Eric Edgar Cooke was born in Victoria Park, Perth on February 25, 1931, with a cleft lip and palate that was badly repaired and left him disfigured and mocked, and to a violent alcoholic father. He was a petty thief from childhood, married, had seven children, and worked as a truck driver.
Between 1959 and 1963 he killed eight people in Perth and wounded fourteen. The method changed constantly, which is why he was not identified as one man. He shot people at random through windows and on doorsteps, stabbed a sleeping woman, ran down a pedestrian, and strangled another.
He also committed hundreds of burglaries, in which he frequently did strange things rather than steal, and he prowled at night through a city that at the time did not lock its doors. The Perth press called him the Night Caller.
Those named in the record are Jillian Macpherson Brewer; Brian Weir, twenty-nine; John Sturkey, nineteen; George Walmsley, fifty-four; Shirley Martha McLeod, eighteen; Constance Lucy Madrill, twenty-four; Patricia Vinico Berkman, thirty-three; and Rosemary Anderson.
Two men were convicted of killings that were his. John Button was convicted of the manslaughter of his girlfriend Rosemary Anderson, run down in 1963, and served five years. Darryl Beamish, a deaf man, was convicted of the murder of Jillian Brewer in 1959 and sentenced to death, commuted, and served fifteen years.
Cooke confessed to both, twice. Once in custody and again on the morning he was hanged, swearing on a Bible that he had killed Rosemary Anderson and Jillian Brewer.
The Western Australian courts refused for four decades to accept it. Button's conviction was not quashed until 2002, Beamish's until 2005. Cooke had been dead thirty-eight years and forty-one years respectively.
That is the part of this case worth holding onto. A confession from the actual killer, given twice and once under the shadow of the rope, was not enough. What eventually freed Button was forensic crash reconstruction that had not existed in 1963, and what freed Beamish was the accumulated weight of the Button ruling.
He was caught in August 1963 after police found a rifle hidden in a bush at Mount Pleasant, replaced it with a dummy and watched the spot for seventeen days. He was hanged at Fremantle Prison on October 26, 1964, the last execution carried out in Western Australia.