While Mr Cruel's well-known attacks targeted girls between the ages of 10 and 14, the other cases police linked him to include adult women and even a teenage boy. This wide range of victim ages is an extremely unusual feature, and it is a trait shared by the Tynong North serial killer.
As established in Chapter 1, the tactical overlap between Mr Cruel and the Tynong North serial killer is a massive statistical anomaly. But the reason for this goes well beyond their similarities in experience level and sophistication. They also share a second, highly irregular and personal feature: their victimology.
While Mr Cruel's most well-known attacks targeted girls between the ages of 10 and 14, the precursor cases police linked him to also included adult women and a teenage boy. Police at the time noted this offender was unique in Australia due to his progression from attacking mature women to young children. Normally, this behavioural escalation happens the other way around. Investigators were right to be surprised, as this completely defied the global profile for serial sex offenders.
Most serial sex offenders show a very clear preference for a specific age cohort. Ted Bundy is the classic example. He targeted college students with remarkably similar physical appearances, with most victims having long, dark hair parted in the middle.
A similar pattern exists with the Truro murders in South Australia in the late 1970s. Those victims were exclusively aged between 15 and 26.
And then there’s Ivan Milat’s “Backpacker Murders”, which includes seven victims found in the Belanglo State Forest in New South Wales. These victims were all aged between 19 and 22.
But Mr Cruel’s target range was different, and it was highly unusual. He had the skill to kidnap almost anybody he wanted, yet he didn’t exclusively attack children and young women, who are usually the demographics most targeted by these predators. He chose to also attack older women and teenage boys. Karmein Chan was of Hong Kong descent, showing he was not fixed on one ethnicity either.
A distinct victim "type" is usually very apparent with serial sex offenders, even when power and control rather than sexual attraction, drive the attacks. But in this case, it is difficult to determine any age preference at all. In the world of serial offending, that degree of versatility is rare. Yet in Melbourne during the 1980s, Mr Cruel was apparently not the only serial offender sporting this victimology. He shared the exact trait with the Tynong North serial killer.
The Tynong North Victimology
In the Tynong North series of six sexual homicides, the ages of the victims spanned from 14-year-old Catherine Headland to 72-year-old Bertha Miller. In total, the victims included two teenagers, a woman in her thirties, and three older women.
The victims found in Tynong North looked nothing like each other. Catherine Headland was 14 with long, dark hair. Bertha Miller was 72 with blonde hair. Anne-Marie Sargent was 18 with brown hair. And Narumol Stephenson, a recent immigrant from Thailand, was 35.
At the inquest into these deaths, Coroner Anthony Ellis highlighted the great disparity between the ages and the different social backgrounds of the women. He stated that other than the fact they were alone and using public transport, there appeared to be no criteria for how they were selected.
The 4 victims found in Tynong North bear no resemblance to each other. Catherine Headland was 14-years-old with long, dark hair. Bertha Miller was 72-years-old with blonde hair. Anne-Marie Sargent was 18-years-old and had brown hair. Narumol Stephenson was 35-years-old and of Thai descent. Images courtesy of Victoria Police.
Detectives admitted that finding two young, naked deceased victims alongside a dressed, elderly woman was highly irregular. They bluntly conceded that had the killer not disposed of 72-year-old Bertha Miller in the exact same location as the two teenagers, they would have missed the link entirely. Her murder would never have been considered the work of the same man. With this realisation, Victoria Police started to question whether another recent murder - that of 59-year-old Allison Rooke in Frankston - might also be connected.
This highlights the limitations of old-school profiling techniques. Detectives struggled to imagine any possibility outside what they had been explicitly taught or had personally experienced. It took a mass grave containing women of wildly different ages to shatter their oversimplified assumptions about serial offender behaviour.
The police got lucky with the Tynong North cases. Most victims of serial murder are not disposed of in common locations, forcing police to rely on other factors to link them together. By burying three victims next to each other, the offender handed investigators the connection directly.
The Mathematical Odds
The evidence shows that neither Mr Cruel nor the Tynong North killer was driven by a fixation on one age group. They both possessed the psychological flexibility to switch between elderly women, adult women, and children without hesitation.
Yet neither of these offenders ever appear in the context of the same conversation, because Mr Cruel is only ever described as a rapist and paedophile. The sense of certainty is so strong that only two options are ever put on the table to explain Karmein Chan's fate. Either the offender panicked and killed her because she saw his face, or it was not Mr Cruel at all. After all, the narrative dictates he was "just" a rapist, remember? It is a circular argument.
I often hear people argue that most rapists are not murderers. That is true. But nearly all serial killers are also rapists. Furthermore, offenders do not conduct their careers in a perfectly linear progression of violence. It is simply wrong to say that rapists escalate to murder, but once a murderer, will never return to 'just' rape. Not ever considering that Mr Cruel could also be a killer was a profound error.
I struggle to believe that Victoria was home to two separate, highly capable offenders who both shared the rare inclination to target victims across generational divides. It is even more improbable that they did so within the exact same geographical space on a perfectly sequential timeline.
The Tynong North serial killer disappeared from the record when Mr Cruel emerged around 1985. Mr Cruel then disappeared from the record following the murder of Karmein Chan in 1991. Victoria was not suffering from an epidemic of uncatchable serial killers and kidnappers during those decades. We just had one very capable serial offender running circles around the police.
