During the late 80’s and early 90’s, a sadistic murderer dubbed 'Mr Cruel' stalked the streets of suburban Melbourne. To this day, he remains at large.
Nowhere was safe for young girls. Not even their homes. A generation of women will remember the fear, that they would be the next to be plucked from their beds like the others before them. He was their bogeyman, Mr Cruel.
Tailored balaclava worn in Nicola Lynas attack sketch by Victoria Police
"Mr Cruel" is the name given to an Australian serial paedophile rapist who attacked three girls in the northern and eastern suburbs of Melbourne in the late 1980s and early 1990s and is the prime suspect in the abduction and murder of a fourth girl. A subsequent newspaper headline referred to the perpetrator as "Mr Cruel," a name adopted by the rest of the media.
He has never been identified and his three confirmed attacks and the suspected murder remain unsolved cold cases. Initially, there was a reward of $200,000 for the two abductions. In April 2016, 25 years after the 1991 abduction and murder of Karmein Chan, Victoria Police increased the reward for information that leads to Mr Cruel's arrest and conviction to $1,000,000.
Police describe him as highly intelligent. He meticulously planned each attack, conducting surveillance on the victim and family, he 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. He threatened to kill his victims with a large hunting knife or a handgun.
Mr Cruel threatened to kill his victims with a large hunting knife or a handgun.
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. He plans his crimes – for example, in one case he abducted a girl and told her he would release her in exactly 50 hours, and indeed he did. He bathed his victims carefully, with one victim describing the act as...
"like a mother washing a baby".
In one case, he took a second set of clothes from the girl's home to dress her before she was freed. In another, he dumped the girl dressed in garbage bags so police could not test her original clothes. 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.
Two of his victims were able to provide police with details of the house where they were kept. Both were shackled to a bed with a rough neck brace. One told detectives she heard planes landing, leading police to believe the house was on one of the flight paths to Melbourne Airport. Police checked houses in Keilor East, Niddrie, Airport West, Keilor Park and Essendon North.
An image of Mr Cruel's bedroom as described by his victims.
On 14 December 2010 Victoria Police announced that a new taskforce had been established about eight months earlier following substantial new intelligence. The new taskforce has been reviewing both the Spectrum Taskforce investigation and some new leads that have come in the last year or so.
A Timeline of Mr Cruel's crimes
22 August 1987 at Lower Plenty, Victoria - A man broke into a family home at 4 a.m. armed with a knife and a gun. He tied the hands and feet of both parents and locked them in a wardrobe. The son was tied to a bed and the eleven-year-old daughter was attacked. He cut the phone lines.
27 December 1988 at Ringwood, Victoria - He broke into the back door of a house at 5.30 a.m. Wearing a mask and dark blue overalls Mr Cruel went to the bedroom of John and Julie Wills and put a gun to Mr Wills’ temple. He then forced the couple to lie down and tied them up with copper wire.
After cutting the telephone line Mr Cruel went into the bedroom of 10-year-old Sharon and abducted her.
He gave her food throughout her ordeal. She was assaulted and eventually was dumped in the schoolyard of Bayswater High School some 18 hours later. When she was found she was wearing a man’s shirt and green garbage bags.
Mr Cruel's second victim - Sharon Wills
3 July 1990 at Canterbury, Victoria - Mr Cruel broke into a house at 11.30 p.m. and tied and gagged a thirteen-year-old girl, Nicola Lynas. Her frightening ordeal was similar to Sharon’s. He placed tape over her eyes, disabled the phones and searched for money.
She was blindfolded and tied up for 50 hours. She was also given food and drink and was aware of his ransom demands. He drove her to another house and molested her before releasing her at a power sub-station in the suburb of Kew.
Nicola Lynas was Mr Cruel's third victim.
13 April 1990 at Templestow, Victoria - Things changed dramatically with his next victim, Karmein Chan who was abducted but also killed. There is a theory she was murdered because she was able to see Mr Cruel’s face. The 13-year-old’s body was found a year after she was taken.
Armed with a knife, Mr Cruel abducted thirteen-year-old Karmein Chan. At the time of the abduction Mr Cruel told Karmein’s sisters he only wanted their money. He then took Karmein away by the hair, and she was never seen alive again.
Her 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. Detective Chris O'Connor answered a journalist question in 2013 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."
Mr Cruel murdered his fourth victim, Karmein Chan
The investigation
Police have searched 30,000 homes and interviewed 27,000 suspects over the attacks, at a cost of $4 million. Police have admitted that some evidence retrieved from the crime scenes at the time has gone missing. One missing item is the tape used to bind one of the victims, which could have provided DNA samples of Mr Cruel using new forensic technologies.
In April 2016, in the lead up to the 25th anniversary of Karmein's murder, Victoria Police released a 1994 dossier (nicknamed the "Sierra files") to the Herald Sun newspaper containing intimate details of the case that had previously not been released to the public. The dossier, which had been prepared with the assistance of the FBI, contained information about seven possible suspects, including details concerning the prime suspect.
A small number of senior police in elite squads were then given access to the Sierra Files, with the instruction that if another child was abducted all seven should be arrested and questioned. Their research suggested any of the seven could be Mr Cruel and all of them had the sick traits necessary to commit the type of horrendous crimes Mr Cruel was responsible for.
The Herald Sun newspaper stated that they had obtained the names of these suspects and also attempted to contact them for information, to varying degrees of success. Victoria Police subsequently increased the reward for information to $1 million.
Searchers sift through the area where the remains of 13-year-old Karmein Chan were found. Picture: News Limited
Former Detective Senior Sergeant Chris O’Connor was one of the police officers tasked with finding Mr Cruel.
“No one was ever charged. That’s the main concern. With a significant investigation like we had to get to the end of it, 25 years later and we have no resolution for the families,” he said.
Former police officer Chris O`Connor is still hopeful Mr Cruel will one day be identified.
Source:News Limited
He knew there were theories that Mr Cruel had been caught and was serving time for other offences — or even dead — but the reality was “no one” knew for sure.
It wasn’t as if the taskforce didn’t have some success. As detectives hunted for Mr Cruel they spoke to “thousands” of suspects and uncovered other serious crimes, including rape.
And Victoria’s child porn legislation was the direct result of the work police did on the Mr Cruel case.
But still the main prize proved elusive.
“The issue of course is was never located. That’s the thing that sticks in the craw of most of the people involved in the investigation,” Mr O’Connor said.
The crimes were unspeakable.
“These were outside of murder the most detrimental offences that could have occurred to the wellbeing of any child that could occur.”
It was possible police spoke to Mr Cruel during investigations.
“That’s always a possibility.”
Of the prime suspects he would only say there were some they worked “very hard on”.
“There were all sorts of people that were more suspicious than others.”
One of those was paedophile Robert Keith Knight, who killed himself in jail in 2013. He was never officially eliminated from the inquiry, although Mr O’Connor didn’t believe he was the one.
Rober Keith Knight
Criminal profiles were compiled, including those by the FBI, but they were only useful to a certain extent.
“There were too many gaps in the information ... Clearly, and you don’t have to be a psychologist to know this, but that sort of behaviour is reprehensible ... Clearly the person had severe problems.”
Mr O’Connor told news.com.au he got close to the victims’ families.
“With crimes concerning children especially you have relatively a lot of contact with them.”
Loved ones had to know why the crime took place.
“And the community needs to know. They need to know, and this is why police work so hard to locate offenders of infamous crimes such at this — so they can have faith in law enforcement and the judicial process.”
Part of the problem confronting police was the lack of forensic material which left them “clutching at straws” at times.
Mr Cruel, it seems, knew a thing or two about leaving no evidence behind and cleaned up after himself, robbing police of crucial clues.
Complicating things were the descriptions they had been given that fitted the profile of “40 per cent of the male population of Australia”.
“You can be the best investigator in the world and it may be the best run investigation, but at the end of the day if you do not have avenues of inquiry that are solid, it’s a very difficult that you’re going to identify the person,” Mr O’Connor said.
In many cases a breaththrough hinged on the offender slipping up, or someone close to them coming forward to divulge what they knew. This does happen — as people try to remove the burden of keeping terrible secrets — and it never far from Mr O’Connor’s mind.
“Loose lips of the offender or someone who has harboured knowledge for some reason is triggered into passing information onto police. And that’s really where we are after 25 years.”
He still lived in hope it would happen.
“Nothing ever happens in a vacuum, even if people don’t understand it at the time, that they are privy to information. Others have their reason for withholding. But down the track sometime things change ...”
Mr Cruel will be hoping that never happens and, if he still alive, he can continue to live in the shadows, with the terrible secret of who he really is.
Anybody with information about Mr Cruel, or any of the crimes attributed to him, should call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or provide information online through www.crimestoppersvic.com.au
Read the full article
Nowhere was safe for young girls. Not even their homes. A generation of women will remember the fear, that they would be the next to be plucked from their beds like the others before them. He was their bogeyman, Mr Cruel.
Tailored balaclava worn in Nicola Lynas attack sketch by Victoria Police
"Mr Cruel" is the name given to an Australian serial paedophile rapist who attacked three girls in the northern and eastern suburbs of Melbourne in the late 1980s and early 1990s and is the prime suspect in the abduction and murder of a fourth girl. A subsequent newspaper headline referred to the perpetrator as "Mr Cruel," a name adopted by the rest of the media.
He has never been identified and his three confirmed attacks and the suspected murder remain unsolved cold cases. Initially, there was a reward of $200,000 for the two abductions. In April 2016, 25 years after the 1991 abduction and murder of Karmein Chan, Victoria Police increased the reward for information that leads to Mr Cruel's arrest and conviction to $1,000,000.
Police describe him as highly intelligent. He meticulously planned each attack, conducting surveillance on the victim and family, he 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. He threatened to kill his victims with a large hunting knife or a handgun.
Mr Cruel threatened to kill his victims with a large hunting knife or a handgun.
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. He plans his crimes – for example, in one case he abducted a girl and told her he would release her in exactly 50 hours, and indeed he did. He bathed his victims carefully, with one victim describing the act as...
"like a mother washing a baby".
In one case, he took a second set of clothes from the girl's home to dress her before she was freed. In another, he dumped the girl dressed in garbage bags so police could not test her original clothes. 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.
Two of his victims were able to provide police with details of the house where they were kept. Both were shackled to a bed with a rough neck brace. One told detectives she heard planes landing, leading police to believe the house was on one of the flight paths to Melbourne Airport. Police checked houses in Keilor East, Niddrie, Airport West, Keilor Park and Essendon North.
An image of Mr Cruel's bedroom as described by his victims.
On 14 December 2010 Victoria Police announced that a new taskforce had been established about eight months earlier following substantial new intelligence. The new taskforce has been reviewing both the Spectrum Taskforce investigation and some new leads that have come in the last year or so.
A Timeline of Mr Cruel's crimes
22 August 1987 at Lower Plenty, Victoria - A man broke into a family home at 4 a.m. armed with a knife and a gun. He tied the hands and feet of both parents and locked them in a wardrobe. The son was tied to a bed and the eleven-year-old daughter was attacked. He cut the phone lines.
27 December 1988 at Ringwood, Victoria - He broke into the back door of a house at 5.30 a.m. Wearing a mask and dark blue overalls Mr Cruel went to the bedroom of John and Julie Wills and put a gun to Mr Wills’ temple. He then forced the couple to lie down and tied them up with copper wire.
After cutting the telephone line Mr Cruel went into the bedroom of 10-year-old Sharon and abducted her.
He gave her food throughout her ordeal. She was assaulted and eventually was dumped in the schoolyard of Bayswater High School some 18 hours later. When she was found she was wearing a man’s shirt and green garbage bags.
Mr Cruel's second victim - Sharon Wills
3 July 1990 at Canterbury, Victoria - Mr Cruel broke into a house at 11.30 p.m. and tied and gagged a thirteen-year-old girl, Nicola Lynas. Her frightening ordeal was similar to Sharon’s. He placed tape over her eyes, disabled the phones and searched for money.
She was blindfolded and tied up for 50 hours. She was also given food and drink and was aware of his ransom demands. He drove her to another house and molested her before releasing her at a power sub-station in the suburb of Kew.
Nicola Lynas was Mr Cruel's third victim.
13 April 1990 at Templestow, Victoria - Things changed dramatically with his next victim, Karmein Chan who was abducted but also killed. There is a theory she was murdered because she was able to see Mr Cruel’s face. The 13-year-old’s body was found a year after she was taken.
Armed with a knife, Mr Cruel abducted thirteen-year-old Karmein Chan. At the time of the abduction Mr Cruel told Karmein’s sisters he only wanted their money. He then took Karmein away by the hair, and she was never seen alive again.
Her 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. Detective Chris O'Connor answered a journalist question in 2013 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."
Mr Cruel murdered his fourth victim, Karmein Chan
The investigation
Police have searched 30,000 homes and interviewed 27,000 suspects over the attacks, at a cost of $4 million. Police have admitted that some evidence retrieved from the crime scenes at the time has gone missing. One missing item is the tape used to bind one of the victims, which could have provided DNA samples of Mr Cruel using new forensic technologies.
In April 2016, in the lead up to the 25th anniversary of Karmein's murder, Victoria Police released a 1994 dossier (nicknamed the "Sierra files") to the Herald Sun newspaper containing intimate details of the case that had previously not been released to the public. The dossier, which had been prepared with the assistance of the FBI, contained information about seven possible suspects, including details concerning the prime suspect.
A small number of senior police in elite squads were then given access to the Sierra Files, with the instruction that if another child was abducted all seven should be arrested and questioned. Their research suggested any of the seven could be Mr Cruel and all of them had the sick traits necessary to commit the type of horrendous crimes Mr Cruel was responsible for.
The Herald Sun newspaper stated that they had obtained the names of these suspects and also attempted to contact them for information, to varying degrees of success. Victoria Police subsequently increased the reward for information to $1 million.
Searchers sift through the area where the remains of 13-year-old Karmein Chan were found. Picture: News Limited
Former Detective Senior Sergeant Chris O’Connor was one of the police officers tasked with finding Mr Cruel.
“No one was ever charged. That’s the main concern. With a significant investigation like we had to get to the end of it, 25 years later and we have no resolution for the families,” he said.
Former police officer Chris O`Connor is still hopeful Mr Cruel will one day be identified.
Source:News Limited
He knew there were theories that Mr Cruel had been caught and was serving time for other offences — or even dead — but the reality was “no one” knew for sure.
It wasn’t as if the taskforce didn’t have some success. As detectives hunted for Mr Cruel they spoke to “thousands” of suspects and uncovered other serious crimes, including rape.
And Victoria’s child porn legislation was the direct result of the work police did on the Mr Cruel case.
But still the main prize proved elusive.
“The issue of course is was never located. That’s the thing that sticks in the craw of most of the people involved in the investigation,” Mr O’Connor said.
The crimes were unspeakable.
“These were outside of murder the most detrimental offences that could have occurred to the wellbeing of any child that could occur.”
It was possible police spoke to Mr Cruel during investigations.
“That’s always a possibility.”
Of the prime suspects he would only say there were some they worked “very hard on”.
“There were all sorts of people that were more suspicious than others.”
One of those was paedophile Robert Keith Knight, who killed himself in jail in 2013. He was never officially eliminated from the inquiry, although Mr O’Connor didn’t believe he was the one.
Rober Keith Knight
Criminal profiles were compiled, including those by the FBI, but they were only useful to a certain extent.
“There were too many gaps in the information ... Clearly, and you don’t have to be a psychologist to know this, but that sort of behaviour is reprehensible ... Clearly the person had severe problems.”
Mr O’Connor told news.com.au he got close to the victims’ families.
“With crimes concerning children especially you have relatively a lot of contact with them.”
Loved ones had to know why the crime took place.
“And the community needs to know. They need to know, and this is why police work so hard to locate offenders of infamous crimes such at this — so they can have faith in law enforcement and the judicial process.”
Part of the problem confronting police was the lack of forensic material which left them “clutching at straws” at times.
Mr Cruel, it seems, knew a thing or two about leaving no evidence behind and cleaned up after himself, robbing police of crucial clues.
Complicating things were the descriptions they had been given that fitted the profile of “40 per cent of the male population of Australia”.
“You can be the best investigator in the world and it may be the best run investigation, but at the end of the day if you do not have avenues of inquiry that are solid, it’s a very difficult that you’re going to identify the person,” Mr O’Connor said.
In many cases a breaththrough hinged on the offender slipping up, or someone close to them coming forward to divulge what they knew. This does happen — as people try to remove the burden of keeping terrible secrets — and it never far from Mr O’Connor’s mind.
“Loose lips of the offender or someone who has harboured knowledge for some reason is triggered into passing information onto police. And that’s really where we are after 25 years.”
He still lived in hope it would happen.
“Nothing ever happens in a vacuum, even if people don’t understand it at the time, that they are privy to information. Others have their reason for withholding. But down the track sometime things change ...”
Mr Cruel will be hoping that never happens and, if he still alive, he can continue to live in the shadows, with the terrible secret of who he really is.
Anybody with information about Mr Cruel, or any of the crimes attributed to him, should call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or provide information online through www.crimestoppersvic.com.au
The ' A Current Affair' report on Mr Cruel
Sources:
https://www.mamamia.com.au/australian-true-crime-stories/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Cruel
Read the full article
