Was Mr Cruel a cop?

On Friday April 12 1991, the taskforce investigating the abduction of Nicola Lynas, Operation Challenge, was officially scaled down. The very next day, 13-year-old schoolgirl Karmein Chan was abducted. For some, this raised suspicions that the suspect dubbed “Mr Cruel”, who always seemed to stay one step ahead of investigators, might have had inside knowledge all along.

A week after the abduction, Inspector Sprague was asked by reporters if the offender could in fact be a cop: “It could just as well be a policeman who is working now; it could be a former policeman. It could also be a solicitor or a barrister or it could just be somebody who is well-read in forensic medicine.”

It could just as well be a policeman who is working now; it could be a former policeman.”

Inspector David Sprague

The other factor suggesting they could well be investigating one of their own was Mr Cruel’s uncanny forensic knowledge. At a time when DNA analysis was in its infancy as a crime fighting technique, Mr Cruel went to great lengths to remove any evidence that might link him to the crimes. He bathed two victims and wiped sinks and benchtops, transported one victim to the release site in garbage bags, made his victims brush their teeth and clean their nails, and even told Nicola Lynas “you will be taken to a hospital and they will test you; you will be examined by a police surgeon. They’ll be looking for evidence to link me to you and they won’t find anything.”

You will be examined by a police surgeon. They’ll be looking for evidence to link me to you and they won’t find anything.”

Mr Cruel

This certainly sounds like someone who is familiar with police investigative techniques and procedures. But could there be an alternative explanation? Perhaps Mr Cruel was simply someone who took a keen interest in forensic science, for instance because he had previously been convicted based on physical evidence he’d left at a crime scene and didn’t want to come unstuck again. If he was paying close attention to the news, he might well have noticed the headline in The Age newspaper in January 1986, “Rapists beware”, announcing the advent of DNA as a forensic tool and warning rapists that they could now be identified from hair molecules or sperm stains several years old.

However, there are more reasons to think that Mr Cruel could have been a policeman. Like a cop, Mr Cruel conducted extensive surveillance and used expert burglary skills to conduct pre-dawn raids, controlling multiple adult victims and extracting his target using a gun, handcuffs and a torch. This all points to someone with real-world tactical experience.

Mr Cruel also spoke like a cop. In 1990, Mr. Cruel said to the Lynas sisters: “Real guns, real bullets…” and threatened to “blow your heads off.” In 2000, describing a drug raid to veteran crime journalist John Silvester, ex-drug squad detective Lachlan McCulloch said “we all had real guns with real bullets. We could have blown his head off.” Was “real guns with real bullets” a phrase commonly used by McCulloch’s colleagues at the Drug Squad or Reservoir CIB?

The best-known example of a policeman moonlighting as a serial rapist is American policeman Joseph DeAngelo, who terrorised California in the 80s. Like Mr Cruel, DeAngelo conducted home invasions where he controlled multiple adult victims, ransacked the house and ate the victims’ food over prolonged periods. Due to the similarities in their M.O, investigators even floated the idea that they could be the same offender at one point. Other serial rapist cops include French policeman and child predator François Verove, and David Carrick in the UK, who both used handcuffs in the commission of the crimes, just like Mr Cruel.

Examples of cops or former cops from Australia who have been convicted of serious crimes include:

• Paul William Higgins, the man Andrew Rule calls Victoria’s most corrupt cop, who was also a multiple rapist and standover man
• Victorian serial paedophile cop Robert William Gommeson, who abused boys and girls during his police career in the 70s and, like Carrick, held his gun to a victim’s head while raping her;
• Victorian cop Harry Bosse who was convicted in 1991 with 12 historic counts of indecent assault of children;
• Rikki Laurence Slater who pleaded guilty to multiple charges of sexual assault against a 12-year-old girl;
• Former Warracknabeal policeman Leslie Charles Patten who was convicted for child abuse material;
• Rogue cop Colin James Creed, who raped women while serving as a policeman in South Australia and became a notorious fugitive bank robber;
• Peter Ronald Doig, who abducted a 17-year-old girl in 1980 for ransom; and
• Anthony Ian Gray, who stalked and broke into women’s homes in Essendon between 97-98.

Then there was Kevin John Hicks, who abused his role as assistant property steward to give drug trafficker Peter Pilarinos access to the Drug Squad storage at Attwood. And while there is no suggestion that Hicks is a sex offender, he does have an intriguing connection to the Mr Cruel case. During the investigation into Hicks’ drug syndicate years later, it was revealed that Hicks had contacted the head of the Karmein Chan murder enquiry to accuse “an enemy of Peter Pilarinos” of being the murderer.

So who was this enemy of Peter Pilarinos? He had a few… one is presumably Grantley David Connell, who gave evidence against Hicks and Pilarinos after being arrested and charged with child sex offences, drug manufacturing and gun possession in 1996. Another was Pilarinos’ drug cook James Sweetin, who also testified against him in exchange for immunity.

But Pilarinos’ number one enemy was none other than Lachlan McCulloch, the hero cop who exposed Hicks’ corruption and got Pilarinos convicted in the first place. According to John Silvester, Pilarinos and McCulloch were “long-term enemies”, and after McCulloch busted their drug network in 1996, outrageous rumours started to spread that the unimpeachable McCulloch “had organised two murders”.

While Hicks had a track record of dishonesty and clearly had good reason to get back at the men who had exposed him, his accusations do nevertheless connect him and his associates to the Mr Cruel case.

So was Mr Cruel was a cop? It is a theory well worth investigating further, but for now we do not claim to know one way or the other. Nor do we claim that any of the men named here is Mr Cruel. Some were in interstate and some were in jail during the Mr Cruel crimes. However, as we have seen in cases like the Golden State Killer, where there is smoke, there may well be fire.