The most unique aspect of Mr Cruel’s attacks was that he kidnapped some of his victims, took them to a private location, assaulted them, and then let them go.
There are very few examples of serial offenders with a similar modus operandi. And there’s a good reason for that. Most would be worried that their victims would be able to identify the detention premises and lead police back to it, and back to them. And Victoria police hoped to do exactly this.
There was one small problem, however. Neither of the two victims who had been taken to Mr Cruel's detention premises and lived to tell the tale, had any idea where they had been taken.
But the police knew they had to find this house. It was the key to solving this crime. Find the house, and you find Mr Cruel.
The noisy clue: Mr Cruel's house was under a major flight path
In the immediate aftermath of the release of the 13-year-old Canterbury victim, the news reported that the girl had been taken to a location situated under a Melbourne Airport flightpath, as she was able to hear planes landing very close above her.
Curiously, this was never repeated in later TV news segments, and was not printed in the paper the following day. So unless you were in Melbourne in July 1990 and watching the evening news you would never have heard this important detail.
For a couple of years, police instead maintained a position that they simply didn’t know where these detention premises vaguely even were.
But in October 1992, 6 months after Karmein Chan had been abducted, there was a small blink-and-you-might-miss-it type of newspaper article published, titled: “Police widen search for Mr Cruel’s lair”.
It went on to say: “Detectives from the Spectrum taskforce, investigating the abductions of a 13 and 10-year-old girl, and the abduction and murder of Karmein Chan, 13, have checked about 3000 houses in more than 10 suburbs in their effort to locate the house. They have been trying to match the configuration of houses with the descriptions of the inside and outside of the house given to them by kidnap victims....Detectives checked about 500 homes in Coolaroo this week.”
Detective Superintendent George Davis was quoted as saying: “Some of the victims have given us information which leads us to believe we may be able to identify the premises where they were held and that's what we are looking for.”
January 1993 - Mr Cruel's house details are revealed
The Spectrum Taskforce gets full points for trying. The operation to find this house was unprecedented. Police externally inspected 30,000 properties with the aim to produce a much smaller shortlist of houses for further investigation. Unsuccessful, they called a press conference in January 1993 to seek help from the public.
Inspector David Sprague, the head of the taskforce, held up a sketch depicting the layout of Mr Cruel’s bedroom and said “The description…was drawn by one of the victims who actually, to her extreme danger, had a peek and looked around…”
The bedroom was described as having beige or cream carpet, light-coloured walls, and a double bed with a peach or orange bedhead. The bedside tables were brown or black, holding a lamp with a peach or orange base and a lemon lampshade with thin white vertical stripes. The wall opposite the bed featured a shelf covered by a dark blanket, hiding its contents.
To the right of the bed was a wall with full-length peach or orange floral curtains covering what the 10-year-old saw as a window. However, the 13-year-old victim, relying entirely on her hearing, reported that there was an internal sliding door to her right.
The sketch showed that the bedroom door opened inwards in an anti-clockwise direction, but this was never elaborated on like the other room details, making me wonder whether the victim wasn't sure and this was fill-in information, or perhaps the detail had been intentionally inverted by the police as 'holdback' information. Details about the shape and size of the room were also not provided, and I note that the perspective - side on and through the wall - is from an impossible point of view. The victim saw this room from her position at the head of the bed, and not through x-ray vision from the room next door.
