The Shark Net

by Robert Drewe

  What? He couldn’t believe this was a proper word he’d said. ‘Yes!’ he agreed quickly. ‘Right! Starfish!’ Then he took a breath and asked him quietly, ‘Where’s the starfish?’

  Crawley was nine or ten miles upriver. Not many starfish that far from the sea. He’d never seen one anyway. None there this day either, and nothing on the shore you’d mistake for one. But hearing him say the word got his hopes up, even after all that time. It made him think things might be changing in the boy’s brain. Maybe a little cog had adjusted itself and moved back into place.

  For a few seconds there on the beach things were pretty strange. Despite the mess of the icecream and the zinc and sand, the boy’s face had changed. He seemed on the ball and older than nine, even a normal nine. There was another thing. When he’d said ‘starfish’, he’d stared deep into his eyes. His look was sort of wise, like he was gazing right into his soul.

  Eric told them this wasn’t just him looking back all regretful and imagining things after they’d happened. The picture was so clear. It was still as sharp to him as five minutes ago. He said he bet his nerves showed that afternoon. In a way he’d been more jumpy then than he was now.

  ‘Good boy!’ he’d said. His own voice sounded enthusiastic and fake to him, like someone in a commercial. But he’d never been more deadly serious. ‘Thinking about starfish? That’s the boy!’ He was desperate to keep the mood and the moment going. Draw it out. So he quickly scratched a star in the wet sand.

  ‘Look, a starfish.’ But his starfish didn’t seem to register. The boy’s wise look was fading. He quickly drew another star shape. It was a pretty panicky star he scratched out this time. But the blind was already coming down. That’s the only way he could describe it. Like shutters. The focus had gone again. Now the look in the boy’s eyes was just his old lights-on-but-nobody-home look. Then he started making the old bossy noises that meant he wanted something right away, and hurry up about it.

  Everything hopeful drained out of him then. He could’ve cried at the nnh, nnh bellowing noises and those gimme, gimme grabbing motions. It was like when they first realised he was not progressing. It was like seeing his little girl’s arm the first time. He cried and then he was angry. He couldn’t be bothered trying to catch on to what it was he wanted. It was always something impossible. Bring me those seagulls! Hand me that cloud! Let me drive that speedboat! Make it happen!

  This one was a real tantrum. He was like a two-year-old in a supermarket. You couldn’t ignore him, of course. Icecream in his eyebrows and ears and trickling down his chest, people turning around at the racket, seeing a screaming boy and giving the father disapproving snaky looks. After a few minutes of this, he grabbed him up, a bit roughly, carried him in his arms into the river and kept walking.

  The boy kept screaming. The river was just stirring up with the sea breeze and afternoon tide. Underfoot it was all oozy silt and algae, and colder than it looked, but he was determined.

  For a while the boy kept up the ruckus, then when the river got deeper he clung on tight, moaning and grimly hanging on. It took a while but he carried him out until the water was up to his own chest and deep enough to submerge them both, and he did.

  When they came up the boy was coughing and sobbing, but then he went quiet and just clung on tight all the way back to shore. He felt like a bastard doing it, but he was still so bitterly disappointed he was numb. As he waded in to shore he felt like he’d been teased and swindled by the world’s most twisted conman. A real sadistic, mocking bastard, that God.

  Back on the beach the boy stayed quiet and well behaved, squatting at the water’s edge, playing his sandy little games while he took some deep breaths. Get a grip, he thought. The little fellow couldn’t help how he was. He was his boy. Be thankful for small mercies – at least the bloody icecream had washed off him!

  Those games were such solemn bits of nonsense you couldn’t help your heart going out to him. First he carefully placed mussel shells in a hole and covered it up, and then he jabbed jellyfish with a stick. Watching him so busy and frowning away to himself with the shells and jellyfish, he’d really tried to understand what made him tick. He studied him real hard.

  Small for nine. Thinner than the younger kids, more pointy-looking and slightly paler. Not abnormal to look at – just the far edge of normal. You noticed his knees and elbows more, and the way his legs bent out to the sides. The other kids were as brown as berries but watching him it struck him that he was the same colour as the sand.

  Everything about him – his skin, even his faded khaki shorts – blended right into the sand. He was like one of those little ghost crabs. Now you saw him, now you didn’t. If you leaned back a bit and half-closed your eyes, the beach absorbed him. It soaked him up. He hardly had an outline. He was nearly invisible. If it wasn’t for his jerky little movements and his noises now and then you wouldn’t know he was there.

  As the murderer waited for the morning of his hanging the people of Perth tried to outdo each other in their claims, if not of kinship (no one wanted to claim that), then at least of a firm and everyday connection to him.

  Suddenly there was a kudos in having once worked alongside him, or even being related to someone who had, at one of his many brief jobs: at Krasnostein’s Scrap Metal, for instance, or the city fruit and vegetable markets, or indeed at Dunlop Rubber.

  There were at least another four people, all women, more reluctant in claiming an association, who eventually came to the realisation that it had been he who’d assaulted them in their beds in Nedlands. One he’d hit with a fire poker and turned into an epileptic, another he hit with a knuckle-duster, one he was trying to strangle and rape until her cat attacked him and he ran off, one he stabbed with an umbrella.

  And then there were the other women, some badly injured, whom he’d run down with cars at night.

  Many hundreds of West Australians, from Premier Dave Brand down – and my family, of course – had unknowingly had him in their homes, scores of them more than once, many of them several times. He had entered so many houses that the police gave up trying to collate all the offences.

  Two other people had a strong connection to the murderer. Darryl Beamish’s death sentence was commuted to life, and John Button served all his ten-year term. They would think of him every day of their long sentences. And for the rest of their lives, even after their innocence was officially recognised.

  4

  THE MURDERER’S WIDOW RECALLS THE EXECUTION

  I felt compelled to ask Eric’s wife, Sally, about her life with him. She had been loyal and attentive during his trial and imprisonment – never missing a visiting day – but had never spoken publicly. For years there was a great curiosity in the community about their relationship. (Did she know or suspect?) But there was also a deference to her own suffering and her unique position as the Nedlands Monster’s widow.

  Eventually, much later, I would ask her how she’d been able to cope with her husband’s execution. I especially wondered about her feelings in the minutes before his hanging.

  A remarkably light-spirited and generous woman, her Liverpool accent still pronounced after many years in Australia, she didn’t seem to mind me asking. She served me tea and a freshly baked cake and as a cuckoo clock ticked loudly in her cheery front room I told her how the terrible suspense of watching the clock as the seconds ticked away to the execution was fixed in my imagination. Even thinking about it now made me feel nine years old and anxious again. Had she counted the seconds?

  ‘No, no, dear,’ she said. ‘What with feeding the kids and getting them ready for school and all the rest of it, eight o’clock sort of went past without me noticing.’

  I looked at her. Surely she was joking.

  ‘Then the next-door neighbour came over and said, “Don’t you feel like crying?” And I said, “No, no, maybe later.” Actually I … Life wasn’t easy with Eric Cooke. He killed every bit of trust. Every bit of respect, admiration, love, was gone at the end. I was
there just because I was his wife and that was it. It made it easier to cope, it made it easier. Oh yes, oh yes.’

  Sally and Eric met at the metropolitan markets in West Perth. She was a waitress at the market cafeteria. She’d been there a year when he started work over at the market store. ‘I was swept away, the same as any teenager. We went out on the eighth of June and we got married on the fourteenth of November the same year, 1953. A whirlwind romance. I was nineteen, he was twenty-two.

  ‘He was Methodist when I met him. He’d been in trouble, so he’d got involved in the Methodist church when he was a teenager. He told me he’d been in bother. He didn’t tell me about arson or life bonds or anything like that, just that he’d stolen. He went from stealing, arson, right through to killing people. In all different ways. Incredible, really.’

  His eight murders had never dawned on her. ‘He was never home; he was never a husband, put it that way. If he’d been home and then suddenly started going out I would’ve realised he was doing something, but he was always going out womanising all our married life, and in some ways I was just so relieved that I was going to get a break from all the hassle, the arguing. We were always arguing about the going out. In the end I knew I couldn’t change him, so I just let him go. He’d always have big excuses when he came home. He’d been out to a nightclub or whatever. If he said he’d been with somebody it was always somebody you could check up with, therefore you don’t check up. You let it go.

  ‘I suspected him of infidelity rather than crime, oh yes. I mean, I lost count of how many women he’d been with. From a year after we got married right to the day he was arrested. Sometimes he’d go away for a week and then come home and I’d think, “He’s been with another woman!” That’s all I used to think. I thought it only concerned us, really. Nobody else.

  ‘If I’d cared a lot it would have been harder at the end. It made it easier. To be able to just go out and talk to a neighbour, which I’d never been able to do, to be able to go out for walks without his permission. Oh, yes. Possessive! I could never have any money. He used to lock the wardrobe with the money in it and take the key to work with him. One day I took the children to the park and he was at work and he knocked off half an hour earlier than I thought and we got home a bit later than him, and he said, “Do I have to lock you and the kids inside when I go out?” I wasn’t allowed to do anything. When he was arrested it was such a relief just to be able to go for a walk and buy the kids an icecream and … you know.

  ‘I often thank God I didn’t ever try to leave him. I mean, I didn’t know he was killing and all that, but now that I know he was killing I think he would have killed me, because I was his possession. I wasn’t allowed to leave. And yet he was out with every woman and never home. He was a liar. A very good liar. I think he even believed his own lies, I really do. He could repeatedly tell the same lie and never trip up. So convincing. He’d say, “You can check with So-and-so.”

  ‘I was real green, talk about naive. I’d always lived with Mum and my sisters, never gone out. I was thirteen when we came to Australia. Mum brought myself and my two young sisters out from Liverpool after the war. Dad had just died and her mother and family were already here. We were Ten Pound Poms. I love Australia. I’ve never been back to England, even for a visit. I love the Australian people. I love everything about it. Great country.

  ‘Eric’s father was Australian and his mother was Scottish. His father, Vivian, known as Snowy, was violent with the drink. Eric never drank, never smoked. Coca-Cola, that was his drink. He loved Passiona and Coca-Cola. Never drank tea, never drank coffee. No hot drinks of any kind. No religious reason for it. I used to think it was because of his harelip, his cleft palate.

  ‘He loved any sport – hockey, swimming. Very particular about his skin. Never a mark on him. He used to swim across the river, a very strong swimmer. A member of the Scarborough Surf Lifesaving Club, but he stole money from there and was tossed out. Before I met him, before we were married. I don’t think he’d actually gone to prison before I met him but he’d come close. They’d put him on a life bond a couple of months before I went out with him. He’d stole money and then set fire to the building to cover up his tracks. The old Boan’s store. He got away with a fair bit of money. He had it hidden under his bed but they found it. He’d had a lot of small crimes but that was a big one for a boy. After I married him he got caught for loitering and being a peeping tom and did a month on each charge. And then of course he stole a car from the markets and did two years, one for stealing and one for breaking his bond.

  ‘When he got caught for stealing the car I woke up that he was a thief. He stole it to go and see a girl in Bunbury. She was in town with the country women’s hockey team. He didn’t make it. He crashed the car in Yarloop and finished up in Royal Perth Hospital. Completely wiped the car off. Brand new car. The boy in the markets he’d stolen the car from, who’d known him for years, felt bad about it. He came to me and said, “Sally, we could’ve worked something out,” thinking about me and the kids, and Eric in gaol. I said, “Don’t worry about it. He committed the crime and he’s got to face the sentence.”

  ‘After that he was good until he had this rampage and he started killing people. It never dawned on me, all the killings I’d read about, and I even said to him one day, “God, I do feel sorry for this poor fellow. They must be desperate. They must have nobody to go home to, nobody who cares.” And he said, “Sally, it could be somebody with everything to live for.” Never ever dawned on me he could kill anybody. I knew he was a liar, a cheat, a thief – you couldn’t do anything about that. But not a killer.

  ‘When the police came Tony answered the door and said, “Mum, there’s a big man with a hat at the door.” And I thought, “Oh my God!” and I went to the door and I said, “What have you got him for this time?” thinking stealing, and he said, “Can I come in, Mrs Cooke?” Detective-Sergeant Bill Nielson and another detective. They sat at the table and asked me a few questions. “When did he go out?” And I said, “Yesterday morning.” They said, “You didn’t worry when he didn’t come home last night?” They had him in the lockup, of course. And I said, “I don’t worry if he doesn’t come home for a week or a fortnight, he’s only with other women. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve got seven little kids here.” I said, “What have you got him for?” and he said, “Well, we’re still questioning him. We’ve got a warrant and we want to search the place.” I said, “Go for your life.” And with that I’ve never seen so many detectives. They were everywhere. Up in the roof, going into the cistern in the toilet.

  ‘Anyway, they went away and they came back and said, “You’d better sit down.” And they told me Eric had confessed to doing the boy Sturkey. I said, “Oh, dear God!” And Mr Nielson said, “You can come and see him tomorrow. Can you get a sitter for the children?” and I said yes. When he came and got me, Mr Nielson said I was going to get a terrible shock when I got to the lockup because Eric had confessed to all the others. Right back to 1959 when he killed Patricia Berkman. Mr Nielson said, “It shocked me so it’s going to shock you. The poor girl Lucy Madrill, he strangled her, dragged her out into the back yard and raped her and she was already dead.” I said to Mr Nielson, “No, he couldn’t!” and he said, “Well, he’s confessed to it, told us everything just the way we found her.”

  ‘It was all proven. He did all of them. Oh, Mr Nielson said, “Why couldn’t he have been on the police force? What a memory.” He was a mastermind for detail. He remembered everything – where he’d thrown the skin-diving knife in the river the night he killed the woman in 1959. He said, “It’ll be down there,” and they dived down there and brought it up. He said, “I’ve thrown the rifle off the bridge. It’s down below that post. I’ve memorised it.” And there it was. The evidence was down there. So it was all proven. Mr Nielson said to him, “Did you realise you’d be caught?” and he said, “I knew I would, one day.”

  ‘I don’t know why he did it. People say a gr
udge against the world because of his harelip. Kids were cruel to Eric. He never talked about it. I did hear he was beaten a lot and that he used to jump in between his mum and dad when they were having a row and that’s how he got himself hit, trying to protect his mother. Whether Snowy actually set out to belt Eric or he just got in the way, I don’t know. I don’t think he had a very nice life. Snowy was always drunk. Eric never spoke about it, never ever. But he always visited his father on Father’s Day and birthdays, hardly the thing to do if you’d been beaten a lot. Maybe he blocked it out as he got older.

  ‘His mother never spoke about it either, or the life they had. And she had a bad life with Eric. He was expelled from school in first grade. First grade, mind you. He was expelled four or five times, until in the end she just pulled him out of school. He was always getting in trouble. There was no point leaving him there. But my eldest daughter was born with one arm, her right arm missing, and she had no difficulty at school. But talking. I mean, he was a pretty bad talker. They called him Birdmouth. And his father did too. His mother told me that when Eric was born he was very ugly and his father said, “If you think I’m going to keep that misfit all my life you’ve got another think coming!” He was really an alcoholic, and she left him. She changed her name back to Miss Erica Edgar and got a legal separation through the courts, and then went back to him. Eric was twelve and he never forgave her for that, going back to the same environment. But she lived under the name Miss Edgar until she died.

  ‘As a family we don’t talk about the bad days at all. It’s as if they never happened. When tragedy hits we all stick together. It was hard when Michael drowned while Eric was in gaol. But I don’t know, I’ve always believed we’re born to a life and we’re born to a destiny. And you’ve just got to not ask questions and keep going. We lost my youngest daughter, Rosalie, with cancer on her twenty-first birthday. And my little grandson has cerebral palsy, can’t do anything about it. A nurse told me once I had a special gift – the gift of acceptance. And I said I’d often wondered why I react different to other people. When my daughter died I went out and planted a bed of petunias. When my sister died I went window-shopping. That’s the thing I do. I do feel a lot, I just react different. The nurse said, “Not many people are born with that gift. Don’t knock it.” ’