October 26

Eric Edgar Cooke was born on February 25, 1931. He was born with a cleft lip and was routinely bullied as a child. He rather consistently got “Does not play well with others” noted in his school records. As an adult Cooke’s behavior tended to be a bit, how shall I put it, testy? He would randomly run people over with his car; knock on strangers doors and when someone opened the door he would shoot them. His inter-personal skills were pretty much limited to random acts of senseless violence and mayhem, qualities not much in demand at the time. He was eventually caught, tried, convicted and sentenced to death. I’m not certain but I would guess that his wife and seven children breathed a collective sigh of relief when the verdict was read. On the 26th in 1964, Cooke was hanged at Fremantle Prison in Australia. He was the last person in Western Australia to be executed. In what I find to be a charmingly ironic event, Cooke was buried in the very same grave as Martha Rendell. Rendell has her own claim to fame: she was hanged on October 6, 1909 and was the last woman to be hanged in Western Australia.