Mr Cruel

Mr Cruel
Tailored balaclava worn in Nicola Lynas attack sketch by Victoria Police.[1]
Years active	1987–1990 (3 attacks)
Known for	Planning Absence of forensic evidence Protecting identity
Criminal charge	Home invasion, abduction, child rape, armed robbery
Reward amount	A$1,200,000
Capture status	Not captured
Wanted since	1987
Comments	1991: suspected abduction and murder weapons: knife and firearm
Details
Location(s)	Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

"Mr Cruel" is an Australian serial child rapist, who attacked three girls in the northern and eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Victoria, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and is the prime suspect in the 1991 abduction and murder of a fourth girl, Karmein Chan. His moniker came from a newspaper headline in The Sun.^[2]

Mr Cruel has never been identified and his three confirmed attacks and suspected murder remain unsolved cold cases. There is a reward of A$200,000 for the two abductions. In April 2016, twenty-five years after the death of Karmein Chan, Victoria Police increased the reward for information that leads to the perpetrator's arrest and conviction from A$100,000 to A$1,000,000.^[3][4][5][6]

Police describe Mr Cruel as highly intelligent. He meticulously planned each attack, conducting surveillance on the victims and their family, ensured he left no forensic traces, protected his identity by covering his face at all times, and left red herrings to divert family and/or police attention. He was soft-spoken, and his behaviour was unhurried, as he took a break during an attack in a victim's house to eat a meal.^[7] He threatened to injure his victims or their family members with a knife or a handgun.

Crimes[]

• On 22 August 1987 in Lower Plenty, a man wearing a balaclava broke into a family home at 4:00 a.m. armed with a knife and a gun.^[8] He tied the hands and feet of both parents and locked them in a wardrobe. He tied the son to a bed and raped the 11-year-old daughter. He also cut the phone lines.^[9]
• On 27 December 1988 in Ringwood, he broke into the back door of a family home at about 5:20 a.m. armed with a handgun and wearing a balaclava.^[8][10] He bound and gagged the parents, and demanded money. He grabbed their 10-year-old daughter, put tape over her eyes, a ball gag in her mouth and abducted her. She was released eighteen hours later on the grounds of Bayswater High School.^[9]
• On 3 July 1990 in Canterbury, he broke into a family home at 11:30 p.m. armed with a knife and a gun and wearing a balaclava.^[8] He tied and gagged a 13-year-old girl. He placed tape over her eyes, disabled the phones and searched for money. He then drove her to another house and molested her for fifty hours before releasing her at a power sub-station in the suburb of Kew.^[9]

Suspected[]

• On 13 April 1991 in Templestowe, a man wearing a balaclava broke into a family home at about 8:40 p.m. armed with a knife and abducted 13-year-old Karmein Chan (who went to the same school as the Canterbury victim).^[8][11] Her decomposed body, with three gunshot wounds to the head, was found a year later. It has been reported that a few detectives had doubts whether this crime was by Mr Cruel.^[12] Detective Chris O'Connor answered a journalist's question in 2013 about whether Mr Cruel was responsible: "we just don't know if it was Mr Cruel who murdered Karmein ... we just can't be sure because there isn't enough evidence to make a value judgement about whether it was or wasn't him in the Karmein case."^[13]

Investigation[]

Spectrum Task Force reward poster for the abductions distributed in 1991.^[14]

Mr Cruel is believed to have videotaped or perhaps taken still photographs of his attacks. Detectives believe that if he is still alive, he will have kept the tapes and/or photos and will still collect, and possibly swap, child pornography. They say he almost certainly continues to collect pornography through the internet and may communicate with children using chat lines.^[15] He meticulously planned his crimes – for example, in one case he abducted a girl and told her he would release her in exactly 50 hours, and he did.^[16] He bathed his victims carefully, with one victim describing the act as "like a mother washing a baby".^[15] In two cases, he took a second set of clothes from the girls' home to dress them before they were freed. The modus operandi was the same in the home invasions/abductions in the three attacks and victim statements provided confirmation to police it was the same offender.^[13]

Two of Mr Cruel's victims were able to provide police with details of the house where they were kept. Both were leashed to a bed. The same two told detectives they heard planes landing, leading police to believe the house was on one of the flight paths to Melbourne Airport.^[16]

Police established the Spectrum Task Force in May 1991 dedicated to catching Mr Cruel.^[17][18] The task force searched 30,000 homes and interviewed 27,000 suspects over the attacks, at a cost of A$3.8 million.^[17][18] There was a A$300,000 reward for information offered by the police for information that led to the conviction of Mr Cruel. A reward poster for the abductions was distributed in 1991 to all Victorian homes, in certain areas in South Australia and New South Wales, and huge posters were placed in public places.^[14] The task force was disbanded in January 1994.^[17]

The task force discovered that some witness statements and crime scene exhibits could not be located when it investigated earlier sexual crimes from 1985 to 1987 with similar modus operandi including a tape used to tie up a victim and also a rope used to tie a victim.^[17][19] The head of the Spectrum Task Force David Sprague said that some exhibits had never been examined by forensics and had either been lost or thrown out.^[17] The police had established a Rape Squad in April 1989 with nine detectives dedicated to investigating serial rapists throughout Victoria particularly in Melbourne.^[20] The police established the unit after a review into the effectiveness of their rape investigations by the Rape Investigation and Evaluation Group found they needed a more coordinated and professional approach to investigations.^[20][21]

On 14 December 2010, police announced that the Apollo Task Force had been established about eight months earlier following substantial new intelligence. The new task force had been reviewing both the Spectrum Task Force investigation and some new leads that had come in the last year or so.^[22][23] The Apollo Task Force closed in June 2013 after finding the intelligence was not credible ruling out the suspect.^[13]

On 9 April 2016, the Herald Sun newspaper published details of the Spectrum Task Force's dossiers on seven suspects known as the Sierra Files. The newspaper also published details from the victims and their family's witness statements to police.^{[8][24][25][26]}

On 13 April 2016, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Chan's murder the police increased the reward for information on her death to A$1 million.^[4]

Earlier crimes[]

There had been varying reports by the media of suspected attacks prior to 1987.^{[7][27][28][29][30]} The police have never released specific details of suspected attacks. Detective Stephen Fontana answered a journalist question in 2001 on earlier attacks "that there just wasn't enough known about him and he didn't want to speculate".^[12] In a 2019 television documentary, retired Detective Chris O'Connor said that there was "broadly speaking perhaps up to a dozen" victims for the investigation.^[19] The first victim was a 14-year-old girl who was abducted from her home in Hampton in February 1985.^[7][31] During her assault the attacker told her, "My liberty, my freedom, is more important than your life".^[19][8] An intimate swab was taken from the victim.^[19]

Moniker[]

The Sun newspaper gave the perpetrator the moniker of "Mr Cruel", which was adopted by the rest of the media, after police described a serial home invasion rapist in November 1987 as "super cool and super cruel".^[2] At the time, police believed the same perpetrator was responsible for three rapes: the first in 1985 of a woman, the second in 1987 of a girl and the third in 1987 of a woman.^[2]

References[]

External links[]

• Melbourne Marvels Mr Cruel 1 – Overview of Case
• Casefile True Crime Podcast - Case 41: Mr Cruel - 7 January 2017