Free Australian Serial Killers - The rage for revenge (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr Page A

for stealing a car. In 1960, having got away with the killing of the divorcee, he returned to prison. In spite of his record, however, the police believed him to be harmless.
    How wrong they were was about to become evident.
    That summer Saturday night in 1963 at around two in the morning, Nicholas August, a married man, was sharing a drink in his car with barmaid Rowena Reeves. Suddenly, Rowena thought she saw a man and August leaned out of the window and told him to ‘Bugger off!’ thinking he was a peeping tom. When August chucked an empty bottle at the figure in the dark, Rowena noticed that the man had a gun in his hands, and was alarmed to see that it was aimed at them. She pushed her companion’s head down as a bullet whizzed into the car, grazing his neck and thudding into her forearm. August fumbled with the keys and switched on the engine as quickly as he could. He pushed his foot down hard on the accelerator, gunning the car past the shooter and almost hitting him. By the time they reached the local hospital, Rowena had slipped into unconsciousness through loss of blood, but, fortunately, both survived.
    The night was still young, however, and Eric Cooke’s next victim wasn’t so lucky.
    An hour after Nicholas August and Rowena Reeves had been attacked, a couple of miles away, fifty-four-year-old George Walmsley was awakened by the sound of his doorbell. Puzzled as to who would be at the door at this time in the morning, he got out of bed, went to the door and opened it. Immediately, a bullet smashed into his forehead. He was dead before he hit the ground.
    A little later, at a boarding house located just around the corner from where George Walmsley had died, a nineteen-year-old student, John Sturkey, who was sleeping on the building’s verandah was discovered shot between the eyes.
    But it was not over yet. When Brian Weir failed to show up for work at the Surf Life Saving Club next morning, one of his colleagues went to get him out of bed, thinking he had merely overslept. He found Weir in bed alright, but his sheets were soaked in blood and there was a bullet hole in his forehead. He lived, but suffered serious brain damage before dying three years later.
    The press went crazy and a large reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of the person they were calling the ‘Maniac Slayer’. It was the random nature of the shootings that terrified people most. They had no idea where and when he would strike next and took to sleeping with loaded guns by their beds.
    All went quiet for three weeks.
    Joy Noble was making breakfast one Saturday morning in her West Perth home when, glancing out of the kitchen window, she was horrified to see a naked young woman lying on the grass in her garden. Initially, she feared that it was her daughter, and first made sure that she was safe and well before investigating. The body was that of Lucy Madrill, a twenty-four-year-old social worker who lived in a neighbouring street. She had been raped, strangled and, bizarrely, dumped on Joy Noble’s lawn. The police were flummoxed, but, with absolutely no evidence to support the theory, claimed that the murderer must have been an Aborigine.
    Cooke laid low for the next six months before shooting dead, on 10 August 1963, an eighteen-year-old science student, Shirley McLeod, leaving the child she had been babysitting unharmed. The gun was different, but the investigating officers had no doubt that their man had just claimed his fourth victim. They began to fingerprint every male in Perth over the age of twelve and there was talk of closing down the alleys that ran down the backs of houses. Doors in the city were now firmly locked at night.
    It was a stroke of luck rather than a great piece of detective work that finally enabled them to trap their man. On Saturday 17 August an elderly couple were out picking flowers in a wooded area in the pretty Perth suburb of Mount Pleasant when they spied a rifle concealed in some