Eric Edgar Cooke

Eric Edgar Cooke
Born	(1931-02-25)25 February 1931 Perth, Western Australia, Australia
Died	26 October 1964(1964-10-26) (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.^[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 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. ^[3] Cooke was frequently hospitalised for head injuries and had suspected brain damage because of his accident-proneness, which was later put into question of if it were a sign of deeply hidden suicidal tendencies. He also suffered from recurrent headaches and was once admitted to an asylum. His blackouts later stopped after an operation in 1949.^[2]

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.^[4] In Estelle Blackburn's telling of the murders, he is described as "a short, slight man with dark, wavy hair and a twisted mouth..." (2). Though very good at subjects that required retentive memory and manual dexterity, he left school at 14 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.

At only six years old, the young abused boy was expelled from his school for stealing from a teacher's purse and transferred to another school where he was once again bullied for his mumble and scar. As a teenager, 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.^[5] During his later teenage years, Cooke would sneak into houses and steal whatever he found valuable. Although, these thefts went to extremes when he begun to damage clothing and furniture in acts of vengeance. He would cut out paper accounts of his crimes and show them to his friends in an attempt to gain friendships. At the age of 18, on May 24, 1949, Cooke was sentenced to three years in prison after being arrested by a Detective Burrows for arson and vandalism. He left many fingerprints and easy clues for detectives which would later teach him to be more careful in his future crimes. ^[3]

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. Though, during his training, he was quickly promoted to lance corporal and was taught to handle firearms. ^[2]

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 had seven children.

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 woman's gloves while committing crimes to avoid leaving fingerprints.^[3]

Murders

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 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 verandah 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 and sexually penetrated it with an empty whiskey bottle, which he left cradled in her arms.

One of Cooke's murders, which caused a false conviction of a man by the name of John Button, was of a 17 year-old Rosemary Anderson. Another was a stabbing of Jillian McPherson Brewer, a Melbourne heiress, with a hatchet and scissors, also causing a 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 involved in hit and runs.

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.^[6] After a rifle was found hidden in a Geraldton Wax bush in 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 constructing a hide in which they waited in case someone returned for it; Cooke was apprehended when he returned to collect the weapon 17 days later.

Cooke confessed to several crimes, including eight murders and 14 attempted murders.^[5] He was convicted on a 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 & execution

Cooke's grave in plot 409, Fremantle Cemetery

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.^[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 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 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

Darryl Beamish, Estelle Blackburn and John Button at the Supreme Court following Beamish's exoneration on 1 April 2005 (44 years after his conviction). Button was exonerated on 25 February 2002, 39 years after his conviction.

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 1961 of murdering Brewer;

• John Button was convicted of manslaughter, following the death of Anderson, his girlfriend.

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 re-trial, a campaign that included a well-publicized 1998 simulated re-enactment 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 Chief Justice of Western Australia, Sir Albert Wolff (presiding) called Cooke a “villainous unscrupulous liar”.^[2]

In 2002, the Court of Criminal Appeal quashed Button's conviction.^[8] 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.^[9]

On 2 June 2011, Beamish was granted a A$425,000 ex gratia payment by the Western Australian government.^[9]

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.^[10]

References

Further reading

• Blackburn, Estelle (2005). Broken lives. Hardie Grant. ISBN 1-74064-073-X.  (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)