Anthony Cook is serving two life sentences in Ohio for two killings in Toledo: the murder of Peter Sawicki, a real estate developer, in September 1981, and the aggravated murder of Tom Gordon in May 1980. In April 2000, under a plea agreement with the Lucas County prosecutor, he gave videotaped confessions to police that accounted for nine killings in all between 1973 and 1981. Three of them, by both brothers' accounts, he committed with his younger brother, Nathaniel Cook. Prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges for the killings that had never been tried.
For nearly two decades Anthony Cook had been in prison for one killing while the others went unsolved. The break came in 1998, when DNA from the rape kit in the 1980 attack on Tom Gordon and his girlfriend matched both brothers. The deal that followed traded full confessions for a promise that Nathaniel would be released after 20 years, and he was freed in August 2018. Anthony, who was not executed and could not have been sentenced to life without parole under the law that applied to his crimes, has been eligible for parole hearings since. He was denied parole in 2015. A hearing set for December 2024 was postponed to March 2025.
Little was reported about Anthony Cook's early life. News reports describe him as a Toledo man and the older of the two brothers. They gave his age as 65 in February 2015 and 68 in February 2018, and WTOL gave it as 75 in its reports ahead of his December 2024 parole hearing.
He served prison time for armed robbery in the 1970s. A WTOL report published ahead of the December 2024 hearing said his killings were reportedly fueled by hatred of white people, and that this hatred reportedly began in prison, where he said white guards had mistreated him. Most of the people he confessed to killing were young and white. Frank Stiles, the Toledo police detective who led the investigation, told WTOL that Cook's history was one of brutality, especially toward white people. Both brothers later worked as long-haul truck drivers, according to WTOL and the Associated Press.
The first killing Anthony Cook confessed to took place more than six years before the others. On December 20, 1973, Vicki Small was abducted in Toledo. In his 2000 interviews with detectives, which WTOL later reviewed, Cook calmly described abducting, raping and killing her; the Associated Press reported that he described shooting her. The case had never been linked to him before he confessed. WTOL lists her among the nine people the brothers killed. Her age and her life were not described in the reports, and no one was ever tried for her death.
On the night of May 13, 1980, by the date in one WTOL account (other WTOL reports give May 14), Tom Gordon and his girlfriend were sitting in his car on a Toledo street when the Cook brothers attacked them. Nathaniel broke the passenger window with the butt of a rifle. The brothers forced the couple to a remote spot in Lucas County. Gordon ran, and Nathaniel shot him dead, by the brothers' own accounts to detectives. Anthony raped and stabbed the young woman and the brothers left her for dead, WTOL reported, but she survived; both brothers admitted abducting her and trying to kill her. She told police that the attackers were two men.
Twenty years later she was one of the people whose evidence brought the case back: her rape kit was the one that, when tested, held DNA matching both brothers. Gordon's killing became the one for which Anthony would later plead guilty, and the attack on the young woman was the basis of Nathaniel's convictions for attempted murder and kidnapping.
About eight months after the attack on Gordon and his girlfriend, the body of Connie Sue Thompson, 18, was found in Lucas County. She had been raped and stabbed. Stiles saw the similarities with the attack on Gordon's girlfriend. In his confession Nathaniel said that he strangled a woman the brothers had abducted, and 13abc counts Connie Sue Thompson among Nathaniel's victims.
A close friend described her to 13abc as fun-loving, with many friends. Her mother died without learning who had killed her daughter. In 2018 her sister-in-law led the family's effort to keep Nathaniel in prison. "That man may have done 20 years, but that is not nearly enough," she said.
On January 27, 1981, according to WTOL's account of the case, the brothers stopped a young couple walking home in Toledo, robbed them at gunpoint and took them into a garage, where they separated them. The young woman was raped and shot. Her boyfriend was not hurt. She survived. She told the parole board that if Cook were released he would do it all over again, because prison life was all he knew. She has described herself as a survivor, not a victim, and has said she never got her day in court.
Dawn Rene Backes was 12, a seventh grader at a Catholic parish school in Toledo. WTOL dates her abduction to February 21 or 22, 1981, as she walked home. According to WTOL's account of the confessions and the police investigation, Anthony took her in his pickup truck, picked up Nathaniel, and the brothers killed her in Toledo. Nathaniel told detectives that this was the last killing he took part in. Stiles said Anthony was mostly responsible.
"She was such a wonderful child. She was good to everybody," her mother told WTOL. A classmate said years later that her death marked the end of innocence for the children at her school: one day she was in class and the next day she was gone. Her mother kept a landline telephone for decades, she told WTOL, waiting for the call that the brothers had died. She also said she felt she had betrayed her daughter by agreeing to the plea deal, and in 2018 she told the Associated Press that the brothers had used Dawn as a plea bargaining chip.
After Dawn's death, Nathaniel stopped taking part in the killings and, by police accounts, had no contact with police until his arrest in 1998. Anthony went on alone. The Associated Press, drawing on the brothers' statements to detectives, reported that he killed five more people before his arrest in 1981.
Scott Moulton and Denise Siotkowski, who were friends, were among them; the AP and WTOL say Anthony Cook killed Scott Moulton in 1981. Scott's brother was in college when Scott disappeared. He told WTOL that the killings still shape the way he protects his own family. At Nathaniel's first court appearance in 2018 he said, "I guess I'm the voice of my brother." Of Anthony he told WTOL ahead of the December 2024 hearing, "I hope he rots in hell." Scott's sister told Toledo News Now in the week of an earlier parole hearing: "Nine murders. About as simple as that. And my firm belief is that it will start again if he's released."
Stacey Balonek, 21, and her boyfriend, Daryl Cole, were, by the Associated Press's account, among the last victims of Anthony Cook, in 1981. He admitted to police that he abducted the couple, raped Stacey and killed them both. Her family did not learn who was responsible until his confession in 2000. Her brother told the Associated Press in 2018 that he could not imagine anyone involved in such crimes being released.
On September 18, 1981, Anthony Cook and an accomplice confronted a young couple in their van outside an apartment building in Toledo, on the border with the village of Ottawa Hills. The young man wrestled the gun away, got free and freed the young woman, who ran for help and called her father, Peter Sawicki, a well-known area real estate developer.
Sawicki arrived and fought with Cook, who crawled away, recovered the gun and shot both Sawicki and the young man. Sawicki died. The young man survived with lasting physical and emotional injuries; he has since said publicly that he has forgiven the brothers, and he wrote to Anthony, who did not answer.
Sawicki's killing came just before Ohio's current death penalty law took effect, on October 19, 1981. That date would matter for the rest of Cook's life.
Several weeks after the shooting an informant led police to Anthony Cook. John Tharp, later the Lucas County sheriff and then a member of the metro drug unit, was on the arrest team. Officers stopped Cook's pickup truck on the interstate and he surrendered without a struggle. In an interview with Stiles that was not recorded, Cook asked the detective whether someone who had committed crimes like these could ever win parole. Stiles told him he believed he would never be released.
After his arrest, the attacks on young white couples in Toledo stopped, WTOL reported.
Cook was tried for Peter Sawicki's murder and convicted in March 1982. The two young people from the van testified. Cook testified in his own defense; he accused the young man of trying to buy drugs, and he admitted that he owned the gun used to kill Sawicki. Because the death penalty law then in force did not apply, he received a sentence of a fixed term to life, which left him eligible for parole, as Julia Bates, the Lucas County prosecutor, later explained. "We didn't have the death penalty back then," she said. "It doesn't mean he'll get parole."
For the next 16 years police suspected the brothers in the other attacks but lacked the evidence to charge them.
The case reopened because of a conversation at a prosecutors' conference. In 1997, in Cleveland, Julia Bates talked about DNA evidence with Stephanie Tubbs Jones, then the Cuyahoga County prosecutor, who mentioned its use in the Sam Sheppard case. Bates later said she woke up thinking that DNA might work in the Cook case, and went to find out whether the rape kit from the 1980 attack on Tom Gordon's girlfriend still existed. On October 15, 1997, she called Stiles and suggested testing the old evidence from the early 1980s killings, WTOL reported.
Usable DNA survived from that kit. Nathaniel was identified as a suspect through a visual identification, and his DNA matched. Anthony, brought from prison, matched as well. The Associated Press summarized it this way: investigators had long suspected the brothers but lacked evidence until 1998, when blood samples and DNA linked them to one of the shooting deaths and rapes. Nathaniel was arrested in early 1998, and his sentence would later be counted from that year.
The DNA tied both brothers to the 1980 attack, but not to the other killings. Bates worked the case with Dean Mandros, then an assistant prosecutor and later a Lucas County Common Pleas judge, whom she described as very seasoned, compassionate and an excellent trial lawyer. She recalled that they worried whether DNA evidence nearly 20 years old would hold up at trial.
Shortly before trial, the two sides discussed a deal. Bates told 13abc in 2018 that the brothers' lawyers asked whether she would consider one; WTOL's account says prosecutors offered it. The terms are not in dispute. If both brothers confessed fully to all the killings and rapes they had committed in Lucas County, and passed polygraph examinations, Nathaniel would be released after 20 years. Any lie would void the agreement. Bates asked the victims' families to decide, and they agreed, she said, because they wanted answers. "Those family members at the time all said to us, please, please, please find out what happened," she said in 2018. The death penalty and life without parole were not available, because Ohio had neither when the killings took place, the Associated Press noted. The agreement was signed in 2000 by the families and prosecutors.
Under it, Anthony pleaded guilty to the aggravated murder of Tom Gordon and received a second life term, The Blade reported. Nathaniel pleaded guilty to the attempted murder of Gordon's girlfriend and to two counts of kidnapping, and the court promised his release on or about February 13, 2018. Prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges for the other killings, and the confessions allowed investigators to close unsolved cases from 1973, 1980 and 1981. Anthony is serving the two life sentences consecutively, according to the Associated Press.
The brothers were interviewed on videotape on April 3, 2000. Between them they described nine killings and several rapes, and Anthony also described other rapes and attempted abductions. Nathaniel confessed to three killings with his brother. By the AP's count, Anthony admitted five others and had already been convicted of the ninth, Peter Sawicki's.
Nathaniel's account largely matched his brother's, with small differences. He said his part began in 1980, when he shot the first victim, and that he took part in the next two killings. He said the brothers never discussed the later killings and that he tried to forget what they had done.
WTOL reviewed close to three hours of Anthony's interviews. In them, the station reported, he showed no remorse or compassion. He described how he stalked his victims, how he planned to subdue them, and how he used different kinds of weapons so that police would not see a pattern. He laughed, WTOL said, at one victim who would not lower a car window and at another who was more worried about her father's car than about her own safety. Stiles called him cool, collected and calm. "Tony Cook enjoys killing," the detective said.
The brothers denied responsibility for four other deaths that police had linked to them. Stiles believes they avoided one of those cases because the victim was the niece of a retired Toledo detective. Detectives also worked with the FBI on about half a dozen other possibilities in the hope of tying the brothers to another crime. "We always thought within 20 years we could come up with something," Stiles told the AP in 2018. "But it didn't happen, and now those 20 years are up." Because the brothers drove trucks across the country, police have said there may be victims elsewhere.
Nathaniel Cook's 20 years ended in February 2018. His lawyer, Peter Rost, filed a motion in Lucas County Common Pleas Court asking for his judicial release under the plea agreement, and the case went to Judge Linda Jennings. Bates said she had expected it. "We made a deal he would do 20 years, and be set free," she told 13abc. She said her office had agreed not to oppose his release, not to support or recommend it: "if my word isn't my word then nobody is ever going to trust the prosecutor in the future ever again." Her office asked that he be evaluated for classification as a sexual predator, which would require him to register his address every 90 days for life.
Families of the victims wrote to the judge asking her to keep him in prison or, if she could not, to impose strict controls. In March 2018 Nathaniel appeared in court for the first time since the plea, in shackles and an orange jumpsuit; he glanced at the families in the front row and looked away.
On August 9, 2018, Judge Jennings ruled that he must be released. She told him she had looked for a legal reason to keep him in prison. "Unfortunately, I found none," she said. He was to spend six months in a work-release dormitory, wear an electronic monitor for a year and register his address every 90 days as a sexual predator. "We've dreaded it, but we agreed to it," Scott Moulton's sister said. The woman he had helped attack in 1980 said she was disappointed and afraid for other people. Since his release, WTOL reported, police have received no complaints about him. He told reporters he had always had religion but did not apologize.
Because his crimes came before the current death penalty law, Anthony Cook has periodic parole hearings. In February 2015, at 65, he was denied parole and told he would next be eligible in 2025, NBC24 reported. That report said he was serving life for the 1981 killing of Peter Sawicki and the 1980 killing of Tom Gordon.
The victims' families have stayed in touch for more than 40 years, WTOL reported; they gathered when Nathaniel was released and have come together every ten years to oppose Anthony's release. Before one hearing, nine flowers and nine candles were set around photographs of the nine victims at a Toledo church, followed by a Mass and a reception. Stiles called it "by far the most unbelievable situation and murders ever committed in Toledo, Ohio."
A new hearing was set for December 5, 2024. Ahead of it, WTOL released portions of his videotaped confessions, choosing segments that showed his planning and attitude and leaving out any description of a killing or assault. The prosecutor's office did not distribute the tapes and asked the station to consider that repeated airing could retraumatize victims and families. Scott Moulton's brother told WTOL that the families had once been told Cook would never leave prison, but were now told the board had to give the hearing serious consideration. Bates said she was fairly confident he would stay in prison. Stiles said he had no doubt Cook would have kept killing, and called him "the worst human being I've ever seen, talked to, known or investigated."
The hearing did not go ahead as scheduled. An official with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction confirmed that it was moved to March 2025, 13abc reported, and WTOL reported that it was rescheduled after Cook refused to meet with the board. As of December 5, 2024, he remained in prison.
Proven by final conviction: the murder of Peter Sawicki (jury verdict, March 1982) and the aggravated murder of Tom Gordon (guilty plea, 2000).
Confessed under the 2000 agreement, never tried: the killings of Vicki Small, Connie Sue Thompson, Dawn Backes, Scott Moulton, Denise Siotkowski, Stacey Balonek and Daryl Cole, and the attacks on the two women who survived. Prosecutors agreed not to bring charges.
Suspected by police, denied by both brothers: four other deaths. WTOL has reported that police believe Anthony committed more killings and rapes than he admitted; one WTOL report gives the police belief both as at least 10 killings and as 11 killings and 11 rapes.
Accounts differ on some details: the date of the attack on Tom Gordon (May 13 or May 14, 1980) and of Dawn's abduction (February 21 or 22, 1981); whether the brothers' lawyers or the prosecutors first proposed the deal; and the spelling of some victims' names (Stacey or Stacy Balonek; Daryl or Darryl Cole).
1970s: Anthony Cook serves prison time for armed robbery.
December 20, 1973: Vicki Small is abducted and killed in Toledo; Cook confessed in 2000.
May 13 or 14, 1980: Tom Gordon is shot dead and his girlfriend is attacked and left for dead; she survives.
About eight months later: Connie Sue Thompson's body is found in Lucas County.
January 27, 1981: a young woman is shot after she and her boyfriend are abducted while walking home; both survive.
February 21 or 22, 1981: Dawn Backes, 12, is abducted and killed; Nathaniel's last killing, by his account.
1981: Scott Moulton, Denise Siotkowski, Stacey Balonek and Daryl Cole are killed; Anthony later confessed to their killings.
September 18, 1981: Peter Sawicki is shot dead while defending his daughter; her boyfriend is wounded.
October 19, 1981: Ohio's current death penalty law takes effect.
Weeks after the Sawicki killing: Anthony Cook is stopped on the interstate and surrenders.
March 1982: convicted of Peter Sawicki's murder.
October 15, 1997: Julia Bates asks Frank Stiles to test old evidence for DNA.
1998: DNA from the 1980 rape kit matches both brothers; Nathaniel is arrested.
2000: plea agreement; Anthony pleads guilty to Tom Gordon's aggravated murder and receives a second life term; Nathaniel pleads guilty to attempted murder and two counts of kidnapping.
April 3, 2000: the brothers give videotaped confessions.
February 2015: parole denied; next eligibility set for 2025.
February 2018: Nathaniel's 20 years end; his lawyer seeks judicial release.
August 9, 2018: Judge Linda Jennings orders Nathaniel released.
December 5, 2024: scheduled parole hearing is postponed to March 2025.
March 2025: rescheduled hearing.