COOK

By Dave Margoshes

Robert Raymond Cook, the last man hanged in western Canada, died just after midnight on November 15, 1960.

Cook, 23 at the time, had been twice convicted and twice sentenced to be hanged for the horrific murders of his family: his father and step-mother, Ray and Daisy, and his half brothers and sisters Gerry, 9; Patrick, 8; Christopher, 7; Kathy, 5; and Linda, 3.

If Cook's trial had been just a year later, he would most likely have been sentenced to life imprisonment. Capital punishment was officially abolished in 1976, but for all practical purposes it died in 1963 when Lester Pearson's government adopted the policy of commuting all death sentences. And even before that, Canada's hangmen had been idle. Only two people were executed in Canada after Cook; convicted of separate murders, they went to the gallows on December 11, 1962, at Toronto's Don Jail.

Interest in the Cook case, which lingers in the memories of many in central Alberta but had been largely forgotten elsewhere, was revived in 2011 with the publication of Calgary writer Betty Jane Hegerat's unique version of the story. The Boy is a skillful blending of fiction and nonfiction that makes for compelling reading.

A lot of people don't think he did it.

"What I discovered very early in my pursuit of the Cook family was that there were more questions than answers," Hegerat writes. "Opinion was sharply divided as to Robert Raymond Cook's guilt. There were conflicting stories dredged up out of failing memories, but a deep-seated interest wherever I went. What became abundantly clear was that Robert Raymond Cook was part of the history of central Alberta."

Bobby, as he was called, was the only child of Raymond and Josephine Cook of Hanna, Alberta. His mother died when he was nine and he grew up lonely and wild. By the time the family moved to Stettler after his dad's second marriage – to red-headed schoolteacher Daisy who'd been Bobby's teacher – he was already troubled.

Ray, a mechanic, had taught his son to drive by the time he was ten, and, as Hegerat describes it in her book, Bobby quickly "developed a passion for other people's cars." He went to reform school, for car theft, for the first time at 14. And he would spend all but 243 of the 3,247 days left in his life as a guest of the taxpayer. Between 1951 and 1957, he was convicted 19 times, mostly for theft although Cook admitted that he'd committed numerous other offenses.

A thief, yes … but a murderer?

There was nothing in his past that would predict that Robert Cook would slaughter his family, quite the opposite, in fact. Hegerat interviewed dozens of people who knew the Cooks and wrote that he was "a boy who loved animals, and was forever bringing home stray dogs. A boy who was markedly fond of younger children. A young man who carried photos of his five siblings and showed them proudly."

Robert Raymond Cook's journey to the gallows began on Tuesday, June 23, 1959 when he was released from the Saskatchewan Penitentiary in Prince Albert. He had been serving a three-year term for break and entry and car theft but was one of 120 low-risk convicts released early – in his case, four months early – because Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were visiting Canada for the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Dressed in the standard prison-issue blue suit and black oxfords, and a white shirt, yellow socks and red tie his step-mother had sent, he caught a bus to Edmonton where he spent the evening of June 24 carousing with friends, ex-cons like himself. The next day, after a detour to dig up buried loot from a previous robbery – or so he would later claim – he headed for Stettler, and home, where his family was waiting for him.

Some time later that day, June 25, Cook's family was slaughtered in their home – the parents shot, the children bludgeoned – and their bodies dumped in a grease pit in the garage. Although there was no direct evidence pointing to young Bob, he immediately became the police's prime suspect – and the presumed guilty party in the minds of millions of Albertans and Canadians farther afield who were glued to newspaper, radio and television accounts of the crime.

On the lam, or mourning?

Shortly after his arrest, the drama was notched up when Cook escaped from the Provincial Mental Hospital at Ponoka, where he'd been sent for psychiatric examination. More than 200 men on foot and in trucks, armored cars, boats and planes – the largest manhunt in Alberta history – searched for him for four days, until he gave himself up. He claimed he'd been trying to get to Hanna, where his family had been buried, to visit their graves, since he'd been denied permission to attend the funeral.

His first trial lasted eleven days and the jury took only an hour and a half to find him guilty. He was sentenced to be hanged on April 15, 1960, but the verdict was overturned on appeal and a new trial granted. The second trial took five fewer days and the jury only half an hour to reach the same verdict. This time, execution was set for October 11. A second appeal was rejected and a bid for a Supreme Court of Canada appeal resulted only in a delay to November 15.

Unanswered questions

Robert Cook took with him to the grave possible answers to questions that, according to Hegerat, still muddy the waters of the notorious case.

On his arrival in Stettler on the afternoon of June 25, he loitered around the town – its population then around 2,500 – and didn't go home to the little house on 52nd Street. But witnesses that evening saw young Cook and his father meeting up and driving off together in Ray's car, a 1958 Chevrolet station wagon. Bob claimed later that he and his dad discussed a plan to buy a gas station in British Columbia, and that he gave the older Cook $4,100, part of the loot he'd dug up, to cement the deal.

Bob then took off again to Edmonton in the car, and the next morning traded it in on a new white Impala convertible. That evening, he arrived back in Stettler, telling police later that he'd stopped at the family home and, finding it empty, figured the family had left for BC in search of a gas station to buy.

When police caught up with Cook, to question him about an irregularity in the purchase of the Impala, he was cruising the main street of Stettler in his new car. As part of the investigation, one of the Mounties went to the Cook house and discovered the horrific scene in the garage.

We don't know why Cook, if he had killed his family, would loiter around town so near to the scene of the crime. In police custody when he was told his father had been killed, he broke down in tears. Through the 17-month ordeal that followed, right up to the moment the trapdoor opened beneath his feet, he maintained his innocence. West