Nathaniel Cook was born on October 25, 1958, nine years after his brother Anthony. He is carried here as an individual because his convictions and his sentence are different from his brother's in a way no combined entry could show. He was never convicted of a murder.
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.
The charges he pleaded to in 2000 were attempted aggravated murder and two counts of kidnapping. They came from the abduction of Tom Gordon, twenty-four, and his eighteen-year-old girlfriend Sandra Podgorski on May 14, 1980. Gordon was shot dead. Podgorski was raped and stabbed and survived.
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 confessed to taking part in three of the nine killings. Detectives put his own figure at four murders and four rapes.
On August 9, 2018 Judge Linda Jennings suspended the rest of his sentence, saying she was bound to follow the law: the agreement signed by her predecessor in 2000 promised judicial release once he had served a full twenty years, a period that had ended that February. She imposed five years of community control with work release, electronic monitoring and sex offender classes, and classified him a sexual predator required to register with the county sheriff for life. Members of the victims' families were in court.
That release is the part of this case that is still argued about in Toledo: a man who admitted a part in three murders walked out because the state had traded his freedom for the confessions that closed them.
The three killings he admitted are the same three that appear in his brother's entry. They are one set of deaths counted once.