Killers - The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time (5 page)

Chapter 3

Australian Spree Killers

Name: Eric Edgar Cooke

Nationality: Australian

Number of victims: 2 injured, 7 killed

Favoured method of killing: shooting

Executed: 26 October 1964

In 1963, on a summer Saturday night in a comfortable Perth suburb, a gunman started picking off people, seemingly at random. Nicholas August, a poultry dealer and a married man, was out with Ocean beach barmaid Rowena Reeves. They were sharing a drink in the car around 2 a.m. on 27 January when Rowena saw a man. Thinking he was a peeping Tom, August told him to ‘bugger off’. The silent figure did not move, so August threw an empty bottle at him.
‘Look out,’ screamed Rowena to her companion. ‘He’s got a gun.’
The man raised a rifle and took careful aim at August’s head. At the last moment, Rowena pushed August’s head down and the bullet nicked his neck. It bled profusely. Rowena yelled at him to start the car and run the gunman down. August sped off, with bullets singing past them. By the time he reached the hospital, Rowena was unconscious. The bullet emerging from his neck had lodged in Rowena’s forearm. Both August and Rowena survived the incident.
Just over an hour later and a couple of miles away, 54-year-old George Walmsley was shot when he opened his front door after hearing the doorbell. The bullet hit him in the forehead and he was dead by the time his wife and daughter, woken by the shot, got downstairs.
Around the corner at Mrs Allen’s boarding house, John Sturkey, a 19-year-old agricultural student from the University of Western Australia, was sleeping on the verandah. At around 4 a.m. fellow student Scott McWilliam was awoken by Mrs Allen’s niece Pauline. ‘There’s something wrong with John,’ she said. McWilliam went out on to the veranda. A strange noise was coming from Sturkey’s throat. McWilliam raised Sturkey’s head. There was a bullet hole between his eyes.
Next morning Brian Weir, who lived nearby in Broome Street, did not show up for training at the Surf Life Saving Club. One of the crew went round to get him out of bed. Brian was found with a bullet wound in his forehead and serious brain damage. He would die from his wounds three years later.
The police had little to go on and the press offered a £1,000 reward for the capture of the ‘Maniac Slayer’ (Australia didn’t their currency to the Australian dollar until 1966). Local homeowners slept with loaded guns next to their beds. Nothing happened for three weeks. Then the killer struck again.
Joy Noble was up early making breakfast one Saturday morning when she glanced out of the kitchen window of her West Perth home. Outside she saw the naked body of a young woman spread-eagled on the back lawn. At first she thought it was her daughter and she ran through the house shouting: ‘Carline.’ In fact, it was the body of Constance Lucy Madrill, a 24-year-old social worker who lived in nearby Thomas Street. She had been raped, strangled and dumped on the Nobles’ lawn. The attack had taken place in the girl’s own apartment, while her flatmate, Jennifer Hurse, slept. No one could explain why the attacker had dragged her all the way to the Nobles’ lawn, then abandoned her. An Aborigine had probably done it, the police concluded – even though there were no records of Aborigines in Western Australia attacking white girls. And it certainly had nothing to do with the shootings three weeks before, the police said.
Six months passed uneventfully. Then on the thundery night of 10 August, Shirley McLeod, an 18-year-old science student at the University of Western Australia, was babysitting Carl and Wendy Dowds’ eight-month-old son, Mitchell. When the Dowdses returned from their party they found Shirley slumped on the sofa with a peaceful look on her face like she had just fallen asleep but in fact, she had been shot by a .22 rifle and was quite dead. Baby Mitchell was unharmed. There could be no doubt that this killing was linked with the murders in January.
Perth experienced mass panic. The
West Australian
advised people to lock their doors at night – unheard of in Perth before that time. Babysitters were warned not to sit near windows, and there were proposals to close the old alleyways that ran down the back of people’s houses. The police began to fingerprint every male over the age of 12 in the city, at a rate of 8,000 a week.
Then, on Saturday 17 August an elderly couple was out picking flowers in Mount Pleasant when they spotted a rifle hidden in some bushes. It was a Winchester .22. The police believed that it had not been discarded but hidden there so it could be used again. They staked out the area for two weeks before a truck driver named Eric Edgar Cooke turned up, looking for the gun.

Cooke had been born in Perth in 1931 with a harelip and a cleft palate. Early operations improved his condition, but his speech remained blurred and indistinct and his appearance was mocked by others. From an early age he suffered severe headaches and blackouts. These were aggravated by a fall from a bicycle and a dive into shallow water at 14. Doctors suspected brain damage, but X-rays and an exploratory operation revealed nothing.
At home as a teenager, his father had beaten him regularly. At 16 he spent three weeks in hospital after trying to protect his mother from one of his father’s onslaughts. He told the doctors he had been fighting with other boys.
Expelled from several schools, Cooke had quit completely at the age of 14. He had taken a series of manual jobs, none of which lasted long, before being called up for National Service. In the army, he was taught how to handle a rifle.
In November 1953 he married an 18-year-old immigrant from England called Sally. The couple had seven children – four boys and three girls. Their first child was born mentally handicapped and their eldest daughter, one of twins, was born without a right arm. Nevertheless it was a happy household. Cooke was a faithful husband and a loving father. Other children from all over the neighbourhood came to play in the Cookes’ house.
However, behind it all was what Sally Cooke described as her husband’s ‘restlessness’. She could not keep him at home. He constantly went out on sprees of petty thieving. He had burgled some 250 houses and spent three short terms in prison before the police picked him up as a murder suspect.
At the police station Cooke claimed to have been at home on the night Shirley McLeod was killed. His wife said he was not. Then Cooke confessed.
On the way home from bowling that day, he had started looking for somewhere to burgle. He found a house in Pearse Street with its back door open and went in. There was a couple sitting in the lounge, so Cooke crept into the bedroom to look for money. Instead he found a Winchester .22. He took it, and some cartridges, thinking he could probably sell it later.
He said he remembered parking his car again on the way home, then – later – finding the rifle in his hand with a spent cartridge in the breach. It was only the next day, when he saw a report about the babysitter’s murder on the television, that he realised what he had done.
The next day he was taken to the scene of Lucy Madrill’s murder and confessed to that killing as well. He said he had been robbing the girls’ flat when he had knocked over a framed photograph. Lucy had woken up and he had hit her. She tried to scream but he throttled her. He dragged her through into the next bedroom, strangled her with a lamp flex, then raped her. He had intended to hide the body.
He dragged it outside and left it on the Nobles’ lawn while he looked for a car to steal. But he could not find one, so he stole a bicycle instead and rode home.
Later he confessed to the spree on 27 January. He had shot five people that night because he ‘wanted to hurt somebody’, he said. Out on his usual Saturday night prowl, he had stolen a Lithgow single-shot .22 and a tan-coloured Holden sedan.
He had been driving aimlessly when he saw a man and a woman in a parked car. The interior light went out, so Cooke thought he would stop and spy on the couple. He took the rifle with him. And when they spotted him and threw a bottle at him, he shot back.
In Broome Street he stopped again, intent on doing a bit more burglary. He clambered over some railings and climbed up on to a balcony. Inside some French windows a man lay sleeping. The bed barred Cooke’s way into the room, so he shot from the hip at the sleeping body. The result was Brian Weir’s irreversible brain damage.
Prowling around the block, Cooke saw a man sleeping on the verandah. Another shot from the hip ended John Sturkey’s young life. The next killing was even more deliberate. He leant the rifle against the garage of a house he had picked randomly in Louise Street and went to ring the front doorbell. Then he ran back to the gun and aimed at the doorway. When a man answered the door, Cooke shot him. Then he threw the rifle off the Narrows Bridge into the Swan River and returned the Holden to the house where he had stolen it. In the morning the owner noticed that the bulb of the interior light had been removed, but the matter was too petty to report to the police.
Only the death of John Sturkey upset Cooke. ‘He was so young,’ he told the police. ‘He never had a chance. I will never meet him because he is up there and I’ll be down there. I’m just a cold-blooded killer.’
With that last sentence, Cooke ruled out the possibility of being found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Cooke also confessed to the murder of 33-year-old divorcée Patricia Vinico Berkman in 1959. Her lover, local radio personality Fotis Hountas, had found her body in bed in her flat in South Perth. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the head and chest. She left a nine-year-old son. And Cooke said that he had killed wealthy society beauty Jillian Brewer later that year. Aged 22, she too had been viciously murdered in her own flat. The killer had used a hatchet and a pair of scissors. There were no fingerprints. The doors were locked from the inside and there was no sign of any windows being forced. The police were mystified.
Four months after the killing, 20-year-old deaf-mute Darryl Beamish, arrested for molesting four little girls, had confessed to the Brewer murder through a sign-language interpreter. At his trial, Beamish claimed the confession had been forced out of him. The prosecutor produced no other evidence. Nevertheless, Beamish was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Cooke’s confession, on the other hand, was extraordinarily detailed. His description of the flat on the night of the murder fitted exactly with the photographs taken by the scene-of-crime photographer. He even explained the locked doors – he had stolen the key to the flat on a previous raid.
On 17 March 1964, Beamish appeared before the appeal court with Cooke’s statement. However, the three appeal court judges – one was the original trial judge, the other two had dismissed Beamish’s appeals on two previous occasions – did not believe Cooke’s confession. But they did commute Beamish’s sentence from death to life imprisonment. Cooke was hanged in Fremantle Prison on 26 October 1964.

Name: Julian Knight

Nationality: Australian

Number of victims: 6

Favoured method of killing: shooting

Final note: he claimed his killing spree was a result of his desire to make an heroic last stand and go down fighting

Cooke’s January night rampage is peculiar, but he otherwise exhibited the profile of a serial, rather than a spree, killer. In 1987 a lone gunman loosed off a hail of bullets in a more typical, random, mindless spree killing.
At 9.30 p.m. on Sunday 9 August, young Alan Jury was driving along Hoddle Street near the suburb of Clifton Hill, Melbourne, when he heard a noise like a firecracker. His windscreen shattered. Quickly realising that someone was shooting at him, he stamped down on the accelerator and roared away from the danger. At the next service station he reported that a gunman was firing at passing cars.
In the car behind him, Rita Vitcos also heard a bang and saw sparks fly off the surface of the road. She too accelerated away. Later, when she got out of the car, she found two bullet-holes in the driver’s door and realised how lucky she had been.
Twenty-three-year-old Vesna Markonsky’s windscreen exploded as she drove down the Street. She jammed on the brakes. When the car came to a halt she discovered that a bullet had hit her in the left arm. She got out and a second bullet hit her, then a third. Her boyfriend Zoran, who was with her in the car, jumped out to help her. More bullets filled the air as he and a young doctor, who had stopped his car behind Vesna’s, ran towards the wounded girl. The doctor collapsed, hit.
Another car pulled up behind Zoran’s. A bullet hit the driver in the right temple. He died instantly. A girl student stopped to help. She too was gunned down. When Zoran reached Vesna, he cradled her in his arms. She spoke a few words, then lost consciousness.
Constable Belinda Bourchier arrived in a police car shortly afterwards. Zoran ran to her and tried to pull her revolver out of its holster. Covered in blood and in a state of shock, he yelled at her that he wanted to kill the bastard who had just murdered his girlfriend. More shots screamed past them. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Constable Bourchier, and they ran for cover behind some trees at the edge of the road.
The gunman continued firing with deadly accuracy. More windscreens shattered and cars careered across the road. A motorcyclist swerved and crashed. He lay in the road trapped under his bike and two more bullets slammed into his body.
After ten minutes of shooting, the police turned up in force. The shots were coming from the ‘nature strip’, a grass verge alongside Clifton Hill railway station. The police set up roadblocks and closed off the area.
A police helicopter was called in. It flew in low over the nature strip. Its searchlight swept the ground. But the gunman had vanished.
A few minutes later a police car, turning into Hoddle Street from the north, came under fire. A policeman on a roadblock there was also winged by a bullet. Another shot struck the helicopter flying overhead, but bounced off its armoured underside.
Spotting the gunman near the track, a signalman managed to stop an oncoming train. He ran up the line, expecting to be shot in the back. But the gunman now seemed to be firing into the ground. The signalman reached the train and told the driver to reverse. When he looked back, the gunman had disappeared.
In a street close by, two constables in a police car spotted a man with a rifle running along the road. They pursued him. The gunman turned in to a lane and they stopped the car, closing off the end. Out of the darkness of the lane came a hail of bullets. One shot hit Constable John Delahunty in the head. He flung himself to the ground and managed to crawl towards the gunman. His partner, Constable Lockman, crawled after him. They got within a few yards of where they believed the gunman to be when the wounded Delahunty saw his head rise above some bushes. Delahunty leapt to his feet and fired his revolver.
The gunman ducked back down behind the bushes. A moment later a voice called out, ‘Don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me.’
‘Put your gun down and come out with your arms up,’ Delahunty shouted back.
A dark silhouette rose from behind the bushes. ‘Don’t shoot me,’ said the gunman again as he walked forward with his arms high above his head. He had a small moustache, a military haircut and identified himself as 19-year-old Julian Knight.