The story of Billy Cook provides a cautionary tale about why one should never pick up hitchhikers. In late 1950 and early 1951, Cook kidnapped and killed drivers in Texas and California.
Billy Cook
William Edward Cook, Jr. was born one of eleven children in Joplin, Missouri, in 1928. At age five, his mother, Laura May Cook, died unexpectedly from a cerebral hemorrhage. Billy and his younger sister, Betty, discovered her body.
Soon after Laura May’s death, Billy’s father moved the children into an abandoned mine. Not long afterward, he abandoned them there with a few supplies, leaving them to fend for themselves. Authorities soon discovered them and placed all the children in foster care. All the children except Billy, that is. An eye problem and his belligerent attitude kept anyone from adopting him, so he became a ward of the state. The State of Missouri found a woman who accepted payment to look after Billy, but the two did not get along.
Drifting into crime and arrested for truancy at age 12, Billy told the judge he preferred a reformatory to foster care. He spent five years in detention before he was transferred, at age 17, to the Missouri State Penitentiary. While there, he attacked another inmate with a baseball bat.
Upon his release from prison, Cook briefly reunited with his father in Joplin. Billy told him, “I’m gonna live by the gun and roam,” before heading west. He landed in the small California desert town of Blyth, near the border with Arizona. He worked as a dishwasher until Christmas 1950 when he headed back east.
Billy Cook Begins His Crime Spree
On December 30, 1950, Texan Lee Archer, a mechanic, picked up a hitchhiking Billy Cook near Lubbock, Texas. Cook robbed the man of $100 at gunpoint, using a sunbnose .32 caliber revolver he bought in El Paso. He then locked Archer in the trunk of Archer’s car. Archer later forced the trunk open with a tire iron and escaped. Cook drove on to Oklahoma.
Archer’s car ran out of gas near Tulsa, Oklahoma, so Cook went back to hitchhiking. Carl Mosser, an Illinois farmer on his way to New Mexico, stopped and picked him up. In the car were Mosser’s wife, Thelma, and their three young children, Ronald Dean, Pamela Sue, and Gary Carl. The family also had their dog with them.
After Mosser picked him up, Cook forced him to drive around aimlessly for three days. Mosser struggled with Cook at a filling station in Wichita Falls, Texas, but Cook was too strong for him. Shortly thereafter, Cook shot and killed the entire family, including the dog, dumping the bodies down a mine shaft near Joplin, Missouri.
Now heading back to California, Cook abandoned the Mosser car in Oklahoma. When authorities discovered it, it had numerous bullet holes and bloodstains. Cook’s receipt for the gun he bought in El Paso was in the vehicle.
Cook Returns to California
Just outside Blythe, Deputy Sheriff Homer Waldrip, suspicious of Cook, went to a motel where Cook had formerly lived with a friend. Although he intended to question the friend, it was Cook himself who jumped from behind the door and took the deputy’s gun. As he had done with the Mossers, Cook had Waldrip drive around aimlessly. During the drive, he bragged about killing the Mosser family.
After some forty miles, Cook ordered Waldrip to get out of the police car and lie face down in a ditch. He told the deputy he was going to shoot him in the back of the head. Instead, he got back into the police car and drove away.
Cook’s next victim was a traveling salesman from Seattle, Robert Dewey. During the drive, Dewey tried to wrestle Cook’s gun away from him, but he was wounded in the attempt, and the car left the road. Cook killed Dewey with a shot to the head. His body was discovered in Waldrip’s police car near Ogilby, California. Meanwhile, Cook took off in Dewey’s car, abandoning it in Mexicali, Mexico.
Billy Cook Captured
By now, law enforcement was on high alert looking for Cook. He kidnapped two hunters, James Burke and Forrest Damron. He held the two captive for eight days, forcing them to drive across the border to Santa Rosalia, Mexico.
The Santa Rosalia police chief, Luis Parra, recognized Cook. He walked up to the fugitive, snatched the revolver out of his belt, and arrested him. At the time, Mexico did not have an extradition treaty with the United States. Consequently, a group of officers simply shoved Cook physically across the border. American police immediately arrested him.
Billy Cook Convicted
Billy Cook was returned to Oklahoma City to stand trial for the Mosser killings. Because he had taken the family across a state line, the case fell under the Federal Kidnapping Act. Cook pleaded guilty to five counts of kidnapping to avoid a possible death sentence. The judge permitted the plea because of questions about Cook’s mental health.
Although he received sentences totaling 300 years to be served at Alcatraz, the sentences had the possibility of parole after 20 years. When this became known, there was considerable public pressure to try him for the murder of Robert Dewey in California.
On December 1, 1951, a California jury found Billy Cook guilty of first-degree murder. They did not recommend mercy, which, at the time, was an automatic death sentence.
Epilogue
Billy Cook died in California’s gas chamber on December 12, 1952, eleven days before his 24th birthday.
Ida Lupino’s 1953 film, The Hitch-Hiker, is based on Cook’s killing spree.
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