1930, Perth, Western Australia, a young, unmarried couple sat with a decision to make.
Vivian Cooke, a local shop assistant, and his girlfriend Christine Edgar, a young woman
originally from Scotland, had just found out that Christine was pregnant. Times being what
they were, both Vivian and Christine felt like their hands were tied and quickly got married
so that their child wouldn’t be born out of wedlock.
But their marriage was far from a match made in Heaven. Vivian had a mean and violent
streak and when his first child, Eric Edgar Cooke, came into the world in February 1931,
that violent streak only grew worse. Vivian was known to drink heavily, and when he drank, he
often beat his wife Christine. When Eric became old enough to start trying to protect his
mother from his father, Vivian beat Eric too.
Christine took to sleeping in the staff room at her workplace to try and avoid going home to
her husband and, even though he was still only a child, Eric took to the streets to do the
exact same thing… avoid his father. He sometimes chose to sleep under the house or just stayed up all night walking around the neighborhood so he wouldn’t have to go home.
But to say that Eric chose to stay out on the streets isn’t entirely accurate either. He’d been
born with a cleft lip which had left him with a speech impediment and a slight disfiguration
on his face even after two surgeries. The other children in his school and in the
neighborhood bullied Eric because of differences, meaning that Eric had no friends and
nowhere to go when he was out of the house, avoiding his father. Occasionally,
he’d be picked up or dropped off at an orphanage or foster home, but he’d always find himself back at the same crossroads: risk getting beaten up at home or rough it on
the streets.
The difficult situation at home and the constant bullying at school turned Eric into a quiet
and withdrawn child. He did well enough in his lessons, but emotionally, he was becoming
more and more unstable and he became prone to angry outbursts.
As he grew, so did the severity and the results of Vivian’s beatings and Eric was often
hospitalized for head injuries. Unfortunately, the side effects of those injuries also seemed
to linger even after Eric had been discharged. He became clumsy and unstable on his feet
which then led to even more accidents outside of the ones from the beatings. He then
started complaining about severe headaches and of sometimes even blacking out, leading
some people to believe that Eric had undiagnosed brain damage. Others argue that his
growing number of accidents were actually a result of his repressed desire to take his own
life.
When he was only fourteen, Eric left school so that he could start working to help support
his family. Vivian often drank away the money that he earned, so Christine would find extra
work cooking and cleaning around the neighborhood, but she still had mouths to feed at
home. She and Vivian had had two more children after Eric and, realizing that his mother
needed financial help with his siblings, Eric found a job as a delivery boy at a local store.
He’d then hand over his weekly pay to his mother to keep the household going, but none of
that actually addressed the main problem at home: his father.
By the age of seventeen, Eric was spending more and more nights on the streets to avoid
Vivian and getting into more and more trouble. He tested the waters with petty crimes and
vandalism, but he got into things deep when he burned down a local church. He’d
auditioned to join the church’s choir and after they’d turned him down, he came back in the
middle of the night and set the church on fire.
He was arrested and served eighteen months in jail for his brush with revenge, but instead
of setting Eric straight, this stint behind bars only seemed to drive him further in the wrong
direction.
He then began saving the newspaper clippings with articles about his crimes. These not
only served as some sort of trophy for Eric, but he also used them in a misguided attempt
to connect with people. He’d show them off and brag about his crimes, and then he didn’t
seem to understand why people weren’t lining up to be his friend afterward.
His crimes then began to escalate further. Now instead of vandalism and arson, Eric had
moved onto breaking and entering and larson. He’d sneak into people’s houses in the
middle of the night, usually stealing anything he thought had any value, but sometimes he
broke in just to make a point. If someone had wronged him, Eric would break into their
homes and damage their property, usually either their clothing or their furniture, as an act
of revenge.
It wasn’t difficult for the police to track down who was behind this spree of break ins,
especially when Eric often bragged about his crimes to people he hardly knew. Fingerprints
placed him at even more crime scenes and Eric was sentenced to three years in prison.
Released at the age of twenty-one, Eric had now grown into a young man. He was short and
slight with dark, wavy hair. He still had a slightly disfigured mouth and speech impediment,
but he’d also finally found the place that he wanted to be. Eric joined the army. He did well
and quickly began to rise up the ranks to lance corporal, but his past came back to haunt
him. A background check uncovered Eric’s criminal record and Eric was discharged.
A year later, he met nineteen-year-old Sarah Lavin and quickly tied the knot. Together
they went on to have seven children, but somehow his turn of luck was too little too late for
Eric’s journey in life.
By day, Eric played the role of family man, but by night, he returned to the familiar hunting
ground of the streets. He stole cars and because many people during the fifties and sixties in Australia often left their keys in the ignition, Eric sometimes brought the stolen cars right
back to where he’d found them. Car owners would wake up in the morning to find their
cars parked where they’d left them, unaware that Eric had taken them for a joyride during
the night.
Eric was only caught after he’d been involved in a crash in 1955. The crash had been so
severe that Eric needed to be taken to the hospital and it was there that his long spree of
car theft and joyriding came to an end. He was sentenced to two years of hard labor, but
it was only after this last stint behind bars that Eric realized that he’d been making things
easy for the investigators.
After that, he took to wearing gloves whenever he was involved in criminal activity and
when he was released early around Christmas of 1956, Eric got right back to work.
The break ins, thefts, arsons and revenge takings all continued, but, unfortunately for so
many in Australia, Eric’s crimes graduated to another level yet again.
In the early hours of January 27th, 1963, a suburb of Perth woke to the sound of gunshots.
A couple sitting in a parked car managed to get away from the unknown shooter and
survived their wounds, but the same couldn’t be said for the other victims that day. A man,
asleep in a nearby apartment, was killed by a single gunshot wound to the head. An
eighteen-year-old student, asleep on the porch of a boarding house, was also killed by a
single gunshot wound to the head. A retired grocer answered the front door of his house
only the next street over and was also killed with a single gunshot wound to the head.
Perth fell into a deep panic. Residents strengthened the security around their homes by
replacing locks and buying dogs, but this particular killer was very familiar with the streets
and he’d been paying attention to how police investigators worked.
Now, instead of following the same MO and bragging about his crimes, Eric kept switching
things up and covering his tracks, but perhaps most importantly, he kept quiet. Instead, he
found new ways to flaunt his crimes to the world.
After stabbing one of his victims, he tested fate by stopping to drink a lemonade on his
victim’s porch. Another time, he strangled a victim with the cord from a bedside lamp
before sexually assaulting his victim’s remains. He then stripped them and dragged the
body outside into a neighbor’s lawn where he penetrated them with an empty whisky
bottle. When he finally left the scene, he placed the bottle between his victim’s arms.
For years his crimes went unchecked. In fact, the police ended up tying two of his murders
to two other suspects and Eric was left to roam free.
It was only after the murder of another eighteen-year-old student, who’d died from a single
gunshot wound to the head, that the authorities honed in on Eric. They discovered the
murder weapon which had been hidden near the crime scene, but instead of collecting it for evidence , the police replaced it with a decoy weapon and waited.
Eric eventually showed up, trying to hide the evidence, but instead, he ended up handing
himself over to the investigators.
At first, Eric tried to play things cool and claimed to have nothing to do with the spree of
murders that had now lasted for four years. Annoyed and frustrated with Eric’s constant
denials, a detective named of Max Baker told Eric: “Cookie, you’re gonna hang, you
know - there’s no doubt about it. You got a wife and kids, think of them, and then think
about whether you’re gonna be dragged to the gallows like a mongrel dog or you gonna go
there like a man.”
The message seemed to hit home.
After that, it was like the seal had been broken and Eric confessed to everything. He
recounted the murders, his arsons and even went into great individual detail on over two
hundred counts of theft. He even confessed to the two killings that had been attributed to
two other men, although the jury is out on whether he really committed those himself or
he was back to bragging in an attempt to impress people and make friends again.
But regardless, Eric soon found himself in court where his defense lawyers argued not
guilty by reason of insanity. They claimed that Eric had schizophrenia and given his long
history of head injuries and possible brain damage, they could have been onto something.
The director of the state mental health services, however, testified that Eric was sane and
the state refused to let Eric be seen by independent psychiatrists.
As far as the courts were concerned, Eric was sane and he was found guilty of murder. His
sentence: to be hanged by the neck until dead. Eric refused to appeal the verdict and his
sentence was carried out about a year later in October 1964. He was the last person to be
hanged in Western Australia before they later outlawed the death penalty.
