I hate everyone and everyone hates me. After this sentence, Billy Cook was executed in the gas chamber of a California prison. It was 1952 and I was 23 years old. The Doors generally didn’t like to explain the meaning of their songs, he said. Jim Morrison that once written, they ceased to belong to them. In 1971, a few months before his death, Morrison recorded his last song: Riders in the Stormfrom the album LA Woman. The song begins with the sound of a storm in the middle of the road. There is thunder. It seems like it’s night. A few seconds later, Ray Manzarek’s Fender Rhodes piano begins the melody. And then comes the voice: “travelers in the storm, in this house we were born, in this world we were thrown, like a boneless dog, surrogate actor… travelers in the storm, there is a killer on the road, There’s a murderer on the road. »And that murderer was Billy Cook.
Everyone knew Cook’s story. During the 1950s, headlines in the American press overlapped when it came to “road killer” the deadly road. Billy was born on this day, December 23, 1928, in the state of Missouri, United States. He had seven siblings and his mother died when he was five. They were so poor that they lived for a time with their father in an abandoned mine, until the man leaves and leaves them stranded.
The children wandered the streets alone for a while until the police rescued them. His brothers and sisters were placed in foster families, but with Billy it was more complicated. He didn’t behave well, he had a defect in one eye, no one wanted him. He was arrested several times when he was a teenager. He even told a judge that I preferred to live in a reformatory rather than being adopted. At 17, back in prison, he attacked an inmate with a baseball bat.
When he was released from prison, he once again wandered the streets alone. He went to El Paso, Texas, and bought a revolver. From this moment on, He became the hitchhiking roving killer. On December 30, 1950, he attacked a mechanic who lifted him by the shoulder. He pointed the gun at him and locked him in the trunk, but the man managed to get out with the car running. Cook continued his journey until he ran out of gas. He hitchhiked again. This time, an entire family stopped.
They were the Mossers. Carl, Thelma, their three children and the dog. For three days, Cook kept them kidnapped, driving aimlesslyuntil we kill them all, including the dog. A few days later, a sheriff became suspicious of Cook and approached a motel where he knew he had been seen. The young man took him hostage and if he didn’t kill him, it was only because his wife had been good to him in the past. Soon after, he murdered again. Always with the same modus operandi: He hitchhiked, they stopped the cars, he asked his drivers to drive, but he didn’t go anywhere. The final destination was always death.
His face was already in all the newspapers. At that time, in the early 1950s, the United States lived by a very rigid idea of internal security. The family car, the road and travel were symbols of progress, freedom and confidence. A right. Mosser’s crime has become almost a moral wound: a stranger, arrested out of compassion, had exterminated an entire family during a trip. While crossing into Mexico, Cook was arrested. Shortly after, he was sentenced to death.
“Take a long vacation, let your children play, if you get this man back, the sweet family will die… killer on the roadkiller on the highway,” the Doors song continues. Morrison wrote the lyrics without mentioning Cook, not only because it wasn’t necessary, but because it made him symbol of unpredictable evil. Riders in the Storm It is a subject with multiple readings which oscillates around the notion of vulnerability in the face of an unpredictable world which is often as arbitrary as it is unfair.
More than a story, it’s a sensation. A state of mind. Travelers, the riders, They go through life without having control of the journey. Carried away by external forces, like the storm; without precise direction, like the murderer, and subject to a certain free will, like the possibility of meeting him on the way. But if Jim Morrison didn’t want to explain his song, we don’t need to either. Billy Cook also did not want to explain his reasons. Although we can guess one. The most obvious and the most profound. The one he spoke of in his last breath: hate.
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