Toledo's mad demons of eroticized racial hatred. (Parts 1-2)

Anthony and Nathaniel Cook represent the rarest of the rare in the annals of crime: sibling serial killers. Yet, what is most exceptional about this case is their motive… a motive that separates them from most “angel of death” type killers (see Michael Swango as an example), financial ones (see Dorothea Puente as the archetype), or even your more conventional type of lust murderers like Ted Bundy or – looking at the dual killers dynamic – Henry Lee Lucas and Otis Toole.

No, if it is fair to compare the Cooks to anyone, it undoubtedly would have to be the DC Sniper murders of John Allen Muhammad (age 41) and Lee Boyd Malvo (age 17) who terrorized the capital area with political ends in mind for three weeks in 2002.

The professed motive of the pair was attempts at kidnapping children who they could in turn extort the government into paying large sums to get them back. This, of course, backfired, if indeed it was ever meant to be an actual plan or not.

The Cooks had a similar dynamic with the two of them, but of course it was more sibling-esque normal – not the one-over-one type relationship that it’s not uncommon to see in the father-son type relationship.

The Cooks also didn’t go out of their way to appear political, which they very well could have considering they only killed white people. No, their reign of bloodshed happened not because of the killers observing macro events in the wider world. It happened instead with those events triggering something inside them.

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From 1973 to 1981, sibling serial killers Anthony and Nathaniel Cook terrorized Toledo, Ohio with a string of violent crimes. The entire case would shock and bewilder the city’s residents…

THUD!

The cinder block destroyed 12-year-old Dawn Backes’s skull with a resounding, terrible “THUD!”

Block crushing bone and viscera and hitting the stone below. THUD! — thundering through the dusty hallways of the old State Theater’s rotting basement like a homicidal, Vaudeville banshee wailing in any of the hollow, shuttered factories dotting Toledo like long-unkempt industrial tombstones in the economic necropolis that is the larger rust belt.

THUD!

The girl’s visceral screams made the most horrible contrast with the sounds of life-affirming ragtime; soul-stirring arias from any of a number of operas; the uproarious laughter of the finest vaudeville acts; all of which once echoed through this space.

The Theater transformed from a nerve center of Toledo social life into the vilest type of hell for 7th grader Dawn Backes — a hell that would ultimately be her tomb.

Satan himself sent the pitch black, nihilistic fire consuming the two feral demons wielding the building block as a blunt dispenser of death. Their eyes seemed to glow with rabid, wild delight — perfectly intoxicated by a potent and sadistic carnal desire punctuated by a skin-deep hatred for “the other.”

THUD! THUD! THUD! THUD!

In this space, no white man could hurt them. In this space — THEIR space — they were gods drunk on their delusive omnipotence.

But not for long.

The crimes of Anthony and Nathaniel Cook would lay bare powerful spirits lurking in the history of the Buckeye State, the nation, and the white psyche — historical devils that, like it or not, still very much inform our zeitgeist.

The case’s ultimate — and bizarre — ending would leave many citizens of Toledo with vexing existential questions about our justice system too.

The Anonymous Caller.

A mysterious, male voice — almost spectral, considering the events that followed — hit the Toledo PD switchboard at 7:56 PM that Wednesday, February 22, 1981.

“I think there’s a body in the basement of the State Theater.”

The officer naturally pressed for greater detail, “what’s your name?”

“I don’t want to get involved,” he replied.

How did he know?

“Just take my word for it.”

With that, he refused to divulge his name and hung up…

(Watch for Part II, coming next week)...