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?

October 30, 2025October 30, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

In one specific retelling, Joe (Martin) Cook, recounts a sit down he had with Frank after Annie brutally whipped him with a stick “Why is Annie the way she is?” stepson Joe (Martin) Cook asked Frank after Joe endured one of Annie’s brutal beatings.

“I don’t know,” Frank said after a long pause. “When we were first married, she was a good wife. She worked hard and was never mean. Then she got sick and went down to Omaha to see a doctor. She was gone quite a while, and when she came back, she was –different. She went back to Omaha a few more times when she didn’t feel well, and every time she came home more –spiteful, meaner.

“You see,” Frank explained. “Annie isn’t happy, hasn’t been for a long time, and she doesn’t want anybody around her to be happy. All she’s thought of, or cared for, for years, Joe, is money. Money and the power over people to make them do what she wants them to do. It’s a sickness, boy, a sickness of the mind. I guess we should feel sorry for her, Joe. It is a terrible thing to be sick in your mind.”

There’s no question that Annie Cook had some sort of mental illness, but what drove that? In Evil Obsession, author Nellie Snyder Yost provides some informed speculation, based on Frank’s characterization, but she abides by Frank’s characterization that it was all about greed, lust for power, and blind ambition. I don’t question that that was Annie Cook’s primary driver, but it does seem a little too surface. It doesn’t explain why she enjoyed hurting members of her own family so much. It doesn’t provide answers for why she progressed from someone who worked hard, to a micromanaging superintendent that could be a little mean at times, to a woman who could be cruel, sadistic, and have no regard for the sanctity of human life.

If the reader suggests that Annie may have done so to manipulate her workers and family members, and keep them submissive, I understand that, but a controlling, micromanager could’ve accomplished that. Even a mean person could’ve found numerous other ways to achieve that. Only an unusually awful would do such things, the way she did them, because she clearly enjoyed humiliating and hurting those she considered her possessions. This, in my opinion, requires a deeper answer to Joe’s question, beyond the “greed and lust for power” answer.

Ms. Yost might say that it’s not the job of a nonfiction writer to provide answers through psychoanalysis and speculation. The quality nonfiction writer provides the evidence to allow their readers to draw their own conclusions. We all respect that answer, and most of us will agree, but there’s nothing wrong with providing some insight based on research.

If we take some of the bullet points of Annie Cook’s life and draw lines from her past to her present, we could speculate that spending an overwhelming amount of her life on farms may have influenced Annie’s views on the animals vital to a productive and profitable farm. That insight could lead an author to suggest that Annie Cook may have regarded the guests of her Cook Poor Farm as nothing more than another type of animal working on her farm.

Before we continue, I think it’s important to note that an overwhelming majority of farmers and their family and friends, are upstanding members of their community. I was going to write that the percentage of good people versus bad in farming communities is equal to members of every other demographic, but I knew some farm kids growing up, and I know some adults who spent their entire lives on farms. In my experience, most farming families don’t just turn out quality individuals on par with other families. They often turn out better people than most. There are numerous reasons why farm kids turn out to be better adults, but the first and most obvious reason is that most farmers work such long hours that most of them don’t have the free time the rest of us do, and as the old proverb states, “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

As with most farm kids, Annie started out with a child’s innocent love of animals, but the harsh realities of farm life—harsh to an innocent, naive child anyway—hardened her. She probably fed and tended to the farm’s chickens, pigs, and other livestock so often that she developed a fondness for some of them. Their eventual deaths probably hit her hard, but she learned, as all farm kids do, that livestock not only provides food for the family but financial gain when they’re sold to the local butcher. It’s a way of life on a farm, that farm kids learn, but we can imagine that they had a tough time adjusting to that early on.

Everything that lives dies, and farm kids learn that earlier than most kids but they must also come to grips with the harsh reality that some animals live so long that they overstay their usefulness. Farmers must measure their livestock with a Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR). The FCR is a measure that farmers use to determine how much it costs to feed an animal versus their level of productivity and overall sense of usefulness. Thus, if Annie’s favorite chicken, pig, or whatever livestock she loved most on a farm failed to produce enough to outweigh what it cost to feed them, she knew they were not for long.

Most farm kids also have more pets than most kids, as farms need cats to keep the rodent population manageable, and they need dogs to protect their territory in other ways. They learn, as all kids do, that very few animals live as long as humans. Farm kids experience so much death on a farm that, for lack of a better term, they just get used to it.

After spending a lifetime on farms, experiencing and learning everything it takes to run a profitable farm, how much of a reach is it to ask if an unusually awful person, with a twisted perspective that could be the result of a mental illness, could view human beings as nothing more than a cog in the machine of farm production? How much of a reach is it to suggest that Annie viewed the humans on her property as her property, or something she owned in the same manner we own cats and dogs, goldfish and parakeets, and livestock. Every state now has their own variation of cruelty to animal laws now, but the laws of the 1930s were relatively limited in scope compared to modern standards. The 1930s citizen could do whatever they wanted to their pet parakeet back then, because they were the owner. How much of a reach would it be for an unusually awful person to suggest they own the guests of the Cook Poor Farm in the same manner, and they can do what they want to them using the Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR) to determine how much it costs to feed them versus their level of productivity, or if they’ve overstayed their usefulness in harsh, stark, and unusually awful determinations of the profitability of the farm.

Humans are easier to train but harder to maintain. Humans are able to do the more complex work animals can’t, and most of them can outwork other animals, but unlike other animals, humans tend to stubbornly seek freedom, fun, and trying to get the most out of life. They also have a way of overstaying their usefulness that just doesn’t make sense financially. The first inclination we might have is to fire the personnel who don’t help turn the farm profitable, but Annie wasn’t paying her farm hands. They were either poor or indigent wards of the state, or family members working for free. The next logical next step, for the farm owner is to find a way to encourage them to work harder, and fear can be a great motivator. Annie believed that mental and physical torture helped keep her staff productive. If that failed to produce results, how hard is it to convince an unusually awful person that those farm hands are overstaying their usefulness?

Anytime we read a true crime book, like Evil Obsession, our goal is to derive motive and motivation of its monsters. As hard as it is for us to imagine how someone could be so callous, malicious and sadistic, it has to be much more difficult for them. “Well, I don’t think a monster like Annie spent one second reflecting on what she did,” you might say. I wouldn’t dispute that, except to say that you might be talking about moral justification. I don’t think Annie Cook spent a second trying to morally justify her actions, but she surely had some “I’m not a monster” moments before a mirror. I base that on my experiences with Beryl Carnelia, who she never tried to morally justify her actions, but she did try to square it in a way that made sense to her and those she respected.

Beryl Carnelia

I never met Annie Cook, or anyone who knew her personally, but I knew Beryl Carnelia, a woman so similar to Annie that reading Evil Obsession felt intimately and eerily familiar. Beryl ran a prostitution ring from her bar, and she exclusively hired less fortunate workers to do the manual labor chores that needed to be done at the bar and in and around her home. The less than fortunate workers didn’t require much money for their services, or respect, and she didn’t give them either. She beat them down mentally as opposed to the physical torture Annie would with her less than fortunate staff, but Beryl’s staff feared her in a manner somewhat similar to the manner in which the staff at the Cook Poor Farm feared Annie. No one feared Beryl ever putting them in an abandoned wagon box to fry in the sun and eventually starve to death, I should clarify, but they feared her abusive tongue. The portrait of Annie Cook that Ms. Yost paints reminds me of Beryl Carnelia most in the sense that they were colorless individuals who were fundamentally unhappy.

Those who had the opportunity to talk to Beryl learned that this woman had a rock solid personal constitution built on a foundation of solid moral values. Beryl followed the golden rule of treating others the way she wanted to be treated, as long as they were as respectable as she was. She knew the difference between right and wrong, in a philosophical sense, and she would drop the great declaration of human equity and universal rights that “all men and women are created equal.” Watching how Beryl treated the less fortunate, led some of us to think that if she ever read anything, she really would’ve enjoyed author George Orwell’s “but some are more equal than others” asterisk to that great declaration.

She would say things like, “Yeah, but I did that to John Wissam,” when we called her out on the inconsistencies of her philosophy when it came to the way she treated the less fortunate. “He’s an idiot.” She said that as if we should join her in recognizing the clear distinction between an upstanding man, one who may have experienced some rough times, and a total idiot like John Wissam. Anyone reading the characterizations Ms. Yost gathered of Annie Cook can see that she drew the same distinctions.

Beryl, like Annie, could not stand to see certain people happy. It just rubbed them the wrong way to see select people laughing, enjoying life, and acting the fool. As Annie’s husband Frank said, “Annie isn’t happy, hasn’t been for a long time, and she doesn’t want anybody around her to be happy [either].” Those who are miserable in their own skin are just like this, and they don’t even know they’re doing it. If we were to call them out on it, in the moment, they would deny it, or they would drop the line, “It’s John Wissam. He’s an idiot.” And we let it go, because John Wissam has adapted to this part of his existence, and we know it’s just a part of their relationship. When she does it to us, however, we realize that Beryl Carnelia just can’t stand seeing other people laughing, acting the fool, and enjoying life.

There’s a tale told in Evil Obsession of Annie’s daughter Clara purchasing a brand new paid of overalls for Joe (Martin) Cook. The two of them enjoyed the new overalls for what they signified and symbolized for a spell, until Annie ordered Joe to remove the overalls. She took the overalls and destroyed them. Another tale speaks of Mary proudly displaying a certificate of achievement from school, Annie took it from her and destroyed it. Another incident involving Mary, spoke of how Annie criticized her for spending too much time in front of a mirror. She cut the girl’s hair off at the ponytail.

“That’s too much,” her daughter Clara complained. ‘That’s too much?’ the reader asks. ‘Annie scarred Mary for life with a hot poker to the face, nearly burned her feet to frostbite when she was a five-year-old, and physically beat Mary with a buggy whip almost every say for sixteen years, and she mentally abused the young girl for sixteen years to essentially damage-to-ruin her entire life, and cutting her hair off at the ponytail is too much for Clara?

To despise others’ happiness that much, it has to be ingrained, right? The dark, colorless nature has to come from somewhere, and our first suspect is the family. Evil Obsession does not provide a thorough analysis of Annie Cook’s family, but we assume that they had to be a dark and colorless family, and Annie absorbed that darkness. As Frank characterized Annie, Beryl appeared to be a good person at one time. We never knew that to be fact, but we often caught glimpses of a kind, loving character, who was full of fun and frivolity. We knew that Beryl Carnelia was spared, or saved, in the past, but we never knew the specifics of what she endured in her youth, because she never talked about her past. Thus, we could only guess that she had whatever color she had taken from her, or stolen from her, through circumstances she couldn’t control.

What is a colorful character? We all define that term differently, depending on the character, but I have my own definition of a colorful character by way of contrasting it to the Annie Cooks and Beryl Carnelias of the world. Beryl laughed at times, we saw it, but it made us feel uneasy when she did, because we knew she wanted our jokes dark. “I have a very dark sense of humor,” she confessed, but we all say that. We all enjoy hearing stories about human foibles, but some like Beryl, and presumably Annie, need something more if they are going to be entertained. There are simple stories of degradations and humiliations, and we’ve all heard those so often that they’re just not as impactful or personal. Beryl types, Annie types, and the type of person we could call unusually awful consider those stories equivalent to cute and clever knock-knock jokes that might not even get a smile out of them. They want stories about human degradation and humiliation. They want pain, be it emotional or physical, in their punchlines. They want to hear a story that if repeated to the subject might cause a tear in their eye.

Beryl saw the world in black and white so often, and in so many situations that when we talk to her, we can see that she’s had the color drained out of her. She became black and white, colorless, vague, unmemorable and miserable. She became so consumed by bitterness that we can feel it shortly after we say, “Hey, how you doing?” and she responds with some witty, dark retort that she’s learned along the way. Again, we all do this to some degree, but something about the dark trail that followed Beryl’s response told us that somewhere along the way, darkness consumed her.

Final Days

“Evil always get theirs, in the end,” social commentators tell us. “It might take a while, but it always comes back, one way or another.” And it does …in the movies, and other fictional tales that are built to satisfy our need for substantial forms of retribution. We could say that the darkness so consumes souls, like Beryl and Annie, that we say, “Imagine having to live with them. Imagine being them.” That is its own form of intangible justice, but it’s not enough for us. We want real, tangible justice for the victims who suffered at their hands, and that does not always “come back, one way or another.” Sometimes, evil doers get away with it all, and they never pay a price.

When we immerse ourselves in the tale of an unusually awful person like Annie Cook, the reason it makes us feel so uncomfortable is based on the idea that they disrupt the moral architecture of our world, and we seek some form of retribution to provide a scaffolding that repairs it. We crave resolution not just for the victim, but for the symbolic universe their tormentors fractured. Annie never did time, she was never subjected to an official investigation of any sort during her life, and she never suffered in anyway that would satisfy those seeking some form of karmic justice.

As she laid on her deathbed, however, Mrs. Cook had very few visitors, the only documented one being Joe (Martin) Cook. The officials who befriended her in life were surely relieved that their secrets died with her, and they probably didn’t want their name associated with her legacy in a way that a hospital visit might invite. Her family and various other associates may have been just as glad to see her go for their own reasons. That latter line might straddle the line of speculation, but it’s based, in part, on those witnesses of Annie Cook’s life that Nellie Snyder Yost interviewed after Ms. Cook’s death. Thus, the only form of subtle retribution her victims and other observers felt at the end was that Annie Cook managed to estrange so many she spent her final days on her deathbed, friendless, alone, and unloved.

If we, somehow, found out that we would die alone and unloved, it might reshape how we live our lives going forward. Would it affect someone like Annie Cook? I can tell you that it didn’t affect Beryl Carnelia. What affected Annie, the woman who killed her daughter, and estranged the husband who once loved her with a malicious, unfounded charge of incest was the idea that she might lose her money. “Oh gawd, help me take care of my money, Oh Gawd help me take care of my money, Oh gawd…” Annie bawled over and over in an irrational state.

When Joe (Martin) Cook, her foster son, and her only documented visitor, heard her shout this, he probably thought about what Frank had said about Annie, “All she’s thought of, cared for, for years, Joe, is money. Money and the power over people to make them do what she wants them to do. It’s a sickness, boy, a sickness of the mind. I guess we should feel sorry for her, Joe. It is a terrible thing to be sick in your mind.” Poor old woman, he thought after leaving what they assumed her deathbed, all she had to show for eighty years of living was her farm, a little money, and the questionable loyalty of a dozen people she “bought”. Not a friend in the lot. Not a friend anywhere.

Dying without a loved one crying at your bedside, or even a friend visiting her in her final days is probably not what readers would call a very satisfying form of retribution, but when her final tears were cast for her money, the only thing that provided her life meaning and comfort, it does feel fitting and emblematic of her empty and meaningless existence.

“Evil always get theirs, in the end,” social commentators tell us. “It might take a while, but it always comes back, one way or another.”

The last vestige of hope readers cling to when we hear that “Evil always get theirs, in the end,” was did Annie Cook have a deathbed revelation? Did she find some way, even in an Annie Cook way, to seek some sort of redemption of some kind or ask us for forgiveness in a spiritual or more general way?

One of the former North Platters telling me this story knew a deathbed nurse who tended to Annie Cook at the end, and the nurse informed her that Annie Cook was unreasonably awful to and demanding of those who tried to offer her some relief from whatever pain she experienced in her final days. (Ms. Yost also alluded to this on page 255 of Evil Obsession.) We can also be sure that Annie did not link the pain she experienced with the physical and mental torture she inflicted on others. To her, it was probably just pain, black and white, and colorless pain, and all she had to do was call the nurse for more pain reliever. If the reader of Evil Obsession read furiously to the end to find her comeuppance, some form of retribution of any kind, they either have never known someone even close to Annie Cook, or they didn’t read carefully enough. Annie Cook, like Beryl, died quietly, unceremoniously, and without any hint of regret or remorse, because she never thought she did anything wrong.

The Unusually Awful Annie Cook

Annie Cook II: The Horror is in the Details