Serial Killer Carroll ‘Eddie’ Cole, the Product of an Anarcho-Tyrannical System

In a recent post about California’s plans for the early release of 78,000 dangerous felons from its state penitentiaries, we introduced the concept of anarcho-tyranny. An anarcho-tyrannical system will, as a matter of practice, turn loose upon uninformed and undefended communities dangerous criminals and the mentally disturbed. We are now witnessing anarcho-tyrannical rule not just in California but throughout the country, as local government leaders defund public safety agencies while major cities experience record-setting crime waves and exploding homicide rates.

Michael Arntfield writes in his book “Murder in Plain English,” that the most prolific serial killers commonly include police officers, military personnel and long distance truck drivers.

The story of Carroll Edward Cole (1938-1985) is a stark case study of an anarcho-tyrannical system, as is the case of William Bonin, who was also confined in some of the same mental institutions for the criminally insane as Cole was.

In reviewing a case like Cole’s, there are two core issues:

1. The problem of detecting the criminal.
2. The problem of taking custody of and providing treatment for the offender once he is detected and legally judged to be guilty.

In the case of Cole — as opposed to hard-to-catch Ted Bundy and Israel Keyes — there was ample detection, but his custody process was a malevolent farce. In fact, he was both caught in serious crimes and, upon recognizing himself as a harm to the public, tried to commit himself to mental institutions. The medical quacks he encountered frequently diagnosed him with untreatable personality disorders and soon released him back into society.

To gain some perspective on what you are about to read, consider that the field of psychiatry and psychology had become more and more dominated by rabid Cultural Marxists. Quacks such as Alfred Kinsey widened the Overton Window on morality and degeneracy with falsified research on what constitutes “normal” behavior.

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Read “Albert Kinsey: The Lying Godfather of Fraudulent Sexual Research”

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Other Marxist quacks, such as Fromm and Cooper, blamed mental disorders on society as a whole, negating individual responsibility. So, using critical theory, they set about changing the former and giving rabid dogs a pass.

Psychoanalyst (((Erich Fromm- Frankfurt School))), for example, in his book “The Sane Society” (1955), wrote, “Many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of ‘unadjusted’ individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself.”

And in 1967, David Cooper, a trained Marxist revolutionary, provided an introduction to Foucault’s “Madness and Civilization” that began, “Madness has in our age become some sort of lost truth.” Continuing the same line of thought, by the end of the following decade, “he elevated madness to the status of a liberatory force,” others observed.

Laing, through the Philadelphia Association, which he founded with Cooper in 1965, set up over 20 therapeutic communities in which staff and residents theoretically assumed equal status and any medication used was voluntary.

The Radical Therapist, a journal first published in 1971 in North Dakota by Michael Glenn, David Bryan, Linda Bryan, Michael Galan and Sara Glenn, challenged the psychotherapy establishment in a number of ways, raising the slogan, “Therapy means change, not adjustment.” It contained articles that challenged the professional mediator approach, advocating instead revolutionary politics and authentic community making.

Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz said the use of psychiatry should not be to treat or excuse what he saw as deviance from societal norms or moral conduct. Szasz argued instead that distress/deviance is due to the flaws or failures of individuals in their struggles in life. The idea of a spiritual side, such as what David Berkowitz learned the hard way, was diminished by the Marxists.

‘Son of Sam’ Berkowitz Was Not a Lone-Wolf Killer (Update)

The Cases of Carroll Edward Cole

While Cole’s father, LaVerne, was off fighting for his country, Cole’s mother, Vesta, started to have multiple affairs with a variety of men. Vesta would often take little Eddie with her and would threaten him repeatedly and physically abuse him to back up her threats. She did not want him to tell his father about what she had been up to.

On other occasions, Vesta would make Eddie dress up like a girl and parade him around in front of her friends, bullying him and taunting him, calling him “mama’s little girl.” All of these abuses started planting the seeds for Eddie’s lifelong hatred of women. Social service and child protection intervention was no where to be seen for young Eddie.

In a repeated pattern later, Eddie at age 7 blacked out and awoke to find he had strangled the family’s puppy. Afterward, instead of feeling bad about the experience, he began to fantasize about killing his mother and females that would cross his path.

At age 8, he was tormented and teased about his girlish-sounding name. After swimming at Richmond’s yacht harbor with a group of boys, he waited until schoolmate Duane was alone and held him under water until he died. This was ruled an accident. Cole confessed to this while in death row.

Eddie dropped out of high school during his junior year and started to drift in and out of menial jobs. He began to drink heavily. He was caught committing crimes and would be in and out of jail for various offenses. These offenses included burglary, arson, car theft and vagrancy.

In February of 1957, Cole joined the Navy, but that didn’t last long. He was dishonorably discharged in October 1958 for stealing guns. He would shoot at cars along San Diego highways for which he served a brief stint in a military brig.

Cole’s mental state seemed to have started to further deteriorate in his early twenties. He committed himself to various mental health institutions off and on over a three-year period starting in the 1960s.

It was in 1960 that Cole attacked two couples with a hammer who were out parking along a local lover’s lane. Afterward, he flagged down a Richmond police officer and told him he had violent fantasies that involved strangling women. He committed himself to the Napa State Hospital for 90 days. The hospital staffs made a diagnosis of Antisocial Sociopath Personality Disturbance and recommended he be discharged, then apply for outside psychiatric treatment or voluntary admission to Atascadero State Hospital due to his sadistic and abnormal sexual tendencies. He was released in March 1961. 

In October 1961, at the age of 23, Cole requested psychiatric help once again. This request was made while he was serving a six-month sentence for auto theft. He was transferred to Atascadero State Hospital and then transferred to Stockton State Hospital in September 1962.

At Atascadero, Dr. Irwin Hart made a worthless diagnosis of Cole as a passive dependent person with a façade of independence and confusion concerning sexual identification.

At Stockton State Hospital, Dr. I.I. Weiss noted that he seems to be afraid of the female figure and cannot have intercourse with her first but must kill her before doing so. Weiss diagnosed Cole’s condition as a schizophrenic reaction of the chronic undifferentiated type.

Cole was granted release by Dr. Weiss in April 1963 diagnosed with an antisocial personality disorder who posed no threat to others. That seemed to be a pattern with Cole’s hospitalizations: a diagnosis of a personality disorder considered untreatable and then quickly discharged back into the community.

Winter Watch Note: Atascadero State Hospital was literally a breeding ground for serial killers and flying monkey types during the 1960s and ’70s. In early 1969, William Bonin was arrested and indicted on five counts of kidnapping, four counts of sodomized rape and one count of child molestation against the five youths he had abducted and assaulted. He plea bargained the charges down to molestation and forced oral copulation and was sentenced to the Atascadero as a mentally disordered sexual offender considered “amenable to treatment.”

Two years after his arrival at Atascadero, Bonin was sent to prison after being declared unsuitable for further treatment largely due to his repeated engagement in forceful sexual activity with male inmates. However, in an act of sheer — and we would say deliberate — malice, on June 11, 1974, the extremely dangerous Bonin was released from prison after doctors concluded he was “no longer a danger to the health and safety of others. He went on to murder at least 18 young men and boys.

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Read “Freeway Killer William Bonin: Ringleader Template of a Band of Sadistic Homosexual Killers”

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After his release from Stockton State Hospital, Cole traveled to Texas.

Soon thereafter in 1963, he attempted suicide with pills after his failed attempt to strangle a woman and spent four days in a psychiatric ward.

It was while in Dallas that he met and soon after married Neville “Billie” Whitworth. She worked as a stripper and was also an alcoholic.

They were together for two years. In August 1965, Cole convinced himself that Billie was sleeping with the other occupants of the motel they called home. He decided to light the motel on fire. Cole was arrested, charged with arson and sentenced to a two-year jail term. He was released after 10 months.

After his release in Texas, Cole traveled to Lake Ozark, Missouri. He wasn’t there long before he was arrested again. In May 1967, the 29-year-old Cole attempted to strangle 11-year-old Virginia Rowden. He had picked her at random. While she was sleeping, Cole crept inside her bedroom and tried to strangle her, but her screaming scared him off.

It didn’t take police long to apprehend him and charge him with attempted murder. He was sentenced to five years in prison and paroled after three.

Cole then drifted back to San Diego, then to Reno, Nevada, where he twice attempted to strangle women he met in bars, but both his victims escaped.

He surrendered to Reno police and confessed his urges to murder women. The officers detained him and charged him with disorderly conduct.

Once more, Cole signed himself over for psychiatric services. While in treatment in Sparks, Nevada, Cole was identified by a psychiatrist as being a malinger. This is someone who fakes symptoms in order to get out of something, like work or jail.

This psychiatrist, Dr. Felix Peebles, diagnosed him with antisocial personality disorder, alcoholism and a compulsion to strangle and rape women. Peebles felt Cole was highly intelligent and manipulative. So what does the doctor do? He releases Cole from psychiatric care and provides him with a bus ticket back to San Diego.

Cole later said that back in San Diego, he felt he could no longer restrain himself from committing murder. He was done with suicide attempts and committing himself to mental institutions.

He then proceeded to fully carry out his compulsions and darkest fantasies. What followed looks a lot like the M.O. of serial killer Samuel Little.

Winter Watch Note: Little’s arrest history begins in 1956 with the theft of a bicycle, for which he was sent to the brutal Boys’ Industrial School in Lancaster, Ohio. Over the next six decades, he was repeatedly arrested in Ohio, Maryland, Florida, Maine, Connecticut, Oregon, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, California, etc. The list goes on and on.

Charges include burglary, breaking and entering, assault and battery, assault with the intent to rob, assault with a firearm, armed robbery, assault on a police officer, solicitation of prostitution, DUI, shoplifting, theft, grand theft, possession of marijuana, unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, resisting arrest, battery, false imprisonment, assault with great bodily injury, robbery, rape, and sodomy.

Collectively, for all of these crimes, Little served just 10 years – and no time after 1987 until his final arrest in 2012. He murdered 96 before retiring- stating “he was getting too old.”

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Read “Samuel Little: The Most Deadly Serial Killer Known in American History”

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On May 7, 1971 — two days before his 33rd birthday — Cole met Essie Buck in a downtown dive bar. They decided to go somewhere more private, which happened to be Cole’s car. He strangled Essie to death. He then placed her body in the trunk and drove around with her for two days before dumping her body.

On May 23, 1971, a little over two weeks later, he picked up in a bar two unknown women. Once again. he strangled one and hit the other on the head with a hammer. He admitted to burying them somewhere outside San Ysidro. There would also be a third woman that Cole would pick up on May 30, 1971, have sex with and strangle.

In June 1971, this habitual criminal served time for theft and drunk driving. He was released the following March.

Newly out of prison, he met and moved in with a barmaid named Diana Pashal and married her in 1973.

Over the next nine years, from 1971 to 1980, Cole would travel to various states and carry out his murders. In 1975, Cole got a job transporting coins from the local airport to nearby casinos. That summer, Cole decided to steal an entire shipment of coins and took off for Wyoming, leaving his wife behind. Inquiring minds want to know, how did he ever get a job in casino security with responsibility for guarding money?

It was in Wyoming in August 1975 that Cole met Myrlene “Teepee” Hamer at a local dive bar. After a night of drinking, she suggested they have sex. Cole accepted her offer. Afterward, he strangled her and dumped her body on a local hillside.

In 1976, Cole checked into a detoxification center where he stole a fellow patient’s $1,500 check and cashed it.

Next in this ongoing farce, he was charged with mail theft and having jumped bail. Cole was captured a short time later and charged with unlawful flight. In February 1977, He was sentenced to one year in prison but never served the time.

July 19, 1977, he was jailed for car theft in Las Vegas. He made bail, then made his way to Oklahoma City.

On March 8, 1978, Cole received a six-month sentence plus three years probation, but he was freed from jail after three months.

In May 1977, the body of Kathleen Blum was found in a backyard in Las Vegas. Blum was known as a local prostitute. She had been strangled.

In November 1977, Cole met another woman in a bar in Oklahoma City. He claims that when he woke up, after agreeing to spend the night with her, she was dead in the bathtub. Her feet and arms were in the fridge and slices of her buttocks were found in a skillet on the stove. Cole claims that he threw her body out with the trash.

Oct. 25, 1978, Cole was arrested for being drunk and charged with a probation violation. He was then released on $2,000 bond.

Nov. 8, 1978, he was arrested on unknown charges that were never reported to his probation officer.

In 1979, Cole met Bonnie Sue O’Neil back in San Diego at a local bar. After a night of sex, Cole strangled her and dumped her body in a garbage can behind a building.

In September 1979, now 41 years old and after a little short of six years of marriage, Cole strangled his wife, Diana, to death but apparently did not leave the city. It took eight days for a neighbor to call the police after he noticed Cole digging a grave in a crawl space. Police would find Diana wrapped in a blanket and stored in a closet. Police decided that Diana died from her heavy drinking (alcohol poisoning) and did not rule her case a homicide. Cole had been detained in Diana’s death but was soon released. Again, we ask, is somebody or something protecting monsters like these? 

Although Cole drifted from state to state, all of his killings were within walking distance to his residence.

Cole once again returned to Las Vegas and found work as a truck driver for a religious charity.

In November 1979, just two months after killing his wife, Cole killed Marie Cushman. He left her body in a room at the Kasbah Hotel.

In December 1979, Cole married for a third time, this time to one of his female co-workers. While on their honeymoon, the couple was pulled over by police for a traffic offense. When police ran Cole’s license, they found that he didn’t have a valid one and there were warrants out for various parole violations. For seven years, Cole had continued to rack up other offenses, such as drunk driving, passing bad checks, mail theft and jumping bail.

Cole was jailed until October 1980. Upon his release, he headed for Dallas. Not one month later, on Nov. 12, he murdered 32-year-old Wanda Fay Roberts after picking her up at a Bryant Street bar. Wanda’s body would be found naked from the waist down behind a clump of trees. She had been strangled to death. Postmortem results would show that Wanda had not been sexually assaulted.

On Nov. 30, after murdering Wanda and another unknown woman, Cole was found at the scene of his third murder victim of the month, 43-year-old Sally Thompson. Her sons had come to visit their mother. When they knocked on her front door, they were met by a disoriented Eddie Cole who was wreaking of whiskey. They found their mom lying on the couch, face down, naked from the waist down. When police arrived, Cole was taken into custody.

He told police that Sally had invited him over for sex. According to police, there were no signs of Sally being sexually assaulted. Police let Cole go, believing Sally had died of alcohol poisoning. It wasn’t until the next day that a detective noted the the address Cole had given was to a half-way house for convicted felons. After being picked up at his job at a Toys ‘R’ Us warehouse, Cole confessed. He admitted not only to Sally’s murder but to his entire history of murders, telling police he had killed up to 35 women.

In April 1981, Cole was sentenced to 25 years to life for three counts of first-degree murder. He had taken the stand in his own defense. In fact, he was the only defense witness. He told the jury about his sadistic upbringing and his hatred of women that all started with his mother.

He agreed to face additional murder charges back in Nevada, waiving extradition on March 30, 1984. Nevada had the death penalty at the time. On Aug. 16, 1984, Cole appeared in court and pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder. Cole stated that he believed in capital punishment and that there were no mitigating circumstances for what he had done. He admitted to being a menace to society and extremely dangerous.

Cole went before a three-judge panel in October 1984 for the penalty phase and was sentenced to die for the murder of Marie Cushman. He was then transferred to Carson City to await lethal injection. After waiving all appeals, his execution date was set and carried out on Dec. 6, 1985. He was 47.

Carroll Eddie Cole was perfectly suited for a malevolent anarcho-tyranny system indifferent to society. There were innumerable opportunities to lock him up and throw away the keys.

Days before his execution and in his own words, Cole indicated he knew he needed to be put down like a rabid dog.