Mr. Cruel

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

Mr Cruel has never been identified, and his three confirmed attacks and the suspected murder remain unsolved cold cases. There is a reward of A$200,000 for information that leads to the perpetrator's arrest and conviction for the two abductions. In April 2016, twenty-five years after the death of 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.

Police describe Mr Cruel as highly intelligent. He meticulously planned each attack, conducted surveillance on the victims and their families, 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; during one attack he took a break in a victim's house to eat a meal. 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 4:00am, armed with a knife and a handgun.

On 27 December 1988 in Ringwood, he broke into a family home through the back door at about 5:20am, wearing a balaclava and armed with a handgun. He bound and gagged the parents, and demanded money. He then grabbed their 10-year-old daughter, put tape over her eyes and a ball gag in her mouth, and abducted her. She was released eighteen hours later on the grounds of Bayswater High School. Chan's decomposed body, with three gunshot wounds to the head, was found a year later. Investigators believe Karmein may have been killed because she had either seen her abductor's face, or because he feared the child could identify him. It has been reported that some detectives had doubts about whether this crime was committed by Mr Cruel. Detective Chris O'Connor answered a journalist's question in 2013 about whether Mr Cruel was responsible, saying "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."

Investigation 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. Mr Cruel meticulously planned his crimes; for example, in one case, he abducted a girl and told her he would release her in exactly fifty hours, which he did. He bathed his victims carefully, with one victim describing the act as "like a mother washing a baby". The task force searched 30,000 homes and interviewed 27,000 suspects over the attacks, at a cost of A$3.8 million. The task force was disbanded in January 1994. 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.

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 surfaced in the last year or so. The Apollo Task Force closed in June 2013 after finding the intelligence was not credible, ruling out the suspect. He had been convicted of two offences committed in 1980 and 1996.

On 13 April 2016, on the 25th anniversary of Karmein's abduction and murder, Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana announced that the reward for information leading to the identity and conviction of her murderer had increased from the original sum of A$100,000 to A$1,000,000. A separate A$200,000 reward for information on the two abductions committed by Mr Cruel that leads to his arrest and conviction also remains in existence.

Earlier crimes There had been varying reports by the media of suspected attacks prior to 1987. The police have never released specific details of suspected attacks. Detective Stephen Fontana answered a journalist's question in 2001 on earlier attacks, saying "that there just wasn't enough known about him and [he] didn't want to speculate". The first victim was a 14-year-old girl who was abducted from her home in Hampton in February 1985. During her assault, the attacker told her, "My liberty, my freedom, is more important than your life". The name was adopted by the rest of the media. 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 also in 1987 of another woman.