Mr Cruel
Mr Cruel"My freedom, is more important than your life"
A series of child abductions during the late-1980’s and early 1990’s were attributed to a single offender who caused terror in the communities of Melbourne. An assault that occurred in 1987 would soon be linked to the abductions of two young girls during separate incidents, as well as a third child who was snatched and later murdered. In 1994, Australian police launched Operation Spectrum, a dedicated investigation with the main task of apprehending the kidnapper and suspected murderer who the media had nicknamed Mr Cruel.
Because of a lack of evidence, this investigation failed to identify the masked home invader, and it would be over twenty years before a fresh inquiry was undertaken. Taskforce Apollo, launched in 2010, conducted a review of the original investigation, and utilized new technology and investigative techniques in a bid to capture the dangerous child rapist and killer who had terrorized the northern and eastern suburbs of Melbourne.
Mr Cruel: The Hampton Rapist
Police had previously investigated a number of other sexual assaults committed against women, young girls and even a young boy. The first had taken place on an unknown date in February 1985, when a man abducted a 14-year-old girl from her Hampton home at around 9:00pm. The masked intruder drove her to a vacant building site and sexually assaulted her, before dumping her at Moorabbin Bowl, a ten-pin bowling outlet on Nepean Highway.
Several months later, in July 1985, a 14-year-old boy was abducted from his Hampton residence at 8:25pm. He was taken to an unknown location and imprisoned for just over three hours, during which he was sexually assaulted, before being released in Caulfield South at 11:45pm. Both of these attacks were mentioned by the Herald Sun in 2016, to mark the anniversary of the Karmein Chan abduction. It is currently unknown why police suspect these incident are linked to the later Mr Cruel abductions.
Three other attacks possibly attributed to Mr Cruel occurred in December 1985. The first of which took place on December 4, when a 30-year-old woman was tied-up and raped in her home at an unknown address in Warrandyte, by a man wearing a balaclava and armed with a sawn-off shotgun who appeared from a walk-in wardrobe while the woman was getting ready for bed. A further attack occurred two days later on December 6, when a woman in her 30’s was bound and raped in her home in Donvale, by a man armed with a long-barrelled handgun and a rusty revolver.
Mr Cruel: The Abduction of Nicola Lynas
It would be almost two years before the resident of Melbourne would suffer the nightmare of Mr Cruel. The area of Canterbury, lies just on the outskirts of Melbourne, to the west of Ringwood and south of Lower Plenty. Another suburban area that is situated much closer to the centre of Melbourne, it was home to many Australian politicians and public officials, as well as the wealthy English Lynas family, who were renting a house along the well-to-do Monomeath Avenue.
The family had moved to Australia for business purposes, and were planning on moving back to the UK within the next few days. Ironically, the family had moved to the Melbourne area of Canterbury to raise their children in the relative safety of the leafy suburban neighbourhood. This illusion of safety was shattered on the night of July 3, 1990, when their home became the scene of the next abduction.
The Lynas parents, Brian and Rosemary, were attending a farewell party being thrown for them, as the family were planning to move back home, and left their two daughters home alone for several hours. Back at Monomeath Avenue shortly before midnight, a masked intruder roused 15-year-old Fiona and 13-year-old Nicola from their sleep, and in angry and commanding threats, ordered Nicola into another room. He ordered her to get her school uniform which she wore when attending the Presbyterian Ladies College, while he tied her sister to her own bed.
As the man was armed with a knife and a handgun, the two girls did as they were told out of fear of their lives. The masked man told Fiona that her father would have to pay twenty-five thousand dollars if he wanted the safe return of her sister, and together with Nicola he fled the home, stealing the family’s rental car, which was parked in the driveway. He drive for around a kilometer before parking the rental car, and presumably transferring to another parked car that he had previously prepared.
This would appear to confirm that the suspect lived in the surrounding vicinity, and most likely near Tullamarine Airport, and more precisely within it’s direct flight path. For the first time, detectives were in possession of eye-witness details about the suspect, and had a rough idea of the interior of home, the type of car he drove, and most importantly where he lived.
As part of this refocused investigation, Victoria police searched houses in Keilor East, Niddrie, Airport West, Keilor Park and Essendon North. Police were now desperate to apprehend the individual known as Mr. Cruel, because it would be only a matter of time before he struck again. Less than a year later, another young girl would be snatched by the masked phantom.
Mr Cruel and the East Area Rapist
One of the many potential leads pursued by police was the possibility that Mr Cruel had committed other crimes, perhaps even in another continent. Crimes similar to the modus operandi of the abductions were investigated and discounted as having no link. One such offender was the unsolved American case of the East Area Rapist (EAR), who was suspected of being responsible for committing upwards of fifty attacks in Northern California from June 1976 to July 1979.
In 2001, the East Area Rapist crimes were linked by DNA to a series of murders committed by a serial killer in Southern California known as the Original Night Stalker (ONS). The method of the EAR was to enter homes late at night or during the early morning hours, threaten the lone female victim with a knife or gun and subdue, bind, blindfold and gag her.
He would then proceed to spend a significant amount of time in the residence, before and after raping the victim. Although this method was similar to the Mr Cruel suspect, the EAR never entered a family home and would most often target lone females. Both offenders did use bondage as a means of controlling their victims. In the Wills and Lynas cases, detectives found that specific knots had been used to bind the victims parents, that they described as uniquely employed by sailors.
“It was a good circumstantial case, but not goof enough to charge him. We have certainly kept tabs on him since and if we had another abduction, he’d be the first person dragged in.” Operation Spectrum had identified several suspects, one of which was considered the prime suspect by investigators, however the identities of these men were never publicly released. It would another thirteen years before information about these potential suspects was made available.
The identity and fate of the suspect known as Mr Cruel had been left unanswered. It was possible he had either been incarcerated for similar but unconnected crimes, moved on to other hunting grounds, become too unwell or infirm to continue his crimes, or had died after the murder of Karmein Chan. It is also entirely possible the memories and keepsakes he had collected from the crimes were enough to satiate his desires.
In 2006, some fifteen years after the abduction of Karmein Chan, Victoria police released to the public a significant piece of evidence which they did not disclose during Operation Spectrum. It was reported that one of the victims remembered seeing a tripod present in the bedroom where she was held captive. It was the firm belief of detectives working the case that Mr Cruel had filmed or photographed his victims in order to keep as souvenirs of his crimes.
The Psychology of Mr Cruel
This information was long kept secret because it was the belief of investigators that if it became public knowledge, the offender might dispose of what would become vital evidence. Australian media outlets began reporting in December 2010 that Victoria police had re-opened their investigation into the Mr Cruel case. During a review of the original inquiry known as Operation Spectrum, detectives launched a covert operation in April 2010, called Taskforce Apollo, which was a dedicated investigation tasked with capturing the suspect known as Mr Cruel.
Leading this new investigation was Superintendent Doug Fryer, who said that substantial new intelligence had warranted the establishment of a new taskforce to explore what he described as “every avenue” of inquiry. Sifting through a huge stockpile of evidence, Apollo investigators would spend six months reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages gathered by Spectrum, which amounted to more than 12,000 piece of information, that needed to be reviewed and cross-referenced with new details as part of the investigation.
Much to the shock of taskforce personnel, it soon became apparent that the stored Spectrum case files were a complete mess. They had been kept mostly unorganized and many relevant pieces of information had been misfiled. They began the laborious task of transferring them into electronic format. But worse was to come. Supt. Fryer admitted that 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. Taskforce Apollo investigators had hoped this key piece of evidence could possibly lead to DNA evidence, but it was now missing from police custody. The fact that important evidence had vanished presented the new inquiry with the very real possibility that Mr Cruel had been an active member of law enforcement, and many within the investigation had to contend with the knowledge that the rapist and suspected murderer might have been under their noses the entire time.
Colin McLaren, a retired detective who had been a senior investigator in the original Operation Spectrum taskforce investigation into Mr. Cruel said that the case was the one that still lingered some two decades later. “I probably don’t know of any other more important case that I’ve worked on that still is unsolved,” he said. “This strikes at the heart of most parents, if not everybody in the community.”
Despite the shortcomings of Operation Spectrum, the newly formed taskforce had learned many important details from the first investigation. At the time the original operation was disbanded, there were 32 suspects who could not be eliminated from enquiries. It was also revealed that Mr Cruel had a much more complicated pattern of offending that was previously known.
He also worked at Camberwell Grammar School, where he taught first aid courses. Knight was initially suspected of abducting and murdering missing schoolgirl Siriyakorn “Bung” Siriboon. The thirteen-year-old went missing on June 2, 2011, however police have ruled out any involvement. Det-Sen-Sgt Chris O’Connor, who had previously worked on the Spectrum taskforce said Knight had been a ‘person of interest’ in the Mr Cruel investigation, one of many the taskforce hadn’t been able to eliminate.
Taskforce Puma is still actively investigating her abduction. On June 23, 2013, 62-year-old Knight fell to his death in an apparent suicide whilst inside the Melbourne Remand Centre, just hours before he was due in court to face charges of possessing almost 10,000 child porn images. Sen-Sgt O’Connor told the Herald Sun, “Given what we know about the man it is probable that future crimes have been prevented by his death.”
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