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POLICE believe Australia's most notorious child-abducting rapist is alive and well and living in Victoria. They know where he is and have kept tabs on the man most likely to be the pervert dubbed Mr Cruel for more than a decade. He is the prime suspect for at least 12 sickening attacks and one murder since the 1980's - but police don't have a strong enough case to charge him. The Herald Sun has also discovered police have either lost, contaminated or destroyed vital evidence that may have convicted him. Victoria Police Commander Dave Sprague is bitterly disappointed that exhibits seized by detectives, which might have linked Mr Cruel to the crimes, have disappeared. He also revealed crucial forensic evidence might have been rendered useless as a result of the last known Mr Cruel crime scene not being sealed off as it should have been. Commander Sprague provided details of the missing evidence and botched crime scene during an interview for MugShots, a new book reporting on 12 crimes. He also said detectives had identified at least 10 people in Victoria with the propensity to commit the sort of offences Mr Cruel committed. "Having interviewed some of them, I can tell you they are bloody scary," Commander Sprague said. Although the taskforce set up to catch Mr Cruel didn't get a conviction against him, it was still enormously successful. It ended up charging more than 70 people with a range of serious offences, including rape, blackmail and pedophilia. Mr Cruel is believed to have last struck in 1991, when he kidnapped and killed 13-year-old Templestowe schoolgirl Karmein Chan. He was also responsible for abducting 10-year-old Sharon Wills from Ringwood in 1988 and taking 13-year-old Nicola Lynas from her Canterbury home in 1990. Sharon was held prisoner and assaulted for 18 hours before being dressed in plastic rubbish bags and dumped at a Bayswater school. Mr Cruel kept Nicola for 50 hours. He only released the Presbyterian Ladies College student after taking meticulous steps to avoid leaving identifying evidence. Serial sexual predators like Mr Cruel usually keep attacking until they are caught or die. But Cdr Sprague, head of Operation Spectrum, the taskforce set up to catch the offender, said the man they most suspect of being Mr Cruel still walks the streets. He confirmed police know where he is and are keeping an eye on him. Cdr Sprague believes the reason Mr Cruel has not struck again is he became scared after being tracked down and interviewed by Operation Spectrum detectives. "I honestly think we got very, very close. So close that he stopped," he said. Over the years, Operation Spectrum detectives have indicated they had a list of about 20 suspects they have been unable to eliminate. Six were strong suspects. They have consistently shied away from saying they think they know who Mr Cruel is. But Cdr Sprague reveals for the first time in MugShots that there is a prime Mr Cruel suspect, who was interviewed for about 14 hours. "He said at the end of it that if we thought we had a good case we should charge him and if not he wanted to be let go then and there. "It was a good circumstantial case, but not good enough to charge him. "We have certainly kept tabs on him since and if we had another abduction he'd be the first person dragged in." Police usually hold back some some information about crimes in order to eliminate suspects. One reason is that attention-seekers often falsely confess to high-profile crimes. Such people might think they know all about a particular crime, having read everything written. But police are able to weed them out when they do not know as much as police do about, for example, the victim's wounds. Operation Spectrum detectives know things about Mr Cruel that have not been made public. They have used this knowledge to eliminate more than 27,000 suspects. But they have not been able to rule out the prime suspect. He fits both the public and secret profiles of Mr Cruel. Cdr Sprague revealed he was not impressed by what he found on arriving at Karmein Chad's home within hours of her 1991 abduction. "The crime scene was not preserved as it should have been," he said. "We had a lot of problems with it. Unfortunately, the initial police member in charge had set up the command post inside the house. "It was a disaster... they didn't seal the crime scene off as they should have." Cdr Sprague is concerned evidence that might have identified Mr Cruel was possibly destroyed in those first few vital hours. He later discovered it was not the first time a chance to identify the kidnapper had been lost. Operation Spectrum established that Mr Cruel was almost certainly responsible for an early series of sex attacks in Melbourne's southern suburbs in the 1980s. Detectives wanted to review the evidence from those cases. But they were bitterly disappointed to find some of the evidence had been lost. Of particular concern was that the tape Mr Cruel had used to bind one of his victims was missing. Forensic technology has improved since those attacks in the 1980s and scientists can extract identifying characteristics from the smallest of samples. Mr Cruel's DNA may well have been on that tape because it is likely he was not as careful during those early attacks as he was in the later abductions of Sharon Wills, Nicola Lynas and Karmein Chan. "But we will never know as the exhibit just isn't there any more," Cdr Sprague said. "In those days police just didnt have the supervision that they do now," he said. "With things like exhibits, people would sometimes leave them in their lockers. "By the time we identified these additional attacks, years after they had taken place, some of those exhibits had been lost and others had simply been thrown out. They had never been examined. "One exhibit that was lost was tape that one of the victims had been tied up in. "There were other examples of exhibits that might have been vital to us in identifying the offender not being able to be located when we asked for them. "There were times when we would go looking for the old criminal record sheets, which would record things like the modus operandi of the offender, for incidents we felt might be connected to the man we were after, only to discover those records were missing. MugShots is written by Herald Sun journalists Geoff Wilkinson and Keith Moor and covers 12 notorious crimes it will be available from newsagents and bookshops from Wednesday. The Mercury (4-8-2003) Keith Moor |
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