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Toledo’s Demons who sexualized racial hatred (Part I)
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.
