Eric Edgar Cooke (25 February 1931 – 26 October 1964), nicknamed the Night Caller and later the Nedlands Monster, was an Australian serial killer who terrorised the city of Perth, Western Australia, from September 1958 to August 1963.

[1] Following a four-year killing spree, Cooke was eventually arrested and made extensive admissions to his crimes, including to ones others had been wrongfully convicted of.

Eric Edgar Cooke was born on 25 February 1931 in Victoria Park, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, and was the eldest of three children.

Though very good at subjects that required retentive memory and manual dexterity, Cooke was expelled from Subiaco State School for stealing money from a teacher's purse at the age of six.

[2] Cooke left school at age 14 to work as a delivery boy for Central Provision Stores in order to support the family.

At the age of 16, he worked as a hammer boy in the blacksmith section of the workshop at Midland Junction, where he always signed his lunch bag "Al Capone".

[6][7] Starting at age 17, Cooke spent his nights involved in petty crimes, vandalism and arson; he would later serve eighteen months in jail for burning down a church after he was rejected in a choir audition.

[8] At the age of 21, Cooke joined the regular Australian Army, but was discharged three months later after it was discovered that, before enlistment, he had had a juvenile criminal record.

[2] On 14 November 1953, Cooke, then aged 22, married Sarah (Sally) Lavin, a 19-year-old waitress,[9] at the Cannington Methodist Church (demolished 1995).

Cooke found it easy to steal cars at night and sometimes returned stolen vehicles without the owners becoming aware of the theft.

In September 1955, after crashing a car and requiring hospitalisation, Cooke was sentenced to two years hard labour on a charge of unlawful use of a motor vehicle; he was ultimately released from Fremantle Prison just prior to Christmas, 1956.

After his release, he took to wearing gloves while committing crimes in order to avoid leaving his fingerprints, which had provided evidence for his prior breaking and entering convictions.

One victim was strangled to death with the cord from a bedside lamp, after which Cooke raped the corpse, disrobed and dragged it to a neighbour's lawn, then sexually penetrated it with an empty whisky bottle.

Cooke's murder victims were Pnena (Penny) Berkman, Jillian McPherson Brewer, John Lindsay Sturkey, George Ormond Walmsley, Rosemary Anderson, Constance Lucy Madrill, and Shirley Martha McLeod.

[12] After a rifle was found hidden in a Geraldton wax bush on Rookwood Street, Mount Pleasant, in August 1963, ballistic tests proved the gun had been used in the McLeod murder.

[14] In his confessions, Cooke demonstrated an exceptionally good memory for the details of his crimes irrespective of how long ago he had committed the offences.

The book Presumed Guilty by Bret Christian includes details of Cooke's confession, made over two days in September 1963 at Fremantle Prison to his Legal Aid lawyer Desmond Heenan.

[19][21] Ten minutes before the sentence was carried out, Cooke swore on the Bible that he had killed Brewer and Anderson, claims which had been previously rejected because other people had already been convicted of those murders.

[22] John Button was wrongly convicted for the death of his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson, who died in Royal Perth Hospital (RPH) at 2:30am in the early morning of 10 February 1963.

Over subsequent decades, Button and his supporters – including Christian and Blackburn – continued to press for a retrial, a campaign that included a well-publicised 1998 simulated reenactment of Anderson's death, conducted by crash test experts, with both a Holden matching one believed to have been used by Cooke on the night in question, and three Simca Aronde sedans like the car owned by Button, which were driven toward a crash test dummy.

[25] Estelle Blackburn spent six years writing the biographical story Broken Lives, about Cooke's life and criminal career, focusing particularly on the devastation left on his victims and their families.

Suzanne Falkiner's biography of Stow revealed that it piqued his sense of humour that Perth denizens at the time of the murders would knock on doors and say 'It's the Nedlands Monster'.

A 2000 memoir by Robert Drewe, The Shark Net[27] – later made into a three-part television series – provided one author's impressions of the effect the murders had on the Perth of that era.