Eric Edgar Cooke (February 25, 1931?October 26, 1964) was a Western Australian serial killer and burglar. From 1958 to 1963, he attacked 20 people in the city of Perth, Western Australia, killing eight.^[1]

Early life

Cooke had a cleft lip and was bullied as a child. He was also frequently beaten by his father when he tried to protect his mother from his father's violent outbursts of rage. As an adult, he married and had seven children, and was described as outwardly amenable.

Murders

He killed at random, running people over in the street or silently entering homes and shooting, stabbing or strangling strangers. He was caught when the gun used to murder one of his victims, Shirley McLeod, was found, and police waited for Cooke to collect it. Cooke was convicted on the specimen charge of murdering John Lindsay Sturkey, one of Cooke's five Australia Day (1963) shooting victims.^[2]

Cooke was nicknamed "the Nedlands Monster", after the Perth suburb in which he murdered Sturkey.

Conviction and execution

Cooke was convicted of wilful murder and sentenced to death on November 28, 1963, by the Perth Supreme Court. He was the last person to be hanged at Fremantle Prison, on October 26, 1964.

After his arrest Cooke claimed to have committed more than two hundred thefts, five hit-and-run offences against young women, five more attacks on women asleep in their beds and the two murders 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 little credence was given to Cooke's testimony; WA chief justice, Sir Albert Wolff, called him a "villainous unscrupulous liar".^[3]

Cooke is buried in Fremantle Cemetery, above the remains of the child-killer, Martha Rendell, who was hanged in Fremantle Prison in 1909.

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 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.

• John Button, who was jailed for 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.

Books

A memoir, The Shark Net by Robert Drewe ? later made into a movie ? 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.

"The Nedlands Monster" also features in Tim Winton's 1991 novel Cloudstreet.

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

References

1. ↑
2. ↑
3. ↑ Australian Dictionary of Biography -- Edgar Eric Cooke http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A130543b.htm

Further reading

• (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)

hu:Eric Edgar Cooke pl:Eric Edgar Cooke