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The Real Cookie Monster

No serial killer in Australia’s history has terrorised a city the way that Eric Cooke terrorised Perth in the early 1960s. Cooke would strike anywhere, and had no particular preference when it came to how he murdered his victims. Knives, a gun, strangulation and cars were all used. No one was safe until the killer was caught.

The eldest of three children, Eric Edgar ‘Cookie’ Cooke was born on 25 February 1931 in Victoria Park, Western Australia. He had a harelip and a cleft palate. Cooke’s mother, Christine, gave young Eric as much affection as she could, but his father Vivian despised him from the minute he set eyes on him. Vivian was an alcoholic, and couldn’t deal with his son’s imperfections. Instead of encouraging his son, compensating for the taunting he received at school, he beat him harshly and regularly.

Cooke grew up a friendless loner, an outcast abandoned by everyone except his mother. Most people who came to know the shy man liked him but deep inside there was an undercurrent of extreme violence and a deep resentment of the society that had rejected him. Naturally smart, he did well at school, but he left at the age of 14 to start work as a delivery boy.

Because his drunken father spent his wages on alcohol, the household was constantly short of money. Eric had to donate much of his pay so that his mother could feed and clothe the family. This constant lack of money saw Cooke turn to thievery from an early age.

To avoid his father’s constant beatings, he spent more and more time out of the house. He started to peep through windows and watch women getting undressed – and, if he was lucky, engaging in sex. He soon graduated to breaking into houses and stealing. In those more innocent times, most Perth houses and flats remained unlocked, sometimes even when there was no one at home. Cooke started to enjoy robbing dwellings while people were there.

By the time he was 18, he was regularly stealing around Perth to increase his income. When he couldn’t find money or valuables, Cooke destroyed clothing and furniture and often started small fires. Then one day, caught red-handed in the middle of a break and enter, police matched his fingerprints to other recent robberies and fires.

Cooke’s first appearance before the courts was in May 1949. He faced two charges of stealing, seven counts of break and enter and four of arson. On hearing that Cooke had stolen to feed and clothe himself and his family, the judge sentenced him to three years in jail with the recommendation that his sentence be reviewed after three months.

Out of prison in the recommended time and on probation, Cooke took a job as a factory worker and became involved with religion. He even joined the Methodist Church Youth Group. For the first time in his life he seemed to be accepted, and the sports and summer camps helped him make friends. But after 18 months police took him away again when they found that his prints matched those on a moneybox that had been emptied when the home of a Methodist official was broken into. Cooke escaped with a £50 fine after members of the church spoke on his behalf.

In July 1953 Cooke took a job as a truck driver at the West Perth Metropolitan Markets, and met 17-year-old Sarah Lavin. They were married in November 1953 and settled in suburban Rivervale. The couple would go on to raise four boys and three girls. Still, Cooke continued to break and enter on weekends. The few pounds he stole saw that he dressed well, he was never without money, and there was always food for his wife and family.

Then, shortly after the birth of his second son in 1955, Cooke was arrested and charged with stealing a motor vehicle after he had crashed it. He was sentenced to two years’ hard labour. Released in December 1956 and employed again as a truck driver, Cooke took to wearing gloves when stealing.

On the night of 29 January 1959, he was casing a block of apartments in South Perth when he noticed the silhouette of a young woman getting into bed. Cooke entered and searched the apartment. Finding no money or valuables, he crept into the bedroom. Attractive 33-year-old divorcee Pnena Berkman woke up and confronted him in the darkness. After a violent struggle that saw Cooke’s face and neck scratched, he stabbed her to death with numerous blows from a 20-centimetre diver’s knife he carried.

On 25 January 1960 Cooke was arrested for loitering in a Perth park and sent to Fremantle prison for a month. By this stage police knew him as a peeping tom and ‘snowdropper’ – a person who steals women’s underwear off clotheslines and masturbates into them.

Perth residents remained unaware of it, but by 1963 police knew there was a mini crime wave going on in their city. More cars than usual were being stolen. Dozens of houses had been robbed. They believed peeping toms were on the prowl. Women were being assaulted in their beds. Several women had also been seriously injured by hit-and-run drivers in stolen cars.

Eric Edgar Cooke had stepped up his activities.

At 2 am on the morning of Sunday, 27 January 1963, Cooke opened fire on a parked car with a .22 rifle he had stolen from a house earlier in the evening. The bullet passed through the neck of one of the occupants, poultry shop proprietor Nicholas August, and smashed into the wrist of the car’s other occupant, barmaid Rowena Reeves. The couple had been sitting in the car enjoying a beer after leaving the nearby Ocean Beach Hotel.

Cooke had crept up on the car but had been spotted by the occupants, who thought he was a pervert. They told him to ‘piss off’. When he didn’t budge, August threw an empty beer bottle. Cooke retaliated by shooting him. August started the car and sped off as Cooke fired another shot – luckily, it missed.

Thwarted in his murder attempt, Cooke searched for more victims. In nearby Broome Street he found a flat with the door open. He entered the bedroom and shot 29-year-old accountant Brian Weir in the head at point-blank range. Weir survived, but was left paralysed down one side, blind in one eye, barely able to speak. He would be restricted to a wheelchair for the rest of his short life.

After the shooting, Cooke walked swiftly to his stolen car and fled, on the lookout for yet another victim. Reaching Nedlands, he stopped and went on foot in search of someone to kill. He found 19-year-old student John Lindsay Sturkey sleeping on the verandah of a boarding house and shot him once in the head at point-blank range. The young man died instantly.

Walking quickly away from the boarding house, Cooke selected another house in a nearby street at random and rang the doorbell twice. When 54-year-old retired grocer George Ormond Walmsley answered his front door, Cooke shot him between the eyes. Walmsley fell to the ground dead. It was 4 am. Cooke dumped the stolen car and returned home as if nothing had happened.

Cooke struck again almost three weeks later, again in the early hours of the morning, but this time he murdered in such a fashion that police didn’t think that it was the work of the Cottesloe–Nedlands gunman. The crimes weren’t even remotely alike.

At around 2 am on the morning of Saturday, 16 February 1963, Cooke was cat-burgling an apartment in West Perth. Constance Lucy Madrill, a 24-year-old social worker, woke to find him in her room. Cooke knocked her unconscious and strangled her to death with a light cord, then removed her nightie and had sex with her still warm corpse. He then dragged the naked body out of the back door of the ground floor apartment and across a bitumen rear lane, and dumped her in the backyard of a house owned by the parents of Perth television personality Caroline Noble.

The residents of Perth were horrified. It was no longer safe to walk the streets. Everyone was a suspect. But then there was nothing; everything went quiet for almost six months.

Then, just as the city was learning to relax, he struck again. On the night of Saturday, 10 August 1963, 18-year-old student Shirley Martha McLeod was studying while babysitting for a family in Dalkeith when Cooke shot her between the eyes with a .22 rifle he had stolen. She was found at 2 am, dead in a lounge chair with her pen still in her hand and her notebook in her lap.

Although the bullet from Shirley McLeod’s brain didn’t match those taken from the victims of the Cottesloe–Nedlands shootings, police had little doubt that it was the work of the same killer. And they now believed that whoever committed the shootings and the murder of Shirley McLeod could also help them with their inquiries into the death of Lucy Madrill.

A week later, on the afternoon of 17 August 1963, an elderly couple noticed a rifle beneath a Geraldton wax bush while they were taking a stroll along the banks of the Swan River. They notified the police, who took it away for a ballistics check and then brought it back. But this time it was tied to the bush with strong fishing line. They put the gun under surveillance. While they waited, a bullet from the rifle fired at the police laboratory proved a match for the one taken from Shirley McLeod’s skull.

Authorities waited for two weeks. On 31 August 1963, 32-year-old Cooke drove slowly up to the Geraldton wax bush. He had a look around before reaching underneath and grabbing the rifle butt. Police set upon him. He was handcuffed and taken in for questioning.

A .22 bullet shell found in his car matched one fired from the rifle. When asked about the murder of Shirley McLeod, Cooke denied any knowledge of it and maintained that he was at home with his wife and family on that night. His wife, Sarah Cooke, was a loyal but moral woman, and refused to give her husband an alibi. She said he was out on the night of the murder.

‘Why did you do that?’ Cooke asked his wife.

‘Because it is the truth, Eric, and you know it.’

‘What do you think I should do now?’

‘That’s up to you, Eric.’

With that Cooke confessed to the murders of Patricia Berkman, John Sturkey, George Walmsley, Lucy Madrill and Shirley McLeod and to the shootings of Brian Weir, Rowena Reeves and Nicholas August. He confessed to breaking into more than 250 homes and stealing money, jewellery, guns and other valuables. Cooke was so good at what he did that many people he burgled didn’t even know they had been robbed.

Regardless of how long ago he had committed the offence, Cooke remembered every theft in detail. He stole dozens of cars – and returned some of them to exactly where he took them from, with the owners being none the wiser. Others he had abandoned or crashed. For a joke, he returned one car he stole to its owner’s home minus the light globe in the internal light.

Cooke confessed to numerous assaults on women as they slept. He also confessed to hitting a 16-year-old girl over the head with a metal object when she was woken by him searching her room. Until Cooke confessed, the girl believed she had fallen out of bed and hit her head.

Cooke also confessed to the unsolved hit-and-runs of seven women he had intentionally knocked down, in some cases causing horrendous injuries. He then confessed, in extraordinary detail, to a murder and a manslaughter that two other men were currently serving prison sentences for.

One was the death of 17-year-old Rosemary Anderson on 10 February 1963 at Shenton Park. Anderson was run down by a car allegedly driven by her boyfriend, John Button, after they had quarrelled. Button signed a confession and was found guilty of manslaughter. He was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment with hard labour, but he vehemently denied his guilt and said police had coerced him into signing the confession.

Cooke also confessed, again providing intricate detail, to the murder of Perth socialite Jillian Brewer, 22, who had been bashed with a hatchet and stabbed to death with a pair of scissors in her Cottesloe apartment on 19 December 1959. In August 1961, two years before Cooke’s arrest and confession, 20-year-old deaf mute and convicted petty thief and child molester Darryl Raymond Beamish had been tried and convicted for the murder of Jillian Brewer and sentenced to death; the sentence was later commuted to life in prison. Beamish had confessed to the murder through his interpreter but pleaded not guilty at his trial. His defence lawyers told the court he had been coerced by police into a confession. Cooke retracted his confessions to the murders of Rosemary Anderson and Jillian Brewer two days later.

He went to trial for murder in the Perth Supreme Court on 25 November 1963. The jury had the choice of finding him guilty of wilful murder or not guilty on the grounds of insanity. The trial lasted three days. The jury took just over an hour to find him guilty. Justice Virtue sentenced Cooke to be hanged.

As Cooke waited on Death Row in Fremantle Prison, John Button and Darryl Beamish’s legal representatives applied to the High Court of Australia for leave to appeal their clients’ convictions. In September 1964, both pleas were rejected on the grounds (among other reasons) that Cooke was a notorious liar and that he had made the confessions in the hope that they would eventually delay his execution by keeping him alive to give evidence at an inquest.

At 7.50 am on 26 October 1964, Cooke took the Bible in his hand and said, ‘I swear before Almighty God that I killed Anderson and Brewer.’ Then, at precisely 8 am, Eric Edgar Cooke dropped through the gallows trapdoor at Fremantle Prison. He was the last man to be hanged in Western Australia.

The ordeal of John Button, who was found guilty and sentenced to 10 years’ jail for the manslaughter of his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, was detailed in Broken Lives, Estelle Blackburn’s award-winning book on the Cooke/Anderson case. After years of protesting his innocence, and based on the case put forward in Broken Lives, on 17 August 1999 John Button was granted the right to appeal his 1963 conviction for the manslaughter of Rosemary Anderson.

In the light of overwhelming new evidence, on 25 February 2002 (which, ironically, would have been Eric Edgar Cooke’s 70th birthday), John Button’s manslaughter conviction of 4 May 1963 was quashed by the WA Court of Criminal Appeal.

The chief justice of Western Australia, David Malcolm, and justices Henry Wallwork and Neville Owen presided. The chief justice described it as a miscarriage of justice and said a retrial was unnecessary.

And in early April, 2005, after his sixth attempt and again aided by extensive investigative reporting by Estelle Blackburn, the High Court of Western Australia unanimously agreed that Darryl Beamish had not murdered Jillian Brewer in 1959 and said they now believed the 1964 gallows confession of Eric Edgar Cooke.

A relieved Beamish said that he wouldn’t sue the government for compensation. ‘All I ever wanted was truth and justice’ he told reporters. ‘The deaf have many problems being understood by people who can hear. There are always mix-ups. I did not understand what happened at the police station, or at court.

‘I just wanted everyone to know for sure that I did not kill anyone. Now they know.’

Though it has not been proved conclusively that he committed them, hypothetically the murders of Rosemary Anderson and Jillian Brewer bring Eric Edgar Cooke’s grisly tally to eight making him Australia’s most prolific individual serial killer of the 20th century.

To this day, those who lived through those horrible times can be heard to advise their loved ones ‘don’t forget to close the window in case Cookie comes’.