Before abducting thirteen-year-old Karmein Chan from her Templestowe home in April 1991, the offender spray-painted a message across the side of the family’s vehicle. The text read: "Pay back, Asian drug dealer. More anon. More to come."
Throughout his campaign, Mr Cruel consistently introduced red herrings to misdirect investigators. This particular diversion proved exceptionally effective, causing decades of analytical paralysis. Both the press and the public fixated almost exclusively on the opening accusation. The phrase "Asian drug dealer" fit all too neatly into the localised, racialised crime narratives of the early 1990s, sparking persistent rumours regarding the Chan family that Victoria Police repeatedly, yet unsuccessfully, tried to debunk.
This sensationalised distraction allowed a critical piece of primary evidence in the second sentence to remain hidden in plain sight. Everyone missed the archaic adverb "anon."
The Clerkly Class and the Etymology of "Anon"
Conventional true-crime commentary has long dismissed "anon" as a crude abbreviation for "anonymous". The widely accepted theory is that the offender simply ran out of space or lacked spelling proficiency when signing off his name.
From an investigative perspective, this interpretation defies logic. There is no social convention that directs intruders to formally sign their threats, and interpreting the graffiti in this way as an abbreviation for a covert signature, renders the sentence nonsensical by placing the sign off mid-sentence. It would become "More, Signed Anonymous. More to come." The majority of the media have dealt with this confusing word by simply deleting it from the historical record, frequently transcribing the graffiti as: "Payback, Asian Drug Dealer. More. More to come."
In historical reality, "anon" was utilised with a highly specific, traditional meaning. While originating as a Shakespearean adverb meaning "soon" or "presently," its usage shifted during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the mid-1900s, it had become a staple of British English training within the Australian "clerkly class". These are the banking executives, accountants, lawyers, and career public servants who prized procedural efficiency but maintained formal linguistic habits.
