In Popular Culture
- In his memoir, Education of a Felon, Edward Bunker describes attacking Cook while in the showers with a shank, cutting him several times before being hauled away into solitary confinement by guards. However, Bunker writes that this incident happened in 1950 in the "High Power" unit of the LA County Jail while Cook was on trial for the murder of Robert Dewey. The actual trial took place in El Centro, CA, in October and November of 1951. Cook was released from the Missouri State Prison in June of 1950 and only in California a few months during that year and he managed to stay out of trouble. Records from the National Archives show that Cook only spent 1 day in the LA County Jail while being transported from Alcatraz to Imperial County to stand trial. Whoever Bunker shanked in the shower of the LA County Jail in 1950, it was not Cook.
- The 1953 film noir The Hitch-Hiker, directed by Ida Lupino, was based on the Cook crime spree. It starred Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy, with William Talman as “Emmet Myers,” a killer modeled after Cook, right down to the deformed eyelid. The plot is a dramatization of Cook’s kidnapping of James Burke and Forrest Damron and their flight to Mexico.
- An in-depth portrait of Billy Cook, his crimes and execution appears in John Gilmore's 2005 book L.A. Despair: A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times.
Read more about this topic: Billy Cook (criminal)
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