Australian Serial Killers - The rage for revenge (True Crime)

by Gordon Kerr

  Australian Serial Killers

  The rage for revenge

  GORDON KERR

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  Contents

  Eric Edgar Cooke

  William ‘The Mutilator’ Macdonald

  Paul Charles Denyer

  Ivan Milat

  The Snowtown Murderers

  John Wayne Glover

  Peter Dupas

  Catherine and David Birnie

  Eric Edgar Cooke

  The city of Perth in Western Australia lies more than 1,600 miles away from the nearest major city, Adelaide. Perhaps, back in the 1960s, it was this isolation that made its inhabitants so relaxed. It was the kind of place where people rarely bothered to lock the doors of their houses or their cars; they were friendly and trusted each other, always ready to lend a helping hand.

  That all changed one summer night in 1963 when Eric Edgar Cooke unleashed a one-man crime wave, a spree of senseless killing that shocked Perth, changing the city and its inhabitants forever.

  Cooke had already killed, in 1959, when he broke into a house owned by a divorced woman who lived alone. As she slept in her bedroom, he searched the rest of her house for cash and valuables. Finding none, he entered the bedroom but was surprised to find the woman awake. She leapt out of bed and struggled with him until he fumbled in his pocket for the small knife he carried in case of emergencies. He plunged it into her body several times, killing her.

  He had never had much of a chance. Born in Perth in 1931, with a cleft palate, he underwent a successful operation to improve his looks. But his speech was never quite right and he was inevitably bullied at school. Things were not much better at home. His father was a violent alcoholic who beat his wife, son and two daughters regularly with both fists and a belt. His father hated Eric so much that if his mother seemed to be paying too much attention to him, she was beaten for it.

  Needless to say, he became a withdrawn, quiet child, with few friends. He also began to suffer from headaches and blackouts which were not helped by a bad fall from a bicycle and injuries received when he unwittingly dived into a pool of shallow water when he was fourteen. He was examined by doctors who, initially suspecting some kind of brain damage, carried out an exploratory operation. None was found.

  Cooke was kicked out of a number of schools for disruptive behaviour and by the age of fourteen had dropped out of the education system altogether. He found work, but as his father often spent his wages on booze, all his earnings had to be given to his mother to help feed and clothe herself and his sisters.

  Life went from bad to worse. At sixteen, he made the mistake of trying to protect his mother from one of his father’s drunken beatings. He ended up in hospital for three weeks, telling doctors that he had been in a fight with other boys.

  Eventually, he was called up to do his national service and finally learned something. Unfortunately for Perth and a number of its inhabitants, it was how to use a rifle.

  He had already begun his criminal career before going into the army. Giving all his earnings to his mother left him little to live on and he had resorted to housebreaking to bolster his wages. It was easy with all those unlocked doors. While the occupants watched television, he would sneak in and raid their purses and wallets. Not only would he steal, however. He became a peeping tom, enjoying watching women get ready for bed or making love with their husbands.

  Demobbed from the army, he carried on where he had left off, breaking and entering and sometimes, when he got bored or found nothing worth stealing, vandalising the house he was in or even setting fire to it. Eventually, however, he was caught, his fingerprints connecting him with numerous burglaries. He went to prison for three years.

  In 1953, aged twenty-two, he married an eighteen-year-old British immigrant by the name of Sally and he would have seven children with her, although even now his bad luck continued – one of his sons was born with a developmental disability, while a daughter was born without a right arm. He was working, however, as a truck driver, although at the weekend he pursued his criminal activities to bring in some extra cash.

  The law caught up with him again in 1955 when he was given two years’ hard labour 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 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 put his hands round his neck and squeezed until blood spurted from the other man’s mouth. Macdonald punched him hard in the face and let him slide to the floor. He was dead.

  He removed his clothes and lay him on the bed before carefully washing the blood off his clothes and hands. He left the room, calmly walked out of the hotel and returned to his lodgings.

  He worried for a few days until, picking up a newspaper, he found an obituary of Hurst. He was astonished to read that he had died of a heart attack. No mention was made of him being strangled. It seemed that Hurst’s death had initially been considered to be suspicious but the coroner was unable to establish conclusively whether the bruising on his neck had killed him or whether he had received it in a fight before his death. They opted for the fight and, to his delight, Macdonald had got away with murder.

  William Macdonald had always been different to the rest. Born Allen Ginsberg in Liverpool in 1924, his childhood had been a lonely and solitary one – as is often the case with serial killers. He had almost no friends and was unable to form lasting relationships.

  Eventually, his life going nowhere, at the age of nineteen he enlisted in the British Army. It was there that he would have the experience that would define his life and tell him who and what he was. He was raped by a corporal who threatened to kill him if he told anyone. There was no problem for Macdonald, however, because not only did he enjoy the experience, he wanted more. He was, he discovered to his surprise, homosexual.

  He had suffered from behavioural problems since an early age and while still a child had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. The same problem resulted in his discharge from the army and in 1947, aged twenty-three, his behaviour was becoming so erratic that his brother had him committed to an asylum. It was an experience filled with horror that ended when his mother obtained his release. He still heard voices and suffered from delusions, however, but when he sought help the only treatment once again was for him to be incarcerated in an institution. It made little difference. When he was released three months later, the same old voices were still echoing in his head. Resolving to make a major change in his life, in 1949 he changed his name by deed poll from Allen Ginsberg to William Macdonald and emigrated to Canada. Six years later, he relocated to Australia, just one of the thousands of Britons hoping to find opportunity in the wide open spaces Down Under.

  Sex was still a problem, however. In Australia, as it had been in Britain and Canada, homosexuality was a criminal offence. Sexual liaisons had to be sought in grubby public toilets or in secluded areas of public parks. He had not been in the country for very long before he was arrested for soliciting sex in a public toilet with a man who happened to be an undercover police officer. Macdonald was put on two years’ probation.

  Murder seemed to give him just as big a thrill as sex, however, and having got away with one, he decided to look for another victim. He purchased a knife and before long was getting drunk with a potential target in a bar. They bought a bottle of sherry and took it to a local park to continue their carousing. The other man fell to the ground, dead drunk. Macdonald felt the urge to kill again, straddling the other man’s comatose body and pulling out his knife. Before he plunged it into his companion, however, he felt the urge suddenly leave his mind. He slipped the knife back into its sheath and walked away, leaving behind a very drunk but very fortunate man.

  He adopted another new identity – Alan Edward Brennan – when he moved to Sydney in 1961 and was employed as a sorter by the Australian Postal Department. Soon, he was a well-known figure in the public toilets and cruising sections of the city’s parks.

  On one venture into a park, Green Park in the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst, he befriended a man named Alfred Greenfield. He lured Greenfield to a well-known hangout for drinkers, the alcoves at the nearby Domain Swimming Baths, by telling him he had some booze secreted there. When they arrived and found a secluded spot, Macdonald waited until Greenfield was comatose, pulled on a
plastic raincoat and drew his knife. He stabbed Greenfield in the neck and body repeatedly until he was certain he was dead. He then removed his trousers and underpants and sliced off his genitals which he later threw into Sydney Harbour. He took off the blood-splattered raincoat, wrapped the knife in it and went home.

  When the body was discovered next day there was outrage. The media went into great detail about the shocking nature of the killing and dubbed the perpetrator ‘the Mutilator’.

  The police, however, were puzzled. It was a crime without any obvious motive. There was speculation that it may have been a crime of passion, sparked by jealousy, but nothing emerged to support that theory. The investigation stalled, even with a $2,000 reward for information.

  The next one, on 21 November, was easy. Forty-one-year-old Ernest Cobbin was already drunk when Macdonald met him and it did not take much to lure him to the toilet of a nearby park. Even drunk, however, Cobbin must have been puzzled when his companion slipped on a plastic raincoat, especially as it was not raining. His bemusement did not last long, however, because Macdonald pulled out a knife with a six-inch blade that he had recently purchased and plunged it into his throat. Again and again he stabbed Cobbin, spraying the toilet cubicle with blood from his severed jugular vein.

  As Cobbin lay dead, the blood from his neck reduced to a trickle, ‘the Mutilator’ pulled down his trousers and underwear and sliced off his victim’s penis and testicles. This time he wanted to be close to them before disposing of them, however. He took them home, washed them and took them to bed with him. Next day, he threw them off Sydney Harbour Bridge.

  The media went crazy but the police still had nothing to go on. It was another murder with no motive. The victim had no enemies and there were no witnesses. Months passed and they were no closer to finding the serial killer whose actions were hogging the front pages of every newspaper in Australia.