Mr. Cruel: Nightmare In Melbourne | Australian Crime Stories | Real Crime

paper was light gold in medieval times [Music] oh no tobacco sugar [Music] that everything we thought we knew about the world might turn out to be completely wrong please bring my daughter calm and back to home because all my family love her very much carmen this is your favorite dress you have to come home and marry it come back and dress it please release my daughter oh my family is a family lover don't small my family friends [Music] it was the crime that traumatized melbourne he's woken up with nightmares what if someone comes in mum thirteen-year-old carmen chan kidnapped by a predator you can't even think about it in your worst nightmares they called him mr cruel some described him as a monster and i think that's probably accurate how many young girls has he preyed on lock up the doors keep the children inside and trust no one but was mr cruel also a killer i think that he probably said i can't release this one adam shan dives deep into the pool of evidence the fear and paranoia was elevated by an horrific truth and discovered shocking revelations for australia's most baffling cold case there was perhaps a dozen victims [Music] so [Music] i'm outside the house in melbourne's eastern suburbs where carmen chan live with her family and where she was abducted in 1991 i was working in melbourne at the time but had no children yet it was a much quieter more genteel town back then there had been abductions before but this offender seemed so calculating and cool no family was safe i'll never forget phyllis chan's heart-rending press conference she could have been any mother in melbourne and carmen anyone's child the city i'd moved to two years prior was changing before my eyes the darkness had never held such terror before big manhunt is underway in melbourne tonight following the abduction at knifepoint of a girl the abduction took place around nine o'clock last night thirteen-year-old kamen chan was babysitting her two younger sisters aged nine and seven while her parents were at work in the family restaurant these were very very ordinary people [Music] in the space of five minutes that was obliterated when carmen was abducted i had a daughter of a similar age and i kept my feet on the ground because i was doing what i was doing for all the girls out there certainly but particularly to protect my own daughter chris let's talk about the carmen chan abduction and the crime scene it seems that whoever took carmen had been looking at the house for some time beforehand i think that's a fair assumption the three chance sisters were at home watching tv yes and the person enters the house what can we piece together uh from what carmen's sisters were able to tell police about the intruder the offender was wearing a balaclava or headgear of some description his arm with a knife and what did he tell the girls [Music] he confronted carmen and her sisters in the hallway and grabbed them and drag them back into the bedroom and instructed the two young ones to go into the cupboard he secured the cupboard door and left with carmen carmen disappears my involvement started with a phone call a visit to the scene speaking to a carmen's sister her mother and spending some time with them in front of you you can see individuals who are crumbling because their child their sister is gone and no one can give them an answer what do you say to someone when you don't have an answer all you can do is provide a connection be there when they want to see you to talk to you and never hold out false hope that it is going to work out advanced space mud clay a massive police manhunt got underway on the streets of melbourne police began door knocking but they had few leads to go on except for a blunt spray-painted message left behind by the abductor the family toyota parked at the front of the house had been dormed with slogans saying payback more to come and a reference to asian drug money the chands run a chinese restaurant in berlin and a takeaway outlet at lower plenty mr chan has been unable to provide police with a motive for the abduction or the graffiti on the car is he known to police in any way at all mr chan is not no he's a very very well respected man in the community away with me and they're very very hard to sleep it's every parent's worst nightmare that some man in a balaclava with a gun and a knife is going to breach the sanctity of your home and take one of your children i was in melbourne living here as a parent and i just thought look i want to get to the bottom of this i want to help catch this blog he almost certainly watched that awful press conference with phyllis it's been three days since their oldest daughter carmen was abducted at knife point from their temple stowe home police and phyllis chalmer hoping that he just had this much amount of human decency and that he would watch that and think yes i'll release her please this is my daughter [Music] reporters can be accused of being a hard-hearted lot but i think that kind of a press conference would have an effect on people not just as reporters but as people living in melbourne oh yes i'm a father of four myself aric and any parent that lived through that period will tell you that they probably changed the way they what they what they let their children do i don't go out anywhere unless she comes with me she doesn't even go to babysitters or anything she's always with us he's he's woken up night with nightmares you know what if someone comes in mum and and it's terrible it's terrible for a five-year-old to have to think like that parents changed their behaviors children changed their behaviours parents and children became fearful no guarantees could be given this man was still out there it was quite a dramatic thing there were reports of children nightmares parents sleeping in the children's bedrooms turning the houses into fortresses and one of the interesting things that follows is that those young children are now young parents and i know perhaps because i was involved in the case many of these people are repeating that behaviour now the abduction of carmen chan was a seismic event for families in melbourne the fear and paranoia they were feeling was elevated by and horrific truth this had happened before other young girls had been preyed upon many including the police believe the man responsible for kidnapping carmen chan had also taken other children in melbourne's eastern suburbs including sharon wills and nikki linus the abductor was now being called mr cruel and he was the most wanted man in australia melbourne in 1991 was a city on edge following the abduction of carmen chan many believed a predator dubbed mr cruel had struck again we found evidence that mr cruel was connected to up to 12 assaults let's go to august 1987 when he attacked an 11 year old girl in melbourne's eastern suburb of lower plenty her identity's never been disclosed but how much can you say about the case well there are a number of close similarities to some of the other cases again the early hours of the morning the this this offender has broken in through a front window he's disturbed the parents who were asleep in bed once the parents were restrained he went to the children's bedroom and there were two children in there one was the victim and one was her sibling the sibling was harnessed to the bed and the 11 year old was taken out of the bedroom to the bathroom [Music] at the completion of the sexual assault he ate some food had some drink he stole quantity of money and some jewelry and clothing from the family and he lived by the front door he's there on the scene for some time and so the more he's there the more traces of his presence he has to remove you wonder whether this might have led him on the next occasion to escalate his behavior and and take his victim away from the scene to minimize the cleanup i'd imagine that may have inspired that behavior [Applause] 16 months later in december 1988 mr cruel struck again this time in ringwood another eastern suburb of melbourne he targeted ten-year-old sharon wills one of four daughters born to julie and john wills this is a photo of the wills girls with their mother julie taken in 1988 it was for a story in the sun newspaper six months before ten-year-old sharon was abducted it told her how julie wills saved sharon from a burning bed police believe the offender read the article and learned that all four sisters slept in bunk beds in one room this was critical information for a dangerous predator who was about to escalate his behavior mr cruel breaks in everybody's asleep in the house john wills wakes up with a gun to his head and mr cruel is saying you're not going to do anything stupid or you're not going to be a hero so they were tied up he then goes into the room and takes sharon it's at this point the offender changes his behavior instead of taking sharon to the bathroom and assaulting her he kidnaps her and takes her for a long drive to a house somewhere in the suburbs maybe even his own home one can only imagine the terror that sharon endured detectives said the man armed with a pistol and wearing a dark-colored balaclava was intent on capturing the child and had possibly loitered in the area for several days before raiding the hillcrest avenue house yesterday morning so how are the parents at that moment you you can't even think about it in your worst nightmares yet here it was it happened to them and what was their fear what was happening to their [Music] daughter this terrible sense that they may not see her again we're dealing with a very cunning person a person who we regard as very dangerous and an unknown potential some describe him as a monster and i think that's probably accurate remember this was before the widespread use of cctv in 1988 police had none of the technology we take for granted today they scoured the streets they door knocked they stopped and searched cars they set up a police van for the public to feed information into everything they could do to find little sharon and then after 18 tense hours a stunning breakthrough about midnight a woman motorist spotted sharon wearing a man's white shirt walking along orchard road bayswater soon after she'd been dumped from a car with a policeman's jacket around her shoulders the girl was taken to the austin hospital for a medical check this morning she was brought home cuddling a teddy bear and in the arms of her father police said sharon had been assaulted gagged and kept blindfolded throughout the ordeal an emotional mr wills was grateful to all who assisted in the search for his daughter i just like to thank all my friends my neighbours my relatives i'd like to thank the media for your coverage and your assistance to get my daughter back and most of all i'd like to thank a lovely lady who buys water thank you [Music] sharon's release was a remarkable outcome that few had expected while the wills family tried to put their lives back together brave sharon was extremely helpful to the police telling them as much as she could about the man who'd taken her she'd never seen him her blindfold was on for the whole 18 hours and yet one time when he left her alone in his bedroom she snuck a look in sharon wilson's case she was able to very bravely take the blindfold off for a second and scarily the thing that was at the end of the bed was a video camera [Music] so he's obviously been recording what he's been doing [Music] sharon was able to describe the bedroom plan of the detention house that description of the bedroom was drawn by one of the victims to her extreme danger had a peep even though she was warned against that when he wasn't assaulting her sharon's abductor was calm and courteous and when he made the decision to release her in the grounds of bayswater high school it was done in a careful calculating way as professor david wells discovered during a medical examination this individual on the victim's description went to great lengths to clean them or remove potentially damaging forensic evidence the girl was placed in a green garbage bag stood in the bag and it was taped around her shoulders another garbage bag was put over her head and taped around her body she still had a blindfold the the tape over her eyes here is someone who perhaps knows a little bit about forensic principles or procedures he was calculating prepared and it made a lot of arrangements to reduce the likelihood of him being caught julie what would you like to say to somebody who might be watching now who may know this man someone must know him he couldn't be that much of a loner someone either is married got a girlfriend he's got a mother somewhere surely he must have some idea he needs help before he takes another little girl this is national my news good evening a ransom demand has been made for the return of a 13 year old schoolgirl kidnapped in canterbury the master armed abductor grabbed nicola linus from her parents home over 18 hours ago police say the men forced a window at the back of the liners home in exclusive monometh avenue just before midnight thirteen-year-old nicola and her fifteen-year-old sister were asleep in a bedroom their parents were out at a dinner party at the time aside from the fact her parents were not at home the abduction of nicola linus was very similar to the sharon wills case mr cool probably staked out the house for days beforehand he forced entry to the property but before leaving with the victim intriguingly he stole a number of items which leads us to a very interesting theory it's my view for what it's worth 27 years of policing and 25 years of psychologist that this man is a burglar who's become opportunistic he plans his operations carefully he selects houses selects families excludes houses with dogs if you look at the information about missing lps and money going missing raiding the fridge that to me has more hallmarks of a burglar who's become more specialized in his taste rather than someone else who is a sex offender who's now acquired the attributes and skills of an expert burglar his own ego drives this as an operation the control is part of that operation that's why he's meticulous that's why he takes his time and that's why eventually he moved into an idea of if i take the girls off site i can control the off-site location and that's what happened sharon wills was released after 18 hours of captivity in the case of nicola linus there was still no breakthrough after twice that long good evening and the father of the 13 year old kidnapped canterbury girl pleads for her safety brian linus says he will do anything to have his teenage daughter released brian linus should have been preparing today for his daughter's 14th birthday instead he was appealing for her safe return we'll just very much like to have nikki back with us obviously can't wait to have her back with us [Music] nicola linus has now been missing for 42 hours 20 detectives are now working on the case did you think she'd be found i hoped so what happened next i think it was about uh in the early hours of the morning my phone rang and it was the old d24 the call-out service from police and a very excited inspector on the phone saying we found her we've got it still bound and blindfolded nikki was bundled out of a car into the darkness of a quiet street just kilometers from the family home nicki i think had been found on the street she was taken to the austin hospital and i went straight there [Music] because the tendency right then and there would be for the parent to grab their child and hold them but there are important procedures that have to be followed what happened then i spent two or three hours with nikki with the assistance of a nurse she was a strong girl but having said that you're aware that this is a very foreign situation she's had some unspeakable events occur now some total stranger strangers sitting in front of her asking her to talk about those events and outside her parents and i remember one of the most emotional moments was when i concluded this examination to be able to walk out and say to the parents physically she's in good shape and now it's your turn nikki appears the emotion in that room everyone was crying everyone even the hardened detectives it was a moment you never forget yesterday detectives scoured the queue area where nicole was dumped early on the morning of her 14th birthday as with previous victims mr cruel had done his homework leaving virtually no trace of evidence for investigators to work with but nicola was able to help in narrowing down the search for the house she was detained in nikki linus was able to give us some good information in relation to the noises sound she heard and one of those sounds related to aircraft the information she gave us allowed sufficiently for them to identify one runway at melbourne airport whose flight path went over these certain suburbs when i say certain suburbs i'm saying anywhere from craigie burn through to strathmore that's a lot of houses so that's about as much as investigators knew or were prepared to release to the media about the abduction of nicola linus nine months later carmen chan was taken in both cases the girl's parents were not at home they were both abducted during school holidays and they both attended the same private school i think nicola's own reaction was such a positive one she did not let it overcome her she was ready to meet with her friends immediately after and to share their friendship and support she showed great courage and i'm sure that carmen will do the same [Music] common your school fans keep bringing you they love you to come back with them you know away with me and then very hard very hard to sleep so we couldn't sleep so we hope that is the main understand and release her as soon as possible so we can have a family together [Music] the days go by there's no ransom note there's no nothing at what point do you start to lose hope that there won't be a repeat of nikki linus's return you have to hold hope you have to because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about but you've also got to be realistic with a parent and a sibling that this is not looking good [Applause] a man walking his dogs through this industrial desert in melbourne's north stumbled across a skull on thursday evening it had several bullet wounds in the side [Applause] after further investigations police recovered the rest of the body and although they're yet to establish an identity they're confident they know who it is whilst we don't have any positive information at this point of time it is quite a possibility that it is in fact common it was almost a year to the day since she'd been abducted forensics fairly quickly confirmed that yes indeed it was the body of common a devastated phyllis chan held a traditional buddhist ceremony with her two daughters in the thomastown wasteland where carmen was found offering food and flowers and praying for her soul terrible sadness at a whole range of levels now that she's gone forever and the knowledge that the individual involved in this case perhaps all of the cases was prepared to escalate his activities to that point the execution-style murder of carmen chan indeed was a massive escalation but it also raised new questions for task force investigators was carmen abducted and killed by mr cruel or could it have been someone else with a different motive [Music] what does three bullets in the head tell you about the offender or the nature of the offence i suspect this was a message being sent this was a child a daughter of a family member and this was about the link between the father and the offender kamen chan was simply just the vehicle used to make the point graffiti sprayed on the chan's family car on the night of carmen's disappearance has raised speculation about a vendetta against the family which owns two restaurants i knew phyllis chen before the abduction when you were afterwards i live in eltham and dined at her restaurant a number of times i don't for one moment think she was evolved in any way in drugs what about john chan her husband i don't know so much about john and he took off fairly quickly after the killing of carmen so i really don't know enough about john victoria police established task force spectrum as soon as carmen chan was abducted it was a multi-faceted investigation because of all the similarities to the earlier abductions but i've been told by a couple of former spectrum members that in their opinion the underworld drug connection was not chased hard enough what you need to know is that there were several crews involved in that investigation and each of the crews had different responsibilities my crew had the responsibility of putting together the brief of evidence and interviewing the suspect if we located him there are members sent throughout the world conducting investigations and advice was sought from police forces throughout the world other crews had the responsibility for looking at the drug involvement and to my knowledge that avenue of inquiry was exhausted as far as we could have at the time but not excluded no it's not being excluded this day i swear i do nothing wrong and i've been here 15 years always in business i start seven o'clock eight o'clock in the morning and finish midnight so i work hard i know a good opportunity to australia there was no evidence to connect john chan with the disappearance of his daughter so police turned their attention back to the prime suspect the reason the police kept coming back to mr cruel was because he had a history of laying false trails remember the 25 000 ransom demand made with nikki linus it came to nothing because she was released without any further demands being made and that was not the only false trail laid by mr cruel in one of the houses he picked up the telephone and pretended to talk to somebody and he did it in front of the victim um when in actual fact the police were able to show that he'd actually cut the lane beforehand he wasn't talking to anybody the spray painting of the car was another tactic to try and divert them away to make them think that isn't connected to the others this is obviously an attack because of something the father did the abduction of carmen chan prompted a massive response from the public anyone who had a suspicion about their neighbor or someone they knew was calling into task force spectrum every single piece of information had to be followed up and scrutinized such was the pressure to find mr cruel and stop him reoffending we received somewhere in the vicinity of 10 11 000 individual information sheets that had to be physically investigated by detective we physically inspected over 30 000 houses trying to seek out the detention premises we sent a letter to all the doctors in victoria seeking any information in relation to any clients they may have and that's the other issue that perhaps highlighted it in into its infamy was that there was potentially several victims many more than what we knew of at the time how many do you put together as being part of this investigation broadly speaking perhaps a dozen and therein lies the challenge from a community perspective if it's promoted as the bogeyman then the response is going to be lock up the doors keep the children inside and trust no one the police were working around the clock chasing up any and every lead that might have led to mr cruel if he was responsible for the abduction of carmen chan the question the police had to answer was why did he not release her as he had nicola linus and sharon wills why did he feel the need to murder her we have no idea there are plenty of theories but there is no evidence that points us in any one direction to this day victoria police is still unclear why carmen was killed by her abductor one thing they know for sure is that mr crawl went to incredible lengths to keep his identity a secret phyllis chan said that carmen was a very feisty 13 year old and she would not have gone quietly and what the police and she suspect is carmen maybe whipped his belly clover off or pulled hers off and saw his face once she'd seen mr cruel's face i think that he probably said i can't release this one if the killer is unmasked he may well indeed be forced into killing the victim absolutely and i fully agree with that and that's another reason why the carmen chan cases has not been excluded from the others as i mentioned earlier mr cruel could be connected to up to 12 assaults i've spoken at length to his first documented victim from 1985. understandably she doesn't want to talk on camera but she did relay what he said to her during the assault my liberty my freedom is more important than your life this is very telling when viewed through the lens of the carmen chan murder in the mid 1980s dna testing was in its infancy and poor forensic work in the early cases dramatically impacted later investigations quite a lot of the original exhibits and witness statements from 1985 86 87 that david sprague desperately wanted were never able to be found in one case the victim and it was to think it was his first victim had been tied up and the rope was retrieved and the rope had been popped into a plastic bag whilst he got very good at covering his tracks common sense suggests you don't start off that good if he was ever going to make mistakes it would have been in those early days that rope could have had his dna on it and the spectrum task force were mortified when they couldn't find the rope the 1985 survivor in her statement believes the assailant ejaculated in her and swabs were taken do you think if they are around they could still be tested they could certainly be matched if they're still in existence good evening crime stoppers the mr cruel case was one of the first where victoria police tried to build a profile of the offender what we're dealing with here is a very disturbed individual who's uh certainly creating an atmosphere of terror in this town tim watson-monroe a criminal psychologist was brought in on the case before sharon wills was abducted he just strikes me as a textbook psychopath somebody who plans a crime meticulously no forensic evidence so i think more likely he's an individual who had sexual perversions floating around in his head and it just went from there it escalated quite dramatically once he crossed the rubicon and started breaking into places and then abducting children and i predicted sadly correctly that the next one may well be killed i can't understand why you were taken my pain that you're going can never compare with the agony which you endured [Music] when carmen chan was abducted police sought the help of the american fbi which pioneered the idea of criminal profiling in the 1970s this was the three page facts they sent through 11 days after carmen was taken it tallied with the view of investigators that mr cruel was actually more like mr average he was aged from his 20s to his 50s between 165 and 183 centimeters tall his build was thin to medium with a small pot belly he had no accent and was quietly spoken this could have been any one of thousands of people [Music] [Applause] the minute you start calling him mr cruel members of the public think there's a shady character with a dog overcoat that wanders out of x-rated shops carrying a bundle full of porn in actual fact he's probably a clean living block who lives with his mom and puts the next-door neighbors rubbish out on a sunday and the people around him might think he's a nice normal blog at the end of a three year investigation operation spectrum ended up with what they called the sierra fowls so there was seven suspects that had the propensity to commit this sort of crime and had committed similar crimes in the past not quite as extreme of which one of those suspects a former melbourne university lecturer is in the eyes of david sprague who is head of the task force the prime suspect that man is brian engler and channel nine's a current affair tracked him down just a few questions about the mr cruel investigation he was jailed for 10 years in the 1970s after pleading guilty to tying up and attacking six girls at knife point over a two-year period you destroyed their lives so you say after comet chan they raided his house because he has priors for sexual offences went to jail for 10 years in the 70s for attacks on children they've found a balaclava and a knife in his attic mr cruel of course wore a bella carver and used a knife you you do admit that you're the prime suspect though well i know i am because they've told me he's the one that david sprague is pretty sure did it but there is no forensic evidence to speak of nor witnesses he denies it how are you going to prove it despite sprague's belief there is no evidence that angler is mr cruel and many think he is not the prime suspect that was one of probably a good half a dozen that were of equal suspicion there are a number of suspects that haven't been eliminated quite a few it's been 28 years since mr cruel abducted his last victim carmen chan no one's ever been charged but the investigation remains open to this day it's frustrating for police but what's always baffled them is that mr cruel's reign of terror came to an abrupt end after carmen why [Music] it depends who you speak during the task force certainly there are some to think it he must be dead because that sort of offender it's a compulsion it's an addiction they don't usually stop until they're caught dave sprague's view is that he got such a fright that he had to do something he didn't want to do which is kill one of his victims that that shocked him into not offending again it's very seductive it's very consumer orientated for the people who read the newspapers it puts the bosses off the back it mollifies the politicians it answers all those what if questions this guy coming back it doesn't make any sense good criminals offenders serial offenders they don't get scared off they believe their ego believes that they're better than the system the better the investigators my suspicion is that he probably just left town or he went to jail and died there were the hillside stranglers in los angeles the guy and his cousin were abducting raping and murdering women in the hills district of la dumping the cadavers on the front lawns of places is all part of the horror show and it stopped as abruptly as it started he was eventually discovered in oregon so he'd relocated he'd gone further north into a different state and it started again back in the 80s there were ireland states within australia in many ways so there wasn't any centralized data bank there was no discussion between forces we devised a system called leak which came into force about three months after i retired new south wales designed a system of a similar kind but they couldn't talk to one another and that was ludicrous there should have been a universal system across the country so forces could share information of that kind there would have been a much better opportunity to track repeat offenders who just simply moved into state and i'm not sure to this day whether the various police systems can actually talk to one another victoria police never got their man but this case jolted our justice system and forced change in the early 1990s our society was woefully ill-equipped to deal with sexual offenders of any description let alone one like mr cruel for instance back then it was still not illegal to possess child pornography in the state of victoria that's remarkable it's important that the community aware that procession manufacture production of child pornography became a specific crime on the statutes as a consequence of our presentation to the parliamentarians of the material we'd collected stalking sex offender loitering in the vicinity of your school again that came directly from the task force [Music] task force spectrum arrested 75 child sex offenders their good works shame governments into recognizing that children needed protecting i still have adult women women in their 40s coming to me saying look i was the same age as carmen and it chills me as much today as it did then that's 25 years down the track [Music] 25 years since the abduction and murder of carmen chan police believe her killer is still alive they're using the anniversary to offer a million dollar reward to find the man dubbed mr cruel who terrorized melbourne schoolgirls anniversary stories often prompt somebody to ring crime stoppers over the years 27 000 people have been interviewed over the crimes 32 men are still considered possible suspects the hope is someone who knows the answer feels safe enough now to come forward every time i write a story about mr cruel i get letters and emails all of which i pass on to the police most of them are people want to nominate their ex-husbands ex-boyfriends and like i'm sure some of it's malicious but you never want to ignore calls to crime stoppers or calls to journalists because it just takes the right one and the crime can be solved [Music] john to this day blames himself and of course he shouldn't but he blames himself because he says keith i was the man of the house it was my job to protect them are you confident that you picked up all the physical evidence [Music] i hope so i i mean we'll never know [Music] [Applause] [Music] chris you retired without an answer do you think possibly the answer is actually already there in the file i think for any unsolved crime the answer could always be in the file this is an active investigation [Music] these people have lived with this for in some cases over 30 years what can we do to ease their load [Music] i know that victoria police is very very keen to solve these crimes the answer could be the next person you speak to

Channel: Real Crime

Views: 939,170

Keywords: Australian crime, Australian crime waves, Melbourne mystery, Mr. Cruel case study, Real Crime, child abduction mysteries, crime coverage, crime experts, crime prevention strategies, crime scene investigation, crime theories, criminal case study, criminal evidence, criminal mastermind, criminal mind puzzle, criminal motive analysis, criminal patterns, criminal psychology analysis, criminal suspect, criminal tactics, true crime stories

Id: ArIl4189jDw

Length: 46min 9sec (2769 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 25 2022