Detectives involved in the original Mr Cruel investigation focused extensively on sex offenders, bus drivers, teachers and electrical workers amongst others. However it’s unclear whether they looked into armed robbers, who undoubtedly had the means and ruthlessness to commit the abductions – and a number of whom were also convicted rapists with links to both Eltham and the north-western suburbs near Tullamarine Airport.
In 2022, respected retired homicide detective Ron Iddles named deceased armed robber Norman Lee as his prime suspect for the Mr Cruel crimes. While Lee, the only man charged with the Great Bookie Robbery, didn’t match the physical description of Mr Cruel, Iddles’ theory ticked many boxes in terms of M.O.
Many of the behaviours and mannerisms displayed by Mr Cruel did resemble those of an armed robber like Lee. Like an experienced armed robber, Mr Cruel wore a balaclava and boiler suit, carried a gun, controlled multiple adult victims, displayed expert burglary skills and conducted extensive surveillance on his targets. Like the Great Bookie Robbers, Mr Cruel also cut phone lines and ripped telephones from walls during three of his four canonical attacks. This was a standard practice for armed robbers. Norman Lee’s close friend Russell Cox and rapist Laurie Prendergast also conducted a series of robberies together in the early 80s in which phone lines were similarly severed.
In his attacks, Mr Cruel would also park his getaway car around the corner from his target, often in a vacant lot, in front of a shop, or near parkland to avoid detection. In the abduction of Nicola Lynas, Mr Cruel even used the family’s car to ferry his victim to a waiting getaway car in Chaucer Ave. This level of planning resembles the tactics used by gangs of armed robbers in the 1970s and 1980s to avoid detection. For example, in Norman Lee’s botched 1992 Tullamarine airport robbery, he and his accomplices had stolen getaway cars waiting nearby in Derby St and Gladstone Park Shopping Centre to switch to before making their getaway. They never had the chance to use either of them though, as Lee was shot dead by waiting police. Another bank robber and rapist known as ‘bank enemy number one’, who was known for taking female hostages during a string of bank robberies in the 1970s, also used this tactic when robbing the National Bank in Doncaster Rd in 1974. He parked one stolen car close to the bank in Jackson St before transferring to another vehicle off nearby Mitchell St.
The phrases “I’ll blow your heads off” and “Don’t be a hero”, which Mr Cruel used, are also often used by bank robbers. For instance, Bank Enemy Number One told a bank manager who tried to shoot him in Macleod in October 74, “Don’t be silly” before coolly turning his gun on the man. The Bookie Robbers threatened to “blow their victims heads off” as did bank robbers Stan Taylor, Peter Reed, Craig Minogue during a violent raid at Kangaroo Ground in 1986, where they tied and handcuffed a couple before sexually assaulting the woman. Of course, these phrases could just as easily be used by someone imitating villains from a Hollywood movie. Someone like serial rapist Peter Vaitos, who told his 14 year old victim in Blackburn he would blow her head off if she didn’t co-operate.
But Mr Cruel displayed many other behaviours that showed real-world experience in breaking and entering via a variety of methods. In the abduction of Sharon Wills he pushed a key through a lock onto the floor inside and slid it back out under the door with a newspaper, a method used by expert burglars at the time. In the Nicola Lynas abduction he forced open a roll-out window. In his attack at Lower Plenty, Mr Cruel apparently broke the window pane prior to his attack, then returned to pick out the glass in the dead of night. This is reminiscent of the tactic used by the Great Bookie Robbers of removing screws from a door hinge in advance of the robbery.
Finally, the execution-style murder of suspected Mr Cruel victim Karmein Chan certainly had the hallmarks of a professional “hit”. This fact is sometimes used to argue that Karmein Chan couldn’t have been a Mr Cruel victim at all, since lone paedophiles usually strangle their victims. But paedophiles don’t usually carry guns either, so could this actually be evidence that Mr Cruel was both a professional armed robber and a paedophile? There are several other examples of underworld victims who were shot in a similar fashion to Karmein Chan: three bullets in the back of the head. For example, Quoc Cuong Duong, a 25-year-old drug dealer from Braybrook, was made to kneel and then shot three times in the head and body at point-blank range by rival drug dealers in 1992. Similarly, Danny Mitchell and his mother Sheryle Garner were both shot three times in the back of the head by a .22 rifle or pistol in Ripponlea in 1979 in a suspected underworld hit. David Basil Nolan was another victim who was found shot three times in the head in December 1989 at Chadstone. His killing is believed to be drug-related, again suggesting a connection to professional criminal activity. Curiously, the same patch of wasteland beside Edgar’s Creek in Thomastown where Karmein Chan’s body was found in April 1992, was later used to bury career criminal Terrence Blewitt in 2004. The man suspected of the hit was Lee’s partner in crime during the botched airport heist in July 1992. Is this a coincidence, or does it suggest that whoever buried Karmein Chan was using a known underworld burial site?
We are not suggesting any of the men mentioned here is Mr Cruel. Some of them were dead or in jail at the time of the Mr Cruel abductions. But we are suggesting that Mr Cruel looked and behaved like these men for a reason. If he wasn’t one of them, it certainly seems likely that he moved in the same circles as these men and possibly knew them.
Who is Mr Cruel? 