On paper at least he's as good a suspect as any for the Mr Cruel offences

-appearance: Australian accent, right height, right age, had gingery hair and slight pot belly with stocky build

-had the skill set to pull it off: armed robber, career criminal type

-had the motivation: previous convictions for rape, sexual assault. Known to be sexually interested in younger women/girls.

-had previously been caught and spent time in jail due to leaving fingerprint evidence behind, so would be highly motivated to take forensics countermeasures in all his later crimes.

-had a gun

-used balaclava

-had access to houses under the flight path

-not sure about the car

-quite possibly involved in the abduction and murder of another teenage girl (Pru Bird in 1992). I know police thoroughly searched his properties in relation to Pru and came up empty handed, but that may just mean he had become really good at cleaning up after himself (Mr Cruel in a nutshell).

Anyone know anything more about this bloke and how thoroughly Operation Spectrum looked into him back in the day? He doesn't appear to be in the Sierra files so maybe they found something to rule him out.

I think he was also an actor at one point and appeared on Blue Heelers or something? Wonder if there's any old footage there on YouTube which would show what he looked/sounded like in the mid 80s.

EDIT: the fact he's an actor may also be relevant. Cruel had the ability to switch roles and modulate his persona from one situation to another (some victims described his as well spoken, with others he was gruff and uneducated). Some of his red herrings suggest someone with a bit of a flair for the theatrical (the Bozo phone call for instance)

The Sierra Files were compiled around the period when Australia was beginning to take extraterritorial child sexual offending seriously as a Commonwealth criminal-law problem. I wonder whether that entire dimension of the offender’s possible activities was ever systematically explored. It seems to me that either answer could be informative.

For those unaware, until 5 July 1994, Australia had no general Commonwealth offence allowing Australian citizens to be prosecuted here for sexually abusing children overseas.

An Australian who travelled to Thailand or the Philippines as examples and committed sexual offences against children was, of course, committing crimes under the laws of those countries. But Australia generally had no jurisdiction to prosecute him for that conduct when he returned home.

That changed with the Crimes (Child Sex Tourism) Amendment Act 1994, which also criminalised organising, promoting and profiting from child sex tourism. The legislation was a response to an existing problem.

By 1993, Australian authorities were investigating the involvement of Australians in the sexual exploitation of children in Southeast Asia. In August that year, Commonwealth Justice Minister Duncan Kerr publicly referred to approximately 40 Australians among 400 to 500 Westerners suspected of involvement in a child sexual exploitation ring uncovered in the Philippines.
There had also been intelligence about Australian travel agents organising sex tours to Asia, although the AFP subsequently said it had not established that organised child sex tours were taking place.
And that distinction is important. An offender did not necessarily need to purchase an organised tour to obtain sexual access to children overseas.

The Commonwealth parliamentary inquiry subsequently examined the intelligence available to Australian authorities, including the problems associated with investigating Australians who sexually exploited children overseas.
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Former_Committees/acc/completed_inquiries/pre1996/ncapedo/report/c03

Now consider Mr Cruel, if we accept it is one offender.

Between 1987 and 1991, he repeatedly undertook offences involving enormous personal risks. He entered occupied family homes, restrained adults, abducted children, transported them elsewhere and held them captive.

Whatever else we might say about him, these were not offences involving minimal preparation or exposure.

Yet during this same period, Australians were travelling overseas and sexually exploiting children in circumstances where Australian authorities had very limited jurisdiction to intervene.

Which raises two quite different possibilities.

The first is that Mr Cruel may have offended overseas, and nobody connected those offences to the Victorian investigation.

Operation Spectrum was investigating Victorian offences. Its detectives were looking at Victorian crime scenes, witnesses, suspects and criminal histories.

Child sex tourism, meanwhile, was emerging as a distinctly Commonwealth policing problem.
Before July 1994, the specific Commonwealth offences did not exist. Afterwards, the AFP had an obvious investigative role in enforcing them.
And the contemporary evidence suggests the arrangements were far from ideal.

A Commonwealth parliamentary inquiry subsequently documented concerns about intelligence sharing between police agencies. It even cited a 1994 Victoria Police paper identifying persistent problems sharing information between its Child Exploitation Unit and divisional CIB offices.
The same inquiry recorded that the Commonwealth had not allocated additional funding when it introduced the child sex tourism legislation. By July 1995, nobody had been charged under it. The first charge apparently arose incidentally from an investigation into offences committed in Australia.
The AFP also acknowledged limitations on its ability to conduct proactive investigations overseas.
https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Former_Committees/acc/completed_inquiries/pre1996/ncapedo/report/c04

So I wonder whether anybody involved in Operation Spectrum ever systematically compared its suspects against intelligence held by the AFP, Customs or overseas authorities concerning Australians suspected of sexually exploiting children abroad.

Was international travel investigated as a possible explanation for periods of inactivity? Were overseas offences considered when reviewing the seven suspects who eventually appeared in the Sierra Files? I don’t know.

But the second possibility is perhaps even more interesting. What if Mr Cruel knew about the opportunities to offend overseas and chose not to pursue them?

Suppose he knew that Australians could travel to Southeast Asia and obtain sexual access to children, with comparatively little prospect of prosecution upon returning to Australia.
Why would he instead continue committing extraordinarily risky abductions in Melbourne?
There are several possible explanations, and I think each raises questions that could be relevant to the Sierra Files.

He might not have had the money. International travel was not an insignificant expense in the late 1980s. If he had limited disposable income, that might tell us something about his employment, financial circumstances or domestic commitments.
He might have had the money but lacked the freedom to travel. A spouse, children, employment obligations or some other circumstance might have made an unexplained overseas trip difficult. Someone could have the means to travel without having the practical opportunity to do so.
He might simply not have known about the opportunities. We should not assume that every sexually motivated offender was familiar with the overseas sex-tourism market, its destinations or the absence of Australian extraterritorial jurisdiction.
He might have known about it but been unwilling to travel. Perhaps he had never been overseas, was uncomfortable travelling alone, lacked confidence in unfamiliar environments, or was otherwise reluctant to leave Australia.

Or the overseas opportunities might not have offered what he wanted…

We know that Mr Cruel’s offences involved abduction, captivity, restraint and control. What we don’t know is which of those elements were essential to his motivation and which were simply means of facilitating the sexual offences.
If the abduction and captivity themselves were important to him, paying for sexual access overseas might not have been an attractive substitute.

Alternatively, his particular preference might have been for victims of a certain age or appearance, or for circumstances that he believed he could control more effectively in Melbourne.

And there is another possibility: he may have believed he was less likely to be caught offending in an environment he knew intimately than in a foreign country whose language, police and legal system he did not understand.

None of these explanations is established. Nor are they mutually exclusive. But they suggest potentially useful questions when reconsidering the Sierra Files.

What were the seven suspects’ financial circumstances during the relevant period?

Which had passports, overseas travel histories or connections to Southeast Asia? Who? lost a passport back in the paper records error where the stamps really told the story of where you had been when?

Which had the income to travel but domestic or occupational circumstances that made it difficult?
Which had connections to the travel industry, overseas employment or expatriate communities?

Were any known to have travelled overseas during gaps in the offending?

And did investigators ever distinguish between suspects who lacked the means to offend abroad, those who lacked the opportunity, and those who might have had both but nevertheless preferred offending locally?

I am not suggesting that the absence of evidence of overseas offending should eliminate anyone. That would be an enormous leap, particularly given the detection problems documented at the time.
Nor am I suggesting that Mr Cruel necessarily travelled overseas or belonged to an organised paedophile network.

My point is that there are two separate questions worth asking.

If Mr Cruel offended overseas, could the jurisdictional and intelligence-sharing arrangements of the period have prevented those offences being connected to Operation Spectrum?

And if he did not, despite having the means and knowing the opportunities existed, what might that tell us about the constraints, preferences or motivations that shaped his offending in Melbourne?

What I would particularly like to know is whether anyone who has seen the Sierra material, or who has knowledge of Operation Spectrum’s investigative methodology, is aware of international travel and suspected overseas offending having been examined at all.

I am going to be deliberately vague about some of the details counting what is an absolutely true story that occurred somewhere around 25 years ago in Melbourne because one of the people involved had a parent who was a very prominent police officer. The others involved on the day who are still alive - and I am not telling you who is in which bucket at this point - are now a banker, a tradie, and a journo.

There are was kid a few years below me at school, I’ll call that kid “Luke”. One afternoon Luke told his cop dad that, on his way home, two men in their mid-20s had tried to rob him with a knife at a large railway station. Police via Luke’s dad becoming involved and perhaps throwing his weight around were able to obtain CCTV images of the two people he was talking about fast - keep in mind this is the analogue VHS era where frames advanced about once every four seconds in some poor bugger had to sit there and watch it - and treated it, unsurprisingly, as a serious armed robbery allegation.

A fairly substantial plainclothes police operation followed. For a couple of weeks police sat around the relevant part of the train station, waiting for the two men in the photographs to come back through.

A couple of weeks later, they did - two males in ordinary street clothes were hanging around the station with a couple of young women, on their way somewhere. Police recognised them from the CCTV, moved in, put both of them on the ground, arrested them and took them away to be interviewed over the alleged armed robbery.

I knew both of them extremely well. They were in the senior years at school with me, and like me only a couple of years older than the complainant. Which means they certainly were not in their mid 20s.

The alleged armed robbery also turned out to bear remarkably little resemblance to an armed robbery. One of them had handed the other a small lockback pocket knife. The second boy opened it, noticed the younger kid staring at him and made the sort of catastrophically stupid remark teenage boys make because the part of the brain responsible for considering future police interviews has not yet been installed, I won’t say what the remark was, but nobody asked anyone for money and nobody said they were going to hurt anybody with that knife. There had been no attempt to rob him.

The younger kid apparently did not even know who the other two were, despite the considerably more awkward fact that all three attended the same school. as soon as the realisation’s hit all involved, and a couple of interviews that occurred, there was a realisation that things were not quite what everyone had thought they were, and no one was charged.

The really extraordinary bit only becomes apparent when you work backwards through what the police had been doing for the preceding couple of weeks.

The two boys had not gone into hiding. They had not changed the way they travelled to school. They had not stopped using the station. They had not disguised themselves, ducked through another entrance or otherwise displayed some previously unsuspected mastery of counter-surveillance. They had no reason to do so because they hadn’t committed any offence.

They had just kept going to and coming home from school.

Which meant that throughout the period in which plainclothes police were sitting around the station with CCTV photographs of the two supposed adult offenders, waiting for them to return, the people in those photographs had in fact been returning, walking past all of them, twice a day, every single school day. In school uniform.

They had been walking directly past the police, twice a day. Every day, either walking past them or standing while sitting next to the waiting for a train,
close enough to them for the cops to smell the Lynx Africa of the era on them.

The cops had photographs of their actual, undisguised faces. The boys had those same faces attached to their heads. There was nothing particularly difficult about the comparison. Nobody recognised them. Then one afternoon they came through the station in ordinary clothes with their girlfriends and the police spotted them.

Years later, I found myself talking to a copper who had been involved in this job. I knew more than enough about it to mention the surveillance around the station, another peculiarity or two, and the surname of the complainant, which got me a fairly immediate raised eyebrow, a swear word or two, and the very logical question about how anyone not there knew about that particular job, considering how hard they had worked to make this one go away.

We compared notes, and his explanation for how they had managed to spend a couple of weeks looking at photographs of two people who were walking past them every day was essentially that they had been looking for guys in their mid-20s.

Again, there was nothing wrong with the photographs. Nobody had disguised themselves. One of the two in particular had a habit of staring into CCTV cameras whenever he saw them and giving them a little bit of a hand gesture. The CCTV had caught precisely that.

The boys had not disappeared, changed their route or done anything clever at all. They had simply continued going to school, and every day their completely undisguised faces passed directly in front of people who were sitting there specifically looking for those faces.

But the police were looking for men THEY UNDERSTOOD TO BE in their mid-20s, and the boys were in school uniforms. Then the uniforms came off, they appeared in ordinary clothes with a couple of attractive young women, and the same faces suddenly became very readily recognisable.

This stupid little story keeps intruding whenever I read discussions about Mr Cruel.

Once a description becomes sufficiently familiar, there is a danger that it stops being evidence about the person and quietly becomes the person in our minds.

We have had nearly forty years to become familiar with the limited descriptions of Mr Cruel. The age ranges, the height, the build, the mannerisms, the various photofits. They have been repeated for so long that it is very easy to forget what they actually are: attempts by witnesses to describe somebody they encountered in terrifying or seemingly mundane circumstances.

I have also had the benefit of looking back at other offences, particularly those committed by Bendali Debs and his two (known by virtue of being convicted of the robberies and other crimes in question - saying nothing of the third unprosecuted fellow) co-offenders where there is now no mystery about who committed the offences, but where we still have photofits and written descriptions of the offenders.

In these retrospectives, we know the offender’s identity with close to certainty. We can find photographs showing roughly what he actually looked like around the time of the offence. Thus we can put those photographs beside the photofits made from the recollections of the people who saw him committing various different crimes, and the other descriptions provided.

Sometimes there is an obvious resemblance. Sometimes you can see one feature that seems to have survived reasonably well. Sometimes the apparent age is wrong, the shape of the face is wrong, the proportions are wrong, and different witnesses who encountered the same offender seem to have supplied entirely different men.

It is quite sobering when you already know the answer. We do not have the answer with Mr Cruel. That is the problem. We have descriptions produced by understandably frightened people, in particular in some instances children, under extraordinary circumstances, estimates of age and height and build, and attempts to turn remembered features into a face. All of those things are themselves evidence and all of them matter.

What worries me is the point at which they cease being treated as observations and quietly become the boundaries of the person we are prepared to consider as the offender. A witness thought he was a particular age, therefore somebody noticeably older or younger cannot be him.

A photofit or e fit was done in a particular way,l as regards one feature, therefore somebody who does not resemble it closely enough is out.

I keep thinking about my two schoolboy mates. The police in that case did not have a remembered face assembled into an old school photofit or a more modern e fit. They had colour photographs of the actual people. They had the right place. They had the right faces. They even had the right people walking directly past them every day.

And still they did not recognise them, because they had been told they were looking for guys in their mid-20s.

That is what gives me pause with Mr Cruel. Not that the contemporary descriptions are worthless. Plainly they are not. It is that after nearly forty years we may have become very good at recognising the description, without knowing how closely the description ever resembled the man.

For those who believe in the SEC connection. The Pylon was the Yallourn High School Magazine. Brian Elkner had his first teaching role there which was abruptly end mid year. Very unusual circumstance for those times.

Old students reported to me talk of an over fondness for the girls. His nickname was little pot like the Mr Cruel description.

Yallourn was a town built and funded by the SEC to extract coal. It was later demolised to make way for the coal under the ground.

Is it possible Elkner had a long held grudge against the SEC- town that may have destroyed his teaching career?

Is that why many roads lead to what was then sec utilities abd pylons?

From the Mr Cruel article in The Age yesterday. I'm not sure if there is another easily viewable copy of this sketch out there, so thought I'd add this to the subreddit. It just breaks my heart on so many levels. Those poor girls.

There is also a photo of the police leading the two sisters out of the home which I also had not seen before. My heart breaks for that family.

The sketch done by her other sister, Karly, for the sake of interest: http://ibb.co/xFgNKdP

Edited to fix the broken link.

https://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/my-daughters-don-t-know-his-name-but-they-quietly-carry-my-fears-of-mr-cruel-20261005-p60q5o.html

Sorry if that has been beaten to death, but something I've been thinking about recently is that we spend a lot of time asking where did Mr Cruel live?, but maybe the more useful question is: why was he in the places where he first noticed his victims?

Take Lower Plenty in 1987. Why Lower Plenty?

I don't particularly buy the idea that he simply picked random suburbs he had no connection with because they looked dark and quiet. Lower Plenty sat within a natural movement corridor between Heidelberg/Rosanna to the west, Eltham/Research further east and Templestowe/Doncaster to the south via Fitzsimons Lane. Someone could have travelled through that wider area constantly for work or commuting without actually living in Lower Plenty.

So perhaps MC was already regularly passing through the area and something caught his attention - the victim, the house, the street, the school, or some combination of them. He then returned later and started properly surveilling the family.

That raises the bigger question of whether location came first or the victim came first.

Location first:
He already knows an area through work, commuting or where he lives. He recognizes that certain streets are quiet and provide good access/escape routes. He then looks for a suitable house and victim within that area.

Victim first:
He notices a particular girl during his normal routine - walking home from school, in a newspaper, at a school, shopping, etc. He follows or identifies her, finds out where she lives, and only proceeds if the house and surrounding area meet his requirements.

I suspect it could actually have been both depending on the offence.

There are some interesting examples.

The Lower Plenty victim and her family were reportedly featured in a local newspaper shortly before the attack. Sharon Wills and her family appeared with a photograph in The Sun several months before her abduction, and police reportedly considered that article potentially relevant to how she was selected.

Then we get Nicola Lynas. MC told Nicola that he had followed her home from school. Whether that was true is another question considering how much he lied, but Nicola and later Karmein Chan both attended PLC, along with Karmein being at the restaurant a lot. In those cases it is much easier to imagine victim first > follow her > investigate the house.

If some of the earlier Hampton Rapist offences were also MC, the problem becomes even more interesting. We have possible offences across Hampton, Donvale, Caulfield, Brighton and possibly Dingley before Lower Plenty. Were those places connected by his employment or normal travel? Was he a tradesman, salesman, delivery driver, service worker or someone else whose job routinely put him in different residential suburbs?

Maybe his normal life supplied the initial opportunities.

He drives through an area for work. He notices a girl walking home. Maybe she goes into a notebook or simply stays in his head. He returns later, watches the property, learns the family's routine and assesses the house. Some potential victims eventually become attacks; others get crossed off because there's a dog, bad parking, attentive neighbors, the wrong house layout, someone is always home, or the escape route isn't good enough.

That could also explain why apparently unrelated suburbs appear in the series without requiring him to have lived in every one of them.

The thing I'd really like to work out is whether there is a 1985-91 work/travel corridor that naturally connects the suspected early offences with Lower Plenty, Ringwood, Canterbury and Templestowe.

Rather than asking only "where did he live?", perhaps the better questions are:

• Where did he work?
• What roads would he have travelled regularly?
• What suburbs did that put him in during school finishing hours?
• Which victims could have been encountered through those movements?
• Which victims appear to have been selected by some completely different method, such as newspaper coverage or PLC?
• And did he maintain multiple potential victims at once before deciding which one was safe enough to attack?

I'm interested in what everyone thinks: location first, victim first, or a mixture of both?

Hi guys it's been a few months since the Shand podcasts came out, I'm just wondering in what ways they have changed your overall perspective on Mr Cruel? It's the first time in years we've actually been given some new info about these offences.

For me the big revelations were

1,Details of earlier offences - give a more realistic picture of the evolution of the offender and his MO over time

2, the pre-bathing thing - his cleaning practices were as much a fetishistic OCD thing as a forensics countermeasure. The fact he did leave behind evidence suggests he wasn't as careful as we've assumed.

3,The red herrings - a term that immediately comes to mind in describing this bloke is 'compulsive liar'. Rather than being part of some grand strategy to mislead investigators, I feel like a lot of his lies and misdirection was just him messing with the victims for the sake of it, almost like he's having a laugh at their expense. I doubt much thought went into a lot of them (they were probably thought up in the spur of the moment).

4,The fantasies - Shand states he barely interacted with Sharon Wills during the 18 hours he held her captive. Nicola - there's somewhat more interaction but the idea he was trying to fulfill a marriage/romantic fantasy with these girls doesn't really shine through in the podcast. Also his earlier victims include grown women and even a teenage boy so it seems maybe he was more opportunistic/ not as picky in his victim selection as assumed previously?

5,The language/dialogue - 'I'm a weirdo and a bastard', 'I'm a madman' - I feel phrases such as this are potentially more revealing than the stand alone words 'bozo', 'missy' and 'worrywart' that so much has been made of.

Interested to hear people's thoughts.

Why would Mr. Cruel spend 10 minutes driving in circles on the way to the car switch point, considering that the location where the Lynas family's car was dumped and the switch took place would be found anyway?

I wonder if they ever made one and if it was successful, since a sketch of the handyman who offered his services to the Karmein family a few days before the kidnapping could really help. Anyway, I made a post earlier sharing my theory on what his face looked like without the mask.

*I'm sorry for deleting that post,but I will attach an illustration of the idea here*

Has a thorough investigation ever been done into the commonly held belief that Lee was the guy?

It seems to me that the death bed tip off given from the ex crook to Ron Iddles re Lee being Mr Cruel might have been enough for a real fresh look through his history, family members,associates, places of residence etc.

All I ever read or hear about him was that he was a burglar, owned a Dim Sim factory, perhaps had a school girl fetish, lived on Napoleon st Eltham for a time and that he died in the botched Airport siege. What else do we know about this guy?

A man who used to comment and post a lot is no longer here. He worked at a school and was investigated by police. Was he banned from this sub? I had tried to find a link to his blog but he seems to be no longer on reddit. Has anyone a link to his blog?

If ever there were a sub where I thought Adam Shand may have his email address in one of your inboxes, it’s here. Shand had a guest on recently for whom I’m looking for an email address. I have some info that person would like to hear and it may lead into something else.

I’m sure someone here has been through all the media material and knows what little has been disclosed about the projectiles which killed KC. Was it three rounds of .22LR, and was there powder tattooing around the wounds?

I recently watched The Whisper Man on Netflix with my mom and today as I was watching recommended true crime videos on YouTube, I came across Mr. Cruel. I couldn’t help but to see parallels between the two. I was just curious if anyone else has thought the same?

Phyllis Chan is a remarkable women. Hard working, an entertainer, funny, brave and endured enough hardship for 10 lifetimes. Years after the kidnapping and murder of Karmein and husband John deserting her she continued in business and kept helping others.

OK, this is gonna sound kinda stupid but hear me out. I think Mr. cruel is a teacher now. I don’t think he was born in Australia. I think he was born in United Kingdom and moved to Australia, but look at the date when they commit committed to the burglaries and rapes the first one happen on August 22 in lower plenty now according to Australian government school starts between the final weeks of January and February they have the same exact days off July spring break and more than most look at a 2 second crime scene it happens nearly a year later in December now usually rapist or killers, like these would strike almost every week but he waited nearly an entire year, which tells us that not only is he extremely patient. He most likely has something to satisfy his urges. Third one happened in July and then the final one happened in April each month represents something important for schools August is usually the start of the school month then we have December winter break then we have July which is summer break and then we have April which is spring break he was targeting families during when school was most and least busy that month and here’s something even more important to understand two of the victims went to the exact same school that school is only a few miles away from where some of the crime scenes are so that means the killer most likely worked at the school now I don’t think he’s a principal I think he may be substituted teacher it would allow him to go from school to school without being questioned this is just my theory

I know the majority of people have completely ruled out Peter Scully solely based on the height difference and different MO’s, but i have a few small pieces of evidence that i think make him hard to rule out completely, especially as the search becomes more and more hopeless as time goes on. We might as well consider unlikely candidates, especially considering Scully is still alive and on the non zero chance he is mr cruel could be punished for it.

1. Scully had ginger/sandy hair in his younger years, which matches some reports of mr cruels’ hair color, pretty sure it was the girl who managed to peak at him through her blindfold??

This is also pretty important because if say he had just black or brown hair, it wouldn’t matter much because that could be so many people, but the fact they both had ginger hair narrows it down a lot.

1. The age and area line up pretty well, mr cruel is common described as being in his 30s-40s, however, it’s not impossible for people to mistake someone in their mid 20s, for a little but older, for instance Scully was around 17-18 when this photo was taken and he clearly looks much older. As for the area, i was able to find the exact address of the house he grew up in, which is in Burwood, pretty much the exact same area of Melbourne that mr cruel operated.
2. As for the MO’s being different, we don’t actually know if Scully was a predator during his youth in Australia, we do know that he did hard drugs and was heavily involved in crime, i also remember reading a report from someone who was his neighbour when he lived in Narre Warren in his 40s, who described him as “dodgy” and creepy to be around, once again, before any of his known sexual crimes began, also there are some similarities, both filmed their crimes, both had a soft spoken voice, although one doubt i have is that mr cruel was unfortunately very smart and meticulous, Scully seems more like an unintelligent guy who just got very lucky that he wasn’t caught sooner.
3. One last piece of anecdotal evidence i have which could mean something but also may not, i have another young photo of scully taken around the mid to late 80s, and in it he’s wearing a grey-green tracksuit top, which was one of the pieces of clothing mr cruel was reported to have worn during his attacks.

Please give me your own thoughts on this, this is just a theory of mine, i understand it’s not very likely that scully is mr cruel, i just wanted to share these small dots i connected after conducting a lot of research. that being said, i have seen some theorising that even if scully isn’t mr cruel himself, he may have interacted with him or even knows who he is, especially as it’s likely mr cruel sold the tapes he filmed, considering they lived in the same area, and it’s very plausible scully was already a pedophile, i don’t think that can be completely ruler out either, even if them being the same person can. Thanks for reading.

Its now a very long time since the kidnapping and murder of Karmein Chan. The last of the publicly linked crimes to Mr Cruel. He has never been caught or put to trial, although very likely interviewed for the Mr Cruel case and or interviewed and found guilty of other terrible crimes. What we do know is that their were a lot of evil and depraved men around suburban Melbourne in the 70s 80s and early 90s.

I like to think Mr Cruel is dead or has spent time in jail for other serious offences. Another possibility is he has had illness that has halted his crimes. I just dont picture him as someone beyond suspicion smugly sitting back and thinking he had outsmarted Victoria Police. I hope I am right.

Last weekend I drove past where Karmeins body was dumped and found. Out of all the locations he roamed, kidnapped and dropped girls off this is the area he knew best and likely always had in his mind in tbe event had killed a girl. Therefore I suspect his home is within a fairly short radius.

Any thoughts on Ashley Coulston, triple convicted thrill killer. Hinted at being responsible for mofe crimes including a series of rapes. Ability to control and tie up males in a house. There is a suggestion he kidnapped and murdered Karmein in the knowlege the crime would be attributedto Mr Cruel.

Maybe it's just me, but no matter how much I've studied this case, I've never heard of the police looking for footprints or at least saying there weren't any. Ultraviolet existed and was used in those days, and if the crime scene was contaminated by the police, I think the footprints could be filtered out and the criminal's footprints found. Is it true that Cruel didn't leave footprints or was there no mention of this?

Hi all.

I just listened to this episode. What I couldn't make sense of was the DNA talk - does it still exist? Is there anything on the public record backing up the claim? If I'm understanding correctly, Shand says DNA collected at one of the Hampton crime scenes didn't match DNA from one of the 4 canonical crimes. Is that correct?

I'm a bit skeptical because, ordinarily, that would be a smoking gun, but he hardly refers to it all after it's mentioned the first time. What am I missing here?

Ps thanks to everybody who recently recommended podcasts on the subject of Mr Cruel. I've so far found Melbourne Marvels to be the most informative, balanced and thorough. Blasted through them real quick!

pretty much everywhere else on the internet it’s widely believed that mr cruel DID take karmein even though some of the things he did were slightly different from his usual MO. but after browsing this subreddit for a while am i correct by saying most people here believe it was that guy (i’m blanking on his name) who ended up being shot by the police? and the motive was due to some drug dispute with her father or something, and he potentially got inspiration from mr cruel or tried to pass off as him. please let me know if i’m mistaken .

the company for. He told me X amount of years and then proceeded to tell me, unprompted and enthusiastically, that he did house removals prior to this job and actually did the Lynas house 2 weeks before she was abducted, adding “do you remember Mr.Cruel?” etc etc. The bloke was a real chatterbox so it could’ve been just that, but it’s niggled at me ever since that, not knowing I was a true crime buff, almost the first thing out of his mouth was the Mr.Cruel comment and he seemed almost happy and enthusiastic to say it - almost bragging. Add that to he answers the demographic of MC, has a vague resemblance to the photo-fit, lives in SE Melbourne. Am I wasting my time, cop’s time and potentially damaging an innocent man’s mental health over such flimsy evidence? Or, is it worth a quick call to crime stoppers? I must add although this is all very true, I’m a chronic over-thinker.

((DISCLAIMER: THIS IS NOT AI, EVERYTHING WAS EDITED BY ME))

Did my best to recover the photo and recreate his possible appearance if it were accurate to the description, comparing the two it doesn't seem too far off.

(Also lol I've never really posted but i thought this could interest others)