Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [18]
He said he remembered parking his car again on the way home, then – later – finding the rifle in his hand with a spent cartridge in the breach. It was only the next day, when he saw a report about the babysitter’s murder on the television, that he realised what he had done.
The next day he was taken to the scene of Lucy Madrill’s murder and confessed to that killing as well. He said he had been robbing the girls’ flat when he had knocked over a framed photograph. Lucy had woken up and he had hit her. She tried to scream but he throttled her. He dragged her through into the next bedroom, strangled her with a lamp flex, then raped her. He had intended to hide the body.
He dragged it outside and left it on the Nobles’ lawn while he looked for a car to steal. But he could not find one, so he stole a bicycle instead and rode home.
Later he confessed to the spree on 27 January. He had shot five people that night because he ‘wanted to hurt somebody’, he said. Out on his usual Saturday night prowl, he had stolen a Lithgow single-shot .22 and a tan-coloured Holden sedan.
He had been driving aimlessly when he saw a man and a woman in a parked car. The interior light went out, so Cooke thought he would stop and spy on the couple. He took the rifle with him. And when they spotted him and threw a bottle at him, he shot back.
In Broome Street he stopped again, intent on doing a bit more burglary. He clambered over some railings and climbed up on to a balcony. Inside some French windows a man lay sleeping. The bed barred Cooke’s way into the room, so he shot from the hip at the sleeping body. The result was Brian Weir’s irreversible brain damage.
Prowling around the block, Cooke saw a man sleeping on the verandah. Another shot from the hip ended John Sturkey’s young life. The next killing was even more deliberate. He leant the rifle against the garage of a house he had picked randomly in Louise Street and went to ring the front doorbell. Then he ran back to the gun and aimed at the doorway. When a man answered the door, Cooke shot him. Then he threw the rifle off the Narrows Bridge into the Swan River and returned the Holden to the house where he had stolen it. In the morning the owner noticed that the bulb of the interior light had been removed, but the matter was too petty to report to the police.
Only the death of John Sturkey upset Cooke. ‘He was so young,’ he told the police. ‘He never had a chance. I will never meet him because he is up there and I’ll be down there. I’m just a cold-blooded killer.’
With that last sentence, Cooke ruled out the possibility of being found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Cooke also confessed to the murder of 33-year-old divorcée Patricia Vinico Berkman in 1959. Her lover, local radio personality Fotis Hountas, had found her body in bed in her flat in South Perth. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the head and chest. She left a nine-year-old son. And Cooke said that he had killed wealthy society beauty Jillian Brewer later that year. Aged 22, she too had been viciously murdered in her own flat. The killer had used a hatchet and a pair of scissors. There were no fingerprints. The doors were locked from the inside and there was no sign of any windows being forced. The police were mystified.
Four months after the killing, 20-year-old deaf-mute Darryl Beamish, arrested for molesting four little girls, had confessed to the Brewer murder through a sign-language interpreter. At his trial, Beamish claimed the confession had been forced out of him. The prosecutor produced no other evidence. Nevertheless, Beamish was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Cooke’s confession, on the other hand, was extraordinarily detailed. His description of the flat on the night of the murder