In the spring of 1991, a chilling abduction in Australia would lead to a renewed push to locate the as-yet-unidentified serial rapist and possible murderer known only as Mr. Cruel.
It was the evening of April 13th, and thirteen-year-old Karmein Chan was at her home in the affluent Victorian suburb of Templestowe, babysitting her two younger sisters—nine-year-old Karly and seven-year-old Karen—while their parents worked at the Chinese restaurant they owned, only a ten-minute drive away.
The girls had been watching a documentary about Marilyn Monroe in Karmein’s bedroom, and at around nine p.m., they decided it was time for a little snack. But as they walked down the hall toward the kitchen, they were confronted with the terrifying sight of a man whose face was covered with a black ski mask and who was brandishing a gun and a large hunting knife.
He grabbed the girls by the hair, and forced Karly and Karen into a nearby cupboard, sealing them in by shoving a heavy bed against the doors. According to the girls, the man had said, “I won’t hurt you.” After a time, the girls were able to free themselves from their prison, but by the time they escaped, both the intruder and their older sister Karmein had disappeared.
When authorities arrived, they discovered that the perpetrator had spray-painted the words “payback,” “Asian drug deal,” and “more to come” on the side of the Chan family’s Toyota Camry, which was parked in the driveway. Police dogs deployed at the scene were only able to track Karmein’s movements to a vacant lot about three-hundred-twenty-five yards from the house before the trail went cold.
From the very beginning of the investigation, police were operating under the assumption that Karmein Chan had likely been abducted by the assailant nicknamed Mr. Cruel. This unknown individual had been responsible for at least three other similar crimes, and had been under investigation by a task force known as Operation Challenge. In August of 1987, for example, he had forced his way into a house in Lower Plenty, tied up the parents and a young boy, cut the phone lines, and raped an eleven-year-old girl.
Then, two days after Christmas of 1988, the same attacker broke into a family home in Ringwood, bound and gagged the parents, and abducted ten-year-old Sharon Wills. The girl was raped multiple times, and released alive eighteen hours later; she was found behind Bayswater High School, clad in garbage bags.
And in early July of 1990, the man the media had dubbed Mr. Cruel apparently struck again, kidnapping thirteen-year-old Nicola Lynas from her home in Canterbury, repeatedly sexually assaulting her, then releasing her fifty hours later.
In an intriguing coincidence, police had actually been scaling back Operation Challenge in the days prior to Karmein Chan’s disappearance, leading some to posit that the kidnapper may have had some inside knowledge about police matters. There were also speculations that Mr. Cruel may have had some involvement with the educational system, as all of the attacks had taken place during school holidays.
Following the abduction of Karmein Chan, detectives reinvigorated Operation Challenge, renaming it Spectrum Taskforce and placing particular emphasis on locating Karmein. They also offered a one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward for any information in the case.
In spite of all their efforts, though, it would be almost a year before the tragic fate of Karmein Chan would be revealed. On April 9th, 1992, a man out walking a dog near Edgars Creek in Thomastown noticed what appeared to be a human skull poking out of a landfill. Police combed the area, but were only able to recover the skull, a few vertebrae, and a jawbone. These limited remains, however, would be sufficient to prove that the final resting place of Karmein Chan had been found at last. The girl had died from three gunshot wounds to the back of the head.
Authorities were still convinced that the man known as Mr. Cruel was responsible for killing Karmein Chan, and after her body was discovered, the Spectrum Taskforce kicked into high gear to try and apprehend him. All they knew was that the suspect wore a black ski mask with white stitching around the eyes and mouth, that he lived in a house near an airport, and that it was likely he had videotaped his kidnapping victims in order to make his own child pornography.
But despite countless man hours and millions of dollars spent, police grew no closer to identifying Mr. Cruel, and the case slowly began to stagnate. In recent years, theories have begun to circulate that Joseph James DeAngelo, allegedly the Golden State Killer who raped and murdered numerous victims in California between the years of 1974 and 1986, may have moved to Australia for a time after his last known American crime and subsequently perpetrated the Mr. Cruel attacks. The modus operandi of the two killers, it must be said, is startlingly similar: both offenders broke into family homes wearing ski masks and armed with a knife and gun; both tied up their victims using complicated knots; both were allegedly heard to speak to imaginary people; and both sometimes stopped in the midst of their assaults in order to eat a meal in their victims’ homes.
Though the FBI are still keeping open the possibility that the Golden State Killer and Mr. Cruel are the same man, it seems that police in Victoria have dismissed the supposition. The identity of Mr. Cruel, then, is still unknown, and it is not even clear whether it was indeed Mr. Cruel who shot and killed little Karmein Chan.
Crime Immemorial 