WARNING: THIS CASE IS DISTURBING

This case takes place in the UK in the years 1974 and 1975. On the evening of the 18th of October 1974, a 20-year-old woman was alone in her room on Springfield Road in Cambridge. All of a sudden, the lights went out. Before she could even understand what had happened, the door was forced open and a man entered.

Like something straight from a horror movie. He approached the young woman and tied her hands. Then, he put a pillowcase over her head. He pressed a knife against her to restrain her and to stop her crying for help. And then, what unfolded was nothing short of horrific. This man forced himself upon the woman.

When he was finished, he took her money and some of her jewelry and then fled from the scene. Once he was gone, this woman called the police. The following morning, investigators asked if anyone in the area had seen anything suspicious the night prior. The investigation began immediately. However, it wouldn’t be long before he struck again.

Just 2 weeks later, on the 1st of November, that very same man entered a flat in Abbey Road. The victim was a 20-year-old student who had just had a bath. This man snuck into the apartment, grabbed the woman, and tied her up. This time, he then proceeded to press an ether-soaked pad over her mouth until she was subdued.

And then, of course, like he did to the previous victim, he took advantage of her, too. By this point, detectives were treating the attacks as the works of the same offender, which meant that they had a serial rapist on their hands. In response, the police began warning single women across the Cambridge area, telling them to keep their doors and windows locked at all times.

On the 11th of November, this man would strike again, but this time the outcome was very different. The woman he targeted fought back. This woman kicked him as hard as she could in the groin, which prevented him from gaining the advantage. She then reached for his head and managed to pull off a wig.

Realizing that his disguise was compromised, the man just ran away, but he was far from deterred. The woman went to the police and told them about the terrifying encounter and warned them that this serial offender was wearing disguises. Now, this gave the officers some clues. He was scared of being recognized, meaning that it was highly likely that he was from the area.

Just 2 days later, the man would strike again. He struck at the Homerton Teaching Training College and the victim was a 28-year-old female student. She had gone alone to a remote soundproofed building on the college grounds to practice her cello. During her practice, this man jumped on her, forced her to the ground, and told her he would murder her if she didn’t comply.

He tied her hands and covered her head with a nearby curtain. He then moved her into the dark out across the grounds to a shed. Inside there, he completed his hideous plan. A soundproofed room on a quiet part of the college campus, late enough that the grounds were deserted, was not a place that anyone stumbled across by chance. It was clear to the police that he had been watching this space for some time.

By mid-November, the Cambridge police force knew that it was dealing with a seriously dangerous serial attacker. He moved across the city, used disguises, carried various tools and chemicals. He was amateur. He was well prepared and he had no conscience. With so many victims in such little time, a task force was assembled under Detective Inspector Jack Cole and Detective Superintendent Bernard Hudson.

Within just a few weeks, officers were conducting city-wide patrols. The police were so desperate to catch this man that they would hide in potential assault spots, hiding up trees, watching and waiting inside bins. They also distributed a wanted notice showing a depiction of what the man could look like based on the victim statements.

The Cambridge colleges were also taking it seriously, too. They organized a bodyguard scheme staffed by male students for women living or traveling alone. Also, a 1,000-pound reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of this serial offender.

But then, on the 8th of December, the attacker entered a block of flats in Newnham. He entered through the back of the building and inside he found a 21-year-old student asleep. Like the first case, the attacker put a knife to the victim’s throat. However, this time, he dragged her outside into the garden. He used her own tights to blindfold her before forcing himself upon her on the ground.

And to add insult to injury, this man tried to humiliate the victim further by saying that he had an STI. Deliberate humiliation was a significant and escalating feature of these attacks. The police soon found out about this horrendous attack and they grew increasingly worried. Despite people being on the lookout, the attacker continued nonetheless.

A week later, on the 15th of September, he returned to the same street where the victim had pulled off his wig the month before. He came back wearing a different wig and a false beard. When this mysterious man tried to restrain the woman, she too fought back. And in turn, this criminal used his knife several times to subdue her.

Tragically, the woman he attacked that night was cut badly enough in the struggle that she later needed a number of stitches, and she was severely hurt.

The winter months brought no respite in the public, even as the attacks paused. Everyone was terrified. The lead investigator and his team continued working through descriptions, physical evidence, and the limited forensic material available.

What they had gathered included small footprints and semen samples useful only for blood grouping. When this case took place, it was not a refined forensic DNA method, as the technology was not yet there. Witness descriptions of the attacker placed him as a relatively short man. He was possibly young and possibly had long hair.

Officers took saliva samples from men aged roughly 17 to 30 in the Cambridge area, but nothing hit. And this was for good reason. Their profile was incorrect.

It would be some time before the despicable man struck again. On the 13th of April, a 23-year-old female receptionist was alone in her house when all of a sudden, she was awoken by a hooded figure. The mysterious man was dressed in black leather. Once he was inside the room, he told her directly just who he was. He identified himself as the Cambridge rapist.

He then bound and gagged the woman and forced himself upon her. Once he was done, he fled the scene, leaving her bound for hours. The woman eventually managed to work her way to the window, pushed the catch open with her teeth, and she called for help, and help soon arrived.

She told the police that the attacker had given himself a new name. It was obvious that he was lapping up the notoriety. For the investigation, this change in behavior was striking. He was becoming increasingly more brazen.

The authorities reportedly increased the number of officers working on the case to 60 by April, but the question was, why could they not find this man? Why was he so hard to catch? The answer in part was that they were looking for the wrong kind of person.

Every appeal made by the police, every photo fit, every public briefing pointed towards a young man, probably under 30. In reality, this mysterious attacker was closer to 47, and he wore wigs and disguises to obscure his true hair and age. And when he left the scene of the crime, he sometimes cycled away in women’s clothing.

This was done to avoid suspicion. He looked to any patrol officer like a woman on a bicycle in the dark.

But with that said, the police came very close to capturing this man. The team of investigators were looking into potential suspects throughout these months. One particular man came up on their radar. This man locally was known as a burglar, and he had a long criminal history.

And on top of that, this man had apparently been walking into Cambridge sex shops and telling people that he was the mysterious serial attacker that everyone was looking for, which is incredibly bold. But this was a city on high alert with information pouring in from every direction. What we do know is, when detectives came for him, they questioned him twice and searched his caravan and his workshop, but they found nothing that they could use.

And with that, he was free to go.

On the 6th of May, the series took another turn. For the first time, an attack occurred in broad daylight. The Cambridge attacker entered the woman’s home, stabbed her in the stomach, and forced himself upon her. Only this time, he was wearing something incredibly disturbing.

He wore a black mask with the letters “RAPIST” painted across the front. As the Cambridge attacker would later explain, he did this so he wouldn’t have to introduce himself before attacking a woman and because the word painted across his head frightened women more effectively than saying it out loud, which was his aim. He wanted to spread as much fear as humanly possible.

By this point, the investigation was struggling and getting a lot of pressure. So, they tried another route. A psychiatrist made a direct televised appeal to the serial attacker. The thinking behind it was that if conventional policing wasn’t to break the case, maybe they could try an opening for the perpetrator. Give them a platform to show off.

Perhaps their arrogance would get the better of them. And what happened next is one of the more extraordinary details in the whole case. The serial attacker contacted the psychiatrist. He got in touch and said that a part of him felt compelled to carry out the attacks, but that another part of him was sorry for what he had done.

In response, the psychiatrist arranged a meeting with him. Things were looking somewhat promising. The day of the meeting finally arrived and the psychiatrist got ready. However, the man didn’t show up and it didn’t stop him from continuing.

At around 2:00 in the morning on the 8th of June 1975, the man wearing the terrifying mask knocked at a room in a hostel. The hostel in question was used by hospital staff. A 27-year-old female medical clerk opened the door on a safety chain, a safety chain that she had recently fitted. As she pulled back the door, she saw the hooded man dressed in black and screamed repeatedly and loudly, but the man thrust his knife through the gap and cut her hand.

Meanwhile, two men were fishing for eels around 200 yards away when they heard the screaming. So, too, did the hostel porter. Realizing that many people had likely heard the scream, the attacker fled.

The police were made aware of what happened and around 100 officers were told to stop everyone they could on the street, no matter who they were. And around a mile away, a detective constable spotted a cyclist in a red coat.

The cyclist appeared to be wearing women’s clothing. When the officer tried to stop the cyclist, the cyclist attempted to go around them. So, the officer just knocked the person to the ground. To his surprise, a wig came off and under it was a man.

The officer then looked inside this man’s bag and inside was a leather handmade mask with the letters “RAPIST” painted across the front. The man was then arrested.

Meet Peter Samuel Cook. Peter was a 47-year-old man who lived in a small village just a few miles outside of Cambridge. To most people, he was an unremarkable man. He had a wife and a caravan behind his parents’ home. He also had a steady, ordinary job. A few people who knew him found him to be a little bit strange.

And for a few reasons, he would often lend out adult content to people in the village and he talked in ways occasionally that made people feel rather uncomfortable, like telling people that he was a sex offender randomly.

Peter’s first contact with the criminal justice system came at around the age of 10. The exact circumstances are not fully understood, but the outcome was that he was sent to the bad boys’ home, formerly known as the approved school system. For most kids, this was a serious intervention. He went from this to then a young offenders institute and then to an adult prison. Somewhere along the way, he was admitted to a psychiatric institution.

Then at some point, he was sent to Broadmoor. Broadmoor is a high-security psychiatric hospital, one of only a handful in England. Broadmoor takes people in who are considered too dangerous or too disturbed for either ordinary prison or standard psychiatric care. Peter spent 17 months there before being released in 1968.

He was around 40 years old by this point, and whatever the system had tried to do with him across those three decades clearly didn’t work. By the early 1970s, he was described as a man who had built a substantial reputation as a burglar. In fact, people in the area had even given him a nickname, the human fly.

When the police searched his home, they found an abundance of physical evidence. They found women’s clothing, wigs, dark glasses, makeup, and a supply of ether. The police also found something chilling: copies of keys to women’s hostels. The investigation teams had been working hard on the case for 8 months, but now they could breathe a sigh of relief.

They had finally caught the Cambridge attacker.

Peter Cook’s first court appearance occurred on the 9th of June, the morning after he was arrested. He was brought in handcuffed by two detectives. Outside, around 200 women had gathered before he arrived. By the time the brief hearing ended, the crowd had grown to roughly 400. A number of SA charges were read, and the hearing lasted just 3 minutes.

And it was requested that the authorities did not publish the names of the victims. This was actually a new thing, soon to be adopted more widely. With the hearing over, Peter Cook was remanded in custody.

On the 3rd of October, 1975, the case came to trial. Melford Stevenson was the judge appointed, and he was known for extreme sentencing remarks.

There was no jury trial. This was because Peter Cook himself had admitted to the six counts of SA and one count of burglary. The prosecution laid out each offense in horrifying detail in a bid to ensure that Peter received the largest possible sentence. The prosecution highlighted how Peter valued humiliation throughout the attacks as much as the attacks themselves.

In one case, after SAing a woman, Peter explained to the woman in depth how the police medically examined the privates after an SA. It is said that he did this to cause even more shame in an attempt to prevent her from going to the police. The prosecution also mentioned that Peter Cook could have soon escalated to murder.

As for the defense, they tried to argue that Peter was addicted to adult movies. They also tried to claim that he was remorseful for what he had done, highlighting that he did want to meet up with the psychiatrist who spoke on TV to him.

Psychiatrists who had evaluated Peter also spoke to the court. They assured that Peter was not mentally ill in any tangible clinical sense.

Upon hearing all of the evidence and all of the horrifying crimes in detail, the judge gave his sentence. The judge sentenced Peter to life imprisonment and then addressed Peter directly. He said that he had shown no compassion for his victims and had terrorized a whole community. The judge then said that life ought to mean life and that he would never be free again.

There is no mention of Peter Cook’s demeanor in court after the sentence was read out. In fact, he was then transported to and from the courts with a blanket over his head. This gave no inkling of how he took the trial. As he was led out for the final time, crowds of women were shouting and banging on the police van as he left.

Peter Cook never left prison. In 1995, a parole board considered his case and recommended a transfer to open conditions. He was given therapy and treatment throughout his sentence. None of this led to his release.

In January of 2004, at the age of 75, Peter Cook died in prison having spent 30 years behind bars.

The women he attacked have never spoken publicly and that is entirely their right. The case of Peter Cook is nothing short of horrific.

The case went on to change British laws and allowed for women to have anonymity in these kinds of cases. Those protections have served thousands of women in the decades since, most of whom will never know that this case had anything to do with it.