Camping or Vamping?

March 24, 2026March 24, 2026 RilalyLeave a comment

“There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm.” –Theodore Roosevelt African Game Trails, 1910

I came up with a word: boring.

When we say something like that, adventure-seekers and wildlife enthusiasts have two words to describe us: city slickers. That’s not good-natured ribbing either. It’s a harsh condemnation as far as they’re concerned, and we can feel their intent soon after they say it. We could try to defend ourselves, but what’s the point? It’s true. We are city slickers who prefer the creature comforts of city-life and technology, and we know it has probably made us all soft and gooey from the inside and out, but we can’t admit that. We have to pretend we’re strong, rugged individualists who could survive in the wild with nothing but a blade and a canteen, because we feel guilty for living the easy life, and we’re a little jealous of the experiences that hardened these outdoorsmen. Are they true survivalists though? Do they know enough to know what they’re supposed to know, or are they just making it up as they go along? Could they compete with a Theodore Roosevelt in the wild, in the harsh conditions he probably experienced, or are they a hybrid between those who are accustomed to modern conveniences and technology combined with our modern definition of the rustic, rugged life? Are they experienced campers or vampers?

We all heed the call of the wild, and the need to step away from convenience and comfort to escape civilization and embrace our untamed/wild instincts to let our primal nature hang out for all to see. We know it’s just good for the soul to have experiences that teach us more about ourselves. “You’ll never know who you are, who you truly are, until you’re backed into a corner.” And that sounds so romantic that if we brought it up in front of a group, almost all hands would go flying up from those who want to join us on our planned expedition. Some hands will even turn into fists, as they shout, “Yeah, gimme some a that!” But the minute we start darkening spots on a calendar, those hands, smiles, and eyebrows all go down. “Something tells me I’m going to be busy.”

The concepts behind achieving a true Theodore Roosevelt spirit, seeking adventure and meaning in nature is such a romantic notion that city-slickers can’t but help but want some of that for themselves for at least one weekend, but we always fail. “It doesn’t matter that you fail, because everyone fails at something or another in life. It’s what you do after failure that defines you.” We love that, all of it, but if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, our failure to become this generation’s Theodore Roosevelt will never bother us so much that we’re going to do whatever it takes to make it happen.

Da Mudder Humper

We know mudder nature offers great solitude and beauty to the unsuspecting and suspecting, but how long how long we’re supposed to stand at the bottom of a mountain before it happens? How long does one quietly stand at the bottom of a mountain before we make a connection to its height and vastness—not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually? I’ve tried to experience it, but someone always interrupts me with, “Ok, are you ready?”

“No, I’m not ready.” I say with indignation. “Hold on for a second.” This interrupter wanted to checkout prematurely, or what we considered a premature checkout, and we weren’t even halfway done, because we thought were close. “We drove all this way to see this mudder humper. Why don’t you go ahead and give me a second to appreciate her.” And we said that with solid conviction, but we didn’t really know how long we needed to convince them, or ourselves, that the very large mound of dirt and rocks inspired feelings of grandeur and timelessness within us to the point that we made that connection.

We don’t want to be a modern who looks at a mountain of breath-taking glory for twenty-two seconds and checks out and moved on. We want to feel, just for a moment, what our forebears must have experienced when they looked upon this mountain. We all think that the man of yesteryear was more in touch with nature than we are, because we’ve been too modernized. There is truth to that, of course, but did they appreciate the wonder of natural landmarks as much or more than we did? My guess is they didn’t view a mountain range as a breathtaking wonder in the manner we do, but as a pain in the ass that they were either going to cross or navigate around on foot or by horse-drawn carriage.

*******

Spotting nature’s finest critters in their environment, doing what they do, can also be awe-inspiring, but how often do we actually see them in the wild? “The one thing we know about nature with absolute certainty is that it’s unpredictable and unreliable,” a tour guide informed us when we didn’t see a single creature on our tour. If we’re lucky enough to actually see a wild animal in their environs, doing what they do, how many of those moments are inspiring or exciting. Most creatures of wild seem to spend about 75% of their time sleeping, 10% hiding from predators, and the rest of their time actively searching for food, eating that food, and sitting on their can doing nothing. If you’re lucky enough to see them during the percentage of the 15% of their time actively searching then you’re one of the lucky few. I’ve never been that lucky.

When we see these incredible beasts in a zoo, we immediately think about how awful it is that they have to spend their existence in a caged environment, but if you’ve ever actually seen one of them in the wild, you know caged animals really aren’t missing that much. The wild ones live lives a lot more boring than most of us know. Their whole lives are about eating whatever they can find, sleeping about 15-20 hours a day, and occasionally finding someone to procreate with to extend the species. The caged animal not only sleeps the same amount of time, but they get free, non-taxing delivery of food, and they also have procreation partners delivered to them. The two things zoo patrons might characterize as the primary deprivations of the wild animal is mental engagement and physical exercise, which I think most wild animals would characterize as overrated. Our tour guide basically bolstered my characterizations when she informed us that one of the only ways they can get the wild animals out of their homes is by providing them salt licks, and they conveniently put them in areas where tourists can spot them. Yet, this only increases the chance that an animal will leave their home. It guarantees nothing.

As a person who is more accustomed to seeing wild animals in action, it’s disappointing to see them do nothing but pant in bask of a sunrise. It’s a pretty decent picture, don’t get me wrong, but at some point you wouldn’t mind seeing what happens after a park ranger sets a mechanical rabbit loose, like they do at the dog tracks to set them in motion. If we got lucky enough to see them hunt or a fight LIVE! and IN ACTION!, and we see them ripping each other apart, we probably wouldn’t want to stick around long enough to see the unsanitary ways they rip entrails out of the loser’s anatomy. We prefer the packages our nature shows put together with their motion-sensitive cameras in the wild, and most of us can’t even last a full show, so we go to YouTube to watch the highlight reels. “It’s not the same,” the nature enthusiast will counter.

“It’s not,” we admit, “but I’ve spent some time in the wild, and I’ve seen these creatures in their habitat, doing what they do, and they’re so boring for such long stretches of time that my embarrassing reflex is to reach for the remote.”

*******

I don’t know if I loved camping in the outdoors (on a protected reserve) when I was a kid, or if I just remember my own highlight package, but I had a love/hate relationship with the wild. Back then, I feared, hated, and loved her dark, wooded regions. The creatures I imagined therein were not all earthly either. I had a vivid imagination, and I imagined that everything outside the campfire light was mysterious, had hidden spirits, and its own relative charm. Now that my imagination has lost some of its vividness, I know I likely would’ve found nothing if I dared venture beyond the campfire light into those dark, foreboding regions. And if I ever had the misfortune of running into one of the most fearsome beasts imaginable in that darkness, my guess is that they’d probably be more scared of me than I am of them, or asleep. I would never tell younger me any of that though, because I know those fears added to the charm of those camping trips, and I still feel that every time I smell burning wood.

When we get older, but not so old that we lose our imagination, we try to recapture the magical charm camping once held for us. The problem is that our parents handled most of the particulars of camping when we were very young, so we needed to find a friend who was a more experienced camper. We searched for that fella or female who knew how to help us, and when we finally found him, we found that the biggest difference between an experienced camper and an inexperienced one is mostly about the tent. Our experienced camper put up quite a few tents in his day, but he wouldn’t put our tent up for us. He didn’t want to deprive us of the sacred rite of passage involved in putting up a first tent, which was the whole reason we invited him to our camping expedition. When we were done, he laughed at us, and he pulled the stakes out another half-inch. “That’s it,” we asked ourselves. “That’s the difference between an experienced camper and an inexperienced one?”

No, that’s not it, he brought a flashlight. “You forgot a flashlight?” he asked with disgust. “You, my friends, are inexperienced campers,” he said. We felt insecure about our lack of knowledge, and we felt some shame for being so unprepared. Feelings of shame are usually followed by some form of rebellion, and we felt that bubbling to the surface, but our experienced camper was not very attractive, he was out of shape, and he was a subpar employee in our company who didn’t have many friends, so we let him wallow in his camping superiorities.

Once we managed to get past the tent and supplies portion of the camping routine, we all decided to go fish. Our experienced camper was also an experienced fisherman, and he did not appreciate us doing the only thing inexperienced fisherman love about fishing: casting. We were casting for distance, and we were casting to break up the boredom of fishing. We also reasoned that because the lake was full of moss and weedy, frequent casting kept it more debris-free. Plus, we didn’t want the fish nibbling our nightcrawler off the line. “What are you doing?” he whispered at us in disgust. “You should be recasting 5-7 minutes apart at the very least.” When we asked him why, our question was a respectful one that ceded to his authority. He explained his rationale, and it was a rather generic answer that involved the frequency of the recast depending on the bait type, water conditions, and target species. When we attempted to explore with more specifics, he tried to answer, but his answers didn’t satisfy us, so we kept asking. “Stop talking,” he spat in whisper, “you’re scaring the fish away.” We respectfully waited beyond reason to speak again, and when we did, he repeated: “Stop talking, you’re scaring the fish away.” We tried to display respect, through more silence, but when we got too bored and tried whispering things to him, he moved to the other side of the lake. Our takeaway was that while camping is boring, but fishing is mind-numbing.

When we extinguished our campfire at the end of the night, our experienced camper brought out an inflatable mattress, which we considered a cardinal sin of the camping world, until he followed that with a Flextailgear Max Pump Three that promised to “inflate the standard inflatable mattress in under two minutes with a 5,000 Pascal pressure rating and a built-in camping light.” We read that off the box to our experienced camper and asked him what his patron saint of outdoorsiness, Theodore Roosevelt, would think of an inflatable mattress with a Flextailgear Max Pump Three.

“I don’t care,” he said. “There’s no way I’m sleeping on that cold hard ground.”

It’s not for me, but I respect anyone and everyone who tries to “ruff it” in the wild, but what does “ruffing it” mean? It’s relative to the person of course, but we all know that minor level of sensory deprivation nature provides can yield a certain sense of peacefulness, as we attempt to connect with nature and ourselves. It’s a momentary escape from the distractions we so enjoy. Once we’re done with that relatively quiet walk through a trail in a wooded region, we ask ourselves what’s the difference between a true outdoorsman, an adventure seeker, an experienced camper, and someone who never travels outside the city? Our guide, teacher, experienced camper or vamper, knew his stuff, but how much stuff is there to know when we go out camping? He improved the taughtness of our tent by moving it about a half-inch, he remembered a flashlight, and he knew enough not to talk while fishing, but he also brought modern conveniences that would’ve made the experienced outdoorsman of yesteryear groan. He didn’t help us renew our appreciation of anything, unless we’re talking about our renewed appreciation for the controlled climate an HVAC can provide, the appliances that provide convenience and comfort, and our devices. When we’re nestled back in our comfortable homes, we appreciate not being smashed into by bugs, as when they see a campfire light, they think it’s a moon, they fly kamikaze-style into it. The june bugs, in particular, don’t seem to care that something as big as a human face stands between them and the light. When we’re in the comfy confines of our home, we also know that nothing is going to stick its disgusting, grimy little proboscis in us to suck blood out of our system. More than anything else, our camping trip gave us a renewed appreciation of our sense of home. Theodore Roosevelt would not have approved of any of this, but the only word we could find to describe “hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm” was boring, and hot and sticky, oh! and the two words ‘never again,’ sorry, Teddy.

The Unusually Awful Annie Cook

October 30, 2025October 30, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

Power, Greed, Corruption, and Murder in Nebraska? Small town, Nebraska? According to reports, the culture of crime, corruption and lawlessness in North Platte, Nebraska was so rampant that it was nicknamed “Little Chicago”. Little Chicago, as in gangsters, as in Al Capone. According to local lore, the town’s law enforcement was so lax during this era, that when various crime bosses and gangsters needed a place to cool off or lay low, they would “vacation” to North Platte, Nebraska.

A woman named Annie Cook (1875-1952) took full advantage of this climate by becoming a bootlegger during The Prohibition Era, a madam of a prostitution ring, and the superintendent of a poor farm that allegedly enslaved and murdered the indigent and destitute who worked on her farm.

Annie Cook built such a prosperous criminal empire that at her peak she was considered her one of the two most prominent criminal figures of North Platte (crime boss Al Hastings being the other). Yet, if we ran into this little woman at one of the church functions she held in her front yard, her smile, her “vanilla voice,” and pleasant demeanor might have reminded us of that cute, little old lady who quietly sits in the back corner of our church.

When I first heard the tale of an unusually awful woman turned gangster, I thought it had bestseller written all over it. When the former and current North Platters dropped the details of her criminal empire, I couldn’t believe no one documented this big secret of the Midwest before. The more they told me about this story, the more my smile faded.

“It wasn’t just innocent people Annie Cook maimed and murdered,” they told me. “Her victims were largely the old, the mentally challenged and the poverty-stricken. She mentally and physically tortured them, and she killed them when they became a financial burden to her.”

Prior to hearing that breakdown, I had this romanticized image of Annie Cook as the original female gangster, or OFG. The more I heard, the more difficult it became to imagine how anyone could romanticize her. We love our gangster flicks, because we love bad guys, and we love violence, as long as it’s justified and noble, or relatively noble.

Don Vito Corleone, the beloved main character of The Godfather, was a bad man, one of the most famous bad guys in fiction, but he only hurt and killed “those who chose this life.” Yet, if this fictional composite of influential figures in organized crime became the most powerful Don of the five families, what atrocities did he have to commit to get there? If a young, aspiring Vito Corleone vowed to only hurt “those who chose this life” and other dishonorable figures, his leader would’ve ordered him to hurt or kill an innocent person to prove loyalty. When Vito developed his first protection racket, what did he do to the mom and pop store owners who failed to pay on time? As a fictional tale of a composite character, author Mario Puzo and director Francis Ford Coppola could do away with the messy details of everything a gangster would have to do to become an all-powerful Don, but who were those influential figures from history on whom Don Vito Corleone was based, and who did they have to hurt and kill?

As the former and current North Platters continued to drop tale after tale on me, I began to realize that leaving out the messy details of the OFG’s rise to the top were almost impossible. The messy details were the story, and no author could omit them in their romanticized gangster tale.

The fact that Annie was able to break so many laws meant that she was above the law, and to me that made her a gangster. The other, messy details were so unusually awful that her tale couldn’t be classified as anything but a horror, a true horror, as opposed to the cinematic variety. These details were such that I realized I no longer had a “cool, female gangster who dominated a small, Midwestern town” tale on my hands, but one of a unusually awful woman who enjoyed hurting and killing the helpless, defenseless, and frail. The tale was so awful that I no longer had big, bestseller aspirations, but a tale that needed to be told.

Much to my disappointment, I learned that Nellie Snyder Yost beat me to it with her Evil Obsession book. I was jealous, but I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it to see if she captured the essence of the Annie Cook story as I imagined it. Ms. Yost exceeded my expectations with her research, as she uncovered details that I consider some of the most horrific I’ve ever read, and I’ve read my fair share of True Crime books. Her research was also so thorough that she is now considered the foremost expert on Annie Cook, and very few have questioned the legitimacy of her claims (some locals claim the book blends fact with oral history at times.) Yet, if the claims Joe (Martin) Cook and Mary Knox Cauffman testified to in court are true, then Evil Obsession is one of the most uncomfortably disturbing recitation of facts that I’ve ever read, the type law enforcement officials spend a lifetime, often unsuccessfully, trying to forget.

How Little Annie Made it Big

In 1893, the 19-year-old, Anna “Annie” Maria Petzke thought she met her savior when she met Frank Cook. She thought he was as rich as she thought her family was, because he owned his own farm, and it came equipped with a white farmhouse and an irrigation ditch.

Suggesting that Annie was “saved” by Frank Cook invites the idea that Annie was enslaved by her Russian Immigrant parents on their Denver, Colorado farm. She wasn’t enslaved by her parents, as reports suggest she didn’t mind the work, but she and her sister Liz worked as hard as their brothers, and the Liz and Annie were never paid for their efforts. Their parents didn’t think women should have money.

Farm life was the only life Anna Maria Petzke ever knew, as she was born and raised on a farm, so she likely didn’t have much knowledge of the outside world. She grew up envying her brothers for the money they made working on the farm, and she thought she had been cheated out of her share of what she considered the vast family fortune.

When Annie married Frank and saw his books, she had to be disappointed to discover that an 80-acre farm doesn’t make near as much money as she always thought, and she was just as disappointed to learn that Frank had little-to-no ambition to expand, buy more farms, and make more money. This led to discussions, arguments, and fights that culminated in Frank informing Annie that his goal in life was limited to generating enough income to support a family, and that he thought his 80-acre farm could do just that. That wasn’t enough for Annie, but she knew Frank well enough to know he was a rather passive man, and that she could dominate him. She knew it wouldn’t take much to convince Frank to buy more farmland to gain more money, and attain more power in the community, but it bothered her that as a woman of the late 1800s, early 1900s, in small town, Nebraska, she had to go through Frank to achieve this. She couldn’t figure out a way to do it on her own, until she experienced some nagging back pains.

After exhausting the efforts of the local physicians to relieve his wife of her nagging back pain, Frank gathered enough money to purchase Annie a train ride to Omaha, Nebraska, and he secured for her the services of a big city specialist. While sitting in the waiting room of that big city specialist, Annie had a chance meeting with a woman named Jane. Annie couldn’t know it at the time, but this chance encounter would change everything for her.

As ambitious as she was, Annie Cook probably would’ve found other paths to all the money she felt her family deprived her of in Denver, even if she never met Jane, but it’s just as likely that her definition of power and big-time money would’ve been limited by her station in life. It’s also likely that if Jane never groomed Annie into the world of prostitution, Annie’s unquenchable greed, lust for power, and blind ambition would have eventually put her on the radar of local law enforcement.

When she returned from Omaha, Annie informed Frank that while the Omaha specialist helped her find some relief from the pain, “The doctor said it was a chronic thing, that I’ll have to go back every now and then for treatment.” (The doctor told Annie she experienced a kidney dysfunction, he prescribed some medicine and told her to come back in a week.) How often she saw this specialist on her return trips to Omaha is unknown, but every time Annie returned to the city, she visited Jane.

Over the course of several visits, and lengthy stays in Omaha, Annie worked at Jane’s “Sporting House” learning, firsthand, how to run a brothel. Jane showed her how to conduct herself as a madam, and how to handle the workforce. Annie made a lot of money, fast, working as a madam for Jane. She paid off the debts she incurred with Jane, and she even managed to purchase a farm she always had her eye on. Annie probably didn’t know it at the time, but becoming a madam in North Platte would not only make her a lot of money, fast, but it would eventually play a prominent role in her dream of creating a criminal empire.

When Annie Cook decided to sell alcohol, and run her own distillery, during The Prohibition Era, she was never investigated for breaking the local, state, and federal laws of that era. Why she was never investigated by the various law enforcement agencies will be a recurring theme throughout this article, as Annie Cook knew how to make the right connections with a couple dollars here and there, and some suggest that her boarding house for girls bordello developed a client list of prominent officials that she built, maintained and used when she needed an issue to go away.

“Anne Cook had officials sign off on death certificates of people who died mysteriously on her farm.” —Panhandle News.

She also used those connections, coupled with numerous bribes and threats of extortion directed at those who frequented her boarding house for girls to help her secure the Lincoln County contract to provide housing, aid, and comfort for the poor and indigent. Annie managed to take that contract away from a kindly, decent widow named Mrs. Emma Pulver, who, by all accounts treated her guests with decency and respect for twenty-five years. Annie outbid the widow by demanding less in the way of government reimbursements for housing them and providing the aid and comfort for their care. We can only guess that Mrs. Pulver, the town, and county officials were shocked that Annie thought she could provide “guests” of Lincoln County care at a rate lower than Mrs. Pulver, but Annie probably told them that she thought the guests could make up for any lost revenue by allowing them to provide her the labor necessary for her farm. While that may have been true, Annie also made up for most of the lost revenue by denying the guests adequate food, heat, hygiene, and anything else she could think up to improve her bottom line.

It’s difficult to convey how awful Annie treated these guests for the next eleven years, except to write that she considered them her possessions from that point forward, and she could do with them what she wished. She basically enslaved the indigent and destitute on the farm, verbally and physically abusing, and some allege torturing them to get more production out of them. She had the guests of what was eventually called the Cook Poor Farm work long, labor-intensive hours without compensation of course, but she also deprived them of many of the necessities of life. At this point in the article we know the answer to the question, ‘Why wasn’t the Cook Poor Farm dinged for all these violations and eventually shut down?’ It survived investigations of the numerous charges made against it for eleven years, and the evidence suggests that the county officials in charge of helping Annie maintain the standards necessary for the quality of life for her guests were either on Annie’s payroll or client lists of her boarding house for girls.

The Unusually Awful Horror of Evil Obsession

“I didn’t like that movie,” a friend of mine said of a Phoef Sutton sports drama/thriller called The Fan. “It made me feel so uncomfortable that I walked out on it.”

“Isn’t that what you pay your hard-earned dollars for?” I asked. “Don’t you want movies and books of this sort to take you out of your comfort zone?” We both looked at each other from afar, as if we couldn’t understand the other’s extreme position.

The difference between the two of us was that she loved horror movies that knew how to keep it fun, acceptable, and lightweight. These popcorn pleasures don’t engage in disturbing truths about human nature, and they don’t lead us to feel sympathy or empathy for the victims. They keep their horror campy, and so over the top with blood and gore that it helps us distance ourselves from the horror. There’s nothing fun about Evil Obsession, and my friend wouldn’t have made it twenty pages in. There are no cats flying into scenes to provide jump scares. The big, bad monster of this tale doesn’t growl like a lion in any of the scenes, and she doesn’t say cool, dark, or quasi funny things before she kills someone. Annie Cook also didn’t try to develop a cool cause to justify her actions either, not in the manner our favorite serial killers or mass murderers do, and her unusually awful acts weren’t committed in a calculating manner the subjects of our favorite True Crime books are. Unless we consider killing useless human beings (by her definition) to improve her finances justifiable in the sense that she was denied money when she was younger, then she wasn’t motivated by righting wrongs either.

The best description we could use to describe most of the mysterious deaths that occurred around Annie Cook is that she quietly did away with the guests of the Cook Poor Farm when they became economically unviable for her. She caused their premature deaths through starvation and other slow, unceremonious measures that proved easy to mischaracterize by various officials. Thus, the horror of Evil Obsession is not theatrical or cinematic, it’s just a tale of a relatively ordinary woman who just happened to be so unusually awful that it makes us feel so uncomfortable to read about her.

Killing Clara

The one glaring exception to that methodology, and the most substantiated allegation of murder, corroborated by Annie’s sister Liz’s eye-witness testimony, suggests that Annie Cook got away with murdering her own daughter Clara. Yet, if Liz’s descriptions of that incident are 100% accurate, and the case made it to the state’s district attorney desk, he would probably seek the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter to secure a conviction against Annie.

Annie’s sister Liz said that the mother and daughter were involved in a heated argument, but she said the two of them were often in heated, vicious, and sometimes violent arguments. Whether or not this argument was worse or par for the course is not stated, but when it reached a point that terrified Clara, she ran from the house to escape her mother. Annie gave chase and in a flurry of rage, she threw a cast-iron stove lifter at her thirty-eight-year-old daughter, hitting her on the head in such a manner that took the life of Clara Cook. Liz reports that the impact initially caused Clara to run around a tree three times before collapsing, as a chicken might after having its head cut off.

Annie reportedly went to her daughter’s aid and wrapped a bandage around her head. After Clara succumbed to death, Liz stated, Annie ordered Joe (Martin) Cook to retrieve a bag of money Clara had hidden in her room. If we take the circumstances out for a moment, Annie’s daughter is dead, and if Liz’s account is as immediate as it sounds, Annie remembered that Clara hid money in her room, and she ordered Joe to retrieve while her daughter’s corpse laid before her, still warm. Then, when we consider the circumstances, she caused her own daughter’s death, and rather than feel remorseful, she ordered Joe to retrieve it in case investigators happened upon it. Ms. Yost reports that Annie then used Clara’s money, combined with the insurance money from Clara’s death, to purchase a farm she always had her eye on. (After a brief, official investigation, it was officially discovered that Clara’s unfortunate demise was the result of an accidental poisoning.)

So, if we were to try to pitch this story to the “just the facts ma’am” crowd, the evidence suggests that we should remove that provocative, bestselling ‘M’ word murder from the back cover, unless that ‘M’ word were used to describe the mysterious death of Clara Cook, and all of the mysterious deaths that happened around Annie Cook.

“But rumor has it that several workers’ carcasses from her Cook Poor Farm were found in ditches shortly after their ill-fated escape attempts,” the concerned citizen might say. “Did your research show you that? Did your research show how many old and indigent patients, who could no longer work, ended up succumbing to mysteriously premature deaths?”

“Fair enough,” we might say, “but no official records confirm those incidents.”

“Official records,” they might respond with exhaustion. “Where do you think this nickname “Little Chicago” came from? North Platte, Nebraska, in the early 20th century, was an absolute cesspool of corruption and lawlessness, and people were absolutely terrified of Annie Cook, because they knew she could get away with anything, including murder, because she did.”

“Anne Cook is an example of if officials weren’t able to be corrupted, they could have stood up to her,” said Jim Griffin, a local historian and Curator Director of the Lincoln County Historical Museum. “She bought off [and extorted] most of the town and council members to continue operating her ventures.”

No one knows, exactly, how many mysterious deaths occurred around Annie Cook, but educated guesses based on local lore and historical context suggest that Annie Cook may have been responsible for multiple deaths, possibly several dozen. Some of these mysterious deaths were the result of blatant acts of criminality of the highest order, and some slipped through the cracks of the bureaucratic foundation of the town.

One example of a mysterious death that occurred on the Cook Poor Farm involved a resident Annie called “that old bastard Kidder”. Old Kidder died of “old age and heart failure” according to the death certificate a county mortician named WR Munson wrote, signing for the county coroner. He wrote and signed the document for his good friend, Annie Cook, “ignoring the all too plain evidence that starvation caused, or contributed to, the death of the unfortunate pauper.” As superintendent of the Cook Poor Farm, Annie Cook was put in charge of this man’s welfare, and she allegedly denied this sickly man food. We can assume that she did it, because the cost of his care began affecting her bottom line. To her mind, Old Kidder overstayed his usefulness.

Who knows how much longer Old Kidder could’ve lived? We can only guess that he was a forgotten man, but who was he? How many people cared about this man, and why didn’t anyone step forward to question how this man died? If anyone aside from Liz, Munson, and Annie suspected foul play, why didn’t they step forward, and if they did who would act on the testimony that alluded to Annie’ s role in this man’s premature death, and who would act on that testimony? If a representative of the coroner’s office officially signs off on the death of a forgotten man that no one cared about, who would have called for a medicolegal investigation that involved a thorough examination of the death scene, interviews with witnesses, and collection of physical evidence? Who would call for an autopsy to prove or disprove initial findings? Starvation proved, in this case, a perfect crime for a well-connected, unusually awful person.

Another incident that went officially undocumented, involved the story of a teenager, named Allen Porter. The young Porter was driving his horse driven wagon to Annie Cook’s house to retrieve a potato digger she borrowed from Allen’s uncle. When they neared the Cook Estate, Allen’s otherwise obedient horses stubbornly refused to pass a wagon box left by the side of the road. After Allen continued to urge the horses onward, Allen reported, the horses’ legs began trembling. Frustrated, the young Porter pulled up to the wagon box to investigate the source of what he considered his horses’ irrational fears. He looked down into the box to see an old man staring up at him. The sight of a frail, old man in an old, abandoned wagon box probably knocked this young teenager back in shock. We can only guess what the young Allen Porter expected to find, but seeing an old man in there was probably the last thing he expected to see.

After he recovered from that initial shock, Allen Porter looked back in to study the old man looking back up at him, eyes wide and bulging, his face covered in flies. As horrific as it must’ve been for the young teenager to discover a corpse in the wagon box, his careful study of the poor, old man revealed the slight expansion and contraction of breath. The man was alive. We don’t know what was going through Porter’s head, or why he didn’t do more to help the poor, old man, but how many of us have experience with such inexplicably horrific matters? How many of us would know what to do? The young Porter was probably so shocked and terrified that he didn’t know what to do, so he rode onto the Cook Estate to try to put it out of mind. Once there, Annie exited her house to greet him. We don’t know how much of Porter’s path Annie saw, but when she met him, she greeted him with a suspicious “What do you want?” Allen told her, and she helped him load the potato digger into his wagon. When Allen took the potato digger back, he reported what he witnessed to his uncle, and the older man was not surprised. He reminded Allen to let the horses cool before watering them, and he turned away.

“Getting away with murder” is a hyperbolic expression we now use to describe someone acting badly without consequences. If our fellow employee loafs on the job, for instance, we say they’re getting away with murder when the boss doesn’t call them out on it. When foreigners hear us use this phrase, they wonder how we can say such an inflammatory phrase so casually. “Getting away with murder is just something we say,” we say. “It’s an expression.”

Even with their now archaic and antiquated technology, getting away with murder was considered one of the hardest things to do to early 20th century American citizens, and they probably dropped that line in the same somewhat sarcastic and serious ways we do today. How would an unusually awful person like Annie Cook respond to such a serious joke in her day? “All you have to do is prey on the unloved and unwanted that no one, if truth be told, wants around anymore. My victims became such a burden to society and their loved ones that if we could force them to be honest, they might actually thank someone like me for having the courage to off the useless peopler who has become such a drain on society and our resources. Before you do it, however, make such you make the necessary connections with prominent people for they can do a lot to help everyone else forget to do their jobs or neglect their responsibilities as good citizens. If you do it right, you can scare good men and women, like Allen’s uncle, into reminding their nephews about how to put the horses away.”

True horror, as opposed to the more theatrical or cinematic, can be found in the ways in which unusually awful people display an utter disregard for the sanctity of life, human life. The horror is in the details of an unusually awful person asking us to be honest and acknowledge that some human life just isn’t special. Some life is an unprofitable burden, and it often overstays its usefulness.

The conclusion of this chapter is that there is no conclusion, as Annie Cook never had to put up with nosy neighbors in North Platte or Hershey, Nebraska, learning things about her. They were terrified of her, and they gave her the much needed privacy she needed to conduct her affairs the way she saw fit. There were never any investigations from law enforcement officials, as they were bought, extorted, or informed that their investigations would go nowhere. Annie Cook also never had to deal with exposés in the media, as there were never any stories done about her during her day. Reading through this story, it almost seems impossible that some young, enterprising young reporter wouldn’t leap the hurdles to overcome the corruption in these towns to produce an award-winning exposé of the killing fields in North Platte and Hershey.

“But you just reported on the climate inherent in these towns, people were terrified, and they were all very hush hush on the topic of Annie Cook and her Cook Poor Farm,” you might say. “I doubt the best reporter or law enforcement official could get anything out of them to do their job.” When Ms. Yost finally decided to write Evil Obsession, she expected to encounter these roadblocks. To her surprise, “All the informants seemed willing, even eager, to tell me what they knew.” Granted, this book came out in 1991, decades after Annie Cook’s death, but where was that eager reporter, looking to expose the travesties occurring at the Cook Poor Farm while they were going on, and where was that reporter in the intervening years, decades, between Annie Cook’s death and Ms. Yost’s decision to research, write, and publish Evil Obsession? If it wasn’t for Ms. Yost, Annie Cook’s legacy probably wouldn’t have suffered either, because there were no official investigations of the mysterious deaths that occurred in and around Cook Poor Farm and the Cook Family Estate in the aftermath of her death. There is also no record of post-mortem investigations, or any cold cases being officially re-opened in the decades since, and the absence of evidence has become part of the legacy and myth of the unusually awful Annie Cook, and that legacy is a stark reminder that horror, true horror lies not in cinematic monsters but in the indifference that lets figures like Annie prey on the “useless” and forgotten.

Annie Cook II: The Horror is in the Details

Annie Cook III: What Drove Her?

Annie Cook II: The Horror is in the Details

October 30, 2025October 30, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

As horrific as the murders and mysterious deaths surrounding Annie Cook were, they pale in comparison to the detailed account her niece, Mrs. Mary Knox Cauffman, provides of the physical and mental torture she experienced on a daily basis at the hands of that unusually awful woman.

“Oh no, I can’t talk about it,” Mary Knox Cauffman informed Evil Obsession author Nellie Snyder Yost. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

Ms. Yost was standing before Mary’s door informing her that she was writing a book on Annie Cook, and she wanted to invite Mary to tell her side of the story. Other than writing that Mary’s reaction exhibited an “all too evident pain,” Ms. Yost also characterized Mary’s immediate reaction as one of “the old paralyzing fear and pain surged upon within her.”

A gifted creative writer would’ve asked Ms. Yost to further convey for the reader Mary’s reaction to someone asking her to relive the worst moments of her life. Yet, it probably would’ve been difficult-to-impossible to do so in a paragraph, or with words written on a page. Even the greatest creative writers would’ve had a tough time conveying the extent of mental and physical torture Annie Cook inflicted on Mary over the course of sixteen years to the degree that the woman exhibited “all too evident pain” forty years later.

After Ms. Yost apologized for causing Mary such pain, she began walking back to her car. Mary recovered from the initial shock, and she asked Ms. Yost to come back. “Come in,” Mary said. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.” In the epilogue, Ms. Yost characterized Mary reliving the pain as Mary speaking “All that afternoon [reliving] all the old fear and pain and despair.” She described Mary’s “flood of words” providing “a veritable catharsis of long pent up emotions.” When Ms. Yost left, “[Mary] felt cleansed, relieved, [and] serene.” We can also only guess that Mary thought if she told this tale as she remembered it, it might help prevent others from looking “the other way and permit it to go on, as the people in this tale did.”

Before we get into the details of what Mary could remember, forty years later, how many horrors did Mary forget, and purposely forget, in her effort to try to remove these horrible stains from her mind? How many of the horrors Mary experienced were day-to-day traumas Annie committed against the young girl that weren’t noteworthy in a literary sense? How many of Mary’s memories did Ms. Yost edit down to what she considered the highlights, for lack of a better term. How many awful moments, incidents, and crimes will the reader never know that led Mary to react in such a manner at the mere mention of the name Annie Cook, forty years later? I think it’s safe to say that the true horrors this woman experienced lay not in the highlights that she relayed to Ms. Yost, but in the daily details of what Annie Cook did to these women to maintain absolute control of Mary and her mother Liz’s hearts and minds.

“We [Mary and Liz] did the daily housework, the farm chores, worked out in the fields, picked the fruit, took care of the 150 ducks, 150 geese, 400 chickens, and never less than 10 cows,” Mary testified in court, long after the worst of it was over for her. “We had to clean the manure out of the barn and clean the chicken pens.

“Whenever the work wasn’t done just when she wanted it done, or it wasn’t done just right, Anna would use the buggy whip on mom and I,” Mary furthered on the stand. “I don’t think a day passed that we didn’t get whipped. Mom and I were really scared.”

“They [Mary and Liz] were forced to clean the barn and chicken houses, and had to work from 4 A.M. to 10 P.M,” Annie’s foster son, Joe (Martin) Cook, said to confirm Mary’s testimony when he took the stand. “I saw Anna ‘sic’ the dogs onto Liz many times, and it was strictly against the rules for Liz to eat with Anna. Company got fried chicken, and we got leftovers or whatever Anna gave us.” Those two testimonies, to determine if Liz had a claim on the Cook Estate (after Annie’s death), read like victim testimony in a criminal trial. When reading through testimonies such as these, our eyes tend to glaze, as we see a recitation of facts. As Nellie Snyder Cook states in the preface of Evil Obsession the purpose of writing and reading books that deal with such sensitive subjects is to warn us to “Not look the other way and permit it to go on, as the people in this tale did.” Immersive reading of such horrors teach us how to empathize with the subjects far better than any other formats do.

If you’ve ever done any work on a farm, you know it’s not for the faint of heart. Imagine doing it every day from 4 A.M. to 10 P.M. for sixteen years, as in the case of Mary, and forty-seven years for Liz. At the end of their eighteen-hour day, they not only were whipped with a buggy whip if the job wasn’t completed when and how Annie wanted it done, but they were also denied food at the end of the day for further punishment. Mary reports that she was denied food for three days in a row at times, and if Annie’s husband Frank hadn’t snuck her food every once in a while, when Annie wasn’t looking, she probably wouldn’t have survived. On the days when he couldn’t find a way to sneak her food, she had to do all of these chores, and wake up the next day before 4 A.M. exhausted and painfully hungry to try to do it all perfect again the next day. And if they didn’t do it according to standards, because they weren’t nourished in a manner to provide them the necessary energy to do so, Annie whipped them. (Annie’s husband Frank often treated their open wounds, when Annie wasn’t around so their wounds didn’t get infected.)

In one of Mary’s most harrowing tales, Annie introduced the then five-year-old Mary to her new life on the Cook Estate by informing her that she was to tend to livestock. When Mary informed Annie that her work shoes were still at her Aunt Nettie’s home, the home where she spent her first five years, Annie informed her that she would not be tending to livestock in her good, church shoes. Thus, she forced Mary to feed the hens and break ice for the ducks in freezing temperatures with no shoes or socks on. When the “thick coat of hoar frost” burned the five-year-old girl’s feet, she screamed out in pain. Annie instructed her to hush her bawling and hurry up. The five-year-old girl somehow managed to keep her cries of pain quieter, until they were finally done and they made their way back to the kitchen. Once there, Mary felt no pain, as her feet were now white and numb. Annie feared that she may have gone too far with the five-year-old, and she put hot water in a pan for Mary’s feet and instructed her to put her feet in it. When the color returned to her feet, Mary cried out in pain, and her Aunt Annie slapped her and told her to shut up. We readers cannot imagine how shockingly horrifying this introduction to her new life on the Cook Estate must’ve been for this little girl to learn that her aunt would force her to do work that burned her feet so badly that they were near frostbitten.

As difficult as this tale was to read, in Evil Obsession, it paled in comparison to the idea Annie came up with to remove that awful mole from Mary’s otherwise beautiful face.

From the few pictures we have of Annie Cook, we can see that she was not an attractive woman, and we can guess that she was not an attractive young girl either. Who cares, right? What does physical appearance have to do with anything? As an unattractive person who sought power over people, Annie probably spent a lifetime seething with jealousy over the effect the beautiful can have on a room simply by walking in.

Beautiful people get us talking, whispering good things and bad. No matter how well Annie did herself up and no matter how many fancy, new dresses she wore to church, no one ever paid any attention to her. Yet, when her fellow church patrons saw Annie’s little five-year-old niece Mary walk into church, they said such wonderful things about her. They informed Annie that her young niece was a natural and unblemished beauty.

“Quite fetching,” they said. They talked about Mary’s lovely dimples, her dark hair, and her lively, sparkling eyes. Annie agreed with them that Mary had fetching qualities, but she did so with resentment. When they wouldn’t shut up about it, Annie reached a point where she couldn’t take it anymore, and she began obsessing over Mary’s lone imperfection, that mole.

“Except for that awful mole,” Annie said, after agreeing with the church ladies that Mary was a naturally beautiful, young child. “You say she’s a natural, unblemished beauty, but I can’t stop thinking about that big, ugly mole. It looks like the devil.”

“That?” the church ladies replied. “That’s nothing. It’s so little. Plus, some cultures and professions actually prize a beauty spot like that, when it’s that small.”

Annie realized that she couldn’t dissuade people from saying such things, and while she harbored deep resentment that no one ever said such things about her, she learned to accept that for what it was to some degree. When they failed to talk about her beloved daughter Clara in that manner, it frustrated Annie further.

These frustrations eventually manifested into an obsession with Mary’s mole, and Annie began ridiculing Mary for her mole relentlessly in the confines of the home the three of them shared. She did it so often that her sister Liz and Mary began to cry when Annie started in on the little girl’s one imperfection so relentlessly. After spending a lifetime with Annie, her sister Liz learned that the best way to defeat Annie’s relentlessness was just to ignore it, and she taught her daughter Mary the same. “Just ignore it,” Liz probably said at some point when she saw how Annie’s relentlessness shattered her daughter. What else could Liz do to protect her daughter?

We’ve all known bullies, and some of us have firsthand experience with their relentlessness. The one thing we all learn is that there is no handbook or standard operating procedure that will help us deal with bullies. We tried things when we were young, and we watched our peers try things, but we all reached the conclusion that nothing works. In total desperation, we reached out to our authority figures. Those of us who have experienced the desperation Liz must’ve experienced when she saw her daughter’s tears know those feelings of helplessness, but we also know that the worst thing she could’ve done was to instruct her daughter to “Just ignore it.” I don’t know if bullies sense weakness, or if they just can’t stop until someone stops them, but when I hear someone advise another to “Just ignore it” I think that’s a mistake, huge mistake! It’s a huge mistake, to my mind, because as anyone who knows a bully knows when we effectively ignore them, we deprive them of their sole source of satisfaction on the matter. Some bullies move onto other vulnerable targets, but most of them up their game.

No matter how this progression happened, Annie eventually decided to remove her five-year-old niece’s lone imperfection, saying, “That big, ugly mole looks like the devil, but Aunt Annie can take it off for you.”

To remove a mole during this era, medical practitioners with cosmetic ambitions used various, now antiquated techniques, and there was always some scarring, but their clients considered that an acceptable trade-off for removing conspicuous blemishes. Annie didn’t want to pay for all that, of course, and using such medically approved procedures wouldn’t accomplish Annie’s goal of destroying Mary’s natural and unblemished beauty.

Annie decided that the best way to remove that “awful mole” was with a coal-fired hot poker that would leave her five-year-old niece with an embarrassing and nasty scar for the rest of her life. Whether or not Annie derived satisfaction or pleasure by destroying a naturally beautiful young girl is not detailed in Evil Obsession, but it’s tough to imagine another motive for permanently scarring a five-year-old’s face. As awful as this incident sounds, the details are worse. The images that Ms. Yost provides in Evil Obsession, culled from Ms. Knox Cauffman’s retelling, left this reader with an image I might not be able to ever shake. It is, as I wrote, the most difficult story in this book to finish.

The idea that this unusually awful woman got away with horrific incidents like this one and the others that would follow are another reason Evil Obsession would never reach the bestseller list. When good people read about awful people doing awful things to other people, we want retribution, especially when those usually awful things are done to an innocent, young five-year-old girl.

When readers read scenes like the near-frostbite incident and the hot poker one, we think, “That’s just too much.” Burning the feet and face of a five-year-old girl burns an image in our mind that never leaves us, and some of us fantasize about going back in time so that we can step in and stop this. We know we can’t do that, but we want to do something.

We’ve all watched moviemakers rewrite history to right a wrong in a fictional sense, and we think “YES!” when we read scenes like this one. It’s a sophomoric desire to achieve some sort of vicarious catharsis, but after I finished reading these unusually awful scenes, I imagined the five-year-old Mary fighting through the hold Annie forced her daughter Clara to hold Mary in. I had Mary grab that coal-hot poker and put it through Annie’s good eye. I also imagined Mary’s mother Liz finding a way to burst through the bedroom door at the last second to wrestle around on the floor with Annie, burning herself and Annie on the hot poker, but sparing Mary that horrific moment in her young, naive, and unblemished years. “We could rewrite scenes like this one and add a ‘based on a true story’ subtitle to the book,” I would submit to Ms. Yost if I were given the chance to ghost write her book with her. “We cannot leave this scene as is, I can’t anyway, because I won’t be able to sleep again, thinking I should’ve done something. Someone should’ve done something, our readers will think, and they’ll throw the book across the room, and they won’t recommend it to anyone, saying, “It’s a beautiful, little five-year-old girl we’re talking about.”

“It’s the truth though,” Ms. Yost would argue. “And the sad truth is that some of the times the most awful people in history got away with everything. One of the goals of any author writing a long-form book of true horror is to procure intimate levels of sympathy and empathy in the reader, so that if they witness similar incidents of true horror in their life, they might do something or say something to prevent the escalation that follows. If we fictionalize to add some sort of fictional retribution, we remove ingrained images that the truth could foster.”

Mary’s Independence Day

The criminal acts Annie Cook allegedly committed, commissioned, and took part in were not of cinematic quality. Starving patients to death, leaving them in an abandoned wagon box to either bake in the Sun or starve, and mentally and physically scarring a five-year-old for life are not horrific events that would excite an audience looking for a “cool” bad guy. These are relatively insignificant incidents against the insignificant that stick in the mind for decades, because of our almost ingrained and reflexive desire to protect the insignificant. My guess is that the relatively minor incidents Mary could remember forty years later don’t scratch the surface of the mental and physical torture Mary endured. My guess is its 1/100ths of the story that ruined that good woman’s life.

As awful as Marys’ tales in this book are, they do lead to the one redeeming tale in Evil Obsession. It occurs soon after Mary refuses to become one of Annie’s prostitutes. “I’ll die before I do that,” she said when Annie put forth the notion when she believed Mary was old enough to become one of Annie’s entertainers. Mary’s reaction makes clear that Annie’s command pushed her beyond the terror she always had of the woman. When Annie threatened to test Mary’s resolve by ending her life with her buggy whip, Mary screamed, “Never!” After a prolonged stand down, Annie tossed her whip aside and grabbed a big butcher knife that her husband Frank always kept as sharp as possible. Holding the knife like a spear, Annie ran at the screaming girl. Mary jumped to the side at the very last moment and caught the knife in the hip as opposed Annie’s more fatal target, the stomach, and Mary ran from the Cook Estate when Annie prepared to strike again.

After Mary managed to escape the confines of the Cook Estate and into North Platte, she ran to the safety of a new sheriff, who was not under Annie Cook’s thumb. The new sheriff wouldn’t return Mary to Annie in the manner the old one would, as he stated that she was now of age, and she didn’t have to return to the Cook Estate if she didn’t want to do so.

This was the third time Mary managed to run away from the Cook estate, and this reader slowly worked his way through the next few chapters waiting for Annie to eventually find a way to force town officials to bring her back. Annie did try, numerous times, but she failed. Mary managed to secure her own freedom, and she went onto live a decent, though thoroughly damaged life.

I hate to confess this, but when I purchase a book about unusually awful people, I usually find the redemptive stories of those who managed to escape and live a relatively normal life a little anti-climactic. Most authors detail the relatively boring but free life these victims of the tale enjoyed. Ms. Yost provides those extensive details of Mary’s new, independent life, but no matter how mundane and relatively boring those details were, I found myself cheering every detail of that woman’s newfound independence. Mary worked in a hotel, cleaning rooms for the woman who housed her, and she worked on a father-in-law’s farm after a failed marriage. She then did some odd jobs, like cleaning work, to help pay the bills. Again, I don’t know if other readers will savor these relatively insignificant details, but I cheered on every word, because the mentally and physically tortured Mary Knox did them as a free woman. As a free woman, Mary tried secure the freedom of her mother, Liz, for twenty-eight years, she tried, and she lived within ten miles of her mother, but Liz would remain under Annie’s control until the day Annie died.

The Unusually Awful Annie Cook

Annie Cook III: What Drove Her?