Deadline: Could ‘creepy’ neighbour lead police to schoolgirl Karmein Chan’s killer?

Thirty-one years after Karmein Chan was abducted from her Templestowe home, a woman is still chilled by what her “creepy” neighbour said then about the little girl.

Karmein Chan’s mother Phyllis at the site where her daughter’s remains were found.

Andrew Rule and Mark Buttler with the latest crime buzz.

Karmein Chan and Mr Cruel

Some crimes stick in the memory, and the abduction and murder of Karmein Chan is one of them. It has fascinated the public for 31 years, since the night the 13-year-old was snatched from her family’s Templestowe house in April 1991.

Last week’s marking of the 30th anniversary of Karmein’s remains being found in Thomastown has prompted several readers to get in touch.

Not everyone is convinced that Karmein’s killer is necessarily the same child abductor, dubbed “Mr Cruel”, who took two young girls and assaulted a third in her home in the preceding 44 months.

A former police officer from the Goulburn Valley, now living interstate, happened to be a friend of one of the victims of murderer, abductor and sex offender Ashley Mervyn Coulston.

Coulston is serving life for a motiveless triple murder in Burwood in 1992 and another violent attempted abduction the same year.

This policeman points out that Coulston shot his three Burwood victims in the head at close range with a .22 calibre firearm, which is strikingly similar to the way Karmein was executed.

Karmein Chan was kidnapped from her Templestowe home at knifepoint on April 13, 1991.

The murders apart, Coulston had also abducted people at gunpoint before (starting when he was just 14) and is believed to have tied up men so he could sexually assault their female partners.

It’s known he moved to Melbourne from New South Wales in 1989, two years before Karmein was abducted, and three years before he committed the Burwood atrocity. The time frame and the modus operandi fit.

Investigators who worked on the Spectrum taskforce for almost four years will no doubt have strong theories about why Coulston is not a good candidate for the Chan crime.

Meanwhile, the anniversary stirs memories.

A woman who moved temporarily into a rundown flat in Spotswood in April 1995 while finishing a new house at Williamstown tells Deadline she met a fellow tenant whose conversation and demeanour disturbed her at the time — and still does.

“Phyl”, an accountant, was moving into the flat at 107 Hudsons Rd when she was approached by a neighbouring tenant, a man in his early 30s.

He rode a big, black motorbike but was not the biker type, being dressed neatly and “daggily” in a zip-up cardigan with knitted cuffs over a striped shirt.

“He was slightly pudgy, with fair red hair, a round face and a slightly large forehead,” she recalls. He was quietly spoken and polite but “creepy”.

What stood out to Phyl was that when she mentioned moving from Doncaster, the tenant immediately said that was near where “the girl” had been kidnapped (in Templestowe).

When Phyl responded, pronouncing the murdered girl’s name to sound like “Karmen” Chan, the man corrected her pronunciation with exaggerated emphasis, as “Kar-me-in”.

A police sketch of the balaclava used by the kidnapper — nicknamed Mr Cruel — of Nicola Lynas.

Something about his manner disturbed Phyl so much (“he almost caressed the word,” she says) that recent publicity has persuaded her to ask if anyone knows who owned that block of flats in Hudsons Rd in 1995?

She believes she rented the flat directly from the owner, who had placed a tiny newspaper rental advertisement.

For the police, of course, this sort of well-meaning “tip” is just another needle in a haystack full of needles.

After eliminating 27,000 men, and 30,000 houses, taskforce police gave up.

Still, anyone with strong information has one million reasons to point the finger and maybe collect a life-changing reward.

While on the subject of the Mr Cruel abductions, another correspondent poses this simple and possibly sensible question: were the abduction victims (and their family members who saw and heard “Mr Cruel”) asked to view film and audio of police interviews with prime suspects in case they recognised an offender’s voice or body shape?

It was overlooking something equally simple — routinely checking gun shop records in northeast Victoria — that meant police missed arresting Raymond “Mr Stinky” Edmunds for 19 years.

The Mongol split

Toby Mitchell and a few staunch former members of the Mongols have their critics. But, as Chopper Read once quipped about his own detractors, “so did Beethoven”.

The people who have ejected Mitchell and two of his key followers from the outlaw motorcycle gang have thrown down the gauntlet — probably more a motorbike glove with studs in it and the trigger finger cut out.

Because, no matter what the in-house critics say, Mitchell and his mates are well-connected and provably tough, according to those whose job it is to monitor the doings of the “one percenters” responsible for all the turf wars over various biker rackets.

Mitchell has been shot twice — once almost fatally — and has returned.

His supporter, Mark Balsillie, is formidable and also a survivor. Shot multiple times in an ambush, most likely by Hasan Topal, Balsillie came back.

Former Mongol mates Toby Mitchell and Mark Balsillie.

He was a trusted and very influential member of the Mongols before the aggressive federal intervention by national president Nick “The Knife” Forbes, well-remembered for his part in the infamous “Ballroom Blitz” shootout and stabbing on the Gold Coast in 2006.

Sam “The Punisher” Abdulrahim has quite some reach in the northern suburbs outlaw gangs and that’s why he was brought in a couple of years back.

And Jason Addison was national Bandidos president before Mitchell recruited him to the Mongols.

Addison is the boss at Echuca, the border post (Checkpoint Charlie?) regarded as strategically important in Bikie World.

It will be interesting to see what happens next.

The Mitchell loyalists could set up a new franchise, join another gang in Victoria or link up with an interstate gang.

A lot of money and prestige is at stake and war drums are beating.

No one wants to lose face, especially when they have so much ink tattooed on it.

Leak probe overcooked

It was revealed last week that an internal investigation has been run into leaked I Cook investigation documents.

A 2020 report by detective Sergeant Ash Penry, published last year by the Herald Sun, found there had been a level of “corruption, misuse of office and a malicious prosecution” in the saga surrounding I Cook’s closure.

This would have caused much spluttering of Weeties among some influential figures.

Victoria Police appears to have gone looking for the source of the leak, which caused embarrassment, given Sergeant Penry’s assessment was followed by an investigation in which no one was actually questioned.

Being a community-spirited column, Deadline is in a position to help.

We’re told that when the initial investigation finished, I Cook asked Victoria Police to return a hard drive containing its own brief of evidence, prepared by former Victoria Police detectives Paul Brady and Rod Porter.

The photo showing a slug found in the I Cook Foods factory, which kicked off the ‘slug gate’ saga.

That happened and one of the I Cook team gave it the once-over to make sure everything was there.

It was, and more. Because also saved to the hard drive was the Penry report, recommending more investigation into the closure of I Cook, which caused the loss of 41 jobs from the Dandenong South food provider.

Presumably, some dozy investigator had left the report accidentally.

The only alternative scenario is that some altruistic investigator decided to leave it there deliberately so the Cook family would see it. The odds against that seem long.

Either way, the report is pretty damning — and pretty damn embarrassing for the VicPol hierarchy.

Which is clearly why some high-ranking officer with a crush on the state government has decided to lavish police time and taxpayers’ money on investigating the supposed “leak” instead of on real police work.

Perhaps everyone should settle down and remember that old saying that given the choice between a conspiracy and a stuff-up, go with the stuff-up.