Nathaniel Cook was born on October 25, 1958, nine years after his brother Anthony, one of nine children of Hayes and Marjorie Cook; their parents divorced the next year, and their mother supported the family as a hairdresser. Nathaniel grew up with Anthony mostly absent, in prison for robbery. He helped raise his younger sisters after the family moved to Southern California in the early 1970s, and when they came back to Ohio, first to Dayton and then Columbus, he was a loner at Linden-McKinley High School and dropped out. He talked about joining the Air Force and never enlisted. Before 1980 his only dealings with the police were traffic tickets. Around 1979, after Anthony was paroled again, Nathaniel reached out to him and the two began spending time together. Both later worked as long-haul truckers. He was never convicted of a murder, and his convictions and sentence differ from his brother's.
Anthony had already killed alone. On December 20, 1973, in a snowstorm in Toledo, he gave a ride to Vicki Lynn Small, twenty-one, and raped and shot her in Ottawa Park. The brothers' series began on May 14, 1980, when they threatened Tom Gordon, twenty-four, and his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Sandra Podgorski, with guns in north Toledo, took over their car and drove them to woods in western Lucas County. They shot Gordon dead. They raped Podgorski and stabbed her, and she survived.
On January 3, 1981, they picked up Connie Sue Thompson, nineteen, from Michigan, drove her out to western Lucas County, raped and killed her, and threw her body off a bridge into a culvert, where it was found on January 17. Jim Stiles, the Toledo detective who investigated her death, wrote that the brothers had picked her up hitchhiking on Cherry Street. Just after midnight on January 27 they stopped Cheryl Bartlett, eighteen, and her fiancé, Bud Coates, twenty-two, as the couple walked home from the grocery store where he worked as a meat cutter; the young couple had a fifteen-month-old son. Anthony took her rings and his wallet and made them put on ski masks, a second man joined him, and in a garage off an alley both brothers raped her. Then they told Coates to hold her and shot her in the back. The gun clicked empty, and the two of them got away; she spent three and a half weeks in the hospital and has had more than twenty operations since, and in 2024 she told her story, as Cheryl Bartlett Fann, to People. In February 1981 Anthony lured Dawn Rene Backes, twelve, a student at Gesu Elementary School, into his car; Nathaniel joined him, and they took her to the abandoned State Theater on Collingwood Boulevard, raped and tortured her for hours, and killed her by beating her head with a brick block. The later killings of 1981, of Scott Moulton and Denise Siotkowski, of Daryl Cole and Stacy Lynn Balonek, and of Peter Sawicki, Anthony committed without him. A retired Toledo detective, Tom Ross, said he believed the killings were racially motivated; the victims were all white and the brothers are Black.
Anthony was arrested on October 14, 1981, and convicted in 1982 of Sawicki's murder, and the rest stayed unsolved. After his brother's conviction Nathaniel was arrested only for minor offenses; during one of those arrests in the mid-1990s a blood sample was taken from him. In 1998, after Anthony was picked up on a misdemeanor, DNA testing matched the brothers to biological traces from the older crimes, and on February 13, 1998, Nathaniel was arrested and charged with Gordon's murder and the attempted murder of Podgorski.
What closed the case was 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. Nathaniel pleaded guilty to attempted aggravated murder and two counts of kidnapping from the Gordon abduction, and admitted taking part in the killings of Gordon, Thompson and Backes; detectives put his own tally at four murders and four rapes. Anthony admitted eight killings and the 1973 murder of Vicki Small and received a second life sentence. Nathaniel's sentence is reported as twenty years, as twenty-one to seventy-five years, and as seventy-five years with parole possible after fifteen or twenty. The price of the confessions was that he would serve twenty years and then go free.
On August 9, 2018, Judge Linda Jennings suspended the rest of his sentence, saying she was bound to follow the law: the agreement her predecessor signed in 2000 promised judicial release once he had served a full twenty years, a period that had ended that February. Members of the victims' families were in court and protested. She imposed five years of community control with work release, electronic monitoring and sex offender classes, barred him from places where children gather, and classified him a sexual predator required to register with the county sheriff for life. He was released on August 10. In 2019 it emerged that he was living about two hundred yards from a school in Toledo; police investigated and found he had broken no rule.
That release is the part of this case 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 among those his brother confessed to, one set of deaths shared between them.