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

bushes. It turned out to be a Winchester .22 and police determined it was the weapon that had been used in the recent killings. They reasoned that their killer would almost certainly return to collect the weapon, staking out the area for two weeks before he finally turned up. Eric Cooke was arrested, handcuffed and at last taken into custody. The entire city breathed a sigh of relief.
    At first, he denied everything, but gradually he began to open up, admitting to some two hundred and fifty break-ins and car thefts, and remembering the smallest details of crimes committed years previously. He told how he had abused women while they slept, and even described how one girl thought she had fallen out of bed and banged her head when really he had hit her with an object but, before he could continue his assault, he had been scared off. He told them of hit-and-runs that he had deliberately perpetrated, running people over and then speeding off without stopping.
    He had obtained the Winchester during a burglary while the owners of the house were watching television in the lounge. He had taken it and some cartridges thinking he could sell it, but instead shot the babysitter, although he claimed to have absolutely no memory of the incident, only realising what he had done when it was reported on the next day’s television news.
    He confessed to the murder of Lucy Madrill, telling officers that she had woken up when he made a noise as he robbed her house. He had struck her and then strangled her with the flex of a lamp. He had then raped her lifeless body before dragging her from her house with the intention of stealing a car and dumping her body somewhere. Finding only a bicycle, however, he had left the body on Joy Noble’s lawn and cycled home.
    All he could say about the fateful night the previous summer when he had shot five people, was that he had done it because he ‘wanted to hurt somebody’. He had stolen the gun and a car, and had driven around until he found Nicholas August and Rowena Reeves. He had merely been spying on them but lost his temper when the bottle was thrown at him. The rest were just pieces of opportunism. The only shooting he claimed to regret was that of John Sturkey. Ultimately, he conceded that he was ‘just a cold-blooded killer’.
    He confessed to the 1959 murder of thirty-three-year-old Patricia Vinico Berkman, lover of local radio star Fotis Hountas. She had received multiple stab wounds to the head as she lay in bed in her apartment in South Perth. Furthermore, he claimed to have killed wealthy twenty-two-year-old socialite Jillian Brewer later that same year. A twenty-year-old deaf mute, Darryl Beamish, had confessed to killing her but later claimed that he had been forced to make the confession. Nevertheless, he was found guilty and given a death sentence. Cooke, however, cast doubt on that verdict by recalling tiny details about the flat. He also solved a mystery about the murder. When the woman’s body was found, all the doors to the flat were locked from the inside and there was no sign of forced entry. Cooke explained that he had stolen one of the dead woman’s keys when he had broken into the flat a few months previously. The appeal court judges did not believe Cooke’s confession, but at least Beamish did not hang; his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
    Eric Edgar Cooke had no such luck. He was hanged in Fremantle Prison on 26 October 1964, the last man to be hanged in Australia.
    Unlucky to the bitter end.

William ‘The Mutilator’ Macdonald
     
     
     
     
    He became a killer on the spur of the moment, he later claimed. It was 1960 and William Macdonald, a thirty-six-year-old emigrant from England started drinking with fifty-five-year-old Amos Hurst in a hotel near Roma Street in Brisbane, Australia. They repaired to Hurst’s room in the hotel and continued the session, both becoming extremely drunk. Macdonald suddenly felt an uncontrollable urge to strangle Hurst and