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Cooke's final walk still echoes

Fifty years ago tomorrow, Eric Edgar Cooke, 33, sat on a stool next to a bucket in a tiny white cell and prepared for the gallows.

He had been given 333 days in Fremantle Prison to contemplate how his end would come.

Here he was, early on October 26, 1964, showered and in new jail clothes with ties, not buttons, in case WA's most notorious killer planned one last act of defiance.

FULL COVERAGE: ERIC EDGAR COOKE

Even before sunrise that Monday, Cooke was raised from cell 12 by the guards who would walk him through his final hours.

They were hand-picked for seniority and relationships built with Cooke since his arrest for the crimes that changed Perth.

One was David Campbell, who had watched over Cooke for months. Today, he remembers in vivid detail the last execution in WA and his part in it.

"He was polite, well-mannered, well-behaved and respectful in here but everyone knew what he had done," Mr Campbell said.


Fremantle Prison tour Guide David Campbell. Picture: Ian Munro/The West Australian


Cooke was the 154th and last person hanged in WA and by that time the preparation for an execution was done in minute detail.

About 10 days earlier, Cooke was measured and weighed so the length of rope needed could be calculated. And then the men who would accompany him on that final walk were selected.

Mr Campbell began work in jails seven years earlier and the Irishman quickly rose through the ranks because of a personable style that exuded authority but with a sympathetic ear.

"I tried to be as hard and as fair as I could and the prisoners seemed to respect that," he said.

"I never had much trouble, certainly not from Cooke."

Hard to believe, given why he was there. Perth had never had a monster like the Night Caller, a serial killer who murdered eight people between 1959 and 1963 and tried to kill 14 more.

The ripples of Cooke's terror reverberated for decades - for his family, the families of victims and, shockingly, men wrongly convicted for some of his crimes.

It took more than 40 years for Darryl Beamish and John Button to be cleared of killing Jillian Brewer and Rosemary Anderson, though Cooke confessed to the crimes on his last day on earth.

That confession was in what Mr Campbell still calls the "death cell", where condemned prisoners were taken before the other inmates awoke to avoid potentially dangerous tensions.

As 8am neared, every jail staff member was at work and every inmate was in the exercise yard.

"On those days there was an electricity running through the place," Mr Campbell said. In Rivervale, Cooke's family watched the clock at a neighbour's house, with his children given a rare day off school. Wife Sally said her goodbyes the previous day in the sterile, pale blue visiting room with a metal table bolted to the concrete floor.

Years later, Mr Campbell says, she would return to sit in that same visiting cell and remember.

The only visitors for Cooke on his last day were officials to observe the sentence Justice Sir John Virtue had handed down.


Eric Cooke with investigating police.


As the prison clock chimed eight times, the swift final walk began, with the four guards and Cooke pausing only to place a cloth hood over his head.

Only Mr Campbell, who is still a tour guide at the long-closed jail, knows who pulled the lever to end Cooke's life.

Only Mr Campbell heard Cooke's last words but he will not reveal that either, except to say the killer accepted his fate.

"When that trapdoor opened, the sound reverberated around the whole prison - and then it was done," Mr Campbell said.