Ostracized in childhood for his harelip and cleft palate, Eric Cooke grew up an angry, brooding loner in the neighborhood of Perth, Australia. As a young man, he was prone to accidents, suffering repeated mishaps on the job. His injuries included several traumas to the head, and it remains unclear to what extent brain damage may have charted Eric's future course of violence. Sexually, Cooke preferred the non-participating role of a voyeur . He also had a flair for burglary and arson , serving eighteen months in jail for burning down a church where he had lately been rejected in a choir audition. Later, Eric torched a theater, apparently for spite. He was accelerating toward a mental detonation which would rock Australia with its violence, confounding homicide investigators with a scarcity of clues. On February 2, 1959, Pnena Berkman was attacked while sleeping in her Perth apartment, stabbed repeatedly and fatally before she had a chance to struggle with her killer. The police discounted sex and robbery as motives; she had not been raped, and nothing had been stolen. Ten months later, on December 20, Jillian Brewster, age 22, was found in bed at home, another murder victim . Jillian's killer had employed a knife and hatchet, hacking at her face before (or after) he delivered lethal stab wounds. She had died sometime between midnight, December 19, when her fiancee left the house, and 9:00 a.m. the next morning, when her body was discovered. Once again, there was no rape, no sign of robbery. Fifteen months elapsed without a break in the disturbing homicides. The citizens of Perth were happy to forget until, on April 17, 1961, a deaf mute held in jail on unrelated charges suddenly confessed the Brewster killing. He possessed an iron-clad alibi for Pnena Berkman's murder, and in August, at his trial, he would recant the earlier confession, but in vain. Convicted on a murder charge, he was condemned to hang. On April 7, 1961, a middle-aged businessman parked with a young barmaid in the Perth suburb of Cottesloe. Distracted by each other, they were unaware of the approaching gunman as he stood beside their car, took aim, squeezed off a single shot. His bullet drilled the woman's hand and pierced her male companion's neck. Both wounds were superficial, and they managed to provide police with a description of the young man they saw running from the scene. By that time, though, the sniper had already struck again. Within the hour, Perth authorities were notified that local resident George Walmsley had been killed by one shot through the forehead, murdered in the act of answering the doorbell which had roused him out of bed at 4:00 a.m. Nearby, a landlady awakened by sirens of police cruisers rushing to Walmsley's house stopped in to tell her roomer there was unaccustomed action in the neighborhood. She found John Sturkey, age 19, a student, Iying on the open balcony outside his room, a bullet in his head. He died a short time later, at the hospital. It seemed the grisly night would never end. At 8:10 in the morning, officers were told that yet another victim had been found. The latest human target, an accountant, 29, had been shot down sometime within the past six hours. Surgeons saved his life, although he lingered for a time in critical condition. Like the other victims of the shooting spree, he had been wounded by a .22-caliber weapon. On August 10, a married couple coming home at 2 a.m. discovered babysitter Shirley McLeod, age 19, lying dead in their Dalkeith home. The single bullet which had pierced her skull was, once again, a .22. On August 17, an elderly couple gathering wildflowers near the Canning River found a rifle Iying in the brush and called police. Ballistics tests confirmed it was the weapon used to kill the babysitter one week earlier. The rifle was impounded, replaced with a look-alike, and detectives staked out the scene. They waited fifteen days before a man arrived to claim the weapon, and they took him into custody without a struggle. Suspect Eric Cooke was 32 years old, married, the father of seven. Family life, apparently, had failed to calm him down from youthful days of burglary and arson. He confessed to killing Shirley McLeod, and when ballistics tests revealed the captured rifle had not been employed on January 27, he led homicide detectives to the place where a second gun was fished out of the Swan River, near Perth. This time, ballistics matched across the board. Interrogation of the killer failed to yield a motive, Cooke insisting that he shot six people, killing three, because he "just wanted to hurt somebody." Convicted on a triple murder count in late November 1963, Eric Cooke was hanged October 24, 1964. At execution time, police considered him their prime -- and only -- suspect in the hacking deaths from 1959.