Family's life of mixed emotions
On the same day every year, she walks down death row, flowers in hand, to a cell where the condemned once waited for the noose and a long drop. Within the walls of the old Fremantle prison, she lays the stems and petals down in memory of the last man to hang in WA.
The nation knew him as the Nedlands Monster, the Night Caller, the notorious serial killer who murdered eight people between 1959 and 1963.
The woman with the flowers knew Eric Edgar Cooke by a different name. Jennifer Cooke called him Dad.
Four streets and five decades away from the house in Rivervale where Cooke lived with his seven children, his widow Sarah "Sally" Cooke, now 78, sat in her home this week with two of their five surviving children, Jennifer, 55, and Tony, 57.
The sins of the father, the betrayal and crimes of a husband, are things each has dealt with in very different ways.
Tomorrow it will be 50 years since Cooke went on a rampage in the western suburbs, shooting five people and plunging Perth into a state of fear.
It was neither the first nor the last time that he killed but, on the eve of that anniversary, his family spoke to _The West Australian _.
Five decades on, they still feel compelled to offer condolences to victims not of their making.
Their own personal struggles on the long journey towards a place of healing, their determination to be defined as something more than the wife and children of a serial killer, are something they neither expect nor ask sympathy for.
Jennifer Cooke, who has never spoken publicly and now goes by a different name, dabbed at her eyes as she visited a confusing place within herself, where a six-year-old girl's memories of a doting father struggle to reconcile with the terrible truth of his life and crimes.
She remembers a man who played with her and bought her a big doll, who a week before he was executed wrote her a message on a torn piece of napkin smuggled out of his cell.
It read: "To my princess, with love forever in my heart, Daddy."
She still has the napkin and an abundance of hurt and anger. The same man who penned those words caused so much pain.
"I feel very sad that my father did what he did," she said.
Eric Edgar Cooke and his wife, Sally.
"It's inexcusable. I feel for the families and the victims. I missed out on a father. That is the ultimate price I had to pay and I'm angry at my father for doing that to me."
Jennifer's annual pilgrimage to her father's cell on October 26, the anniversary of his execution nearly 49 years ago, is something she has done alone and without the knowledge of her mother and brother.
Tony, dry eyed, said he believed the fact that his sister was only six when Cooke hanged had a lot to do with the discrepancies between their recollections of the man they called Dad.
"That age gap was enormous," Jennifer said. "At the time, I remember Dad as being really loving. I think I had a bond with my father because there were already two boys, and then I came along, and I was his little princess, his little girl.
Sally Cooke with children Tony, left, Derick, Tim, Jennifer, Rosie (on her mother's lap) and Leone.
"I was the apple of his eye really, he treated me very well. I have fond memories."
Tony said his earliest memories were of being cruelly lashed with words or beaten by angry hands, or watching his disabled older brother Michael "getting it for nothing".
"My memories of him were not that he was always bad but there was always this edge, that he could fly into a rage," he said.
Only Sally knew both the charming Jekyll and the violent Hyde that was Eric Edgar Cooke.
The note written by Cooke on a piece of napkin to his daugther, Jennifer
It was 1953 when she met the man who would father her seven children, a charismatic truck driver with a hare lip and a hard-luck background who worked at the metropolitan markets in West Perth, where she had a job as a waitress.
"I was 18 when I met him, 19 when I married him," Sally said.
"He was quite nice. He was 21 and the most handsome looking bloke."
