Mr Cruel

Mr Cruel
Tailored balaclava worn in Nicola Lynas attack sketch by Victoria Police.
Years active	1987-1990 3 attacks
Known for	Planning Absence of forensic evidence Protecting identity
Criminal charge	Home invasion, abduction, rape, and murder
Reward amount	$1,200,000
Capture status	Not captured
Wanted since	1987
Killings
Victims	1 suspected abduction and murder
Date	1991
Weapon	Firearm and knife

"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. There is 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 from $100,000 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 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.