Goodnight Sally Cooke!

[Historian]

RIP. You conducted yourself with dignity and brought up your children in the most trying circumstances. For those of you who don't know, google Eric Edgar Cooke.

Widow of notorious Perth serial killer passes away

The wife of the last man hanged in WA, “Night Caller” Eric Edgar Cooke, Sarah ‘Sally’ Cooke was instrumental in clearing the names of men charged with horrific crimes her husband had committed.

thewest.com.au

 

[Historian]

The making of a serial killer
ESTELLE BLACKBURNThe West Australian
Monday, 21 January 2013 11:00AM

A dapper Eric Edgar Cooke striding out on St Georges Terrace. Credit: The West Australian

Eric Edgar Cooke was a perfect fit for the serial killer type identified by criminal profilers.
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-aggrandisement, 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 was born in February 1931 to a violent, alcoholic teenage father who loathed at first sight the son born with the facial deformity of a cleft palate and cleft lip.
Eric had a misshapen mouth and bad mumble, with surgery and speech therapy in those days not able to remedy what was called a hare lip.
He was subjected to daily beatings from his father using his fists, belts and sticks, as well as such general neglect and emotional cruelty as to leave him in no doubt that his father didn’t want him. His mother also suffered at her husband’s brutality, living in fear and poverty, working to raise him and two younger daughters on her meagre kitchenhand and cleaning wages, her husband drinking all he earned.
The hungry young Eric who grew up describing himself as the freak of the family took to wandering the streets to escape his father’s cruelty and to steal food. School was more of the same — the children taunted him, mimicking his speech. He was expelled from Subiaco Primary School in his first year for stealing.
He joined Scarborough Junior Surf Life Saving Club at 14, and his desperation for inclusion and admiration led him to steal a watch and have it engraved to look like an award: To Cookie from the boys of the SJSLC. On discovery of this theft, and suspicion over other thefts from lockers, he was rejected by the club.
Though accident prone while attention seeking, he grew into a cunning and adroit criminal, becoming a particularly deft cat-burglar who could get through the narrowest or highest windows, break one piece of stained glass door or remove one louvre to reach the key inside, and, after propping open a back door for a quick getaway, stealthily steal in the presence of the owners.
Leaving school at 14, he learnt his way around the streets through his first job as a delivery boy for Central Provision Stores in North Perth. He stole to supplement the few shillings pocket money left after he gave his wages to his struggling mother.
As he grew up, stealing funded his efforts to make friends and impress women.
At age 17, Cooke started setting fire to the houses and flats he broke into, after stealing food and money and slashing clothing and bedding.
He smashed a window in a house to make it look like a break-in when the friendly owner had given him a key to look after it while on holiday.
Police who caught him for the break-ins and arson were sympathetic, describing him as “one of life’s unfortunates”. So at 18, too late, he finally received the intervention he had needed years earlier. In an attempt to “rescue him from a life of crime and early symptoms of schizophrenia”, he was paroled after three months of his three-year jail sentence.
A Methodist minister, the Rev. George Jenkins, offered to rehabilitate him, taking him into the fold of his South Perth Methodist Church. Cooke gained an active social life through acceptance by the Young Methodists, and he enthusiastically embraced Bible classes.
But he was indeed beyond help. He later stole from his Methodist friends — and Mr Jenkins finally accompanied him to his execution for the worst crime of murder.
The Methodist Church inadvertently introduced him to the wealth of the western suburbs when he started attending the Nedlands Methodist Church and was welcomed into the parishioners’ homes.
The Methodists’ care and effort at rehabilitation could not counter the rejection of his dismissal from the CMF (now the Reserve Army). Exclusion from an organisation or activity where they shine is a pointer to serial killers’ future violent behaviour.
Lance-Cpl Cooke’s flair for fast and accurate shooting trained him in weaponry and helped satisfy his need to dominate. His dismissal from the army, which excludes anyone with a criminal conviction, was dire punishment.
He desperately tried to get back into the CMF, going to Melbourne at the age of 21 and joining there. In the 3½ months before his WA conviction was discovered, he excelled further at weapons training.
He returned to Perth and in a further attempt to gain admiration, he lied about having been in the Korean War and having a metal plate in his head from his injuries.
Cooke met Sally at work at the metropolitan markets, married her in 1953 and had a son six months later and another son, Tony, a year after that. But the love and happy home was also too late to overcome his early damage. The charming man who Sally’s mother thought was a good catch turned violent after the first child and Sally was trapped by a cruel, violent, womanising husband.
Sally was too loyal to leave him, even when advised to do so after he was jailed for two years for crashing a stolen car when following a girlfriend to Bunbury. The birth of twins followed his return from jail, but they couldn’t stop his cravings for attention, friends, peeping tom thrills and for winning the game against society by so audaciously invading people’s homes and stealing from under their noses.
He prowled most weekends, cunningly reading The West Australian’s wedding notices and breaking into the brides’ homes in the knowledge no one would be there, and he studied the floor plans of big houses from The West’s weekly home architecture features to know his way around them.
Despite having work and family, the pain of rejection rankled. His first violence in September 1958 may have been sparked by failing to win a young woman he once followed home from a bus stop and used to watch in her bedroom from behind a tree. He stole her father’s car and ran down a mother cycling nearby, saying, in his confession: “I just wanted to hurt someone, and she was it for the night.”
He continued wanting to hurt people.
He soon fractured the skull of a teenager asleep in her bed in Applecross, then deliberately ran down a woman in a stolen car in Belmont.
He claimed that his first murder in January 1959 was from panic, stabbing Pnina Berkman in South Perth after she awoke and fought back. At the end of that year, he was ferocious in his hatchet and scissor attack on a sleeping Jillian Brewer whose sexual activity with several men he had watched in the previous months.
Rejection was most likely the motive for his Australia Day rampage, having been told to “piss off” by the man he was watching parked in a car with a woman late at night. This time he had a rifle.
His rage escalated when he strangled his next sleeping victim, dominating her further through necrophilia and abuse with a bottle.
When he was caught after his shooting murder in August 1963, he gave up and told all.
He admitted eight murders — including two that other youths had been convicted of and jailed for, wanting them freed before he hanged — and to 14 attacks on people who survived — five deliberate hit-runs and five attacks on sleeping women.
He had an extraordinary memory, detailing features of homes and exact denominations of coins he stole. His break-ins and thefts, car thefts and the reports by frightened women of a man who dazzled them with a torch when they awoke to find him in their bedrooms were too numerous for police to record.
Deemed sane by the Director of Mental Health Services and with the defence being refused its request for a second opinion, his fate was inevitable in Perth’s hanging days.
It was almost as inevitable given his formative experience and development fitting so well the pattern of serial killers.
On death row, he read his Bible, spoke often about his wife and children, expressed much concern about John Button and Darryl Beamish who were in jail for his murders and went on a hunger strike over not being believed about them.
He joked when being weighed and measured for the executioner.
There are many in Perth still deeply affected by Cooke’s activities — including those he condemned to the heartache of having loved ones so cruelly stolen from them, and others so traumatised that they still can’t sleep without the light on.
For them and most of Perth, he was indeed the Nedlands Monster, as he was dubbed. It would be understandably too difficult for them to accept the view of South African profiler Micki Pistorius, who stated in 2000: “Serial killers are not monsters. They are human beings with tortured souls.”
Estelle Blackburn, in her research for Broken Lives, had access to Cooke's medical, legal, police and prison files and interviewed two psychiatrists and a psychologist who had dealt him.

 

[Historian]

Chilling murders shocked us all
ROBERT DREWEThe West Australian
Monday, 21 January 2013 11:00AM

A young John Sturkey, one of Eric Edgar Cooke's victims. Credit: The West Australian

Can it really be 50 years ago that The West Australian’s front page jumped out and walloped me? The memory is so sharp that it seems barely months ago that I read that my friend John Sturkey had been murdered in his bed.
That Monday morning I — and the whole State — read that he and two others had been shot in the head by an unknown prowler on Saturday night, the night of Australia Day.
And then and there I, and indeed Perth itself, seemed to lose our moorings.
It was shocking, horrible, and it made no sense. Amusing, good-natured Sturks shot in his sleep? In my mind we were still chatting in St Georges Terrace the week before. I was leaning against the Government House fence waiting for the bus to South Perth, to visit my girlfriend.
He was leaving soon for the East to study veterinary science on a scholarship from the Department of Agriculture.
We talked for a while and I wished him luck. He was on his way and I envied him. He was only 19 and yet he was heading off to an enlarged life in a bigger city. As he strolled off down the terrace to pick up his interstate train ticket, he seemed debonair.
The newspaper’s stark typefaces and grim photographs eventually came into focus as I absorbed the words and followed the press artists’ dotted lines linking the shooting times and sites in Cottesloe and Nedlands.
As that hot summer night had merged into Sunday morning, a couple in a parked car in Napier Street, Cottesloe, noticed someone spying on them. Annoyed, they threw a beer bottle at the voyeur, whereupon he drew a rifle and shot the man in the driver’s seat, Nicholas August.
Rowena Reeves, a barmaid at the Ocean Beach Hotel, was sitting in the back. She pushed Mr August’s head down and saved his life. He was struck in the neck, she was hit in the forearm, and they sped off to Fremantle Hospital. The man with the gun then climbed into a flat in nearby Broome Street and shot Brian Weir, a 29-year-old accountant and Swanbourne lifesaver, in the head while he slept.
The gunman then drove to Nedlands and prowled through several properties before spotting John Sturkey asleep on the veranda of Mrs Connie Allen’s student boarding house in Vincent Street. Standing less than a metre away from his bed, he shot John in the head.
The prowler wasn’t finished. He strode into the next street, Louise Street, ejecting the spent shell as he went, rang a random doorbell, took a bead on the sleepy man who turned on the front light and shot George Walmsley, a 54-year-old retired grocer, as he opened his door.
This would be the prowler’s biggest night: the night he shot five helpless strangers. The night he thought he was God.
But there had already been other victims on other nights, and soon there would be more, and eventually he would kill eight people, variously shooting, stabbing, bludgeoning, strangling, hacking, and running them down with cars. Why? There would never be a satisfactory answer. Childhood insults and abuse? A belief in a divine right to do so?
The string of mysterious murders created widespread anxiety and instant local myth. As the community reeled, those of us who knew the victims — and everyone seemed to have some connection with these murders — were particularly stunned. What staggered me further, when he was finally caught, was discovering that I also knew the killer.
He came to our house all the time: openly, during the day. And, covertly, at night.
Once Eric Cooke was caught red-handed — reaching for his most recent murder weapon, a rifle hidden in a Geraldton wax bush in Mt Pleasant — and became the subject of macabre fascination from that moment until he was hanged, he was transformed publicly from a small, shrewd, swarthy man with a harelip to a maniac serial killer with three names: “Eric Edgar Cooke”.
When I first met him I was 13 and he was just “Eric, from Dunlop”. He hadn’t killed anyone yet (though, unknown to us, he was already an arsonist, a sneak thief and a “snowdropper”: a stealer of women’s underwear from clothes lines). He was working for my father as a truck driver at the Dunlop Rubber Company. I was kneeling on our veranda fixing a puncture on a bike tyre.
While I waited for the rubber cement to seal the patched tube, I was boredly pumping the bicycle pump against my wrist so it made a squeaky farting noise.
This wiry, dark man appeared on our back steps and said to me, “You’ll get warts doing that.” His cleft palate and talking-through-the-nose voice meant that I misheard him at first. When he said “warts” I thought he said “horse”. Either way, it didn’t make much sense.
For two years he came to our house a couple of days a week in the yellow and black Dunlop truck. (We’d later hear he’d prowled our house at night when he knew my father was away on business).
Sometimes we hit a hockey ball together in the backyard. His stick work was quick and nimble, much better than mine. When some marked banknotes proved he was stealing from his workmates’ lockers, my father had to sack him.
Six years later I was a young reporter covering Eric’s committal hearing for murder in the Perth Police Court.
After two days of convoluted detective-speak (“Whilst in attendance at Vincent Street I ascertained that a male person had been shot in the head whilst sleeping in bed by a person in that immediate vicinity”), it was strangely easy to momentarily forget that the charge he faced involved someone else I’d known, a boy now dead.
With a sickening shock, I’d remember that the subject of the police photographs on the court clerk’s table, especially Exhibit 14: the shattered head, the blackened mess of blood and matter, was John, my friend. At the Press table I felt giddy, in a daze of such intense unreality that I think I passed out for several seconds over my notebook.
I’d been avoiding Eric’s eyes, hoping he wouldn’t recognise me, but suddenly I felt him staring at me from the dock. Then he winked.
Instantly I would feel a hot wave of embarrassment and self-loathing.
But, involuntarily, insanely, I winked back.
These events and their effect on the West Australian consciousness are the theme of Robert Drewe’s memoir The Shark Net.

 

[Happy2]

And she was still able to raise a son with the self confidence and self belief to become a strong member of the community

 

[Historian]

Raised 4 kids I think.

 

[Historian]

Tony Cooke dead: WA union leader who stepped out of a dark shadow dies after cancer battle
By David Weber
Updated 25 Apr 2018, 1:18pm

PHOTO: Tony Cooke engineered massive union protests against the Court government changes. (ABC Perth: Jamie Burnett)
RELATED STORY: Reconciling the sins of a father
RELATED STORY: 'It was as though I was God': A serial killer's voice from the grave
Tony Cooke, the former head of Unions WA and figurehead for massive industrial protests against the WA government in the 1990s, has died at the age of 62 after a long battle with cancer.

Mr Cooke, who died just after 11pm on April 24, was a well-respected union official and was at the centre of a movement against the industrial reform pushed by Richard Court's government in the 1990s.

WA Premier Mark McGowan praised him on Twitter, calling Mr Cooke "the leader the union movement needed as the 21st century began".

PHOTO: Tony Cooke leads a mass union march down St Georges Terrace in Perth. (Supplied)

Mark McGowan

✔@MarkMcGowanMP
https://twitter.com/MarkMcGowanMP/status/988946785723863043

Tony Cooke was the leader the union movement needed as the 21st century began.

In the face of massive change, he brought unions together to work for a fairer future for all Western Australians.

He has left a mark on this State, and we are all the better for his efforts. Vale.
https://twitter.com/intent/like?tweet_id=988946785723863043

Deputy Premier Roger Cook said Mr Cooke was a "terrific bloke and a great friend".
"Tony was a giant in the labour movement, his strength and leadership … was an inspiration to all young members of the labour movement, such as myself," Mr Cook said.
The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) also praised Mr Cooke for his lifetime of service to the workers of the state.
"A proud life member of both Unions WA and the ALP, Tony leaves us loved by so many and with a better legacy than he inherited," the union posted on its Facebook page.

"No more pain. The struggle is over for others to carry on."

Unions WA secretary Meredith Hammat said Mr Cooke would be remembered as one of the most influential WA leaders in recent times.
"He was an enormous figure for the Western Australian trade union movement," Ms Hammat said.
"Even after his time at Unions WA, he continued to work to make sure working people in this state could live with dignity and respect.

"He's left a lasting legacy."

Ms Hammat said Mr Cooke had a "humble and personal style."
"There's no doubt that Tony had a strong commitment to improving the lives of working people, both at work, but broader community objectives as well and he really worked his whole life in the pursuit of that," she said.
Life devoted to protecting workers
Mr Cooke excelled at school and in the air cadets.
He came to devote himself to helping those less fortunate, which for him meant joining the union movement.
PHOTO: Tony Cooke engineered massive union protests against the Court government changes. (ABC Perth: Jamie Burnett)

Protests became increasingly confrontational as he rose through the ranks of the Trades and Labour Council (TLC), which he later renamed Unions WA, becoming state secretary in 1995.
Unions and a range of community and religious organisations opposed the Court government's waves of industrial relations legislation, which they saw as severely restricting workers' rights.
Mr Cooke lead the charge when union battlegrounds shifted to the wharves and against mining companies, when stevedoring company Patrick Corporation tried to restructure, sparking mass protests at Australia's major ports.
The protests culminated in a rally of an estimated 35,000 people from the Perth CBD to Parliament House.
After leaving Unions WA in 2001, Mr Cooke worked as a consultant and stayed active in employee and volunteer organisations.
PHOTO: Tony Cooke and his wife Barbara at the reopening of Trades Hall. (Supplied: Rob Mitchell)

Stepping out of a dark shadow
But Mr Cooke also had a connection to a much darker side of West Australian history — his father Eric Edgar Cooke killed eight people and tried to murder 14 others in a crime spree running from 1959 to 1963.
In 1964, Eric Cooke became the last man to be hanged in Western Australia. His son later became a vocal campaigner against the death penalty.
One of seven children, he told Australian Story in 1998 that as a child he was forced to stand up to bullies who tormented him over his family's past.
"I snapped," he said.
"I decided look, these kids haven't got any right to treat me like this, why are they so curious about it anyway, it's just part of my life.
"I'm going to have to learn to live with it, it's not going to dominate me."
Topics: death, unions, perth-6000, wa

 

[Historian]

Tony Cooke outside Parliament House. Credit: The West Australian
Tom Percy
Tom Percy: Tony Cooke rose above the stigma of being a serial killer’s son
Tom PercyPerthNow
May 2, 2018 12:00AM
HOW would you cope as an 11-year-old boy when your father is taken to the gallows and hanged?
How would you deal with growing up being the son of WA’s most vilified and hated human being?
The difficulties from a very young age confronting Tony Cooke, who died this week, were many and obvious.
One might have expected he could have chosen an inconspicuous life, away from the glare of the hateful spotlight that was to follow him and his family over the next half century.
But to his enduring credit, he didn’t.

Tom Percy, lawyer for Joshua Billington, who was sentenced to nine months jail on a coward punch charge. PICTURE NIC ELLIS THE WEST AUSTRALIAN Credit: THE WEST AUSTRALIAN
From his early adulthood he took on a role of helping those less fortunate (if that could be imagined) than himself.
As a trade union official he rose to a position where he could make a positive difference to the working class people of WA, doing it with aplomb and dignity.
Never an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, which was a platform clearly open to him, Tony Cooke resolutely and determinedly set about the task of improving the conditions of WA workers without ever trading on his own considerable childhood disadvantages.
I crossed paths fleetingly with Tony Cooke in the early 2000s, during the bitter fight over the John Button and Daryl Beamish appeals.
I was an advocate committed to proving that his father, serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke, was responsible for two additionalmurders for which the system had never held him accountable. Tony Cooke had every reason to despise me, as well as the others working with me in dredging up that past that would see his father enshrined in history in an even more shameful light.
But he didn’t. Tony Cooke rose above that.
He was polite, accepting of what was taking place, and entirely respectful of the processes of the law which, as it turned out, had failed the two men who had been wrongly convicted of his father’s crimes.
Following the final judgment in Darryl Beamish’s case in 2005, a few of us gathered for a quiet drink at a tavern in Leederville. Sitting quietly at the back of the bar was Tony Cooke.
He shook my hand and offered his congratulations, as he did to Darryl Beamish and Estelle Blackburn (the journalist who had started the whole revisitation of the case) who later dropped in.
The magnanimity of his presence and demeanour on that occasion is something I will never forget.
The enormity of his father’s already notorious reputation had just been magnified to officially include two more victims, one an horrendous sexually motivated axe murder. He had every reason to be disappointed, angry or worse. But he wasn’t.
His respect for the judicial system, albeit to his and his family’s enormous detriment, was evident, remarkable and unique. It was, however, typical of the man. Despite his pivotal role in opposing many questionable measures of the State government over the years, often with considerable success, his enduring quality was his respect for due process, and the rule of law.
Tony Cooke lived his life under the weight of crosses that most of us would never be able to bear, or even imagine. His career was notable for many reasons, and for many qualities.
The foremost of these were dignity and tolerance. He was, in many ways, a lesson to us all.
Tom Percy is a Perth QC and can be heard on 6IX on Thursdays at 7.40am

 

[Historian]

In the papers today it was reported she brought up 7 children!