Killers_ The Most Barbaric Murderers of Our Time - Cawthorne, Nigel [19]
On 17 March 1964, Beamish appeared before the appeal court with Cooke’s statement. However, the three appeal court judges – one was the original trial judge, the other two had dismissed Beamish’s appeals on two previous occasions – did not believe Cooke’s confession. But they did commute Beamish’s sentence from death to life imprisonment. Cooke was hanged in Fremantle Prison on 26 October 1964.
Name: Julian Knight
Nationality: Australian
Number of victims: 6
Favoured method of killing: shooting
Final note: he claimed his killing spree was a result of his desire to make an heroic last stand and go down fighting
Cooke’s January night rampage is peculiar, but he otherwise exhibited the profile of a serial, rather than a spree, killer. In 1987 a lone gunman loosed off a hail of bullets in a more typical, random, mindless spree killing.
At 9.30 p.m. on Sunday 9 August, young Alan Jury was driving along Hoddle Street near the suburb of Clifton Hill, Melbourne, when he heard a noise like a firecracker. His windscreen shattered. Quickly realising that someone was shooting at him, he stamped down on the accelerator and roared away from the danger. At the next service station he reported that a gunman was firing at passing cars.
In the car behind him, Rita Vitcos also heard a bang and saw sparks fly off the surface of the road. She too accelerated away. Later, when she got out of the car, she found two bullet-holes in the driver’s door and realised how lucky she had been.
Twenty-three-year-old Vesna Markonsky’s windscreen exploded as she drove down the Street. She jammed on the brakes. When the car came to a halt she discovered that a bullet had hit her in the left arm. She got out and a second bullet hit her, then a third. Her boyfriend Zoran, who was with her in the car, jumped out to help her. More bullets filled the air as he and a young doctor, who had stopped his car behind Vesna’s, ran towards the wounded girl. The doctor collapsed, hit.
Another car pulled up behind Zoran’s. A bullet hit the driver in the right temple. He died instantly. A girl student stopped to help. She too was gunned down. When Zoran reached Vesna, he cradled her in his arms. She spoke a few words, then lost consciousness.
Constable Belinda Bourchier arrived in a police car shortly afterwards. Zoran ran to her and tried to pull her revolver out of its holster. Covered in blood and in a state of shock, he yelled at her that he wanted to kill the bastard who had just murdered his girlfriend. More shots screamed past them. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Constable Bourchier, and they ran for cover behind some trees at the edge of the road.
The gunman continued firing with deadly accuracy. More windscreens shattered and cars careered across the road. A motorcyclist swerved and crashed. He lay in the road trapped under his bike and two more bullets slammed into his body.
After ten minutes of shooting, the police turned up in force. The shots were coming from the ‘nature strip’, a grass verge alongside Clifton Hill railway station. The police set up roadblocks and closed off the area.
A police helicopter was called in. It flew in low over the nature strip. Its searchlight swept the ground. But the gunman had vanished.
A few minutes later a police car, turning into Hoddle Street from the north, came under fire. A policeman on a roadblock there was also winged by a bullet. Another shot struck the helicopter flying overhead, but bounced off its armoured underside.
Spotting the gunman near the track, a signalman managed to stop an oncoming train. He ran up the line, expecting to be shot in the back. But the gunman now seemed to be firing into the ground. The signalman reached the train and told the driver to reverse. When he looked back, the gunman had disappeared.
In a street close by, two constables in a police car spotted a man with a rifle running along the road. They pursued