Broken Lives

Broken Lives was written by Estelle Blackburn between 1992 and 1998. The book is about the false imprisonment of two people, John Button and Darryl Beamish who were both convicted for murders that were later proved to be committed by Eric Cooke the last man hanged in Western Australia in the Fremantle Gaol.

Though the information was to go into a book it became a combined exercise in authorship and citizen advocacy which led to the re-opening of the cases of both Button and Darryl Beamish and the quashing of their long-standing convictions.

In 1963 John Button was convicted of the manslaughter of his girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson. Button was originally charged with wilful murder but the jury found him guilty of the lesser charge and was sentenced to 10 years jail. Button's brother approached Blackburn in January 1992 claiming his older brother had been framed for a murder committed by Eric Cooke, though skeptical Blackburn met John Button in February 1992. After hearing his testimony and reading the appeal books kept from his previous court actions, he decided that his case would be an appropriate topic for the book.

The key discovery in the revision of the case histories was that Eric Cooke had been a multiple-method killer. His offences show a significant deviation from the pattern generally accepted as the orthodox "serial killer" template, which holds that such killers target the same type of victim in the same way, impelled by the same underlying motive. Cooke, conversely, for differing reasons, using various methods, killed or attempted to kill persons of both sexes and of a wide spread of ages and social circumstances.

Blackburn discovered, once granted access to police archives, that the police had not emphasised this behaviour pattern of Cooke in their public statements. They made no public announcement that Cooke had attacked seven other women in five hit-runs and five other women asleep in their beds, women who survived the attacks. So the Western Australian community at large and the legal advocates for Button and Beamish were unaware that Cooke had attempted murder by vehicle impact. This was the means by which John Button's girlfriend, 17-year-old Rosemary Anderson, had been killed. At the time of Button's trial for her wilful murder, her death appeared to be an isolated event and his claim that he had coincidentally discovered her after the attack seemed implausible. Likewise, during Darryl Beamish's trial for the wilful murder of 22-year-old heiress Jillian Brewer (who was attacked while she slept), the offence was not placed in the context of the series of assaults that Cooke had committed against other women asleep in their homes.