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Orgy Of Violence

The nation's greatest manhunt began the morning of January 3, 1951, with the routine investigation of an abandoned car, mired in the mud near Tulsa, Oklahoma. A quick glance into the interior of the car revealed evidence of one of the most shocking crimes in U.S. history - the brutal, senseless murder of a whole family. In the twelve days that followed, 2,000 peace officers trailed a guncrazy, mad-dog terrorist through fourteen states and Mexico, uncovering in his wake six murders and as many kidnapings. William (Billy) E. Cook orgy of violence overshadowed anything in the John Dillinger-Pretty Boy Floyd era.

Trouble had begun for the runty little criminal at birth. He came into the world on December 3, 1928, with a large, ugly growth covering his right eye. It did not impair his eyesight, but he had to lift the lid with his fingers in order to see. There were eight children-four girls older than Bill, two younger sisters and a younger brother. Bill was the quiet, bashful one. He talked little, kept his face down, blushed easily and never was noted for cursing. He loved his younger sisters and brother. His mother always could trust him to look after them, and when they got in trouble, Bill would say, "I don't want you to spank them, I want you to spank me first."

Bill's mother died when he was five. Her name was Laura Steven, and she had four children by a previous marriage when Will Cook showed up as a sharecropper on her father's cotton farm near Webber Falls, Oklahoma, during World War I. Later, the family moved to Joplin, where Will went to work in the Eagle-Picher mines carting wheelbarrows piled high with slag. Never a big man, but strong as an ox, he could haul the biggest load of anyone. But he only worked occasionally, and never earned enough to provide for his family. Will left his wife and children in 1933. Laura was recovering from a stroke, when one day she was cutting kindling wood. A stick leaped high, striking her between the eyes. Though weak from the blow, she walked calmly into the house and told Bill and the other children that she was lying down for a nap. Hours later, when the children became hungry, Bill ran into a neighbor's house, crying, "Mommie went to sleep and we can't wake her up." She was dead.

Shortly afterward, the local truant officer learned that a gang of ragged kids was living in a cave of the abandoned White Shirt lead mine located in uninhabited timberland a half-mile off the highway outside Joplin. Those were depression days and when the father came for the children, the court let him have them. But Will Cook soon left his children again - this time in an abandoned blacksmith shop between Chitwood and Smelter Hill. This time the court persuaded Will Cook to release the children from his care "now and forever." The children were separated. All of them found permanent foster homes - except Bill.

He was shuttled from family to family. Nobody wanted him. They were afraid his deformed eye harbored some kind of disease. Welfare officers arranged for an operation. The operation was not completely successful. The eyelid drooped. He was eleven now. The court sent him to live with an older married sister. Within ten days, he was before the judge again. His sister accompanied him. She said he was unruly, went into tantrums, and was unmanageable. "He did not have a nickel's worth of clothes and what he had on was dirty enough to stand alone," the court record entry read. And it added: "Bill is not a bad boy." He was placed in another home and went back to school - for a while.

On July 15, 1941, his latest foster mother returned Bill to the probation office. He was booked as "incorrigible." Judge Wilbur Ovaen gave the boy a choice - straighten up and attend school regularly or be committed to the reformatory. "You can stay in a home, and we'll let you choose the home," the judge said. "I'll not stay any place you put me," Bill declared. Judge Owen sentenced him to one year at Boonville.

The FBI agents knew the rest of the story and the search for Cook continued in Missouri. The FBI pinpointed the locations of known friends and relatives in other states, and had their homes watched. They blanketed the country with "wanted" circulars showing front and profile views of Cook, and the same photographs appeared on the front pages of metropolitan newspapers.

On a Thursday night, a service station operator at Pittsburg, Kansas, twenty-five miles from Joplin, reported that he sold gasoline to a man resembling Cook who was driving a green 1947 Chevrolet sedan bearing Missouri plates. Two hours later, the town of Cherryvale, fifty miles northwest, was in an uproar after a woman reported a man answering Cook's description approached her car in what she thought was an attempt to kidnap her. She told Police Chief Albert Clark that she grabbed her car keys and fled into her mother's home before the man could stop her. Chief Clark said, "The whole town is aroused, and the police station is filled with people who want guns."

Still later that night, a statewide alarm was sounded for a gunman who tried to steal an automobile from a garage at McCook, Nebraska, then wounded Deputy Sheriff Fran Dolan during a wild, ninety-five-mile-an-hour chase. Sheriff Emmett Trosper said the fugitive "might be Cook," since the sedan in which the gunman escaped was coated with gray mud, indicating it recently had been driven from Missouri.

By Friday morning a man believed to be the desperado was fleeing across South Dakota after spending the night at a Worthington, Minnesota, hotel, seventy miles east of Sioux Falls. Heavily armed state highway patrolmen set up roadblocks on every route between Sioux Falls and Sioux City, Iowa, and scores of police joined the manhunt at other points

Another report, received late in the day, placed Cook at Sundown, Texas, forty-five miles west of Lubbock, where he had entered the car of his first victim, Archer. A masked man had forced his way into a home, grabbed food from a kitchen table, and fled. And a hitchhiker told El Paso police he had ridden at night across West Texas with a short, stocky man about Cook's age, who had kept a pistol on the seat between them.

The FBI built files, ran down the leads, and indexed every movement of the wanted man. Agents frankly were at a loss to explain how Cook-if it was he-got so many places in thirty hours. The reports were reminiscent of the days when Pretty Boy Floyd was "robbing banks two hundred miles apart" at the same hour. But one report interested them. Across the Mexican border, a frightened nightclub dancer went to the Juarez police with her story of the droopy-eyed gunman's promise to return; she asked for protection. She remembered where Cook told her he had spent Christmas day. A special alert spread to California.

Working round-the-clock with the FBI in an effort to close all gaps in Cook's background, Nutt and Gamble learned that he had threatened to shoot an ex-convict acquaintance and throw him down a hundred-foot shaft. They decided to go to the shaft and look around. It was 11 A.M., Monday, January 15. Nutt looked into the shaft. It was too dark to clearly see the surface of the water thirty feet below. "Bring the searchlight," he called to Gamble. "I think something is floating around down there." The searchlight's powerful beams cut the darkness and played onto a body. The beams caught another body, then another.

A call to the Joplin fire department brought emergency rescue equipment. A pile of timber was choking the shaft. Floating above the timbers in the murky water were five bodies. The firemen handled them gently. The cable pulled the firemen to the surface. He was holding Pamela Sue. Next came Gary Carl, then Ronald Dean, then the mother, and finally the father.

Pamela Sue and Gary Carl had been shot through the heart. Powder burns indicated the killer had held the gun at less than arm's length, possibly while they struggled in his grip. Ronald Dean had been shot three times, twice through the heart and once in the head. He was gagged and his wrists bound with a yellow cord torn from his cowboy hat, a Christmas gift he had insisted on wearing to visit his Uncle Chris in Albuquerque.

Thelma Mosser's hands were tied tightly behind her back and a piece of Turkish towel stuffed in her throat. She had been shot through the chest. Mosser had been shot once, in the head. He was gagged, but the bonds on his wrists were loose. Obviously he had tried to free himself in a desperate effort to save his family. Blood had trickled over another of Ronald Dean's prize possessions - a wallet stamped "Hopalong Cassidy" which still contained a dollar bill, six dimes, and fifteen pennies, the only money Cook had not taken from his victims.

Hundreds of spectators jammed the streets leading to the mine after news of the discovery spread. Folks don't shock easily in Chitwood and adjoining Smelter Hill. They have seen plenty of life in the raw. But they stood dazed and aghast as firemen and volunteer workers carefully laid the bodies of the Mossers side by side on a tarpaulin spread over the barren ground.

Lieutenant Chris Mosser arrived from Tulsa with two police detectives. He nearly collapsed after viewing the bodies. "I'm glad it's over," said Chris as he bit into his lips. "It has been hell these past two weeks-knowing they were dead but dreading to find out how they died. If they had to die at the hands of this beast, thank the Lord he killed them without torturing them."

Afterward, the bodies were removed to a funeral home in Joplin. The grim task, begun at 11:55 A.M., was over in less than an hour. At the same moment, even as the angry rumble rose from the crowd that stood and watched the fireman struggle from the shaft bearing his first horrible burden, officers in Mexico were closing in on the stocky, thick-lipped youth who had grown up in their midst.

Police Chief Kraus Morales of Tijuana and his men were working one end of the "pincer movement" along the single highway leading into the South District through the Sierra de Santa Catarina mountains. Morales arrived at Santa Rosalia the morning of January 15. He went to Chief of Police Parra Rodriguez. The officers stepped inside a restuarant and moved quickly up to the booth. Rodriguez placed the muzzle of his .45 service pistol against the nape of Cook's neck and told him to stand up. With his left hand he pulled a .38 revolver from Cook's belt, handed it to Chief Morales, and took a .32 pistol from Cook's jacket pocket. He ordered all three men to stand against the wall and searched them. Then Chief Morales handcuffed Cook. It was 12:02 P.M., Pacific time, when the arrest was made and the manhunt across two countries ended.

The gruesome details of the brutal murder of six persons remained a secret - locked behind the cruel, thick lips of the Joplin badman. Cook's .32 automatic was the gun used to kill the Mossers. The serial number showed it to be the same weapon Cook had purchased in El Paso. The scientific examination further showed that two bullets removed from Robert H. Dewey's body had been fired from Deputy Waldrip's .38 revolver, recovered from the gunman at the time of his capture. Faced with this evidence, Cook became more tractable, and from his lips came the story of his senseless, bloody rampage. Of the slaying of the Mossers, he said: "The kids were crying, the dame was hysterical and started screaming. It was too risky. I didn't want them to get the cops on me, so I plugged them all!"

Cook and the Mossers had arrived at the outskirts of Joplin and stopped in a vacant field off the highway pursuant to an agreement with the family that he was to leave them bound and gagged in the car in order that he would have time to escape. Then came the tragic incident that resulted in their deaths. Cook was in the process of binding his victims when a police car passed and two officers looked them over carefully and drove on. As the tail lights of the police car faded away, the woman and children began screaming, so he shot the entire family. Cook then slid under the wheel, drove to the abandoned mine and dumped the bodies into the shaft. He placed the time at 3 A.M. That ended three days of terror for the Mossers-three nightmarish days spent with Cook's gun trained on them while they traveled almost aimlessly through Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arkansas.

It began on December 30, when he stopped the family and with his gun forced entry into their car. I told the man to drive to Oklahoma City, and if they did as I said they would not get hurt." They finally arrived at Oklahoma City, rode around town for "about an hour," then drove to Wichita Falls, where they bought gasoline at the small grocery-service station. Cook told the FBI agents that Mosser "tried to escape here," but he did not elaborate on the incident.

He then went on to describe how he forced Mosser to drive as far west as Carlsbad, New Mexico, then south to El Paso. Here Cook became frightened when a police car got "too close for comfort," and ordered Mosser to "turn around and head eastward." They drove to Houston, Texas. From Houston, they proceeded to Winthrop, Arkansas, where Mosser bought some food for the family. "Then we drove to Fort Smith and north to Joplin, where I killed them." In making the statement, Cook showed no remorse and offered no other excuse than that he feared apprehension.

After disposing of the bodies, he drove to Tulsa. "I arrived in the morning as people were going to work. I was excited and didn't want to be seen with all that blood in the car. I swung off on a side street and headed west on a dirt road. I slid into a muddy ditch and had to leave the car." He had left Tulsa by bus, and by combining short trips with random hitchhikes, had worked his way back to Blythe and "run into (Deputy Sheriff Homer) Waldrip" at the motel.

He took Waldrip's car, gun, and money and vanished into the wastelands. Seven miles north of Ogilby he left Waldrip's cruiser with the keys in the ignition and the red light still burning. He turned on the red flasher light of Waldrip's car to get Dewey to stop. After signing the confession, Cook looked up and asked, "How high do they hang you in Oklahoma?" "Pretty high," the agent replied, and Cook said, "I guess all I can do now is act crazy and get the sympathy of the people."

At the same moment, two hundred persons crowded the little chapel in Atwood, Illinois, for the funeral services of the Carl Mosser family. A public address system was set up to bring the services to hundreds more who stood outside. More than five hundred filed past the five gray caskets holding the bodies of Mosser, his wife Thelma, and their three children - Ronald Dean, Gary Carl and Pamela Sue. Afterward, the bodies were taken eight miles to the Hammond, Illinois, cemetery and lowered into graves covering two cemetery lots. At the farm north of Atwood that Carl Mosser rented, a waiting Collie dog and Christmas wreaths still hanging on doors and windows were stirring reminders of a whole family wiped out by the gun of a brutal desperado.

Cook's confession served to strengthen the kidnapping charge against him in Oklahoma. Venue in such cases lies in the federal district where the crime has its beginning. U.S. District Attorney Robert E. Shelton air-mailed a certified copy of the arrest warrant for the multiple killer to U.S. District Attorney Ernest Tolin in Los Angeles. "The crime was committed in the western Oklahoma district when he kidnapped the Mossers near Luther," explained Shelton. "We know he took them into Texas and Arkansas, and we know their bodies were found in Missouri. It makes no difference where the family died, the crime was in kidnapping and taking the members, while they were alive, across state lines."

District Attorney Don Bitler, of Imperial County, spoke about Cook's custody. "I will not battle the federal government," Bitler stated. "He should be tried where they have the strongest case. We have an excellent case against him in California for the murder of Robert Dewey. We also have him charged with the armed robbery of Waldrip. If it's charges they want, we can charge him with kidnappin; Waldrip, robbing Dewey, and stealing two automobiles." Five separate Mosser murder charges were filed against Cook by the Jasper County, Missouri, prosecuting attorney, Dave Tourtelot, at Joplin. But Tourtelot said, "We regard these merely as insurance to be invoked if the federal case falls short of the death penalty."

With his hands and feet shackled, the prisoner was taken by automobile under heavy guard to Los Angeles and put aboard a train to Oklahoma. He arrived in Oklahoma City at 1:27 PM., Sunday, January 21, shackled to two deputy U.S. marshals. The former juvenile delinquent cringed as he walked between rows of plainclothes men and uniformed officers who held back a huge crowd at Union Station. There was no shouting. The crowd merely watched him pass and discussed his crimes in hushed tones.

On March 13, in a suprise move seeking to beat the electric chair, Cook pled guilty. The judge ordered a sanity hearing for March 20th to be sure that Cook was mentally competent to enter a plea. Scheduled for attorneys to make closing arguments, on the second day of the hearing Judge Stephan S. Chandler turned to the prisoner. An expectant hush settled over the packed courtroom. "William Edward Cook, Jr. - stand up, I sentence you to the custody of the attorney general for a period of sixty years on the first count, and for a like sentence on each of the other four counts to run consecutively. I further recommend that you be committed to Alcatraz." The consecutive terms totaled three hundred years. Visibly brightened, Cook emerged from his stolidity and was ushered from the room. The crowd milled about, muttering. There was no demonstration. Judge Chandler had ordered deputy marshals stationed around the room to guard against any possible disturbance.

Shelton went to his office, fuming. In the hearing Shelton had said, "If ever a crime deserved the death penalty, this is it! I want the court and society and the public to know where law enforcement stands." He called the sentencing, "The damnedest travesty on justice ever!" He pointed out that a new federal law passed in July 1950 made it possible for a prisoner to be released on parole after serving fifteen years of a life sentence or a sentence of forty-five years or more. "In federal parlance, Cook would be eligible for parole when he is thirty-eight!"

Immediately he petitioned the attorney general to release Cook to California or Missouri, where state murder charges were pending. Within hours, the justice department in Washington an nounced it would honor a request by the state of California to try Cook in Imperial County for the murder of Robert Dewey, after completing his normal screening period at Alcatraz. Cook left Oklahoma City on Saturday night, March 24, in the custody of U.S. Marshal Rex Hawks and two deputies. He wore handcuffs, leg irons and a chain passed from the seat about his middle, like an airplane safety belt. When he stepped off the train at Emeryville, California, two days later, he still had heavy chains on his wrists.

On November 27, Superior Court Judge Luray J. Mouser ruled Dewey's killing "willful, deliberate and premeditated - committed in perpetration of a felony, robbery." He scheduled formal sentencing for 2 P.M. the day following. Judge Mouser asked if there was any reason why he should not pronounce the sentence. The judge stated he was aware that Cook was "emotionally unstable but pointed out that he had admitted the murder of Dewey, had been found sane by a jury, and that the degree of murder had been found to be the first degree." When he completed the charge and said, "I sentence you death," Cook paled slightly. A few seconds later a half-smirk appeared on his thick lips.

Handcuffed and shackled to two Imperial County deputy sheriffs, doomed Billy Cook left Imperial Valley for the last time before dawn Saturday, December 1, en route to San Quentin prison. On May 7, 1952, Attorney John Connolly made his last appeal for Cook's life. He told the California supreme court it should commute the Missouri killer's death sentence to life imprisonment because he was "obviously insane." District Attorney Bitler contended the question of sanity "had been fairly determined by a jury." The supreme court unanimously confirmed the jury verdict. The court's order went down to Trial Judge Mouser. Mouser set Cook's execution date for December 12.

During the last full day of his life, December 11, Cook sat moodily on his prison cot in death row reading newspapers and listening to the radio. He refused to accept the comfort of the prison chaplain or talk with Warden Harly O. Teets or newsmen. His only show of interest was in the menu for his last meal. Cook ordered fried chicken, french fried potatoes, peas, pumpkin pie, coffee and milk. Sullen and defiant to the last, the youth entered the prison's green-walled gas chamber flanked by two guards with one guard bringing up the rear. He was helped into the chamber's heavy wooden execution chair, and while being strapped in, looked around the eight-sided room as if completely oblivious to the presence of some fifty witnesses.

When the chamber's door closed at 10:03 A.M. and the lethal cyanide pellets were dropped, Cook's hands clenched. As the fumes began to fill the room, his hands remained closed and the word "HARD" across his fingers was clearly visible. He held back his head, inhaling the fumes. He did not struggle against death. The audible signs of his dying were three distinct gasps. Live by the gun and roam was his credo. He would roam no more.

Glenn Shirley. The Mosser Massacre: The Southwest's Greatest Manhunt. . Eakin Press, Austin, Texas. 2001.

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