Eric Edgar Cooke terrorised the people of Perth for years, but they didn’t know it.
The people didn’t know that the nighttime prowler breaking into people’s homes and stealing money from purses while they slept, the peeping Tom who watched women getting changed and young couples getting busy, the maniac striking women down in deliberate hit-and-runs, the murderer of two young, well-known socialites, and the perpetrator of the Australia Day weekend massacre were all one person. How could they? What kind of a criminal commits such different crimes, with different MOs and no set victim type? Eric Edgar Cooke was a criminal unlike Perth had ever seen before.
EPISODE NOTES:
If Eric Edgar Cooke lived in the early days of criminology, his picture would have been used to model Lombroso's theory of the born criminal. He had a cleft palate and cleft lip, and the surgeries to correct these deformities left serious facial scaring and left him able to speak only in a mumble. In general, he looked like the guy you would have moved away from on the bus. Eric felt constantly rejected from society, and he wanted to strike back, and take back a little bit of the power that those beautiful, rich people held.
At first it was small – stealing pocket change to supplement his income from his manual labour job. Clumsy and accident-prone in his daily life, he realised that at night, sneaking around people’s houses, he was agile and untouchable. He would prowl the streets of Perth night after night, stealing small amounts of money left out, and watching beautiful girls sleeping in their beds.
Soon, that wasn’t enough. Cooke stole cars and began a series of hit-and-runs that were never linked together. Some of his victims died, some sustained life-long injuries. Still that didn’t satisfy him. He stabbed Pnena Berkman to death with a diver’s knife while she slept in her bed. Then he murdered Jillian Brewer with a hatchet. Still not enough. He went on a frenzied massacre on Australia Day, 1963, shooting at five people with a stolen .22 rifle. He got away with it all.
Police wouldn’t link these crimes together for a long ass time… not until after two innocent people were imprisoned for crimes Eric Cooke had committed.
Our main source this week was Estelle Blackburn’s Broken Lives, which discussed the life of Eric Cooke as well as John Button, one of the innocent men locked up for a crime Eric committed. We’ll get into John Button’s story more next episode. The book can be found here https://www.dymocks.com.au/book/broken-lives-by-estelle-blackburn-9781740640732
You can read an article Estelle Blackburn wrote for the West Australian here https://thewest.com.au/news/the-making-of-a-serial-killer-ng-ya-284009
Read more about Cooke on Murderpedia here https://murderpedia.org/male.C/c/cooke-eric-edgar.htm
You can read about Mark Berkman, the son of Pnena Berkman, and his story about finding out what happened to his mother as a result of the book here https://thewest.com.au/news/wa/angels-return-a-childhood-taken-by-violence-ng-ya-343689
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