Billy Cook (criminal)

William Edward Cook Jr. was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1928, and had ten siblings. When he was five years old, his mother Laura May Cook (née Hinkle) died unexpectedly at the family home. He and his young sister Betty were the first to discover her body. A subsequent coroner's investigation headed by W. G. Hogan ruled cerebral haemorrhage as the cause of death, and noted that she had "apparently been in good health an hour before her body was found." [2] Her obituary oddly does not mention William Cook Sr., her husband at the time and William Cook Jr.'s father; no reason is given for this omission.

Soon after, William Cook Sr. relocated the children to an abandoned mine, eventually leaving them to fend for themselves with a few supplies. They were discovered there by the authorities and all the children were placed into foster care except Cook. A deformed eye and belligerent attitude stopped him being adopted by any family so he became a ward of the state. Cook was eventually placed in the care of a woman who accepted state money to look after him, but they had a poor relationship.

He soon drifted into petty crime and was eventually arrested for truancy. At the age of 12, he told a judge he would prefer a reformatory to more foster care. Cook spent several years in detention before he was transferred, aged 17, to the Missouri State Penitentiary. While in prison, he assaulted another inmate with a baseball bat.

When Cook was released from prison in 1950, he returned to Joplin and was briefly reunited with his father. He told him his intention was now to “live by the gun and roam.” Cook then drifted to the small desert town of Blythe, California, where he worked as a dishwasher until just before Christmas 1950. In late December, he headed east again; on the way he acquired a snubnosed .32-caliber revolver in El Paso, Texas.

On December 30, 1950, Texan mechanic Lee Archer was driving his car near Lubbock, Texas, when he picked up Billy Cook, who was hitchhiking. Shortly afterward, Cook robbed Archer of $100 at gunpoint and forced him into the trunk of his car. Later, Archer escaped by forcing open the trunk with a tire iron.

After the car ran out of fuel between Claremore and Tulsa, Oklahoma, Cook posed again as a hitchhiker. This time, he was picked up by farmer Carl Mosser from Illinois, who was en route to New Mexico with his wife, three children, and a dog. At gunpoint, Cook forced Mosser to drive around aimlessly for 72 hours. At one point, Mosser nearly overpowered Cook at a filling station near Wichita Falls, Texas; but Cook was too strong for him. Cook shot the entire family and their dog shortly afterward. He dumped their bodies in a mine shaft near Joplin, Missouri.

Cook headed back to California after abandoning the Mosser car in Oklahoma. The vehicle was discovered full of bullet holes and covered in blood. The receipt for Cook's gun was found in the car.

Just outside Blythe, California, Deputy Sheriff Homer Waldrip became suspicious of Cook and went to the motel where he had earlier lived with a friend. Hoping to question the friend, he was instead taken by surprise when Cook himself jumped from behind the door and took his revolver. Waldrip was taken hostage by Cook. As with the Mossers, Cook forced the deputy to drive around aimlessly. During this drive, Cook bragged about murdering the Mossers. After some forty miles, Cook ordered the deputy to pull over and lie face down in a ditch, saying he would shoot him in the head; however, Cook instead got back into the police car and drove away. Cook then kidnapped another motorist, Robert Dewey, from Seattle. Sometime later, the traveling salesman tried to wrestle the gun from Cook, but was wounded in the process. The car left the road and careened into the desert. Cook murdered Dewey with a shot to the head. Dewey's body was found in Waldrip's abandoned car near Ogilby, California; Cook abandoned Dewey's car in Mexicali, Mexico.[3]

By this time, all law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. Southwest were on the lookout for Cook, who had returned to Blythe. He kidnapped two other men, James Burke and Forrest Damron, who were on a hunting trip. He forced them to drive across the Mexican border to Santa Rosalia, where he was recognized by the Santa Rosalia police chief, who walked up to Cook, snatched the .32 revolver from his belt, and arrested him.

Cook was returned to Oklahoma City to answer for the Mosser killings, and sentenced to 300 years in prison. In 1951, a California jury sentenced him to death for killing the salesman from Seattle, Robert Dewey. On December 12, 1952, Cook was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison. "I hate everybody's guts," he said at the time of his arrest, "and everybody hates mine."[1]

Cook's body was returned to Joplin, Missouri, to be buried in Peace Church Cemetery.

• December 30, 1950: Lee Archer (survived)
• 1951
  • January 2: The Mosser family
    • Carl Mosser, 33
    • Thelma Mosser, 29
    • Ronald Dean Mosser, 7
    • Gary Carl Mosser, 5
    • Pamela Sue Mosser, 3
  • Homer Waldrip, 32 (survived)
• January 6, 1951 Robert Dewey, 32
• January 21: James Burke and Forrest Damron (both survived)

• In his memoir, Education of a Felon, Edward Bunker describes attacking Cook in the showers with a shank, cutting him several times before being hauled away into solitary confinement by guards. However, Bunker writes that this incident happened in 1950 in the "High Power" unit of the Los Angeles County Jail when Cook was on trial for the murder of Robert Dewey. The actual trial took place in El Centro, California, in October and November 1951. Cook was released from the Missouri State Prison in June 1950 and only in California a few months during that year and he managed to stay out of trouble. Records from the National Archives show that Cook only spent 1 day in the Los Angeles County Jail while being transported from the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary to Imperial County to stand trial. Whomever Bunker stabbed in the shower of the Los Angeles County Jail in 1950, it was not Cook.
• The 1953 film noir The Hitch-Hiker, directed by Ida Lupino, was based on the Cook crime spree. It starred Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy, with William Talman as “Emmett Myers”, a killer modeled after Cook, right down to the deformed eyelid. The plot is a dramatization of Cook’s kidnapping of James Burke and Forrest Damron and their flight to Mexico.[4]
• An in-depth portrait of Billy Cook, his crimes and execution appears in John Gilmore's 2005 book L.A. Despair: A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times.
• Cartoonist Mark Zingarelli made a seven-page hard-boiled comic story on Cook in 1987, titled "The 'Cockeyed' Cook Story" collected in The New Comics Anthology (ISBN 0-02-009361-6).
• In the original script for The Doors lead singer Jim Morrison's film HWY, the main character is a hitchhiker named Billy, which is a reference to Cook. The events also inspired the second verse of The Doors' song "Riders On The Storm".

• Gilmore, John (2005). L.A. Despair: A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times. Amok Books. ISBN 1-878923-16-1.
• Young Man with a Gun. Time (January 22, 1951). Retrieved on 2009-3-19.
• 300 Years Is Not Enough. Time (April 2, 1951). Retrieved on 2007-11-12.
• The New Pictures. Time (April 6, 1953). Retrieved on 2007-11-12.
• The Ghost of Billy Cook. Retrieved on 2007-11-12.
• Billy Cook at Find-A-Grave