Young Man with a Gun

When William E. Cook was five years old, his mother died; his father, a ne'er-do-well Joplin, Mo. smelter worker, abandoned the boy and his seven brothers & sisters in a deserted mine cave. After the authorities discovered them there, most of them found foster parents, but only "the county" would take William, a small, ugly child with a deformed right eyelid. William bit like a caged wildcat at the institutional hand that fed him.

When the county put him in a boarding home, he threw tantrums and complained that he wanted a bicycle like other kids. At twelve, he quit school; when he was hauled before a judge he sullenly asked to be sent to the reformatory. A married sister got him out; he responded by robbing a Joplin taxi driver of $11.

H-a-r-d Luck. William Cook spent almost all his youth behind bars. Reformatory authorities noted that he was neat, quiet, and wrote a "nice hand." But he started endless fights. At 17, he was sent to the Missouri State Penitentiary, where he gained a measure of fame among the convicts by hitting a fellow inmate over the head with a baseball bat. When he got out last year, he was 21a short, heavy-shouldered, brooding youth with a pimply, undershot chin, and the legend H-a-r-d L-u-c-k tattooed on his knuckles.

He looked up his father, who lives on a pension in a Joplin shack, and announced that he was "going to live by the gun." Then he made his way to the hot little desert town of Blythe, Calif., got a job as a dishwasher. On the night before Christmas, Cook disappeared. He bobbed up in El Paso and bought a .32-caliber automatic pistol. After that he started out to fulfill his promise.

Help Me! His first harvest was a car, a prisoner and $100. He hitched a ride with a 56-year-old Texas mechanic named Lee Archer, robbed him and locked him in the automobile's trunk. But after Cook began driving, the mechanic pried open the trunk and escaped. Then, near Oklahoma City, the car broke down.

Cook got out and flagged down a blue 1949 Chevrolet sedan. It was crowded. A 33-year-old Atwood, 111. farmer named Carl Mosser was taking his wife and three little children on a vacation trip. Cook squeezed in and made them his hostages. During the next three days & nights, the blue Chevrolet traveled almost 2,500 miles in an erratic course around Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas.

The captive farmer tried to escape at a filling station near Wichita Falls, Texas. He pinned Cook's arms and yelled: "Help me! Help me! He's going to kill me and take my wife!" Cook wrenched free, yanked out his pistol and forced Mosser back into the automobile. Cook and his hostages stopped twice more, once at a filling station in Randlett, Okla., once at Winthrop, Ark., but neither Mosser, his wife, nor his children made any outcry. Two days later, the blue car was foundempty, bullet-pierced and drenched with bloodin the hills near Tulsa.

Two Hopalong Hats. A white-faced state policeman, who had the job of cataloguing its contents, wept when he came to one item: two Hopalong Cassidy hats. A nationwide alarm went out; police set up roadblocks across half a dozen states. But William Cook and his .32 vanished. Then, three days later, back at Blythe, Calif.1,600 miles from Tulsaa deputy named Homer Waldrip strolled into an auto court to question a man who had been one of Cook's friends.

Waldrip knocked. There was silence. Then the door flew open, and a man in a red shirt jumped out, a pistol in his hand. It was Cook. He took Waldrip's pistol and ammunition belt, walked him out to his patrol car, told him to drive south into the desert. He bragged that he had thrown the Mosser bodies into a ditch, had killed seven people in all, and "would just as soon kill you." But after 35 miles, he tied the deputy's arms, set him down in the fierce sun, andafter a moment of ominous hesitationdrove on.

A passing car found Waldrip two hours later. Seven miles down the road they found the patrol car with its red light on and its engine running. Less than a mile farther, they found a mana vacationing Seattle salesman named Robert Dewey lying dead with a bullet hole in his head. Dewey's automobile, a blue 1947 Buick sedan, was found that night beside a dusty Mexican road, 50 miles south of the border.

Then, in dreadul repetition of the pattern, two El Centro, Calif. prospectors were reported missing after starting out on a trip to Mexico. FBI and police posses scoured towns all along the border, immigration and customs officials searched every vehicle, planes and helicopters swept the desert roads. It was one of the most feverish manhunts since the days of John Dillinger.

It ended abruptly this week when Tijuana's Chief of Police Francisco Kraus Morales led a posse 450 miles into Baja California. There he finally ran the gunman to earth, liberated the two prospectors who had been captured by Cook, and triumphantly flew his quarry back to the border.

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