Do Victoria Police have Mr Cruel’s DNA?

Contrary to the long-standing perception that Mr Cruel never left behind any DNA evidence, Victoria Police do in fact have Mr Cruel’s DNA on file from the abduction of a Ringwood schoolgirl in 1988.

That is the bombshell revelation made by journalist Adam Shand in the Channel 7 show The Hunters.

According to Shand, the DNA profile was used to eliminate the February 1985 abduction of a 14 year old girl in Hampton as a Mr Cruel attack.

If correct, this obviously begets several questions which we will address in turn:

1. Do police still have Mr Cruel’s DNA?
2. Is it Mr Cruel’s DNA?
3. Why don’t police publicly rule out the 1985 abduction in Hampton as a Mr Cruel crime?
4. Why haven’t they used it to eliminate suspects or track him down?

Do police still have Mr Cruel’s DNA?

It has long been taken as gospel that Mr Cruel did not leave behind any DNA.

Over the years, Victoria Police have certainly let media run unchallenged with the line that Mr Cruel “was careful not to leave behind any DNA”. Mr Cruel investigator Chris O’Connor told the Herald Sun on Nov 8 2013: “Forensic evidence for this particular series of crimes is the leanest I have ever seen.” And he and another Spectrum detective appeared to be surprised by the DNA bombshell when interviewed for The Hunters.

However after a close review of Victoria Police’s public statements on the case, we cannot find any instance of police definitively stating that they do not have Mr Cruel’s DNA. Moreover, they declined to comment on the revelations made in The Hunters.

According to Shand’s source, another Spectrum taskforce member, the DNA from Sharon’s abduction was compared with the DNA found on a rope from the Hampton abduction of a 14 year old girl in 1985. Investigators were “hanging their hats on the result”, but it was found not to match.

Exactly when this comparison was conducted could be critical to whether the DNA samples till exist. Shand says the comparison happened “back in the day”. Early DNA profiling methods required a substantial amount of DNA material and involved breaking down the sample. Due to the limitations of these techniques, a single sample might have been partially or entirely consumed during testing.

Fortunately, advancements in DNA technology have significantly improved the efficiency and sensitivity of testing. Modern methods can work with degraded or trace amounts of DNA, if there is anything left to test.

But is it Mr Cruel’s DNA?

Mr Cruel was known for his uncanny forensic awareness which predated popular knowledge about DNA. 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 survivor 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.”

Moreover, using trickery and red herrings to confuse victims and divert police was another feature of Mr Cruel’s crimes. Mr Cruel staged a call to someone he called ‘Bozo’ during the Lower Plenty attack and during the Lynas abduction, he demanded a ransom and pretended to speak to an accomplice. If it was the same offender, then he also spraypainted “Pay-back. Asian drug deal. More to come.” on the Chan’s car to confuse police.

Would a man so fastidious about not leaving behind evidence slip up by leaving DNA? Or is it possible that he deliberately left behind someone else’s DNA?

It seems plausible. And for this reason, police obviously would need to think twice before using the DNA profile to clear any suspects, or definitively rule out a connection with the Hampton abduction.

Why don’t police publicly rule out the 1985 abductions in Hampton as a Mr Cruel crime?

Over the years, it has been reported that police believed Mr Cruel may be responsible for the abduction of a 14 year old girl in Hampton in 1985. This claim was made by veteran journalist Keith Moor in The Herald Sun in April 2012 and again as recently as 2016 on the 25th anniversary of Karmein Chan’s abduction, when he also revealed new details about the prime suspect Brian Elkner (using the psuedonym ‘Bill’).

But again, after a review of public media statements by police, we cannot find any statement of police themselves linking Mr Cruel to the Hampton case, publicly confirming only the four canonical attacks in Lower Plenty, Ringwood, Canterbury and Templestowe.

So if early investigators did consider the Hampton abduction to be the work of Mr Cruel, but subsequently used DNA to rule it out, perhaps Keith Moor was relying on outdated information in his 2012 and 2016 articles. If so, he could be forgiven, since according to Moor he let police review and approve the article before publication – meaning they green-lighted the reference to Hampton and ‘Bill’, who lived there at the time.

Why haven’t police used DNA to rule in or out some of the publicly named suspects like Brian Elkner and Robert Keith Knight?

If police have Mr Cruel’s DNA, there is no doubt they would try to match it to Brian Elkner, their prime suspect. 

But would they have had the technological means to do so?

This may depend on what the source of the DNA profile is. Interestingly, an anonymous online commenter recently claimed that police had found a ‘ginger whisker’ at one of the crime scenes. Until recently, hair strands could not always provide a reliable DNA profile. In particular, rootless hair shaft samples like whiskers pose challenges due to their insufficient amounts of nuclear DNA. Traditionally, mitochondrial DNA analysis is used for rootless hair, which is far less precise. Many people share identical mitochondrial DNA sequences and therefore, it cannot definitively identify a specific individual. However, it can be used to exclude individuals in the same way that blood groups can.

In the last decade, new DNA extraction techniques have made it possible to obtain profiles from degraded or trace samples like rootless hairs with increasing success. So it’s likely that the technology has advanced to a point where police would be able to generate a profile if they had – and still have – a whisker of Mr Cruel’s.

But even if they wanted to, would they be legally empowered to do so? This requires us to understand what powers police have in Victoria. At this point it is worth reviewing the history of DNA in Australia and wordwide.

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History of forensic DNA in Victoria

• 1982: Police and scientists start freezing and storing crime scene exhibits forensic services department in Macleod
• July 1985: First suggestion that DNA could be used as a forensic tool published in Nature Magazine https://www.nature.com/articles/316076a0.pdf
• Dec 1985: First article confirming potential of DNA as forensic tool published in Nature Magazine https://www.nature.com/articles/318577a0
• Jan 1986: First mainstream news article in Australia reports on DNA as a forensic tool citing Nature Magazine article
• 1987: DNA used for the first time ever in a criminal case in Leicestershire England, firstly to exonerate a rape-murder suspect, then to charge the real killer Colin Pitchfork.
• 1987: Vic Pol take frozen samples from a series of rapes committed between 1982 and 1986 to a specialist laboratory in the US for testing to compare with the DNA of their suspect George Kaufman
• 1989: Kaufman is convicted for over 19 rapes – the first person in Victoria to be convicted with the help of DNA evidence
• 1990: Vic pol given power to take DNA from suspects in serious crimes (eg rape) with court approval where reasonable grounds for suspicion exist and a sample exists to compare it to
• 1994: Vic pol given power to take and retain DNA from convicted sex offenders with court approval (unclear if retrospective)
• 1996: first sex offenders actually ordered to provide DNA under 1994 laws, including Trevor Ross Hemer, Robert Alan Johnson, Giovanni Marziale, John Leslie Giles and Lief Milton Hansen
• 1998: Vic pol given power to take DNA from any serving prisoner and people convicted with any of a wider range of offenses, including burglary with court approval (unclear if retrospective)
• 2001: National DNA database established
• 2011: Victoria Police add 428 new DNA profiles from frozen samples to national database, resulting in 113 “cold hits” relating to 290 sex offences, including five unsolved child abductions and rapes committed by paedophile Terry Shores 
• 2012: Cold case sexual crimes squad formed to investigate the results of the DNA “cold hits”.
• 2014: Vic pol given power to  take DNA from all suspects with court approval
• 2016: Vic pol given power to  take DNA from all suspects without court approval
• 2018: Vic pol given power to  take DNA from every arrested person

We can see that along with technological advances in forensic science, Vic police powers in this area have rapidly expanded in recent years too. While we haven’t been able to work out if these powers are retrospective at the time of publication, even if they were it’s clearly not feasible for police to go around the world looking for convicted sex offenders to obtain their DNA.

So in summary, police likely have the DNA of anyone imprisoned since 1998 and anyone arrested since 2018. This would not include either Robert Keith Knight, who was imprisoned in 1996 and re-arrested in 2013, or Brian Elkner, who was released from jail in the 70s.

But police would technically have the power to get Elkner’s DNA since 2016. It is possible they have done so and privately ruled him out since Keith Moor’s article was published in 2016.

Why haven’t police used forensic genetic genaeology to find Mr Cruel?

In 2018 the Golden State Killer was sensationally unmasked after police ingeniously uploaded his DNA into public genaeology databases and worked backwards through his family tree to identify him from a distant relative.

The same technique, forensic investigative genetic genealogy (FIGG), has been used in Australia in 2017 to convict Patrick Perkins, the north Adelaide rapist, whose son was in the national crime database, and in 2019 to convict Matthew White, after QLD locals including his mother volunteered DNA. Furthermore, Jodie Ward and her team at AFP are using the technique to identify unidentified bodies.

On The Hunters, Dadna Hartman from the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine suggested FIGG could potentially be an avenue of investigation if there’s DNA in the Mr Cruel case.

But to this date, Australian police have not followed the US police in accessing public genaeology databases to solve any cold cases to the best of our knowledge. Why not?

Under Australian law, police can only access Gedmatch and Familty Tree DNA for forensic genealogy. However according to 730 from June 15 2020, the technique is governed by different state policies, which mostly place strict limitations on the circumstances in which a familial search can be conducted. It is currently limited to only the most serious crimes and only after all lines of other investigative work have been exhausted.

Meanwhile, no one seems to be particularly pushing police to use these techniques. Australian journalists invariably raise privacy concerns in any media articles about FIGG. The extent to which such privacy concerns exist in the Australian public is questionable. Surely the public would welcome the opportunity to solve some of the most notorious in our history from the Easey St murders to Mr Cruel by accessing public genealogy databases. Yet Victoria Police have apparently sat motionless on the DNA while technology races ahead. Meanwhile, Mr Cruel may be in his late 70s or 80s if he is still alive. The public must demand that police act on this while there is still hope of justice.

If you feel compelled to act, you can write to the Victoria police minister Anthony Carbines now and ask him why Victoria Police haven’t used FIGG to catch Mr Cruel: anthony.carbines@parliament.vic.gov.au