Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [16]
Later that year, a woman reported being sexually assaulted by a man using the Measuring Man routine, but otherwise all the activity of the Boston Strangler stopped. This coincided with the arrest of DeSalvo for housebreaking. Held on bail, DeSalvo’s behaviour became disturbed and he was transferred to the mental hospital at Bridgewater, where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic.
Although they had him in custody, the police still had no idea that DeSalvo was the Boston Strangler. But in Bridgewater, another inmate, in for killing a petrol pump attendant and also a suspect in the Boston Strangler case himself, listened to DeSalvo’s manic ramblings and began to put two and two together. He got his lawyer to interview DeSalvo.
In these taped interviews, DeSalvo revealed facts about the murders – the position of the bodies, the nature of the ligature and the wounds inflicted – that the police had not revealed. He also admitted to two murders that had not already been attributed to the Boston Strangler.
DeSalvo was a mental patient, so he was not prosecuted for the rapes and murders he confessed to. But there was no doubt that he was, indeed, the Boston Strangler. DeSalvo was transferred to Walpole State Prison. He was found dead in his cell in 1973, stabbed through the heart.
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