On the morning of October 26, 1964, a few minutes before he was hanged at Fremantle Prison, Eric Edgar Cooke took the Bible from the prison chaplain and said, without being asked, "I swear before Almighty God that I killed Anderson and Brewer." Rosemary Anderson and Jillian Brewer were two of the eight people he had killed in Perth. For each of their deaths another man had already been convicted, and both of those men were in prison as he spoke. The courts of Western Australia would take thirty-eight years to accept what he said about the first and forty-one about the second.
For almost five years Perth did not know it was dealing with one man. The victims were shot with different rifles, stabbed with knives and scissors, struck by cars, strangled and attacked with a hatchet. Some woke to find him in their homes; some were shot as they slept without anything in the house being disturbed; one was shot on his own doorstep after answering the bell. There was no common type of victim, no common suburb, no common weapon. The newspapers called the unknown attacker the Night Caller, and later, after a run of shootings in the western suburbs, the Nedlands Monster. The city had been a place where people left doors unlocked and windows open on summer nights, and by 1963 it no longer was.
The first two killings came in 1959. Pnena Berkman, thirty-three, known as Penny, was stabbed to death in South Perth in January; some records give her name as Patricia Vinico Berkman. On the night of December 19 into December 20, Jillian Macpherson Brewer, twenty-two, was attacked as she slept in her flat at Cottesloe by an intruder who used a tomahawk and a pair of dressmaking scissors. Brewer was a great-granddaughter of Sir Macpherson Robertson and an heir to the MacRobertson's chocolate fortune, and her death was news across the country.
The police charged Darryl Beamish with her murder in April 1961. He was deaf and could not speak, and he had been eighteen at the time of the killing. He lived near Brewer, had a history of breaking into houses, and had recently pleaded guilty to indecently assaulting four small girls. Detective Owen Leitch testified that Beamish had confessed four times: twice through a sign-language interpreter, once in a written statement and once in words scratched on the wall of the exercise yard at the Perth lockup. Beamish said the confessions were extracted under duress. At trial the prosecution placed the Brewer killing beside the offenses he had in fact committed against children rather than beside a series of attacks on women asleep in their homes, which no one at that point had connected. He was convicted of wilful murder and sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
Cooke had been questioned about the Brewer case in January 1960, and nothing came of it. He was twenty-eight then, a married man with a growing family and a record of petty crime. He had been born in Victoria Park, Perth, on February 25, 1931, the eldest of three children of Vivian Thomas Cooke, a shop assistant, and his wife Christian, born Edgar in Scotland. He was born with a cleft lip and palate. The repairs left his face slightly misshapen and his speech indistinct, and he was bullied for both at school. His father drank and beat him, including when he tried to protect his mother. He served in the Citizen Military Forces and moved into the Permanent Military Forces until the army learned of his convictions: three for theft, seven for breaking and entering, and four for arson. In 1953 he married Sarah Lavin, with whom he had seven children, and he worked as a truck driver and at other laboring jobs. By his own later account he had been breaking into houses in the suburbs for years, sometimes stealing, sometimes simply moving through rooms where people were asleep.
Over the Australia Day weekend of January 1963 he took a .22 rifle into Nedlands and the neighboring western suburbs. Brian Vincent Weir, twenty-nine, was shot as he slept and survived with permanent injuries; the accounts differ on whether he died of them two or three years later. John Lindsay Sturkey, a student, was shot dead as he slept; the records give his age as eighteen or nineteen. George Ormond Walmsley, fifty-four, was shot when he went to answer his front door. None of the three had any connection to Cooke or to one another.
Rosemary Anderson was seventeen. On February 9, 1963, she spent the day with her boyfriend, John Button, celebrating his nineteenth birthday, and in the evening they played cards at his parents' house. After an argument she set off to walk home. Button followed her in his Simca and asked her to get in, and she refused. When he drove on he found her lying gravely injured at the side of the road near Shenton Park. He went for help at a nearby doctor's surgery; she died in Royal Perth Hospital early the next morning. Detectives decided that Button had driven his car at her in a temper. He had a bad stutter, which they read as nerves; he was refused access to his parents or a lawyer, was struck once by an interviewing officer, and signed a confession after about twenty-two hours of questioning. There was no hair, blood or fabric from her clothing on his car. He was charged with wilful murder, and in May 1963 the jury convicted him of manslaughter. He was sentenced to ten years and served just under five. Cooke later said he had been cruising the streets that night in a stolen Holden looking for someone to run down, one of several hit-and-run attacks he admitted on women walking alone.
A week after that, on February 16, Constance Lucy Madrill, twenty-four, a social worker, was strangled with a lamp cord in her flat in West Perth. Her body was sexually assaulted, dragged outside and left on a neighbor's lawn.
The last killing was of Shirley Martha McLeod, eighteen, a university student who was babysitting at a house in Dalkeith on the night of August 10, 1963. She was shot dead in the house. Soon afterward a .22 rifle was found hidden in a bush. Ballistic tests matched it to the bullet that killed McLeod. Detectives replaced it with a similar rifle made inoperable, tied it in place with fishing line, and built a hide from which officers watched the spot. Seventeen days later, on September 1, 1963, Cooke came to collect it and was arrested.
In custody he talked for days. Over nearly five years, beginning in September 1958, he had committed at least twenty violent attacks, eight of them fatal. He confessed to eight killings, fourteen attempted murders and more than 250 burglaries, and investigators found that he could describe break-ins from years earlier down to what he had taken and where he had left it. The accuracy of that memory is what made the confessions hard to dismiss. It was also what made one part of them so uncomfortable for the prosecutors, because among the killings he claimed were the deaths of Jillian Brewer and Rosemary Anderson. He confessed to the Brewer killing on September 10, 1963.
He was tried in the Supreme Court of Western Australia beginning November 25, 1963, on a single specimen charge, the wilful murder of John Sturkey. His counsel sought a verdict of not guilty on the ground of insanity. The evidence described a man with a quick temper and a retentive memory, abused as a child and repeatedly hospitalized for head injuries; the psychiatric case that he was schizophrenic was not accepted. On November 27 the jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to death. He did not appeal.
Before Cooke was hanged, Beamish's lawyers took his confession to the Court of Criminal Appeal. On May 22, 1964, the court dismissed the reference. Chief Justice Wolff, who had presided at Beamish's trial, held that the case against Beamish was strong, and Justice Virtue called Cooke an "utterly worthless scoundrel" and a "palpable and unscrupulous liar." A later bid for special leave to appeal to the High Court failed. Cooke's oath on the gallows five months afterward changed nothing in law.
Cooke went to the gallows on October 26, 1964, the last person executed in Western Australia, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Fremantle Cemetery, above the remains of Martha Rendell, the child killer hanged at Fremantle in 1909. The two men he had named as innocent stayed convicted. Beamish was paroled, returned to prison after assaulting an eight-year-old girl in 1971, and was paroled again in 1977, having served fifteen years in all, five of them for that later offense. Button, released in the late 1960s, never stopped saying he had not killed his girlfriend, and in 1998 he published his own account of the case, Why Me Lord!
What reopened both cases was a book. In 1992 Button's brother approached the Perth journalist Estelle Blackburn, who was skeptical but read the appeal books and began tracing Cooke's surviving victims. Her book Broken Lives, published in 1999, set out the full series of attacks and showed how each wrongful conviction had depended on treating a killing as an isolated event. Tom Percy QC and the solicitor John Davies took up the cases without fee and persuaded the Attorney-General to refer Button's conviction back to the Court of Criminal Appeal. The fresh evidence came from the American pedestrian-crash expert William Haight, who ran tests with a human-form dummy, Simca sedans like Button's and a Holden like the one Cooke said he had driven. The results matched Cooke's account and excluded the Simca, and the damage fit the records of a panel-beating shop that had repaired Cooke's car in 1963. On February 25, 2002, the court quashed Button's conviction without ordering a retrial. Beamish's appeal followed, arguing that fresh evidence showed Cooke's confession to the Brewer killing was almost certainly true and that the 1964 court's rejection of it was unsafe. The same court quashed his conviction on April 1, 2005.
Cooke's victims are counted as eight dead, with fourteen attempted murders beside them. The count leaves out two more people whose lives his crimes took apart: John Button, who went to prison for Rosemary Anderson's death, and Darryl Beamish, who was sentenced to hang for Jillian Brewer's. Both convictions stood for nearly four decades after the man who committed the killings had said so, first to detectives and then on the gallows.