be eligible for parole in November 2027 after serving six years in prison.