Eric Edgar Cooke

Eric Edgar Cooke was born 25th February 1931 in Victoria Park, Perth and was the eldest of 3 children. Cooke was born with a cleft palate and hare lip, he endured intense bullying throughout his school life due to his deformities. Eric Edgar Cooke’s home life was no better, he received beatings from his alcoholic father on a daily basis, emotionally neglected. Cooke also suffered from a number of conditions that included regular blackouts spending a lot of time in the hospital due to them; headaches; many illnesses and injuries from being accident prone. Despite this Cooke became a very adept cat-burglar confessing to more than 200 burglaries.

At the age of 14, Cooke left school, working as a delivery boy he supplemented his income through stealing. By the age of 17, Cooke had moved onto arson, burning flats and houses that he broke into. He was eventually caught and police took pity on him as “one of life’s unfortunates”, and he was paroled after 3 months of a 3-year sentence. Cooke returned to his life crime stealing.

Eventually, he joined the Permanent Military Forces on 27 May 1952 but was discharged on 28 August when it was discovered that he had a series of convictions for theft, breaking and entering, and arson. Cooke returned to Perth in 1953, where he met and married 19-year-old Sally Lavin. After the birth of their first son, Cooke transformed from the charming man Sally had married, into a violent and angry husband. And by the late 1950s, Cooke added voyeurism and perversion to his criminal behavior, regularly watching lovers through the windows of their cars or houses and stealing underwear from clotheslines.

In hindsight, examining Cooke’s early life one can see that he had the makings of a serial killer. Estelle Blackburn author of “Broken Lives” wrote the following description of Cooke:

“He was physically and emotionally abused as a child in a dysfunctional family, he escaped through disassociation and fantasy, sought to boost his low esteem through self-aggrandizement, raged against the society that ostracised him and he sought revenge, power, and control through violent acts starting with arson and escalating to power over life and death.”

Cooke’s rage escalated to violence in September 1958. He stalked a young woman who he had been watching for a number of days, stole her father’s car and intentionally ran over a woman cycling nearby. In later years Cooke confessed “I just wanted to hurt someone, and she was it for the night." Soon after this incident, Cooke fractured the skull of a young woman as she slept in her bed, and then stole a car to deliberately run over another woman.

January 1959, Eric Edgar Cooke committed his first murder. Pnina Berkman was asleep in her bed when Cooke climbed through the window. Pnina awoke and fought back, Cooke fatally stabbed her through the heart. At the end of that same year, Cooke brutally attacked and killed Jillian Brewer with a hatchet and scissors. Cooke had been stalking Jillian Brewer in the previous months prior to her murder. Cooke had not hit law enforcement’s radar yet, as 18-year-old deaf-mute, Darryl Beamish had been arrested and charged with Brewer’s murder.

On the 27th January 1963, Cooke would hit Perth in a violent rampage, claiming that “the power of God overtook him, allowing him to take the revenge he had wanted all his life.” Moving through the suburbs of Perth, Eric Edgar Cooke randomly shot victims with a .55cm rifle. His first target was a couple who were wounded while sitting in the car in Cottesloe. Delivering a single fatal shot to the head, Cooke’s next victim was a male accountant sleeping in his own bed. Cooke then moved on and shot an 18-year-old student in the head as he slept on the verandah of a boarding house. Cooke’s final victim for that morning was a retired grocer. Cooke walked up to the door of the grocer’s house and fatally shot him as he answered the door.

It wasn’t long before Cooke would strike again and his rage was more depraved and perverted this time around. On the 16th February, Cooke broke into the home of a young woman, strangled her with a cord from a night lamp, engaged in necrophilia. Cooke then dragged her body onto a neighbor's lawn, sexually penetrated the corpse with an empty whiskey bottle, which he left cradled in the victim's arms. Perth was now stricken with fear of “The Night Caller”, gunsmiths, locksmiths, and the dogs' refuge did a brisk trade.

Cooke’s final crime occurred on 10th August of the same year, 18-year-old Shirley Martha McLeod was shot in the head while she was babysitting in Dalkeith. Cooke was apprehended by the 1st of September, as he returned to bushland to retrieve the weapon he used in the shooting. During his trial, Cooke sought a verdict of not guilty on the grounds of insanity. His claim was rejected by the Director of Mental Health and no further psychiatric evaluations were permitted by the courts. Eric Edgar Cooke was sentenced to death on 27th November 1963.

During his incarceration, Cooke confessed to over 200 burglaries and 5 hit-and-run offenses against women. Cooke also confessed to the murders of Jillian Brewer and Rosemary Anderson which Darryl Beamish and John Button who had been wrongly convicted of. Little credence was placed on Cooke’s confession and it was not until 2002 that John Button was exonerated. In 2005, Beamish was also finally exonerated of murdering Jillian Brewer.

26th October 1964 almost one year after his capture and conviction, Eric Edgar Cooke “The Night Caller” was the last man executed in Western Australia.