The Boy (6 page)

Roads Back

Josephine Grover was eighteen years old when she married Raymond Albert Cook in Hanna, Alberta, in 1936. An elderly uncle, when I asked him to reminisce about that period of time on the prairies stroked his chin and frowned. These were the dirty thirties: drought, crop failure, low prices for grain even in the years when there was enough moisture to bring it to harvest, hungry men at the back door wanting to exchange small labour in exchange for a bowl of soup. Legions of men, including my own father, “rode the rails” looking for work. My dad went east to a logging camp, and came back so lean and dirty his mother didn't recognize him when he walked onto the farmyard.

Still, in the reminiscing there was a note of pride. People stuck together in hard times, my uncle told me. When everyone was poor there was a spirit, such a closeness in the community that there were good times to soothe folks through the bad. Among those good times, I imagined, were the dances Josephine and Ray Cook might have attended on the nights Marion Anderson and her friend were hired to watch over young Bobby. Or perhaps, like my parents, they played cards at someone else's house, whist or cribbage around the kitchen table, the air choked with cigarette smoke, a bottle of rye whisky on the counter, the “lunch” of ham sandwiches and perked coffee at the end of the evening.

Robert Raymond Cook was an only child, although according to Jack Pecover's account of the family history, Ray and Josephine considered adopting a second when Josephine was told that another pregnancy would be life-threatening because of her rheumatic heart. Country dances and family plans notwithstanding, life in the Cook family was troubled. There was a separation, then a reconciliation shortly before Josephine died. Josephine was counseled by a friend to divorce Ray Cook because of his “philandering” but decided to stay in the marriage “to make Ray suffer.” Psychiatrists who examined Robert Raymond Cook after the murders likely pondered the significance of domestic strife, the early loss of his mother, the intrusion of a stepmother in turning Bobby Cook into a pint-sized car thief and then a mass murderer. Those were certainly the musings and speculations of the general public.

When his mother died during routine surgery to correct a twisted bowel, Bobby was just nine years old. Too young, his father decided, to attend the funeral. Ironically, thirteen years later, Robert Raymond Cook made a Herculean effort to attend his father's funeral. The service for the murdered family was in Hanna on July 2, 1959. On that same day, Dave MacNaughton, Robert's lawyer, received a letter from Ponoka.

The doctor here tells me they're not going to allow me to go to the funeral. I've just got to be there, please for Christ sakes arrange it. I've got about $90 they can have for the expenses. If you could only understand how much it means to me. There the only people in the world I have that care if I live or die. So please try and fix it so I can go. … I truly hope you belive me, for nobody else thinks I am innocent. You probly dont know what it feels like to be completely alone, since there gone.

By the time Robert Raymond Cook wriggled his way through an impossibly small window at the Ponoka Mental Hospital and escaped into the wooded countryside, the seven members of his family had been in their graves for more than a week. When he was captured, Cook said he broke out to attend the funeral, but later he amended his story to say he was on his way to visit the graves. That tendency to amend, to tailor his story to what he believed his audience wanted to hear became a fatal flaw worthy of a Greek tragedy.

In interviews in prison and in the psychiatric examination at Ponoka, Robert Cook gave varied dates for the death of his mother, reported his own age at the time as eight, eleven, twelve, and on one occasion said he was “orphaned” when he was thirteen and “more or less on his own ever since.” The night before he died, he spoke about his mother to one of the two pastors who had been his spiritual advisors. He said that Josephine wrapped Christmas presents for him before she died, that he remembered the sadness of opening them on Christmas morning without her. Josephine died in September, during fairly routine surgery, likely expecting to spend Christmas with her son. So organized a young housewife that she'd done her shopping three months early?

Distorted though his memories of his family may have been, one thing that was certain was that Robert Cook lost everyone of significance in his life. Dave MacNaughton was with Cook when
he was told in police cells in Stettler that his father was dead. Although MacNaughton didn't recall the exact words, he
remembered that they were hard. Your father is dead, and you're under arrest for murder. No more than that. MacNaughton had no doubts about the honesty of Cook's response: “He wasn't acting when he broke down and said, ‘Not dad, not my brothers and sisters.' He couldn't speak after that.”

Cook's response was recorded by the police as: “Not my father, not my father.” Nowhere in any of the recorded interviews or court transcripts is there a comment from him about Daisy's death.

I was relying heavily on Jack Pecover's book, feeling ever more strongly that I should contact this man and find out what had obsessed him about Robert Raymond Cook's trials, “the work of justice.” Although he stated his purpose “simply to present the complexities of the case, allowing readers an outsider's view of how and why a man was sent to death by his community” (pg. xxiv) the text is heavily-laden with anger and frustration, and the author's conviction that justice was not served. I would, I decided, follow my own path to the Cook family. Mine was a different purpose, my question “Why?” rather than “Who?” I would hold off contact with the man who wrote this scathing account as long as possible.

Pecover's book describes Ray and Bobby Cook as being as close as any father and son could hope to be, pals, linked by a passion for cars and pulled even tighter with the loss of Josephine. Ray Cook taught his son to drive at the tender age of seven. After Josephine's death, on evenings and weekends, Ray took Bobby along to the garage where he worked. For three years father and son were tight-knit. Then came Daisy.

Miss Gasper had been one of Bobby Cook's teachers. Though touched by the loss of his mother, she likely knew that the stepson she was acquiring would be a challenge. Bobby had already been in trouble for “joy-riding.” He was remembered by a Hanna police officer, Gordon Russell, for his ability to unlock and hot-wire a car with breath-taking speed. At the time, Bobby was so young he was barely visible over the wheel. Cars, trucks, tractors, it seemed any vehicle was a temptation to go for a spin around town.

Daisy May Gasper and Ray Cook were married in July, 1949. Bobby didn't attend their wedding. But he did force his way to the centre of their attention shortly after when he notched up his “borrowing” of cars and for the first time took one of his joyrides beyond the town limits.

That theft is mentioned in a RCMP summary prepared after the murders and dated January 4, 1960:

At the age of 12 years he took a car belonging to Mr. E. Hart of Botha, Alta. Was eventually stopped by Police. He had been operating the car at a high rate of speed and apparently was not particularly concerned with his behaviour.” (
The Work of Justice
pg. 33)

Robert Cook may have been unconcerned, but the newly wed Daisy must have held her head in her hands. She was twenty-eight years old, had one year of teacher training and a brief career as the local school marm. Now she was the mother of a twelve- year-old car thief. She was also pregnant. Her first child, Gerald, was born seven months later, in February 1950.

The following summer, July, 1950, Ray and Daisy Cook moved their growing family to Stettler, to a small apartment above McTaggart Motors, the garage where Ray Cook had found employment. Perhaps they hoped a change of scenery would have a positive affect on their eldest son. Shortly after the move, Bobby stole another car. The account of that adventure as told to Jack Pecover by Gordon Russell is livelier than the RCMP report of the earlier crime:

One night he stole a car from Stettler. I was at Castor at the time, my dad was there, the town cop was there and a Mountie. We got a call to put up a road block; a stolen car was coming down the highway from Stettler. Dad went out to stop him and he swerved at Dad and took off. The Mountie said, ‘Christ! There's nobody in that car!' We chased him into a coulee near Castor. Dad went up to the car and said, “All right, get out!” but he had abandoned the car and gone up into some trees. He disappeared completely. We hunted for him until about 5 am but couldn't find him. We were standing by the hotel and somebody hollered, “There he is!” He was stealing another car off a used-car lot across the street. We grabbed him.” (
The Work of Justice
pg. 34)

The town of Hanna knew Bobby Cook as one of their own, a lad who lost his mother and was seen driving a tractor trailer with his dad beside him when he was barely old enough to look over the steering wheel. A boy prone to mischief with cars in his pre-adolescence. Stettler met him as a juvenile delinquent.

The two towns to which Robert Raymond Cook laid claim as home in his short life straddle the parkland region of Alberta to the north and the grassland region to the south. Around Stettler there is a mosaic of aspen woodlands, fescue grasslands, shrublands and wetlands. As it rolls gently south to Hanna, the landscape becomes grassland, part of the Great Plains that stretch from the Gulf of Mexico, through the United States and up into the Canadian prairies. Hanna is in the Alberta Badlands, where the rivers have carved deep into the bedrock and formed spectacular coulees and ravines. All that open space, so many cars left unattended.

In 1950, Stettler had a population of 2442, Hanna had 2027 citizens. Similar size, both service centres for the surrounding farming districts, only about 80 miles, an hour and a half's drive, apart. Hanna was Bobby Cook's home and it seems unlikely that he was consulted about the move to Stettler.

Unlikely, as well, that he was thrilled with the arrival of a baby brother so soon after Daisy usurped his father's affection. I had a hard time conjuring an image of Ray Cook. In my mind he was a generic small town mechanic, a quiet, hard-working father who left the management of home and family to his young and very capable wife. That part was clear, but it was the younger Ray Cook, husband of Josephine, alleged philander, widowed father of Bobby who both interested and eluded me. In Jack Pecover's interviews, my own interview with Bobby Cook's lawyer, and some casual conversations with people I met who had lived in Stettler during that time, there were hints that Bobby Cook had inherited his attitude toward the law and his slippery fingers from his father. When I pressed for more specific details, though, there seemed always to be a reluctance to speak ill of a man who'd died so tragically.

What was clear throughout, though, was that father and son had a bond, and Daisy and her children drove a wedge into that relationship. In quick succession, Bobby “borrowed” Ray's car for a trip to Hanna to visit his relatives, took a school bus in Hanna for a spin, and stole a car from his dad's employer, McTaggart Motors, in Stettler. He was sentenced to eighteen months in the provincial jail at Lethbridge, almost 250 miles, a four hour drive, from home, likely the farthest he'd ever been from his dad. He was fourteen years old.

The Boy

August, 1996

Jonathon was born the day after Louise found the file of newspaper clippings about the mass murder of the Cook family. There were cans of paint, a roll of carpet, gauzy white fabric for curtains for the nursery, but so far Louise had little interest in turning the spare bedroom into a nursery. Jon slept in a wicker bassinette that was never out of her sight during the day, and snugged up against the bed at night. This was not necessary, Jake told her the second night. Danny slept in his crib in a room down the hall from the day they brought him home from the hospital. Brenda was determined not to spoil her new son, and within a few days he was sleeping through the night.

Jake stopped abruptly, as though he was reading Louise's thoughts on the spoiling of Daniel. She shrugged. It was just easier to feed Jon in the wee hours when he was close, she told Jake. She didn't admit that she couldn't bear the thought of the baby being farther away than arms' reach while she slept. If he were in another room, she would lie awake listening for the tiniest of whimpers, the sound of footsteps in the hall.

In the small hours of this morning when she was nursing the baby, the bedroom door creaked open and Daniel stood silhouetted against the dim light from the hall.

“What is it?” Louise asked softly.

“I thought I heard him crying,” the boy said.

“Well he was, but only for a minute and now he's fine.”

He nodded, and padded back to his room.

This morning, when Dan came sleep-rumpled to the kitchen, she asked if the baby's crying in the night always woke him.

“I never hear him.”

“You mean last night was the first time?”

“What are you talking about? I slept all night.” He filled his bowl to almost overflowing with Rice Krispies and then ground them down with the palm of his hand before he added milk.

Jake appeared then, and tousled Daniel's hair as he walked past on the way to the coffee pot. “Me too, pal. Seeing as we're sleeping through all the little guy's squawking in the night, what do you say we let Mom have a nap this afternoon and take Jon for a stroll around town?”

Louise had suggested to Jake that Daniel would likely
never think of her as “Mom,” but Jake kept on trying. Now that the baby was here, and she felt like a Mom, she'd stopped flinching at the word, but Daniel still scowled. “In the buggy? I'm not pushing any baby carriage around town!” Parked on the verandah was the monstrous English-style pram that Brenda's parents bought when Daniel was born. They retired to Victoria shortly after Brenda died, and so far as Louise knew, there'd been no contact with them since they sent their regrets to the wedding invitation.

“I'll do the driving,” Jake said. “He'll be good for an hour while you snooze, won't he, Lou? We'll go down to the coffee shop and let Dan show off his new brother.”

“Oh, I don't think …” She was stopped by the cautionary expression on Jake's face. Do not refuse this, it said. Instinctively, she looked toward the living room where Jon was asleep in the bassinette.

Get a grip, she told herself. Jake was the father, and he was as reliable as she was, maybe even more so because he was reasonable, not boiling over with hormones. He was proud of the little guy, and he wanted to show him off.

“Have a good nap,” Jake tells her cheerfully after lunch.

Not likely, Louise thinks as she stands at the window watching them leave, Jake stoically pushing the pram, Danny racing ahead on his bike. Instead of sleeping, she pulls the box marked “Brenda” into the living room. From a chair in front of the window she'll be able to watch for their return. The day is overcast, a nasty wind whipping the yellow leaves off the Manitoba maples that form a canopy over the wooden sidewalk. Louise imagines the bumpety ride, Jake taking care to ease the buggy over gaps in the wood, through drifts of leaves. He was positively puffed up when they got the pram out of the garage and dusted it off.

“This thing,” he had said, “has a chassis that'll give as good a ride as the Queen's coach. I gave Brenda a real hard time about looking like an English nanny.”

Daniel had been poking around in some of the other furniture still packed into the back corner of the garage. He looked up at the mention of his mom's name, stared at the pram. “Was that mine?”

“You bet. You rode in style, my boy. And so will your little brother. I wish we still had some of the other baby stuff around. Nothing but the best was your mom's motto.” He fell quickly silent then, no doubt remembering the argument he and Louise had when she was barely pregnant and Jake came home with a fancy crib. He was just walking through Sears, he said, on the way to the hardware department when he saw a whole gaggle of pregnant women heading up the escalator, following the signs for Baby Week. He decided to tag along to the sale. Heck of a deal on the crib, top of the line, so he couldn't pass it up. Louise had already arranged the loan of baby equipment from one of the teachers she worked with. She hated spending money on items that were only going to be used for a few months, hated any kind of
extravagant consumption. Hated too, the tension that created with Jake. He wasn't a spendthrift, just impulsive and generous.

The crib, she knows, is out here somewhere, still in the box, and one of these days she will ask him to bring it in and set it up.

She unfolds the flaps on the box with Brenda's name on it, then sits back in the chair a moment to ponder the woman who delighted in buying the very finest for her baby boy. Why keep only the pram? Where have the rest of the baby items gone? At some point hope of another baby ceased and they were too sad a reminder? Brenda has been much on Louise's mind these past two months. In the middle of the night, when she rocks with Jon at her breast, she feels overwhelmed by the baby's helplessness, his dependency on her. How long, she wonders, does a mother anguish over what will become of her child if she isn't there to watch over him? How Brenda must have anguished.

The file of newspaper clippings is at the top of the box. She pulls it out and begins to read.

“Hey, you're supposed to be sleeping. Were we gone too long?”

Louise gathers the papers on her lap into a jumble. Jake is in the doorway with the baby in his arms. She blinks. Glances at her watch. She's been reading for more than an hour, hasn't looked to the window at all.

“What's got you so engrossed there?” He shifts Jon to his shoulder and gently pats the baby's back. When she takes a deep breath and spreads her hands over the newspaper clippings, he crosses the room to sit down on the footstool beside her chair. Jon is awake, gnawing on his fist, beginning to fuss.

“Why did Brenda keep a file on this horrible murder case?”

He tips his head to look at the print. “Cook? Brenda knew the guy. Where did you find this stuff?”

Louise drops the papers into the box, and holds out her arms for Jonathan. Instinctively, she looks toward the door before she pulls up her sweater and settles the baby at her breast. “Where's Danny?”

“Aw,” Jake waves his hand dismissively, his eyes on the newspaper clippings, “he got bored as soon as he sucked down his milkshake. He said he was going for a bike ride.” He picks up the top sheet of paper, tapping his finger on the photo of Robert Raymond Cook, bare-chested in what looks like a cell. “Brenda knew somebody who knew somebody who went joy-riding with this guy after he killed his folks—everybody knows somebody who knew him, same as with every other ugly story. Imagine the nerve, cleaning himself up, sporting around the country in a snazzy new convertible he bought with his dad's money.”

“The man who wrote that article thinks he was innocent.”

“Oh yeah, lots of people on that side of the fence but just as many on the other.” He stands up, rolls his shoulders, and gives his head a shake. “Gruesome stuff. I'll get rid of this whole box. I doubt there's anything in there we need.”

“No, leave it. There are some cookbooks. Leave it, and I'll sort through later.” She tries to appear distracted, as though it's no big deal. “Busy day down at the coffee shop?”

“The after-church crowd,” he says. “A bunch of grey-haired women fighting to hold the little guy. I drank my coffee and ate my flapper pie, and they still wouldn't give him back.”

“No wonder Dan cut out.” The boy was well-trained when it came to meeting adults, but Louise has noticed that he never suffers more than five minutes before he comes up with an excuse to leave the room.

“Everybody asked about you.” Jake bends down and strokes the baby's cheek with his thumb. “I told them things are getting a little more organized around here and you probably wouldn't mind an invitation to coffee. Maybe you could do the inviting?”

Likely Brenda was planning dinner parties for twelve and volunteering at the hospital three weeks after Daniel was born. “Phyllis is going to stop by this week when she's in town,” Louise says. “Frankly, that's about all the socializing I feel up to just now. Maybe in a week or so we can invite the Schultzes over for coffee some evening.” The old couple who live next door welcomed them with a basket of cookies the day they moved in, chatted over the fence, offered advice on the garden.

Jake frowns. “They're a bit miffed with me,” he says. “Henry and I had words last week.”

Even before he explains, Louise knows this is about Daniel. She heard Henry shouting at Daniel one afternoon. “About…?”

“Aw, he says somebody's been in his garage, messing around with his tools. He's missing a few things. Cripes, Lou, he's eighty-five years old. He's probably given the stuff to his kids and forgotten all about it. The place has a padlock and chain across the door that would give Houdini a run for his money.”

And a small cardboard-covered window on the alley side, Louise thinks, that wouldn't be difficult for a small body to wriggle through. “You weren't rude to him, were you?” Normally easy-going Jake can be sharp and dismissive. Surely not to an old man, though.

“I told him I'd speak to Dan, but turns out he already did. I wasn't rude, but I probably let him know I thought he was out of line. He should have come to me first.”

“And did you speak to Danny?”

He nods. “He said he hasn't been anywhere near that garage, and why would he want to go in anyway because it's full of old junk. Pretty much what I was thinking.”

She closes her eyes. She can hear Danny's voice saying those words, see the slight squint of his eyes, his teeth catching his lower lip. She would have snapped back at the boy, asked him how he knew about the junk if he hadn't been in the garage.

“You believed him?”

“Of course I believed him. Judas Priest, Louise! He's my son. I should take the word of a senile old man over that of my own son?”

She looks away so that he won't see the nod in her eyes. Yes, Jake, when the son is a liar, we start from a different place.

“I didn't mention it before,” Jake says, “because you have enough on your mind here. It'll blow over.”

Blow over, and maybe Jake's questioning will have been enough to deter Danny. Meanwhile she'll speak to Mrs. Schultz. Go over tomorrow with a thank you card for the booties and hat the old woman crocheted for Jon.

Jake walks to the window. “I wonder where that kid got to. I'm going to go for a drive and see if I can find him.”

When the baby is asleep in his basket again, Louise returns to the clippings. She's skimmed the newest pieces, an
Edmonton Sun
series written for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murders. How bizarre, she thinks, to be holding an anniversary for a gruesome murder. The man who wrote the piece didn't hedge. He thought the wrong man had been hanged. Louise thinks suddenly of her dad, how she wishes she could ask him if he remembers this crime, and what he thought. She's sure that if a court of law said it was so, then for her dad it would have been so. Black and white, or at least as dark a shade of grey as it took to make a judgment. She is also sure he would have said, “Hindsight's 20/20, Louise. Everybody's a Monday morning quarterback.” She wonders about her mom, whether the name might flick a switch and illuminate one of those patches of long ago memory that occasionally surprise Louise when she visits.

The older pieces are worn at the folds, as soft as flannel to the touch and most of them marred by the dark stain on the envelope in which she found them. A cup of coffee? Young Brenda's bottle of coca-cola splashed across the collection? From what she knows of Brenda, Louise imagines her frowning, blotting the envelope, looking for a new one to replace it with. She riffles through again, looking for the headline that clutched her by the throat just as Jake came through the door. “Place Usurped by Hated Stepmother. Spoiled Son Turns to Crime.” Robert Cook was hanged for murdering his father, stepmother, and their five children. Jake is right. Even though the headline is ridiculously sensationalist, worthy of a grocery store check-out tabloid, this is gruesome. She should throw it all away. She piles the papers onto the back of a shelf at the top of the bedroom closet.

Jake's visit with the Sunday morning coffee crowd prompts a phone call from Phyllis on Monday morning. She's planning a baby shower. What day would be best? Jake works evenings all week, they have only one car, Phyllis lives about five miles out of town, and it's a problem to leave Daniel home alone in the evening. But Phyllis is dauntless. One of the women from town will be happy to give Louise a ride, and Dan of course is welcome to come along. He flatly refuses. Boring, he says. Phyllis is from the traditional Mennonite side of Jake's family. No television or computers in their house. The kids, Dan says, are “dorky” and the farm is a drag and Paul, Phyllis's husband, is mean. He made Dan help with chores when he spent a weekend at the farm right after Jon was born.