Eric Edgar Cooke was hanged at Fremantle Prison on October 26, 1964. He was 33, a married father of seven from the Perth suburb of Rivervale, and the last person executed in Western Australia. A jury had convicted him of a single wilful murder: John Sturkey, an 18-year-old student shot as he slept on a verandah in Nedlands. By the time he died Cooke had confessed to far more. He told police he had killed eight people and tried to kill 14 others between 1959 and 1963, and that he had broken into more than 250 homes, ABC News reported in 2017. The state acknowledged him responsible for two other murders, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The rest of his confessions were never tested by a court.
Two of those confessions concerned killings for which other men were already in prison. J.B., then 19, had been convicted of the manslaughter of his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson. D.B., a deaf young man, had been sentenced to death, later commuted, for the murder of Jillian Brewer. Shortly before he was hanged, Cooke reportedly swore on a Bible that he had killed both women. Nothing changed for the two men in his lifetime. The Western Australian Court of Criminal Appeal quashed J.B.'s conviction on February 25, 2002, and D.B.'s on April 1, 2005, after a journalist spent years reassembling the full record of Cooke's crimes.
Cooke was born on February 25, 1931, at Victoria Park, Perth, the eldest of three children of Vivian Thomas Cooke, a shop assistant born in Australia, and his wife Christian, born Edgar, who came from Scotland. The details of his early life come mostly from the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry written by Hugh Collins.
He was born with a cleft lip and palate, and at school he was bullied for the disfigurement it left. His father drank and was violent, and the boy was abused, according to the dictionary and to the National Film and Sound Archive's summary of Channel Seven coverage, which adds that the father also attacked Cooke's mother. The catalogue description of a memoir by the Perth journalist Estelle Blackburn opens with the line that his father despised him from the moment he first saw him. He went to five schools and from the age of 14 worked a succession of semi-skilled jobs. He suffered repeated head injuries and at one point was admitted to an asylum; the dictionary does not say when or where.
He served in the Citizen Military Forces and joined the Permanent Military Forces on May 27, 1952. He was discharged on August 28 of that year once his earlier convictions for theft, breaking and entering and arson came to light. On October 14, 1953, he married Sarah Lavin, known as Sally, a 19-year-old waitress. Their son Tony later said his parents met at the West Perth markets in the late 1940s and described his mother as a vulnerable young woman who had come out from Liverpool. The couple had seven children and lived in Rivervale.
To the people around him he did not stand out. Tony Cooke told ABC Perth in 2014 that his father was affable and charming outside the house and seemed an ordinary member of the community, while inside it he was volatile, violent and cruel, and his moods governed the family. When he was arrested in 1963 he had six earlier convictions, all for minor crimes, the dictionary says. Police knew him as a prowler and thief and as a practiced liar, ABC News reported.
By his own later account Cooke's violent crimes began in September 1958 and ran until September 1963, according to Estelle Blackburn, who reconstructed them for her 1998 book Broken Lives. She counted 22 crimes of violence in that period: eight killings and 14 attempted murders or serious assaults. Around them were years of break-ins. Cooke claimed more than 200 thefts, according to the dictionary, and ABC News put the break-ins he confessed to at more than 250. Reviewers of Blackburn's book described him as a peeping Tom who crouched at bedroom windows and watched couples in parked cars.
His crimes followed no single pattern. The National Film and Sound Archive describes him as an opportunistic killer with no obvious method: his victims had nothing in common, and he shot, stabbed, strangled and ran people down with cars. That variety is a large part of why Perth did not understand for years that one man was responsible, and why two of his killings were pinned on others.
The dictionary records that the state accepted Cooke's responsibility for the stabbing of a beautician in South Perth in January 1959. Her name was not reported.
In December 1959 Jillian Brewer, 22, was killed in her flat at Cottesloe, a beachside suburb west of the city. She came from Melbourne, where her family was wealthy; the National Film and Sound Archive calls her a Melbourne socialite and chocolate heiress. Blackburn describes the killing as an axe murder. At D.B.'s appeal in 2004 a prosecutor said she had been killed in a frenzied attack with a tomahawk and scissors, and that robbery was not the motive.
D.B. was charged with her murder. He was deaf and unable to speak, and he was 18 or 19 at the time, according to different sources. He was convicted of wilful murder in 1961, according to a 2002 statement by the Western Australian Attorney General, and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The Central Western Daily, reporting in 2021, described him as having been coerced into a confession.
The killings that frightened the whole city came on the night of Australia Day, 1963. In the early hours of January 27, according to the dictionary, someone moved through the western suburbs of Cottesloe and Nedlands shooting strangers with a .22 rifle.
A couple sitting in a parked car at Cottesloe were wounded. A man the dictionary describes as an accountant was shot once in the head as he slept in a flat nearby, and the dictionary calls the wound fatal. ABC News identifies Brian Weir as one of the people shot that night, at his Cottesloe home. John Sturkey, an 18-year-old student, was asleep on the verandah of a boarding house in Nedlands when he was shot once in the head and killed. In the next street a retired grocer went to answer his front doorbell and was shot dead in the same way. ABC News names George Walmsley among those shot. In all, five people were shot that night and three of them died, ABC News reported in 2017.
None of the victims knew their attacker, and nothing linked them to one another. Two weeks later two more people were murdered in Perth. Those killings had nothing to do with Cooke: Brian William Robinson was charged with both, tried for one and hanged, according to the dictionary, which says the second set of deaths deepened the city's fear.
Years later, at his trial, Cooke tried to describe what had happened to him on the night of the shootings. In recordings of his evidence found decades later at the Supreme Court in Perth, he said a power had come over him that was stronger than an impulse, and that he had felt as though he were God, ABC News reported.
Rosemary Anderson was 17. On February 9, 1963, she spent the evening with J.B., her boyfriend, who was celebrating his 19th birthday. The two argued and she left to walk home. In Shenton Park she was struck by a car and badly hurt, and she died later that night, ABC News reported. Cooke later admitted that he had run her down; the dictionary records that he claimed five hit-and-run offenses against young women in all.
Police focused on J.B. On February 10, 1963, an ABC newsreader reported that a youth had been arrested and charged with the wilful murder of a young girl in Shenton Park. J.B. confessed in police interviews conducted without his parents or a lawyer present, according to Blackburn, and then pleaded not guilty. Decades later he told the Central Western Daily that detectives had beaten him until he gave a confession, and that his lawyer had advised him not to raise the beating at trial because a jury would never believe that police would do such a thing.
The charge carried the death penalty. In May 1963 the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter instead of wilful murder, which took him off death row, Blackburn wrote. He was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment with hard labor, served five and a half years, and was released on parole in December 1967, according to the Attorney General's 2003 statement. His appeals to the Court of Criminal Appeal and the High Court in 1964 were rejected, according to Blackburn.
A week after Rosemary Anderson died, a young woman who worked as a social worker was strangled in West Perth, on February 16, 1963. The dictionary says the state acknowledged Cooke's responsibility for her murder. The reports do not name her.
In August 1963, after months without another shooting, the pattern returned. Shirley McLeod, 18, a university student, was babysitting at a house in Dalkeith when she was shot once in the head and killed, according to the dictionary and ABC News.
This killing led police to Cooke. The weapon had been hidden, and on September 1, 1963, police captured him when he tried to retrieve it, according to the dictionary.
In September 1963 three detectives went to the house in Rivervale and told Sally Cooke that her husband had been arrested over a series of Perth murders. Their son Tony, then eight, listened at the door, he told ABC Perth in 2014. Sally Cooke later recalled that her husband had once asked her to give him an alibi, saying that with his record police would not be fussy and would pin it on him. She said she later told police about the request, ABC News reported in 2017.
Cooke was charged with Shirley McLeod's murder in September 1963. In custody he talked at length. He confessed to eight killings, 14 attempted murders and more than 250 break-ins, according to ABC News, and Blackburn's tally of his violent crimes covers the five years from September 1958. Among the crimes he admitted were the deaths of Jillian Brewer and Rosemary Anderson.
Detectives rejected those two confessions, Blackburn wrote, although two other men had already been convicted of the deaths. Her book, according to its description, also sets out 12 assaults and attempted murders by Cooke that police had concealed.
Cooke was tried in the Supreme Court of Western Australia from November 25, 1963, for one killing only: the wilful murder of John Sturkey. A single conviction was enough for a death sentence, and he was never tried for any of the others, ABC News noted.
He pleaded not guilty, and his counsel sought a verdict of not guilty on the ground of insanity. The defense set out his history: an abusive father, bullying over his cleft palate, repeated head injuries and time in an asylum. The defense case that he had schizophrenia was rejected by Dr. A. S. Ellis, the state's director of mental health services, and no other psychiatric specialist was allowed to examine him, the dictionary records. The National Film and Sound Archive summary says state mental health professionals found him sane.
Cooke gave evidence himself. Recordings of the trial, rediscovered at the Supreme Court in Perth by the researcher Susan Maushart, were restored and used in an ABC podcast in 2017; the audio was later removed from the ABC's site at the request of the Supreme Court.
The jury took about an hour and a half to find him guilty of wilful murder, ABC News reported. He was sentenced to death on November 27, 1963, according to the dictionary; the National Film and Sound Archive gives the date of conviction as November 28. No appeal by Cooke against his own conviction was reported.
Cooke's confessions to the Brewer and Anderson killings went before the courts in 1964, but as evidence in other men's cases. The dictionary says they led to unsuccessful appeals, and that the court placed little weight on his testimony; it records that Chief Justice Sir Albert Wolff called him a "villainous unscrupulous liar."
For D.B., the 1964 Court of Criminal Appeal declined to order a new trial on the strength of Cooke's confessions to the same crime, according to the Attorney General's 2011 statement. D.B. went on to lose a series of appeals, including one to the Privy Council in London in 1965, Blackburn wrote. J.B.'s appeals in 1964 were also rejected.
Cooke spent the months after his trial in Fremantle Prison. On the morning of his execution, Monday, October 26, 1964, Sally Cooke kept the children home from school, and Tony Cooke remembered a gloomy day of visitors and quiet kindness from neighbors. Her family urged her to move east to get away from the scandal; she stayed, and Tony credited her with holding the family together.
About 15 minutes before he was hanged, Cooke reportedly swore on a Bible that he had killed Rosemary Anderson and Jillian Brewer, ABC News reported. The Law Society of Western Australia's exhibition on wrongful convictions says the Reverend Jenkins recorded the statement and that a copy is held in D.B.'s court file. He was hanged at 8 a.m., Blackburn wrote. Only one woman kept vigil outside the prison, the dictionary says, and there was little public opposition to the sentence. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Fremantle cemetery.
According to Fremantle Prison, its gallows, built in 1888, were the only place of legal execution in Western Australia from 1888 to 1984, and 44 people were hanged there, 43 men and one woman. Cooke was the last. The state parliament abolished capital punishment in 1984. Fremantle Prison holds a noose and leather straps that a former senior prison officer said were used at Cooke's execution; the prison's catalogue records this as the donor's claim, not as a confirmed fact.
The hanging did not help J.B. or D.B. Blackburn wrote that when it went ahead, both men understood there would be no reprieve for them. The Central Western Daily reported that police opened no inquiry after his last confession, and both men stayed in prison.
The dictionary notes a clear change in Perth's attitude to personal and household security in the months when the killings were unsolved. The National Film and Sound Archive places his crimes beside the disappearance of the Beaumont children, the Wanda Beach murders and the Graeme Thorne kidnapping as events that ended an era in which Australians left doors and cars unlocked. Tim Winton's 1991 novel Cloudstreet reflects the atmosphere of the time, according to the dictionary, which calls the portrayal imaginative but faithful. Newspapers called the unknown killer the Night Caller, and used a second nickname tied to the suburb of Nedlands.
Cooke's children grew up with his name. Tony Cooke told the ABC program Australian Story in 1998 that he was bullied over his father as a boy until he finally stood up to the bullies. He spent decades working for the Trades and Labor Council in Perth and became an outspoken opponent of the death penalty. In 2014 he told ABC Perth that his father was a deeply damaged man whose acts were monstrous, but that such people are made, not born. He said he had questioned whether he was fit to be a father and had waited until he was 38 to have his first child. He died of cancer on April 24, 2018, aged 62.
The cases of J.B. and D.B. were reopened because of one journalist. In 1991 Estelle Blackburn, a Perth newspaper, radio and television reporter, met J.B.'s brother at a social occasion, and the conversation led her to look into Rosemary Anderson's death. She met J.B. the following year, according to a 2020 interview in Canberra CityNews. She went through police and prison files, trial records and press reports and found witnesses who had never been interviewed. Over six years she tracked down the families of Cooke's victims through electoral rolls, phone books and door knocking. "Apart from one, I managed to gather the stories of every murder victim's family," she told CityNews.
Broken Lives was published in November 1998. It set out the full sequence of Cooke's crimes and argued that both convictions had been wrong. It won the Ned Kelly Award for best true crime book and the Western Australian Premier's Award for non-fiction, and in 2001 Blackburn won a Walkley Award for her work. She was later made a Member of the Order of Australia. She has described a 13-year effort that nearly bankrupted her. The barrister Tom Percy QC and the solicitor Jonathan Davies took on both men's cases without fee.
The fresh evidence for J.B. came from tests of how a car strikes a pedestrian. In February 2000 William "Rusty" Haight, an American crash reconstruction specialist, ran pedestrian crash tests in Perth using a Simca like the one J.B. had been driving on the night Rosemary Anderson died, according to the Law Society's exhibition, which calls the evidence compelling and convincing. Trevor Condren, the police vehicle examiner who had inspected J.B.'s car in the police yard in 1963, also gave evidence on the appeal, Blackburn wrote.
The Court of Criminal Appeal heard the case in May 2001, before Chief Justice David Malcolm, Justice Henry Wallwork and Justice Neville Owen. Cooke's confessions were themselves inadmissible as hearsay. Instead the court looked at evidence from Cooke's other hit-and-run victims and treated it as similar fact evidence, applying the rule less strictly because it was offered to clear an accused person, as was explained at a ceremonial sitting of the Supreme Court in 2014 that marked Malcolm's career. On February 25, 2002, the court quashed J.B.'s manslaughter conviction, almost 40 years after it was entered, holding the verdict unsafe and unsatisfactory. The Attorney General, Jim McGinty, said the Chief Justice had stated clearly that there had been a miscarriage of justice. Blackburn describes it as the longest-standing conviction ever overturned in Australia.
On April 9, 2003, the government approved an ex gratia payment of 460,000 dollars to J.B., then 59: 400,000 dollars for his financial future and 60,000 dollars toward his legal costs. McGinty said the state had no obligation to pay but found the case compelling, and that it was the largest such payment ever approved in Western Australia.
J.B. later worked with the Western Australian Innocence Project and lobbied for legal reform, and in 2013 moved to Orange, New South Wales, to be near his son. As of January 2021, Western Australia Police had refused repeated requests to apologize to him or to D.B., the Central Western Daily reported.
J.B.'s success opened the way for D.B. On June 28, 2002, McGinty referred D.B.'s petition against his 1961 conviction to the Court of Criminal Appeal, saying the outcome of J.B.'s appeal weighed heavily with him, since much of the evidence D.B. intended to rely on had been accepted in that case as raising serious doubts.
The sixth appeal was heard in October 2004 by Justices Chris Steytler, Christine Wheeler and Carmel McClure, according to Blackburn. Tom Percy argued that the killing shared many features with Cooke's other crimes and that D.B. might have won an earlier appeal had Cooke's confession been put in evidence. The Director of Public Prosecutions questioned whether the confession was genuine, noting that it was neither signed nor dated, ABC News reported. A Crown lawyer, Simon Stone, told the court that Cooke broke into houses to steal and usually inflicted one or two wounds, so a frenzied attack without robbery was not typical of him.
On April 1, 2005, the court unanimously quashed the conviction, finding that a substantial miscarriage of justice had occurred because a retrial had been refused in 1964 in the face of Cooke's confessions. No retrial was ordered. D.B. had served 15 years in prison. His sister told reporters outside the court that he could now walk proud and hold his head high in public.
D.B. said at first that he would not seek compensation. On June 2, 2011, the Attorney General, Christian Porter, announced an ex gratia payment of 425,000 dollars, describing it as an act of grace that could not fully compensate him. Porter listed the factors weighed: there had been no conclusive finding of significant misconduct by police or prosecutors; D.B.'s own other offending; the length of time he spent in prison for the offense; and the 2005 court's view that the case against him had been strong at the 1964 appeal, together with its finding that a reasonable jury might have acquitted him had it heard Cooke's later confessions. Porter called the payment a step toward closing a tragic chapter in the state's criminal history. Blackburn told a radio interviewer that the expression of regret mattered even if the sum was limited, and J.B. said such payments were symbolic and bore no relation to what the men had suffered.
Interest in the case has continued. In 2017 the ABC podcast Wrongful, produced by Susan Maushart, used the restored trial recordings. Blackburn published a memoir of her investigation, The End of Innocence, in 2007. In 2020 her research formed the basis of After the Night, a series made for the streaming service Stan, Canberra CityNews reported. Channel Seven marked the 30th anniversary of Cooke's capture with a news special, now held by the National Film and Sound Archive.
Proven by final judgment: one wilful murder, that of John Sturkey on January 27, 1963. Cooke was found guilty by a jury, sentenced to death and hanged.
Attributed but never tried: the murders of the South Perth beautician in 1959 and the West Perth social worker in 1963, which the dictionary says the state acknowledged as his; and the killing of Shirley McLeod, for which he was charged but not tried.
Confessed but never tried: the other shootings of January 27, 1963; the deaths of Jillian Brewer and Rosemary Anderson; and the attacks counted among the 14 attempted murders. Cooke's word was disputed in his lifetime. The courts of 1964 did not accept his confessions to the Brewer and Anderson killings, and the prosecution argued in 2004 that the Brewer killing did not fit his pattern. The quashing of both convictions, in 2002 and 2005, rests on the finding that the earlier verdicts were unsafe or that a miscarriage of justice occurred. Neither judgment amounts to a conviction of Cooke, who was never tried for either death.
Points on which sources differ: the date of the death sentence (November 27, 1963, in the dictionary; November 28 in the National Film and Sound Archive); the number of break-ins or thefts he admitted (more than 250 or more than 200); D.B.'s age at the time (18 or 19); D.B.'s 2011 payment (425,000 dollars in the government's statement; 420,000 dollars in an ABC report); and the outcome for the accountant shot on January 27, whom the dictionary describes as fatally wounded.
February 25, 1931: Eric Edgar Cooke is born at Victoria Park, Perth.
May 27 to August 28, 1952: serves in the Permanent Military Forces until discharged over his record.
October 14, 1953: marries Sarah (Sally) Lavin; they have seven children.
September 1958: his violent crimes begin, by his own later account.
January 1959: a beautician is stabbed to death in South Perth.
December 1959: Jillian Brewer, 22, is killed at Cottesloe.
1961: D.B. is convicted of her wilful murder and sentenced to death; the sentence is commuted to life.
January 27, 1963: five people are shot in Cottesloe and Nedlands; John Sturkey and two men die.
February 9, 1963: Rosemary Anderson, 17, is run down in Shenton Park and dies.
February 16, 1963: a social worker is strangled in West Perth.
May 1963: J.B. is convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 10 years.
August 1963: Shirley McLeod, 18, is shot while babysitting at Dalkeith.
September 1, 1963: Cooke is arrested when he returns for the hidden rifle.
November 25 to 27, 1963: tried for John Sturkey's murder; found guilty and sentenced to death.
1964: courts reject appeals by D.B. and J.B. that rely on his confessions.
October 26, 1964: hanged at Fremantle Prison, the last execution in Western Australia.
1965: D.B. loses an appeal to the Privy Council.
December 1967: J.B. is released on parole.
1984: Western Australia abolishes capital punishment.
1991: Estelle Blackburn begins investigating.
November 1998: Broken Lives is published.
February 2000: pedestrian crash tests in Perth.
February 25, 2002: J.B.'s conviction is quashed.
June 28, 2002: D.B.'s case is referred to the Court of Criminal Appeal.
April 9, 2003: J.B. is awarded 460,000 dollars.
April 1, 2005: D.B.'s conviction is quashed.
June 2, 2011: D.B. is awarded 425,000 dollars.
November 2017: the trial recordings are heard in the ABC podcast Wrongful.
April 24, 2018: Tony Cooke dies.