It’s kind of a Criminal Minds-style cliché to have a murderer be motivated by his sexual inadequacies, but truth is sadly often much worse than fiction. Mark Errin Rust was a sexual predator, rapist, arsonist, and murderer who was convicted of the sexual assault and murder of two women, 30-year-old Maya Jakic, and 18-year-old Megumi Suzuki.

Maya Jakic had been murdered and left in the bushes outside the old Payneham police station in Adelaide, South Australia, in April of 1999. Calls were made to triple 000 by Rust to report the body, but the police could not locate it. Frustrated, Rust left a note on a police patrol car again stating that there was a body at the old station, and this time, police found Jakic. She had clearly been sexually assaulted. Her killer, however, could not be found.

Megumi went missing in August of 2001, after she failed to return to her student accommodation for six whole days. As a part of the search effort, police put information about Suzuki and Maya Jakic on a website dedicated to finding missing persons. On that website was audio of the 000 call Rust placed about Maya Jakic’s body. Even in 2001, information travelled fast around the internet, and the audio was eventually heard by a man named Steve Rust, who now had to confront the fact that his brother, who he had known to have some prior criminal offences, was likely a sadistic murderer.

EPISODE NOTES:

Mark Errin Rust had a small dick.

Okay, there’s more to it than that. He suffered from a disorder known as Klinefelter syndrome, which meant that he had an extra X chromosome, resulting in infertility and a shrivelled and deformed, um, package. Throughout his life, Rust took out his frustration with his inadequacies on women. He loved nothing more than to expose himself to unsuspecting women and got off on their horrified reactions. He followed women from the age of 13, and was arrested for gross indecency and arson, and eventually rape. He was in prison for the rape of a woman in 2001 when police showed up at his cell and re-arrested him for the murders of Maya Jakic and Megumi Suzuki.

Maya Jakic had been found in April of 2001 dumped in the bushes outside the old Payneham police station. Rust had left a note on a police patrol car notifying them about the body, but the police were not able to uncover the identity of her killer at the time. Megumi Suzuki had gone missing in 2001, only 13 days before Rust would be arrested for the rape of a woman in an office building. In jail, Rust bragged to another inmate about the murder of Suzuki, saying he had dumped her in a skip, and that he had taken her personal CD player with him into prison.

The inmate didn’t have much loyalty to Rust and fully ratted him out. The police were finally able to locate Megumi’s body, buried underneath 10,000 tons of trash, at a nearby dump in December of 2001. Rust showed little remorse for his crimes, and when asked why he killed Megumi, he responded, “because I did”. Luckily for humanity, he was sentenced to life in prison for the murders.

Our main source this week was the classic Aussie criminal investigation show Forensic Investigators, season 1 episode 7, which can be found on Youtube.

Read more about the case on the trusty Murderpedia here http://murderpedia.org/male.R/r/rust-mark-errin.htm

News articles about Rust’s (thankfully denied) application for a non-parole period can be found here https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/mark-errin-rust-who-murdered-megumi-suzuki-and-maya-jackic-will-ask-sa-supreme-court-to-grant-him-a-nonparole-period/news-story/11c3a817ac3e7d903779338786ef3bf3?fbclid=IwAR0lyhmIjHMtmUWWk_HR2iKwdCNxRLQM4L7jK2JX88aB-oQYoI3-WQPrm0o

And you can read the transcript or listen to the episode of True Crime 365 covering this case here https://truecrime365.com/2018/06/29/mark-errin-rust/

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