Anthony H. Cook was born in Mobile, Alabama on March 9, 1949. He is carried here as an individual because he was convicted and sentenced as one; his brother Nathaniel has his own entry, and their outcomes are not remotely the same.
The killings attributed to the pair ran across Toledo and northwestern Ohio. The first was Vicki Small, abducted near a hospital on December 20, 1973. At least eight more followed in a seventeen-month period beginning in May 1980, most of them attacks on couples parked in cars or on young women taken off the street. Both brothers worked as long-haul truckers, and detectives have said they believe there are further victims in other parts of the country.
He was arrested on October 14, 1981 after a stakeout, pulled over on the interstate in a pickup truck. Officers approached not knowing whether he was armed; he gave himself up without incident. That truck was used in every one of the killings except the murder of Peter Sawicki, the Ottawa Hills property developer he was convicted of killing in March 1982. Sawicki was shot after a botched abduction of his daughter Leslie and her boyfriend Todd Sabo, who was shot and survived. The attacks on couples in Toledo stopped with that arrest.
What closed the case was a plea agreement in 2000. Anthony had been in prison since 1981 for one murder, and the rest were unsolved until he was picked up on a misdemeanour in 1998 and DNA testing connected the brothers to the older killings. Under the deal 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 of those confessions was the term Nathaniel would serve: twenty years, and then release.
He admitted nine killings, the first being Vicki Small in 1973, shortly after he had been released from prison for armed robbery. He denied three other deaths put to him. Detectives put the real figure at eleven killings and eleven rapes.
In 2024 he refused to meet the parole board and his hearing was rescheduled; asked about his prospects he said hell would be better but he would settle for jail. The lead detective on the case has said publicly that he believes Cook would kill again at once if released.
The nine is the figure he confessed to. Three of those he committed with Nathaniel, and those three appear on both entries; they are one set of deaths, not two.