Anthony H. Cook was born in Mobile, Alabama, on March 9, 1949, the third child of Hayes and Marjorie Cook; the next year the family moved to Ohio, where six more children were born, among them his brother Nathaniel. His parents divorced in 1959, and his mother supported the family as a hairdresser. He went to a Toledo boys' school for pupils who were struggling and got poor grades. As a teenager he snatched purses, drag raced and groped a neighborhood girl; around 1965, when his older brother went to prison for rape, he shot himself in the chest and survived. In 1968 he robbed a pedestrian, was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a mental hospital, and eight days after his release robbed a sixty-one-year-old woman of 250 dollars, for which he got ten to twenty years.
He was paroled in mid-1973. On December 20, in a snowstorm in Toledo, he offered a ride to Vicki Lynn Small, a University of Toledo graduate of twenty-one; accounts give her age as twenty-two as well. She asked to be taken to her apartment a block away. He drove her to Ottawa Park instead, raped and beat her and shot her six times with a .25 pistol, and left her behind a golf building at Bancroft Street and Parkside Boulevard. Police were criticized for their handling of the case, and her father complained to the city council; as many as a hundred people were looked at, and no one was charged. The next year he robbed two people at gunpoint and went back to prison until 1979. After his release he hauled scrap metal and married an elementary school teacher, and his younger brother began spending time with him.
The killings resumed in May 1980. On May 13 or 14 the brothers took Tom Gordon, twenty-four, and his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Sandra Podgorski, from Gordon's car outside her home on Utica Street, drove them to Rabb Road in western Lucas County, shot Gordon dead, and raped and stabbed Podgorski, who survived. On January 3, 1981, they picked up Connie Sue Thompson, nineteen, from Michigan, raped and killed her and threw her body off a bridge into a culvert, where it was found on January 17. A Toledo detective who worked her case later wrote that they had found her hitchhiking on Cherry Street. Just after midnight on January 27 they ambushed Cheryl Bartlett Fann, eighteen, and her fiance, Bud Coates, as they walked home from his grocery store shift; they raped Fann in a garage and shot her in the back, and she survived. In February they raped and tortured Dawn Rene Backes, twelve, in the basement of the abandoned State Theater on Collingwood Boulevard and beat her to death with a brick block. After that Nathaniel stopped taking part.
Anthony went on alone. On March 27, 1981, he took Scott Moulton and Denise Siotkowski, both twenty-one, from near a supermarket, drove them to Oregon, Ohio, raped Siotkowski and shot them both. Years later Scott's brother, Steve, said what he minded was that his own children never got to know their Uncle Scott. In the early hours of August 2 he attacked Daryl Cole and Stacy Lynn Balonek, both twenty-one, as they came home from a night out, raped Balonek, beat both to death with a baseball bat from her car and left their bodies in the trunk. In September, two blocks from the Ottawa Hills police station, he confronted Todd Sabo, twenty-one, and Leslie Sawicki, twenty, in a parked van, shot Sabo and tried to rape her. She got away and called her father, Peter Sawicki, a well-known Toledo developer, who arrived before the police, fought with Cook, and was shot dead. Sabo survived. Cook's fingerprints were at the scene, informants named him, and on October 14, 1981, after a stakeout, he was pulled over on the interstate in a pickup truck and gave himself up without a struggle. The truck had been used in every killing except Sawicki's. The attacks on couples in Toledo stopped.
He was convicted in March 1982 of the murder of Peter Sawicki. The rest were unsolved until 1998, when DNA testing of traces from the older crimes matched the brothers. Under a plea agreement in 2000 both men gave full videotaped confessions under immunity and submitted to polygraph examinations, so that the Lucas County prosecutor could close a series of unsolved homicides; the price was that Nathaniel would be released after twenty years. Anthony was convicted of two counts of aggravated murder, with attempted murder, attempted rape and aggravated robbery, and received a second life term. He admitted nine killings, three of them shared with Nathaniel, among them Vicki Small's, which had never been connected to him, and denied three other deaths put to him. Frank Stiles, the Toledo detective who chased the brothers for sixteen months, told of a night they sat at a railroad crossing behind a couple in a car and argued over whether to take them. Detectives believe he committed more killings, rapes and robberies than he admitted, and have put the figure at eleven killings and eleven rapes. A retired detective, Tom Ross, said he believed the killings were racially motivated: the victims were all white and the brothers are Black.
Because his killings came before Ohio's current capital punishment law took effect in October 1981, he became eligible for parole. It was denied in 2015. When a hearing was set for December 5, 2024, the detective who had hunted him, Frank Stiles, said that if he were let out it would not be any time at all before he killed somebody. Cook refused to attend, and the hearing was moved to March 2025. "He's right where he belongs, in jail," said Sharon Wright, Dawn Backes's mother. "Hell would be better, but I'll settle for jail." On March 13, 2025, he refused again, and the board heard the case without him at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution. Parole was denied, and he will not be eligible again until 2034, when he will be eighty-five. "He's got at least 10 more years, what a lucky St. Patrick's Day," Wright said.