50 years ago on this date, 26 October 1964,
Eric Edgar Cooke, an Australian Serial Killer, became the last man to be
executed by hanging in Western Australia. I will post information about him
from Wikipedia and other links.
 |
| Eric Edgar Cooke |
Born
|
25 February 1931
Perth, Western Australia, Australia |
Died
|
26 October 1964 (aged 33)
|
Cause of death
|
Hanging
|
Other names
|
The Night Caller
|
Criminal penalty
|
Death
|
Killings
|
|
Victims
|
8 murders and 14 attempted murders
|
Span of killings
|
1959–1963
|
Country
|
Australia
|
State(s)
|
Western Australia
|
Date apprehended
|
1 September 1963
|
Eric Edgar Cooke
(25 February 1931 – 26 October 1964), nicknamed the "Night Caller",
was an Australian serial killer. From 1959 to 1963, he terrorised the city of Perth,
Western Australia, by committing 22 violent crimes, eight of which resulted in
deaths.
Early
life
Childhood
Eric
Cooke was born on 25 February 1931 in Victoria Park, a suburb of Perth, and was the eldest of three
children.
Cooke
was born into an unhappy, violent family; his parents married solely because
his mother, Christine, was pregnant with him, and his alcoholic father, Vivian,
beat him frequently, especially when the boy tried to protect his mother from
the elder Cooke's drunken rages.
Christine Cooke would sleep in the staff room at her job in the Como Hotel to
avoid beatings. Much like his mother, Cooke would hide underneath the house or
roam neighbouring streets just to escape a night of his father's violence.
Cooke was also placed in orphanages or foster homes on occasion.
Cooke
was frequently hospitalised for head injuries and had suspected brain damage
because of his accident-proneness. Later it was questioned whether this was due
to repressed suicidal tendencies. He also suffered from recurrent headaches and
was once admitted to an asylum. His reported blackouts later stopped after an
operation in 1949.
Cooke
was born with a hare lip and a cleft palate, for which he had
one operation when he was three months old and another when he was 3½. Surgical
operations to repair the deformities were not totally successful, and left him
with a slight facial deformity, and he spoke in a mumble; these handicaps made
him the target of bullying at school. In Estelle Blackburn's telling of the
murders, he is described as "a short, slight man with dark, wavy hair and
a twisted mouth..." Cooke's disfigurements made the murderer ashamed, shy,
and emotionally unstable at a young age due to the beatings and bullying that
came with it.
Though
very good at subjects that required retentive memory and manual dexterity,
Cooke was expelled from Subiaco State School for stealing money from a
teacher's purse at the age of six. Once he was transferred to Newcastle Street
Infants' School, Cooke was again the butt of many jokes with his mumble and
scar. He continued to be made fun of at every school he attended, including
Highgate Primary School, Forrest Street Primary School, and Newcastle Street
Junior Technical School. He left school at 14 to work as a delivery boy for
Central Provision Stores to work in order to support the family. He would give
his weekly wages to his mother who could not fully support the family with the
money she earned from cooking and cleaning. Many of Cooke's jobs put him in the
hospital due to his accident-proneness. At a job in the factory of Harris,
Scarfe and Sandover, Cooke landed in the hospital due to effects of being
struck on the nose by a winch. At the age of 16, he worked as a hammer boy in
the blacksmith section of the workshop at Midland Junction, where he always
signed his lunch bag "Al Capone," and ended up burning his face with
steam and suffering second-degree burns. At the same job he jarred his right
hand and also injured the thumb of his other hand.
As
a teenager, starting at 17, Cooke spent his nights involved in petty crimes and
vandalism; he would later serve 18 months in jail for burning down a church
after he was rejected in a choir audition. During his later teenage years,
Cooke would sneak into houses and steal whatever he found valuable. These
crimes escalated to damaging clothing and furniture in acts of vengeance. He
would cut out newspaper accounts of his crimes and show them to his
acquaintances in an attempt to gain friendships.
Adulthood
At
Cooke's grandmother's house on March 12, 1949, police finally caught up with
the young vandal, finding evidence at his house. His fingerprints were then
matched to those found in other open cases. At the age of 18, on May 24, 1949,
Cooke was sentenced to three years in prison after being arrested for arson and
vandalism by a Detective Burrows who considered the boy one of "life's
unfortunates." He was convicted on two charges of stealing, seven of
breaking and entering and four of arson. He left many fingerprints and easy
clues for detectives which would teach him to be more careful in his future
crimes.
At
the age of 21, Cooke joined the regular Australian Army, but was discharged
three months later after it was discovered that before enlistment he had had a
juvenile record for theft, breaking and entering, and arson. During his
training, he was quickly promoted to lance corporal and was taught to handle
firearms.
On
14 October 1953, Cooke, then aged 22, married Sarah (Sally) Lavin, a
19-year-old waitress, at the Methodist Church in Cannington. They had seven
children, four boys and three girls.
Cooke
was arrested several times as a "peeping tom" and for other minor
offences. In 1955 he was arrested for stealing a car and sentenced to two years
hard labour. After his release, he took to wearing women's gloves while
committing crimes to avoid leaving fingerprints.
Murder
spree
Cooke's
victims included Jillian Macpherson Brewer, 22; Brian Weir, 29; John Sturkey,
19; George Walmsley, 54; Shirley Martha McLeod, 18; Constance Lucy Madrill, 24;
Patricia Vinico Berkman, 33; and Rosemary Anderson, 17. As his crimes were
opportunistic and used varying methods, and his victims shared no obvious
common traits, predicting where he would strike and catching him was difficult.
Cooke's
killing spree involved a series of seemingly unrelated hit-and-runs, stabbings,
stranglings, and shootings. Victims were shot with several different rifles,
stabbed with knives and scissors, and hit with an axe. Several were killed after
waking up as Cooke was robbing their homes, two were shot while sleeping
without their homes being disturbed, and one was shot dead after answering a
knock on the door. After stabbing one victim, Cooke got lemonade from the
refrigerator and sat on the veranda drinking it. One victim was strangled to
death with the cord from a bedside lamp, after which Cooke raped the
corpse, dragged it to a neighbor's lawn, then sexually penetrated it with
an empty whiskey bottle, which he left cradled in the bodies arms.
Two
of Cooke's murders resulted in false convictions. One of them, for which a man
named John Button was wrongly convicted,
involved Rosemary Anderson. Another was the murder of Jillian Macpherson
Brewer, a Melbourne heiress who was stabbed with a hatchet and scissors, which
led to the false conviction of Darryl
Beamish.
During
the 1960s, people in Australia frequently left cars unlocked and/or with the
keys in the ignition, which enabled Cooke to steal a car almost every night. He
sometimes returned stolen vehicles without the owners becoming aware of the
theft, including several cars that were involved in hit-and-runs. Cooke's first
hit-and-run was on Nel Schneider, 29, a mother of four who came to Australia
from Amsterdam in September 1955. After being thrown from her bike, Schneider
was left with a fractured skull and permanent brain damage.
The
police investigation included fingerprinting more than 30,000 males over the
age of 12, as well as locating and test-firing more than 60,000 .22 rifles.
After a rifle was found hidden in a Geraldton
Wax bush on Rookwood Avenue, Mount Pleasant, in August 1963, ballistic tests
proved the gun to have been used in the murder of Shirley McLeod. Police
returned to the location and tied a similar rifle, rendered inoperable, to the
bush with fishing line and constructed a hide in which they waited in case
someone returned for it. Cooke was apprehended when he returned to collect the
weapon seventeen days later.
Cooke
confessed to several crimes, including eight murders and fourteen attempted
murders. He was convicted on a charge of murdering John Lindsay Sturkey, one of
Cooke's five Australia Day shooting victims. In his confessions, Cooke
demonstrated an exceptionally good memory for the details of his crimes
irrespective of how long ago he had committed the offences. For example, he
confessed to more than 250 burglaries and was able to detail exactly what he
took, including the number and denominations of the coins he had stolen from
each location.
Conviction
and execution
Cooke
pleaded not guilty on the grounds of insanity. At trial, Cooke's lawyers
claimed that he suffered from schizophrenia, but this claim was dismissed after
the director of the state mental health services testified that he was sane.
The state would not allow independent psychiatric specialists to examine Cooke.
Cooke was convicted of willful murder on 28 November 1963 after a three-day
trial by jury in the Supreme Court of Western Australia before Justice Virtue.
He
was sentenced to death by hanging and, despite having grounds to appeal, he
ordered his lawyers not to apply, claiming that he deserved to pay for what he
had done. From Death Row, the serial killer, at the age of 33, was led out at 6
a.m. after 13 months in New Division. Cooke, listed as Prisoner No. 29050, was
hanged in Perth, Western Australia at 8 o'clock near the Swan River settlement,
where solitary confinement was the punishment for its convicts. Ten minutes
before the sentence was carried out, on 26 October 1964, Cooke swore on the Bible
that he had killed Jillian Brewer and Rosemary Anderson, claims which had been
previously rejected as others had already been convicted of those murders.
Cooke
was the last person to be hanged in the state of Western Australia.
Cooke
is buried in Fremantle Cemetery, above the remains of child killer Martha
Rendell, who was hanged in Fremantle Prison in 1909.
People
wrongly convicted of Cooke's crimes
Cooke's
confessions appeared to exculpate two men who had already been tried
separately, convicted and imprisoned for the killing of Jillian Macpherson
Brewer (1959) and Rosemary Anderson (1963) respectively:
- Darryl Beamish, a deaf mute, was convicted in December of 1961 of murdering Brewer.
- John Button was convicted of manslaughter, following the death of Rosemary Anderson, his girlfriend. Anderson was one of Cooke's first hit and run victims though, after intense questioning, Button confessed to the murder.
Despite
Cooke's 1963 confession, Beamish served 15 years, while Button was sentenced to
ten years and served five as prisoner No. 29050.
The
appeal court dismissed Button's initial appeal, even though Cooke had provided
details that only the culprit could have known; in particular, the judges did
not believe Cooke's claim that Anderson's body was thrown "over the
roof" of an EJ Holden without damaging its sun visor, as Cooke had claimed.
Over subsequent decades, Button and his supporters – including journalist Estelle
Blackburn – continued to press for a retrial, a campaign that included a
well-publicized 1998 simulated reenactment of Anderson's death, conducted by crash
test experts, with both a Holden matching one believed to have been used by
Cooke on the night in question, and a 1963 Simca Aronde like the car owned by
Button, which were both driven at a crash test dummy. The dummy was thrown over
the roof of the Holden, as Cooke had claimed, and the damage sustained matched
the records of a panelbeating business that had, in 1963, repaired the vehicle
driven by Cooke. The experts found that the sun visor flexed when hit by a body
and returned to its original shape, without even cracking the paint.
Beamish's
initial appeal was also dismissed because the court did not believe Cooke's
evidence. The prosecution claimed that his confessions were an attempt to
prolong his own trial and the then-Chief Justice of Western Australia, Sir Albert
Wolff, called Cooke a "villainous unscrupulous liar".
In
2002, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed Button's conviction. Button's
success opened the way for an appeal by Darryl Beamish, who was acquitted in
2005. In both cases, the appeal judges found that the murders had probably been
committed by Cooke.
On
2 June 2011, Beamish was granted a A$425,000 ex gratia payment by the
Western Australian government.
Media
A
2000 memoir by Robert Drewe, The Shark Net – later made into a
three-part TV series – provides one author's impressions the effect the murders
had on the Perth of that era. According to the book, more people bought dogs
for security and locked back doors and garages that had never been secured
before.
Eric
Edgar Cooke, as "The Nedlands Monster", features in Tim Winton's 1991
novel Cloudstreet and the subsequent 2011 television adaptation.
Cooke
is referenced in Craig Silvey's 2009 novel Jasper Jones.
Walkley
Award-winning journalist Estelle Blackburn spent six years writing the
biographical story Broken Lives, about Cooke's life and criminal career,
focusing particularly on the devastation left on his victims and their
families.
In
March 2009, the second season of Crime Investigation Australia featured
an episode about Eric Edgar Cooke.
OTHER
LINKS:
No comments:
Post a Comment