Carroll Edward Cole was born in Sioux City, Iowa on May 9, 1938, the second son of LaVerne and Vesta Cole, and grew up in Richmond, California, where his father found work in a shipyard.
He said the first killing was in 1946, when he was eight: another boy of the same age drowned while the two were swimming, and it was recorded as an accident. Cole gave it as a murder decades later, writing in prison. Nobody has been able to test that.
By his teens he was in and out of mental hospitals. As an adult he was convicted of arson after setting fire to a motel he believed his wife had used with other men, and was arrested again after trying to strangle a girl of eleven. He asked more than once for psychiatric help, telling doctors he had urges to kill women, and was released each time.
The adult series runs from 1971 to 1980, across California, Nevada and Texas. He drank in bars, left with women who were drinking too, and strangled them. He told detectives afterwards that he saw his mother's adultery in them; as a child he had been made to keep her affairs secret and beaten for it. Nine years of this passed without his becoming a suspect, largely because the deaths of women found in that condition were often not treated as homicides at all.
His wife, Diana Faye Pashal, died in 1979. That death was initially put down to alcoholism. He later said he had killed her.
He was arrested in Dallas on November 30, 1980, after three women were killed there in eleven days. The police were on the point of clearing him. He confessed instead, and kept confessing. Texas convicted him of the three Dallas murders and sentenced him to life without parole.
What he wanted was to be executed, and he went and got it. In February 1984, after his mother died, he waived extradition and went voluntarily to Nevada to face two charges of murder, for women strangled in Las Vegas in 1977 and 1979. He pleaded guilty to capital murder. When the death sentence was passed in October 1984 he said, thank you, judge. He told his lawyers to file nothing, argued that keeping him alive was a waste of public money, and resisted the efforts of others to intervene on his behalf. Fourteen months separated the sentence from the execution.
He was put to death by lethal injection at Nevada State Prison in Carson City at about ten past two in the morning on December 6, 1985. It was the first execution by injection in Nevada, carried out on a table in the converted gas chamber, and the first execution anywhere in the far west since 1979.
The counts in this case are three different things and are kept apart here. Five is what he was convicted of, three in Texas and two in Nevada. Thirteen is the figure he gave police, and reports of his confessions run from thirteen to sixteen; Murderpedia lists fifteen, one boy and fourteen women. Thirty-five is what he once told a psychiatrist, and investigators at the time believed more than half of that was boasting.
He also told investigators he had eaten part of one victim. That is his own claim and was never established.