Edgar Eric Cooke: The Night Caller Who Terrorised Western Australia

Between 1959 and 1963 we knew him only as the Night Caller, a mystery killed who terrorised the people of Perth between 1959 and 1963.

In the years that followed, the name Eric Edgar Cooke would live on in infamy within Australia’s criminal history.

Eric Cooke’s Childhood

Eric Edgar Cooke was born on the 25th of February 1931. He was the product of an unhappy marriage between Vivian and Christine Cooke, that had only come about as his mother was pregnant with him.

Cooke’s father Vivian was an alcoholic who beat both him and his mother on a frequent basis. Cooke’s mother Christine tried to escape this by sleeping in the staff room of her job at the Como Hotel. Cooke in turn hid underneath the family home, or roamed the streets at night.

Of small and somewhat slight stature, Cooke was the target of bullies for most of his life. He was born with a hare lip and cleft palate, and although two operations fixed them on the surface, Cooke was left with a slight facial deformity and a speech impediment.

As a child he was very accident prone, which as an adult was attributed to repressed suicidal tendencies. He was once admitted to an asylum for intense headaches and blackouts, which reportedly stopped after a 1949 operation.

Cooke struggled in school and dropped out at the age of 14. He began committing petty crimes, such as theft and burglary, to support himself. He was eventually caught and served time in juvenile detention.

More Reading:

Certainly, he was an odd boy and he turned into a strange teenager who spent his nights involved in petty crimes, vandalism and arson. At the age of 18 he was sentenced to three years in prison for arson, vandalism, stealing, breaking and entering and more. He had been caught after his fingerprints were found at the scene. Little did police know that Cooke wouldn’t make that mistake again. As soon as he was released he joined the army, where it took them three months to realise he had a criminal record.

He was discharged, but had already received a large amount of training in the use of firearms, another skill he wouldn’t soon forget.

Eric Cooke Marries Sally Lynch

Eric Edgar Cooke married Sally Lavinia Cooke (née Lynch) in 1952. Sally was a 19-year-old waitress and Eric was 22, and they would go on to have seven children. During this time he continued his spate of crimes, which now included a number as a peeping tom. Then in 1955 he stole a car and did two years of hard labour. When he was released from prison, Cooke began wearing women’s gloves to hide his fingerprints. By now, he had all the ingredients of a killer.

The Murder of Pnina Berkman: January 1959

Pnina Berkman was born ‘Patricia Grigg’ in Melbourne in 1925. She adopted her husband’s Jewish faith and adopted her new Hebrew name ‘Pnina Berkman’ in 1949. The couple didn’t last, so to get a new start in life, Pnina moved from Melbourne to the smaller city of Perth with her son Gary.

Pnina and young Gary were renting a unit in South Perth, a quiet and safe suburb of Perth. Her new friends Fred and Ruby Pascoe who owned her previous unit in Nedlands dotted on young Gary and often babysat for the single Mum.

During the night of the 30th January 1959, Pnina had Gary babysat by the Pascoe’s whilst she went out for the evening with her neighbour, the Greek-born radio DJ Fotis Fountas. When Pnina got home to her unit, she fell asleep naked on her bed. Cooke crept into Pnina’s unit through a tiny window in her flat, and repeatedly stabbed the young mother with a knife.

Pnian’s DJ boyfriend found her body and reported it to the Police. The public was scandalised both by the murder and the fact that Pnina slept naked and had a lover out of wedlock.

Despite initially pointing the finger at Pnina’s boyfriend (who fled back to his homeland of Greece, never to return), the Police could not find a culprit for the murder. Gary’s father came over from Melbourne to pick up his son, and both the two moved to Israel.

On January 27, 1963, Cooke broke into the home of the family with whom Berkman was staying. He entered her bedroom and attacked her with a knife, stabbing her multiple times in the neck and chest. Berkman’s host family discovered her body the next morning.

Some of his victims were killed after waking while Cooke was robbing their homes, but two were shot while sleeping, and one after answering Cooke’s knock on the door. Once after killing a victim Cooke helped himself to a drink from the victims fridge. In another instance after strangling someone he raped the corpse and then displayed it on a neighbour’s lawn. He was a man without reason, and that made him difficult to catch.

As the crimes were so different from each other, it was hard for the police to narrow down which ones the Night Caller had actually committed. The result of this was that two people were falsely convicted of the two murders. It would take years for justice to be served for them. In investigating the Night Caller, police fingerprinted 30,000 males over the age of 12. They also located and examined more than 60,000 .22 rifles, a favoured weapon of Cooke. Their break came in 1963 after a rifle recovered in a bush on Mount Pleasant was ballistically matched to one of the murder victims. Thinking that the killer may return for the rifle, police set up a hide to wait for him.

The apprehended Cooke 17 days later when he did just that.

Cooke confessed for a number of crimes, including the eight murders and 14 attempted murders. As police took his confessions, they realised that he had an incredible memory of his criminal past. He knew all the details of every crime, regardless of how long ago it had occurred. Cooke confessed to more than 250 burglaries, and was able to tell police in exact detail everything he took, including the number and value of the coins taken from each location.

The Last Hanged Man

At trial, Cooke originally submitted an insanity plea. His lawyers claimed that he suffered from schizophrenia, but the state mental health services testified he was in fact sane. No independent psychiatric specialists were allowed to examine Cooke. After just a three day trial Cooke was convicted of wilful murder and sentenced to death by hanging.

He still had access to an appeal, but Cooke instructed his lawyers not to pursue it. He claimed that he deserved to pay for what he had done. So, on the 26th of October 1964, after 13 months in prison on death row, Cooke was hanged. He became the last person to be hanged in the state of Australia, and was buried in Fremantle Cemetery