Three women were strangled in Dallas in eleven days in November 1980: Sally Thompson, Dorothy King and Wanda Faye Roberts. The police had a suspect for the second, and on November 30 they found the same man at the scene of the third. They held him, but the medical picture looked like a natural death, and they were about to rule him out. Eddie Cole, forty-two, then confessed to that killing and to the other two, and went on confessing. He told detectives he had murdered many more women over the previous nine years, and that he was usually drunk at the time and could not keep count; the Nevada Supreme Court later recorded that by his own admissions he had killed at least thirteen people, and other accounts give fourteen. Until that afternoon no police force in the country had treated him as a suspect.
He had been asking to be stopped for twenty years. Carroll Edward Cole was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on May 9, 1938, the second son of LaVerne and Vesta Cole. A sister followed in 1939, and the family moved to California, where LaVerne found work in a shipyard before going to war. While he was away, Vesta had affairs and took the boy along to her meetings, threatening to beat him if he told his father. She dressed him as a girl, and at school he was teased about his girl's name.
His first killing, by his own account, came when he was eight, in 1946 or 1947. A classmate named Duane Eugene Owen drowned in a lake in Richmond, California, and the death was recorded as an accident. Cole confessed to it decades later in an autobiography written in prison, and in a press interview described himself at the time as "primed": he had made up his mind to get even with his mother, he said, and it built into an obsession. No one has been able to test the account.
As a teenager he was arrested again and again for drunkenness and petty theft. The Army gave him a bad-conduct discharge in 1958 for stealing pistols. In 1960 he attacked two couples parked on a lovers' lane, then telephoned the Richmond police himself to say he was tormented by fantasies of strangling women. He spent most of the next three years in mental hospitals. At the last, Stockton State Hospital, a Dr. Weiss wrote that he seemed "afraid of the female figure" and had to kill a woman before he could have sex with her, and in April 1963 approved his release, although the staff had diagnosed antisocial personality disorder.
He moved to Dallas, where his brother Richard lived, and in 1963 married Billie Whitworth, a stripper who drank heavily. Two years later he set fire to a motel where he had persuaded himself she was meeting men, and went to prison for arson. After his release he tried to strangle an eleven-year-old girl in Missouri and served five years for it. In Nevada he tried to strangle two more women and checked himself into a mental hospital once again. The doctors recorded the murderous fantasies, declined to hold him, and gave him a ticket back to San Diego.
The killings he could name began there. On May 7, 1971, by his account he picked up Essie Louise Buck in a San Diego tavern, strangled her in his car and drove around with her body in the trunk before dumping it. Two weeks later he killed a woman who has never been identified and buried her in a wooded area. He said afterward that the women had shown themselves unfaithful to their husbands and so reminded him of his mother.
In July 1973 he married Diana Faye Younglove Pashal. They fought constantly, and he would disappear for days, killing while he was away; he later said he had partly eaten one of those women, a claim that was never established. In 1977 he strangled Kathlyn J. Blum in Las Vegas, a killing for which he later received a life term in Nevada. In September 1979 he strangled Pashal. A neighbor called the police eight days later, and officers found her wrapped in a blanket and pushed into a closet, decided, by later accounts, that she had died of her drinking, questioned him and let him go. Later that year, by his own account as the Nevada court recorded it, he met Marie Cushman in a Las Vegas bar, went with her to a motel, had sex with her, and strangled her with his hands and a piece of cord he carried in his pocket.
On April 9, 1981, a Dallas jury convicted him of the three November murders and he was sentenced to life at Huntsville. His mother died on January 27, 1984, and people who dealt with him said his attitude changed. In February 1984 he agreed to go to Nevada to face charges there, knowing they carried the death penalty, and he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for Blum and Cushman. On October 12, 1984, a panel of three judges, citing his Texas convictions for strangling Thompson, King and Roberts with his hands, sentenced him to death. "Thanks, Judge," he said.
He told his lawyers to file nothing and argued that keeping him alive was a waste of public money. Because he would not appeal, the Nevada Supreme Court appointed counsel to test whether his waiver was valid, and on October 22, 1985, in Cole v. State, it held that it was. Some time before the end he reportedly converted to Catholicism. On the last day the American Civil Liberties Union, the United Methodist Church of Reno and men on death row with him tried to have the sentence commuted, and he objected to every attempt.
For his last meal he asked for jumbo fried shrimp, french fries, a salad with French dressing and Boston clam chowder. The night before he had wanted Kentucky Fried Chicken, but he was not allowed food with bones, and the guards could offer only chicken nuggets. He was put to death by lethal injection at Nevada State Prison in Carson City at 2:10 in the morning on December 6, 1985, on a table in the converted gas chamber, the first execution by injection in Nevada and the first in the far West since 1979. He was forty-seven. Hours later his brain was removed and sent to the University of Nevada medical school in Reno to be examined for abnormalities.
The numbers attached to him measure three different things. Five is what courts convicted him of, three in Texas and two in Nevada. At least fourteen women, and one boy, are what he confessed to police, and reports of the confessions run from thirteen to sixteen. Thirty-five is what he once told a psychiatrist, and investigators at the time believed more than half of that was boasting.