Reflections on the enduring impact of the 'Mr Cruel' crimes

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There is a macabre kinship among women who grew up in Melbourne in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Alongside the usual rituals of early adolescence – finishing primary school, submitting to first bra measurements at the hands of grizzled Myer matrons – we obsessively war-gamed our own kidnappings, preparing for what seemed a terrifying inevitability.

This was not the result of overly elastic imaginations: the daily papers and nightly news bulletins were dominated by stories of girls our age, taken from their homes by a balaclava-clad man wielding a knife and gun. A journalist dubbed the perpetrator Mr Cruel, though police later said Mr Cool was a more accurate descriptor, given his steely confidence and meticulously planned attacks.

For my generation, the Mr Cruel crimes unfolded in two chapters: first as frightened children, and now as frightened parents. The ongoing mystery of his identity means we can’t consign him to history. My children have quietly absorbed the fact that I’ve never felt I can protect them, or that home is always a safe haven.

Mr Cruel didn’t target insolent teens with spidery Maybelline lashes, but girls in late primary and early high school who occupied the jarring, liminal space between childhood and full-blown teendom, who still read The Babysitters Club and watched Saturday morning cartoons, but also nursed nascent crushes on their classmates. Girls like us. Girls like my own teenage daughters, onto whom I glommed all my ancient Mr Cruel anxieties.

For some people, the defining image of the ’90s is OJ Simpson’s mugshot, or Nelson Mandela walking free from prison. For me, it’s a Victoria Police poster with the words “CHILD ABDUCTIONS” writ large in bold type, pleading for public assistance in finding the man responsible for a series of assaults and kidnappings between 1988 and 1991.

The images on those posters are as familiar to me as anything from my own family albums: a bespectacled 10-year-old with a keen, attentive face; a grinning 13-year-old with silver braces and a lanky brown bob. It’s the third girl whose picture still troubles me in the middle of the night, her beaming face bordered by thick braids. Karmein Chan was 13 when she was abducted from her Templestowe home, her body discovered a year later in Thomastown landfill.

Leaflets of the poster were mailed to every home in the state. It was displayed in railway stations, shopping malls, and on billboards. Its ubiquity meant any parental attempts to assuage our fears were futile: every trip to the shops provided evidence to the contrary.

Around that time, my family moved to the north-eastern outskirts of Melbourne, where dense suburbia abruptly gives way to rolling acreage. Our new home was just 15 minutes from both Karmein’s house, and the location of the first suspected Mr Cruel victim, who was never publicly named. I had always feared the dark: now I had good reason to. I quaked in my bed each night as the wind whipped the trees in the bush that backed onto our house, fingers jammed into my ears to block out the rustling sounds that I attributed not to possums and kangaroos, but Mr Cruel.

For me, and many women of my generation, the memories of that time remain chillingly sharp. At the precise moment we were beginning to understand that there were certain things our parents could not protect us from, Mr Cruel drove the point home with savage efficacy.

“I still have nightmares that someone’s at my bedroom window, trying to get in,” recalls Nicola, an old school friend. Nicola used to carefully arrange her curtains to completely obscure the view into her bedroom; I’d always thought it was just me who did that, lining up cat figurines and schoolbooks along the bottom of my blinds.

Other friends told similar stories. Lauren remembered her sense of hopelessness on learning that Karmein’s home had bars on the windows. “I obsessed over that detail … if bars couldn’t stop him, what hope did I have?” Ellen mapped her home’s layout through the eyes of Mr Cruel, convinced that her balcony door would be his entry point.

Being frightened of a predator is not comparable to being a victim of one. But that fear embedded itself in our DNA, permanently warping our sense not only of our own, but also our children’s safety.

“As an adult, I’ve only lived in houses where the children are upstairs and my bedroom is downstairs, purely so no one can get to them without passing me first,” says Kathryn.

My housing choices reflect my vestigial fears, too: I’ve lived in above-ground level apartments for most of my adult life. Even so, I’ve never been able to reassure my daughters with any conviction that they’re safe in their own home, and they bear the marks of my poorly concealed anxieties.

The hyper-surveilled world in which they’re growing up leaves far less cover for a predator in the vein of Mr Cruel, who never had to contend with ring cameras and widespread CCTV. But part of me will never stop worrying that he’s still out there – the part that sees Karmein’s sunshine face in the middle of the night, and forgets, for a moment, that 35 years have passed since he terrorised our city.

Bunny Banyai is a freelance writer and author.

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