The Boy (19 page)

“I don't think so, Jake. Like I told the police, I'm sure he was in the house that night likely even before I got home and he stayed until it was light. Alice said it was dark when she opened the door.”

“And that doesn't make me sick to my stomach, him creeping around the house in the dark while you and the kids were sleeping?”

“Jake, this is Danny we're talking about.”

“No, it's not,” he says. “This isn't the kid I raised, this is some man who grew out of that one and I feel like I don't know him anymore.” He stares straight ahead through the windshield, his lips grey, frost-tinged. “I'll do whatever you want, Lou, to make sure you and the kids don't have to stand in the path of all the shit he kicks up.”

Louise rolls down her window on the pretence of clearing the muggy smell of coffee, but really it is Jake's breath puffing out all those words that makes her stomach churn. The day is overcast, not a hint of breeze. She stirs the air outside the car with her hand, trying to create a freshening current. When she looks back at Jake, he's picking at the rim of the cup. “Just once I'd like to win,” he mutters.

“We can't turn him away, Jake.” She takes a deep breath. “In fact, I think that would be the very worst thing we could do. You're the only sure thing he has, and if you take that away from him, what does he have left?”

A long ragged breath and then he grabs her hands. “Thank you,” he says, before he starts the car. In the half hour drive home, there is nothing more to say.

Jon's voice, loud and then even louder, “Mom, Mom, Mom,” now he's tugging on the pillow. Louise drags herself awake. She automatically moves over, makes room for her son. Another nightmare.

“No. Come,” he says, “I heard this awful noise. In the bathroom.”

Louise sits up, but knows without turning or patting the sheet behind her that Jake is not in bed with her. She races down the hall ahead of Jon. “Bring me the phone,” she shouts, even before she opens the bathroom door. Even when she sees Jake on the floor, the absolute stillness of him, she shouts again for the phone. Get help.

If she hadn't been so sound asleep. You were exhausted, and understandably so, Phyllis tells her. Jake was probably careful not to wake you when he got up to go to the bathroom. If she had heard him cry out, if she'd gotten to him more quickly. Probably a massive coronary, the emergency room nurse tells her, nothing she could have done to save him. If she hadn't let him eat that donut. She looks at Phyllis and the two of them break into guffaws that become barks of laughter and then sobs.

Oh.

I'm sorry.

Roads Back

After the interview with Jack Pecover, I felt that I had done as much gathering as I needed. All of his files, he'd told me, had been donated to the Stettler Public Library, and if they needed his permission he would ask them to grant me access. As it turned out, the files had been accessible enough to the public that some items had gone missing and out of concern for preserving the archives, all of the material had been moved to the Stettler Museum. The curator of the museum told me that I could examine whatever I needed to see and read, but to keep in mind that these were artifacts, and must be treated as such. I imagined donning white gloves and holding documents with my fingertips. There would be no photocopying, no borrowing of material. My friend, Shirley, agreed to come along to Stettler, she, still puzzled by my obsession with the Cooks and curious, too, about this town with the bloody history.

Wait a minute. Wasn't that an awfully abrupt ending to my story?

Why do you assume that's the ending?

Well even if it's not, that's all the words you're going to spend on Jake's dying? Jake is dead, right?

That is correct.

Short shrift! Two paragraphs?

In emotion-charged scenes, sometimes what's left unsaid is more powerful than trying to find words.

And…?

Yes. And I'm finding it hard to write this ending.

Not just the ending to my story. You're struggling with the whole of it. That's why it's taken five years. What are you afraid of?

Just a minute here. Let me finish writing this chapter, and then I'll try to answer that question once and for all.

The Stettler Museum is an historic village with ten buildings including a courthouse. The September day I chose to scan the evidence Pecover had examined in the writing of his book was again unseasonably cold and wet—the parking lot at the museum site almost empty.

In the reception office, a small group of people sat around a table behind the counter drinking coffee, eating donuts. They were volunteers, the director told me, when she introduced me as someone interested in the history of the Cook murders. As always, they remembered. Bobby Cook was a mean child, one of the women said, beating up on everyone else, the children, even some of the adults afraid of him. But, no, someone else piped up, I wasn't afraid of him, and he was always kind to the girls, it was just the other boys he picked fights with. I was anxious to get to the archives, not inclined to hear any more divided opinions on Cook's innocence, and I had decided that I was no journalist eager to follow every lead, so I left them to their coffee and their own re-hashing of the crime. A summer student was sent to sit with us in the old courthouse while I examined the archives, to supervise my handling of them, safeguard against theft, I presumed. The building was unheated, and Shirley and I shivered in our thin fall jackets. Behind the bench, a mannequin who looked like a clothing store dummy from the boys' department was clad in judicial robes which the curator told me later had been donated by Dave MacNaughton. We sat at a table at the front of the courtroom where decades of lawyers and accused must have made their cases to the bench. The supervising student sat on the other side of the railing in the spectator seats, reading. First, though, she used a key to open the glass cabinet at the front of the room into which the files had been crammed. Folders and folders and folders of court transcripts, letters, newspaper clippings, envelopes of crime scene photos, the familiar photos of the family and the white bungalow all crammed into a piece of furniture that would have been no obstacle to either theft or natural disaster. I did not need white gloves to handle the disorganized mass of material that literally fell off the shelves when the doors slid open, but I did handle all of the pages, and the pictures with the care their aged state deserved.

So much of the material was familiar; the same newspaper stories, transcripts from which I had read the salient bits in Pecover's book. I looked for new information, missing pieces to my own wonky construction, and found myself wandering off on tangents.

I pulled photos out of an envelope. Crime scene; the familiar newspaper photos, pictures of every room in the house, every piece of evidence, different stages of the removal of the bodies from the pit. Everything sharper, more real. Cowboy scenes on the wallpaper in the boys' bedroom, a plastic tablecloth on the kitchen table, worn upholstery on the sofa in the living room. Seven pairs of shoes. Real photos of a real home.

In another envelope, a scrap of fabric from the blue suit tailored at Saskatchewan Penitentiary for Cook's release, found bloodied under the mattress in the master bedroom, a cuff from the mysterious white shirt to which ownership was never ascribed, a swatch of the wallpaper someone had scrubbed in an attempt to remove the spatters of blood. Real pieces in my hand.

Shirley leafed through clippings, letters, pausing now and again to slide something across the table to me. How sad, how horrible, the two of us sighed and murmured in that icy cold room.

Too much to copy, so much I'd already seen or read about in one form or another. We adjourned, finally, made our way to a warm restaurant on Main Street and watched the ebb and flow of the town around us. If I'd walked down the street, stopping people and asking about the Cook murders, I was sure I would find another dozen people with a dozen similar versions of what happened in the house on 52
nd
Street.

When we went back to the old court room it was even colder, and for three hours I read into my tape recorder: transcripts of interviews, letters and telegrams. I felt guilty, making the young student sit in that icy room, but she, at least, was dressed in toque and heavy jacket, turning the pages of her book with mittened fingers.

Now, the voice of Robert Raymond Cook seemed to fly loud and clear off the pages. From the cross examination in the first trial:

Q: A thing that gives me some pause – why do you suppose Constable Bell would say he saw two suitcases and a metal box in the truck of your car at 4:30 in Camrose if they weren't there.

A: Well Sir, I have done a little bit of thinking about that myself and the only conclusion I could come to he didn't mention it at the preliminary until he found out there were suitcases in it when I was picked up. I can't state for sure, but I think he's been reading too many newspapers.

Here, finally, in a psychiatric report from an interview at Fort Saskatchewan Provincial Gaol, March 15, 1960, Robert Cook responds to questions about his siblings:

Yes they all got wiped out, Gerry nine years old, Patty eight, Chris seven, Kathy five, Linda three. Yes, I knew them all except Linda I didn't know her very well she was so little and she didn't know me one night when I was home before the murder. Yes real cute, that's all. I have pictures of them. They're real cute kids. It's hard to figure out how anyone could have done that only one person I know.

There was a break in the interview after which the psychiatrist noted:

On prisoner's return he had snapshots, several including the whole family, father, mother and stepsiblings. Seemed to take normal pride in showing me them and in particular in speaking about the kids and his father. He himself was not included in any of the groups and possibly he had taken the snaps.

No, more likely that Robert Cook was in prison when the photos were taken. During the short lives of the young Cook children, Robert was simply not part of family life.

The interviewer asked Cook if he read. He replied that he liked historical novels, stories like
Ben Hur.
He said he didn't read mysteries although he had read
The Anatomy of a Murder
. For now, he thought he had enough mystery on his own hands.

Here was the handwritten note from Cook to Dave MacNaughton pleading to be allowed to attend the funerals, and here was MacNaughton's sincerely regretful reply.

Here was the letter from Dr. J. M. Byers of Ponoka, after Cook's “elopement,” declaring him “fit to stand trial.”

The letters were filed chronologically and as I read through Cook's many notes and telegrams to Giffard Main and Dave MacNaughton, I found myself growing as tense as if I didn't know the outcome of the story. Over and over again, Cook analyzed the evidence, offered advice, tried to come up with new information. When Main suffered a heart attack just before the second trial, his partner, Frank Dunne, took over and it was clear from the letters that followed that neither Cook, nor his former foster sister, Lila Larson, felt comfortable with the replacement. Lila became a frequent visitor to Fort Saskatchewan, and in a letter to Main just before the Appeal in March 1960 said she was “anxiously waiting. May God help you see that justice is done.”

Mrs. William Hanson from Streamstown, Alberta sent cigarettes and books, small amounts of cash and corresponded with both Cook and the warden of Fort Saskatchewan, finally sending a plea to the Prime Minister's office. The final note in her communications was a letter to her from the warden, returning her money order of two dollars that had arrived on November 17, 1959, “too late to be cashed.”

Nora Gall, Astrologer, Calgary, Alberta had written to Cook's lawyers offering to plot Cook's horoscope. No one is this country, she wrote, afforded astrology the proper respect, and she was sure she could shed light on Cook's personality if someone would please provide the dates she required.

Mrs. C. Parraton wrote to Main saying she did not know the family at all but had been keeping up with the hearings. And ended with a plea: “Please do not hang him. I am a mother and I have a son.”

There were letters from amateur sleuths who were sifting the evidence, discussing it in the community, speculating on the testimony of some of their own. Others advising divine intervention as Cook's only hope: “Do not know if your man is guilty or innocent but has your man asked for the help of God?”

So much material, Shirley and I passing papers back and forth across the table. I envisioned coming back again, when I could read and record without hunching into my coat.

On October 11, 1960, Lila Larson wrote to Dave MacNaughton to say that she had had a half hour visit with Bob Cook and she feared he had lost faith. An article in the
Edmonton Journal
about his lost appeal mentioned three other people who had been successful in their appeals and ultimately acquitted. Bob wondered, Lila said “if there is another sets of laws for him.”

In the final chapter, Pecover's book devotes three pages to the re-appearance in Cook's life of the Larson family, former foster parents, and in particular to their daughter, Lila. The Larsons remained steadfast in their belief that the boy they had known could not have committed this crime. In the Stettler museum, Lila Larson's handwritten letters to MacNaughton, Main, the Prime Minister, the Governor General, the Solicitor General, the Premier of Alberta finally give real voice to someone with a personal connection to Robert Raymond Cook. MacNaughton, Main, and Dunne worked tirelessly on his behalf. Among the documents, there is an invoice from a firm of lawyers in Ottawa, requesting payment of fees in the amount of $77.85 for acting on Cook's behalf in the Federal Court of Appeal. As laughably small as that fee seems by today's standards, the Alberta lawyers likely received even less for their efforts. But theirs was a professional involvement, in spite of the obvious emotional nerves struck by the young Cook's plight.

There were strict rules around access to death cells in 1959: prison officials, chaplains, immediate family, defense counsel, senior police officers if there was good reason. Lila Larson put her request to visit to Giffard Main. She was directed to the Warden, who asked, “How good is your stomach?” and when she replied that yes, this would bother her, but she was not going to let it show, he in turn sent her to the Sheriff, whose responsibility it was to plan the
details of the execution. A responsibility, Lila Larson told Jack Pecover, that he said he “hated.” Pecover speculates that the Sheriff may have seen Lila Larson's request as an opportunity to “alleviate the agony of a condemned man.” Whatever the Sheriff's motivation, Lila Larson was given the written permission she required.

Meanwhile, efforts on Cook's behalf continued. In the files, there is a copy of a letter dated Oct. 26, 1960, “Personal and Confidential” to the Rt. Hon. John Diefenbaker from Terence Nugent MP For Edmonton Strathcona:

As you are no doubt well aware the above-named is now under sentence of death for the murder of his father with execution scheduled for the fifteenth of November. I am writing to you personally as one lawyer to another to stress one factor of this case. On Cook's first trial, my senior partner, Giffard Main, defended Cook and took the appeal. Giffard is certainly one of Alberta's outstanding lawyers if not the top one in his field with experience in many murder trials…both of my partners are very competent, sound and realistic barristers, both stress the entire circumstantial nature of the evidence in this case and both are very uneasy about the conviction. Each one of my partners has earnestly impressed on me that they have a very real doubt as to Cook's guilt. Each feels we may hang an innocent man here. For this reason, because of their real fear in this regard I ask that this sentence be commuted.

There is no copy of a reply from John Diefenbaker, but Pecover's book mentions that prior to Cook, thirty-two death sentences came before Diefenbaker's cabinet for review and twenty-six of these men on death row were granted a commutation of their sentence to life imprisonment. In this, Pecover says, Diefenbaker “exhibited political courage of a high order since his party's natural constituency knew the death penalty was the only effective deterrent to murder and the only fitting punishment for those murderers who were undeterred.” The odds, then, should have been in Cook's favour, but the commutation of the sentence of a Calgary man, Ronald McCorqudale, convicted of killing a child, brought such outrage just prior to the request on Cook's behalf that “political courage” must have faltered at the prospect of “political suicide.” Ironically, McCorqudale committed suicide early into his life sentence.