Eric Edgar Cooke

Eric Edgar Cooke
Background information
Birth name	Eric Edgar Cooke
Born	25 February 1931(1931-02-25) Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Died	26 October 1964(1964-10-26) (aged 33)
Cause of death	Hanging
Killings
Number of 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 nicknamed The Night Caller (25 February 1931 – 26 October 1964) 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.^[1]

Early life

Eric Cooke was born on 25 February 1931 in Victoria Park, a suburb of Perth and was the eldest of three children.^[2]

Cooke's father was forced into marriage, when Cooke's mother discovered she was pregnant with Cooke. Cooke's father showed no affection towards his oldest child and only son, who would often be a victim of his father's alcohol addiction. The child was subjected to beatings for no apparent reason.^[3] Cooke was also often beaten by his father when he tried to protect his mother from his father's violent outbursts of rage. Cooke was frequently hospitalized for head injuries and had suspected brain damage. He also suffered from recurrent headaches and was once admitted to an asylum.^[2]

Cooke had been bullied at school due to the impediments of a hare lip and a cleft palate.^[4] Surgical operations to repair the deformities were not totally successful and had left him with a slight facial deformity, and he spoke in a mumble. Leaving school at 14 to work, Cooke had to use his pay to support the family as his father spent most of his on alcohol. As a teenager, rejected by his peers due to his disability, Cooke had no social life, little money and spent his nights involved in petty crimes and vandalism. Cooke would later serve 18 months in jail for burning down a church after he was rejected in a choir audition.^[5] At the age of 18 Cooke was sentenced to three years in prison after being arrested for arson and vandalising homes he had broken into.^[3]

At the age of 21, Cooke joined the Permanent Military Forces 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.^[2]

A year later, on 14 October 1953, Cooke, then aged 22, married Sarah (Sally) Lavin, a 19-year-old waitress, at the Methodist Church in Cannington.^[2] They were to have seven children. Although now happily married with children, Cooke continued to roam the streets every night and 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 woman's gloves during his nocturnal activities to avoid leaving fingerprints.^[3]

Murders

Cooke's strange killing spree involved a series of seemingly unrelated hit and runs, stabbings, stranglings and shootings which had Perth completely terrorised. This was an unusual serial killer whose methods seemed as random as his choice of victims. His behaviour was inconsistent and bizarre. The various shootings had been carried out with several different rifles. Victims had been stabbed with knives and scissors, and hit with an axe. One victim was shot dead after answering a knock on the door, several were killed after waking while Cooke was robbing their homes; two were shot while sleeping without their homes being disturbed; after stabbing one victim, he got lemonade from the refrigerator and sat on the verandah drinking it; another victim was strangled with the cord from her bedside lamp, her dead body raped, then dragged to a neighbor's lawn, where she was violated with an empty whisky bottle which was left cradled in her arms. In the 1960s, people often left the keys in their cars' ignition overnight, and Cooke would steal a car almost every night, returning it before the owner awoke. It was later discovered that the cars involved in several hit and runs had been returned without the owners realising they had been stolen. Cooke was to later claim he just wanted to hurt people.

During the police investigation, more than 30,000 males over the age of 12 were fingerprinted and more than 60,000 .22 rifles were located and test fired.^[6] Cooke was finally caught after a rifle was found hidden in a bush in August 1963. Ballistic tests proved the gun had been used to murder Shirley McLeod. Police returned to the location and tied a similar inoperable rifle to the bush with fishing line, constructing a hide in which police waited for the owner to collect it, which Cooke did 17 days later. When captured, Cooke confessed to numerous crimes, including 22 violent crimes - 8 murders, and 14 attempted murders.^[5] He was convicted on the specimen charge of murdering John Lindsay Sturkey, one of Cooke's five Australia Day (1963) shooting victims.^[7] 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

The other murder confessions included those of Jillian Brewer and Rosemary Anderson for which Darryl Beamish and John Button had already been convicted and imprisoned. Cooke's confessions were referred to in appeals by Beamish and Button but, in Button's case which was heard first, although Cooke had given details withheld by police that only the killer would have known, little credence was given to Cooke's testimony as the vehicle Cooke claimed he had used had an external steel sunvisor, the appeal judges did not believe a body could be thrown "over the roof" as Cooke claimed without ripping the visor off.^[8] Beamish's appeal was dismissed after the judges cross-referenced Cooke’s evidence with that of the Button appeal. West Australia Chief Justice Sir Albert Wolff called him a "villainous unscrupulous liar" and the prosecution claimed that both confessions were an attempt to prolong his own trial.^[2]

Pleading not guilty on the grounds of insanity, at trial Cooke's defence lawyers claimed that Cooke 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.^[2] 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 and despite having grounds to appeal, he ordered his lawyers not to apply claiming that he had killed and deserved to pay for what he had done. Ten minutes before the sentence was carried out Cooke swore on the Bible renewing his rejected claim that he had been the killer of Jillian Brewer and Rosemary Anderson. Cooke was the last person to be hanged in the state of Western Australia, on 26 October 1964.

Cooke is buried in Fremantle Cemetery, above the remains of the child-killer, Martha Rendell, who was hanged in Fremantle Prison in 1909 and was the last woman to be hanged in Western Australia.

The wrong men

Two other Australians were convicted of crimes later attributed to Cooke:

• Darryl Beamish, a deaf mute convicted in 1961 for the 1959 murder of Jillian Macpherson Brewer, a wealthy woman originally from Melbourne. He served 15 years despite Cooke's 1963 confession to the crime. His conviction was quashed in 2005 after evidence pointed to Cooke being the killer. On 2 June 2011 Beamish was granted a A$425,000 ex gratia payment by the Western Australian government.^[9]

• John Button, who was jailed for ten years (served five years) for manslaughter in the death of his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, a conviction that was quashed in 2002 after evidence proved Cooke was the killer.

Media

A memoir, The Shark Net by Robert Drewe – 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. See Cloudstreet (TV series)

Cooke is referenced in Craig Silvey's 2009 novel Jasper Jones.

The Walkley Award-winning journalist, Estelle Blackburn, spent six years writing the biographical story Broken Lives, about Cooke's life and criminal career, focussing 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.^[10]

References

1. ^ Christian, Brett. "Police decoy used in killer hunt sting". Post Newspapers. http://www.postnewspapers.com.au/20030201/news/002.shtml. Retrieved 2006-09-21. ^{[dead link]}
2. ^ ^{a b c d e f} "Cooke, Edgar Eric (1931 - 1964". abd. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A130543b.htm. Retrieved 2008-12-12. 
3. ^ ^{a b c} "Eric Edgar Cooke - The Night Caller". 2003. http://www.unsolvedmysteries.com/usm348226.html. Retrieved 2008-12-13. 
4. ^ Broken Lives p.18. (Blackburn writes that Cooke had an operation on his lip at 3 months as a baby and for his cleft palate at 3½ years of age)
5. ^ ^{a b} "Eric Edgar Cooke - The Night Caller". http://www.trulyunusual.com/wards/showthread.php?t=3356. Retrieved 2008-12-12. 
6. ^ Episodes in Western Australia’s Policing History (1963 Serial killer Cooke) Western Australia Police
7. ^ Blackburn, Estelle (2005). Broken lives. Hardie Grant. ISBN 174064073X. 
8. ^ Crash tests with the same model car in 1998 found that the sunvisor flexed when hit by a body before popping back to its original shape without even cracking the paint. The body (a $2,500 biomedical human-form dummy that behaves exactly as a human body in an accident) was thrown over the roof exactly as Cooke described and the damage sustained in the test exactly matched the details recorded by the panel shop that had repaired "Cookes" vehicle for the insurance company in 1963.
9. ^ "Ex gratia payment for wrongly jailed man". The Sydney Morning Herald. 2 June 2011. http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/ex-gratia-payment-for-wrongly-jailed-man-20110602-1fhq6.html. Retrieved 2011-06-02. 
10. ^ "Channel Nine Episodes, Crime Investigation Australia". http://channelnine.ninemsn.com.au/crimeinvestigationaustralia/episodes/. Retrieved 2009-03-02. 

Further reading

• Blackburn, Estelle (2005). Broken lives. Hardie Grant. ISBN 174064073X.  (review)

External links

• Cooke's hanging & its legal significance
• Serial killers (has one paragraph on Cooke)
• The lasting effect Cooke's crimes have had on Perth
• ABC-TV, Australian Story: "Murder He Wrote" (transcript of the 2002 Australian Story feature on the Cooke case, first broadcast 29 July 2002)

Persondata
Name	Cooke, Eric Edgar
Alternative names
Short description	Serial killer
Date of birth	25 February 1931
Place of birth	Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Date of death	26 October 1964
Place of death	Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia