Though she appeared in nearly five dozen films and scores of TV shows in the course of her forty-eight-year acting career, Ida Lupino’s enduring renown rests on her trailblazing, behind-the-scenes role as the first female director to work within the Hollywood studio system. For serious cineastes, her crowning achievement in that capacity was the 1953 thriller The Hitch-Hiker—the only classic film noir directed by a woman.
The film stars William Talman who, in a few years, would win fame as Hamilton Burger, the consistently outsmarted district attorney in the popular TV series Perry Mason. Here, he plays a character on the opposite side of the law: a seriously frightening psychopath named Emmett Myers, whose MO—killing luckless drivers who offer him a lift—has earned him the nickname “the Hitch-Hike Slayer.”
After committing a couple of murders in the opening scene, Myers is picked up by a pair of buddies on a fishing trip, Roy Collins and Gilbert Bowen, played, respectively, by Edmond O’Brien (the Academy Award–winning character actor whose thirty-year résumé includes such classics as White Heat, D.O.A., and The Wild Bunch) and Frank Lovejoy (Lloyd Bridges’s stooge in Try and Get Me! [see sidebar, p. 135]). For the remainder of the relentlessly tense, seventy-minute film, the sadistic Myers, holding the two hostages at gunpoint, leads them on a grueling odyssey through the arid Baja California Peninsula, toward the coastal town of Santa Rosalia, where he plans to escape on a ferry.
Along the way, he loses no opportunity to torment his captives both physically and mentally. Though outnumbered two to one, the fiendish Myers never lets his guard drop for a moment. Aside from his extreme psychopathology, his most distinctive trait is his abnormal right eye, which never completely shuts, even in his sleep. Among the film’s most unsettling images are the close-ups of his all-seeing eye, fixed on his cowering captives throughout the night, preventing them from attempting an escape. They are finally rescued, in the film’s climactic scene, by Mexican police officers who have been working with American authorities.
Though the grotesque Myers seems like the kind of nightmarish figure that only a Hollywood screenwriter could dream up, he is, in fact, closely based on a real-life serial killer. Indeed, in creating her movie, Lupino conducted her own firsthand research into the case, even interviewing the actual hostages who were the models for the fictional Collins and Bowen. Their actual names were James Burke and Forrest Damron, and their kidnapper was a young homicidal maniac named Billy Cook.
Cook had the kind of background virtually guaranteed to produce a sociopathic personality. Born in a shack in Joplin, Missouri, two days before Christmas 1928, he was an undernourished five-year-old when his mother died, leaving him and his seven siblings in the questionable care of their father, William E. Cook, an Oklahoma sharecropper turned lead miner. Saddled with his brood, the old man drove them to an abandoned mine shaft, supplied them with a few provisions—a couple of blankets, a flashlight, a jar of jam, some crackers, a box of cornflakes, and a can of Spam—then drove away, never to be seen again.
Discovered a few days later by a mining employee, the half-starved children were farmed out to foster families. Billy, however, proved too much of a handful for any of his prospective guardians. Though the clinical category had not yet been labeled, he already displayed symptoms of what is now called antisocial personality disorder: rebelliousness, aggression, a hateful attitude toward the world at large. Adding to these deformities of character was a disconcerting physical flaw: a defective eye that, even after a pair of operations paid for by the county, never closed properly. Unable to find a family willing to put up with the belligerent, unmanageable child, the county consigned him to the Missouri Training School for Boys in Boonville, a facility, according to one journalist, “that was known for overcrowded dormitories, violence, rape, corporal punishment, and lack of rehabilitation.” Billy was eleven years old.
His criminal career began at the age of fourteen when—briefly sprung from Boonville by a married older sister who took him into her home—he got hold of a blackjack and robbed a Joplin cab driver of eleven dollars. Promptly arrested, he was returned to the reformatory, where, as he recalled, he received regular beatings with a rubber hose for his many infractions.
He soon managed to break out but, after being nabbed for attempted car theft, found himself back inside. Official records describe him as an incorrigible troublemaker, who “attempted escape by sawing through bars with a smuggled hacksaw blade,” was “caught with razor blades, illegal pills, and knives in his possession,” and showed “no interest in learning a trade or skill.” The fingers of his left hand now bore the crudely tattooed letters HARD LUCK.
Assessed by the counselor assigned to his case as “a walking time bomb,” he was transferred to the Missouri State Penitentiary, where he quickly earned a reputation for violent and erratic behavior. When another inmate teased him about his malformed right eye, Billy nearly beat him to death with a baseball bat.
Released in 1950, Billy tracked down his father, by then a broken-down, seventy-year-old drunk subsisting in a mining shack on the outskirts of Joplin. When the old man inquired about his plans for the future—“What’re you going to do now they’ve cut you loose?”—Billy replied, “I’m going to live by the gun and roam.”
Thumbing his way to Blythe, California, a desert town near the Colorado border, Billy worked for a time as a dishwasher in a diner, earning enough money to purchase a .32-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Then, just as he said he would, he set out to fulfill his life’s ambition—to roam, rob, and kill.
On the evening of December 29, 1950, not far from Lubbock, Texas, a fifty-six-year-old mechanic named Lee Archer offered the hitchhiking Cook a ride. They had traveled for several hours and were nearing Oklahoma City, when Cook drew his gun and ordered the startled driver to pull off the road. After relieving Archer of all the money in his wallet, Cook locked him in the trunk, got behind the wheel, and took off.
Unfamiliar with manual transmissions, the young kidnapper kept stalling the car, while, inside the trunk, Archer worked furiously to free himself with a jack handle. When the car came to a sudden stop, Archer, who had managed to jimmy open the lock, slipped from the trunk and took off running. By the time Cook realized that his captive had escaped, Archer was out of sight.
Speeding off in Archer’s Buick, Cook headed northeast. He had passed through Tulsa and was halfway to Claremore when the overtaxed engine finally gave out. Abandoning the car, he waved down a passing 1949 Chevrolet. Inside was the Mosser family: thirty-three-year-old Carl; his twenty-nine-year-old wife, Thelma; their three small children; and their little white dog. They were on their way from their Atwood, Illinois, farm to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to visit Carl’s twin brother, Chris, an army lieutenant.
Good Samaritan that he was, Carl offered the stranded young man a lift. No sooner had Cook gotten into the rear seat than he pulled out his gun, stuck it into Mrs. Mosser’s side, and ordered her husband to drive.
For the next seventy-two hours, he kept them moving on a nightmarish zig-zag ride through four states. At one point, inside the tiny grocery of a filling station in Wichita Falls, Texas, Mosser managed to grab Cook and pin his arms, while shouting to the elderly attendant, E. O. Cornwall, for help. Believing that the two men had broken into a scuffle, Cornwall—variously described in news accounts as “confused” and “unalert”—pulled a .44-caliber revolver from beneath the counter and ordered them out of his store.
Back in the car, with Cook holding his family hostage at gunpoint, Mosser was forced to drive more than two thousand miles on an aimless course through Texas, New Mexico, Arkansas, and finally into Missouri. Outside Joplin, too exhausted to go on, he pulled off the highway. By then, his wife had collapsed into hysterical sobbing.
Tearing strips of fabric from the clothes in their suitcase, Cook bound and gagged Carl and his wife, then tied up the children’s hands with the chin cords from the Hopalong Cassidy hats the boys had received for Christmas. As fast as his finger could work the trigger, he shot all five of them, along with the family dog. He then drove the corpses to an abandoned mine and dumped them down a shaft.
Fleeing to Tulsa, Oklahoma, he left the car in a muddy ditch and caught a west-bound Greyhound bus. By then, Carl and his family had been reported missing by his twin brother, Chris. When a Tulsa cop found the Mossers’ ditched car—the seats and floorboards punctured with bullet holes, upholstery caked with dried blood—a nationwide all-points bulletin was issued for Cook, who had been identified, among other ways, by the contents of a duffel bag he had left in Lee Archer’s hijacked car and a description provided by E. O. Cornwall, who had informed police about the violent struggle in his filling station.
Despite the thousands of law officers hunting him, Cook, who now topped the FBI’s most-wanted list, managed to make his way by hitchhiking and bus to one of his old haunts, Blythe, California. On January 6, deputy Homer Waldrip of the Blythe sheriff’s department drove to a local motor court to question a former acquaintance of Cook’s, a man named Paul Reese, on the off chance that he might have some knowledge of the fugitive’s whereabouts. When the lawman knocked on Reese’s door, it was opened by Cook, who stuck his pistol into Waldrip’s neck, relieved the deputy of his service revolver, then led him to his patrol car and had him drive into the desert.
Along the way, Cook bragged about slaying the Mosser family and claimed that he had “killed two others in Oklahoma and buried their bodies in a snowdrift.” When Cook ordered Waldrip out of the car about forty miles outside Blythe, bound his hands with blanket strips, and made him lie facedown in the sand, the deputy assumed he was about to meet the same fate. Cook, however, had kind feelings for Waldrip’s wife, Cecelia, a former coworker in the Blythe diner, and had a sudden change of heart. Leaving the terrified deputy alive, he jumped behind the wheel of the patrol car and sped off.
A few miles up the road, the young killer turned on his red lights and siren and pulled over a 1947 Buick driven by a vacationing oil salesman from Seattle, Robert Dewey. Executing Dewey with a shot to the head, he dragged the corpse into Waldrip’s patrol car, then drove toward the Mexican border in the dead man’s Buick.
When Dewey’s corpse was discovered a few hours later, Cook—now variously referred to in the press as “the Hitch-Hiking Killer,” “the Mad Dog Slayer,” and “the Squint-Eyed Desperado”—became the object of the biggest manhunt since the days of John Dillinger. City and state police, FBI agents, Texas Rangers, and small-town sheriffs were on the lookout for him in every state west of the Mississippi. By then, however, their quarry was already in Mexico.
A hundred or so miles south of the border, Dewey’s Buick broke down. Cook was standing by the side of the road when he was offered a ride by two passing motorists: James Burke and Forrest Damron, a pair of amateur prospectors from El Centro, California, on a gold-hunting expedition. They were taken hostage at gunpoint and, over the next week, forced to drive their young kidnapper on a 450-mile journey through the Baja California desert. Along the way, they listened to regular radio bulletins about the search for the Hitch-Hiking Killer. “He told us that there had been eight passengers in three other cars he had ridden in,” Damron later explained, “and all of them were dead. We weren’t about to do anything foolish.” When they camped at night, Cook would recline with his back propped against a tree or a rock, his finger on the trigger of his semiautomatic pistol, his one bad eye never closing. As Damron would tell reporters, he and his buddy never tried to escape because “they couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or not.”
Their salvation came on January 15, 1951. Alerted by various informants that the two missing prospectors and their captor had been spotted in Santa Rosalia, six hundred miles south of the border, Francisco Kraus Morales, chief of the Tijuana police, boarded a small government airplane and flew to the little fishing village. With the local police chief, Parra Rodriguez, at his side, Morales found Cook and his captives seated in a café. Cook was arrested without a struggle.
At virtually the same time, searchers in Joplin made a ghastly discovery. Acting on a tip from a former jail mate of Cook’s—who told police that Billy had once bragged about killing a man and disposing of the body in a mine shaft—they began exploring all the abandoned shafts around Joplin and quickly found the bullet-ridden corpses of the Mossers. The five bodies were so badly decomposed that the police and firemen who descended into the shaft to retrieve the remains had to wear gas masks.
Returned to the States, Cook was tried and convicted for the kidnap-murders of the five Mossers and given five consecutive sixty-year sentences, for a total of three hundred years. The outraged federal prosecutor, Thomas Shelton, denounced the decision as “the goddamnedest travesty of justice ever! If ever a crime deserved the death penalty, this is it.”
Shelton’s hunger for vengeance—shared by the majority of the American public—was satisfied when Cook was turned over to California authorities and tried for the murder of Robert Dewey. After jury deliberations lasting less than an hour, he was convicted and sentenced to death in the San Quentin gas chamber.
Unrepentant to the end, Cook refused to see the prison chaplain or talk to Warden Harley O. Teets. He did, however, briefly meet with one visitor, Ida Lupino, who was eager to secure the rights to his story and came to San Quentin to have him sign a release.
After a final meal of fried chicken, french fries, peas, pumpkin pie, coffee, and milk, Cook was executed on the morning of December 12, 1952. For a while, his corpse was put on public display by a Barnumesque mortician in Comanche, Oklahoma. It was viewed by an estimated twelve thousand morbid curiosity seekers from as far away as Alaska before being claimed by family members and buried under cover of darkness in Joplin’s Peace Church Cemetery. When the grave was vandalized and the tombstone stolen, the body of the notorious badman was exhumed and reburied in an undisclosed location somewhere in the cemetery. To this day, no one knows where the remains of “Butcher Billy” Cook lie.
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