Eric Edgar Cooke: The Nedlands Monster

Eric Edgar Cooke was born in 1931 in Victoria Park, Perth, and grew up with a violent, alcoholic father. A cleft palate left him with a speech impediment, and he was bullied at school and drifted into burglary and theft. In 1953 he married Sally Lavin, and they had seven children. Neighbors saw an ordinary working family man, but at night he broke into homes across the city’s suburbs.

Between 1959 and 1963 Cooke stabbed, strangled, shot and ran down his victims with no fixed pattern. They included Pnena Berkman and Jillian Brewer in 1959, and in 1963 John Sturkey, George Walmsley, Rosemary Anderson, Lucy Madrill and Shirley McLeod. Over the Australia Day weekend of 1963 he shot five strangers in Nedlands and Cottesloe; one, Brian Weir, died of his wound in 1965. Perth began locking its doors. After McLeod’s murder that August, police matched a rifle hidden in a Mount Pleasant garden to the killing, staked it out, and arrested Cooke when he returned for it on September 1, 1963.

Convicted of Sturkey’s murder in November 1963, Cooke refused to appeal and was hanged at Fremantle Prison on October 26, 1964, the last person executed in Western Australia. He swore he had also killed Brewer and Anderson, deaths for which Darryl Beamish and John Button had been convicted. Button’s conviction was quashed in 2002 and Beamish’s in 2005.