Nathaniel Burkett, who appeared in most Nevada court files as Nathan Burkett, spent much of the last forty years of his life either in custody or under suspicion. He had family roots in Picayune, Mississippi, and long ties to west Las Vegas. In 1983 a Mississippi jury found him guilty of manslaughter in the death of his mother. In 2003 he pleaded guilty in Nevada to voluntary manslaughter in the death of Valetter Jean Bousley, 41. Neither case, at the time, touched the two unsolved deaths that would bring him back to a Las Vegas courtroom: those of Barbara Ann Cox, 22, in 1978, and Tina Gayle Mitchell, 27, in 1994.
Las Vegas police charged him with both in 2012, after a federally funded cold-case review, and soon added a third murder charge for the death of Althea Williams, 32, a woman from Los Angeles who died in Las Vegas in May 1994. The case took six years to resolve. On October 25, 2018, in Clark County District Court, Burkett pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, under a plea in which he admitted only that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him. One count covered Barbara Ann Cox. The other covered Tina Gayle Mitchell and the third woman, named at the hearing as Althea Williams Grier. Prosecutors had already withdrawn their request for the death penalty after learning that he was in the early stages of dementia. By then authorities had linked him to at least five deaths across more than four decades, and the chief prosecutor said he believed there were probably more victims than had been identified. Burkett died in Nevada state custody on January 19, 2021, at the age of 74.
Burkett was 68 when he entered his plea in October 2018 and 74 when he died in January 2021, which places his birth in the second half of the 1940s.
His family came from Picayune, a small city in Pearl River County, Mississippi, and he returned there repeatedly over his life. He also lived for long stretches in west Las Vegas, including at the time of the 1978 and 1994 deaths. Las Vegas police arrested him more than a dozen times from 1975 onward.
Barbara Ann Cox was 22 when she died in Las Vegas on April 22, 1978. Her sister, who was 60 by the time the case reached court, remembered her as someone people warmed to and as good with children. "Everybody liked her," she said. Barbara was her only sister.
The death went into the files of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department as an unsolved homicide. It stayed there for thirty-four years. Nobody was charged, and Burkett's name was not connected to it until the cold-case review of the 2010s.
In the early 1980s Burkett was living in Mississippi again. In Pearl River County he was charged with capital murder in the death of his mother. On August 10, 1983, he was found guilty of manslaughter, and the court sentenced him to 20 years.
He appealed. On March 19, 1986, the Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed the Pearl River County manslaughter conviction and the 20-year sentence, finding no merit in any of the errors his lawyers had assigned. Burkett served his time in Mississippi from 1983 until his release in 1992. The conviction stands as manslaughter, not murder.
By 1994 Burkett was back in west Las Vegas. Tina Gayle Mitchell, 27, died in Las Vegas that February. Her mother was left to wait for an answer that did not come for eighteen years.
A few months later, in May 1994, Althea Maria Williams, a 32-year-old from Los Angeles, died in the same city. In later court papers she appears as Althea Williams Grier. Burkett was not named as a suspect in either death at the time. Both cases joined the Cox file among the department's unsolved homicides, and for the next decade and a half the three deaths were not connected to each other or to him.
Valetter Jean Bousley was 41 when she died in Las Vegas in 2002. This time Burkett was prosecuted promptly. In 2003, under the name Nathan Burkett, he pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. He received a sentence of 115 months, served about six years and was released in July 2009.
The Bousley case is the only Nevada conviction on his record before 2018, and it stands as voluntary manslaughter, not murder. It mattered later for another reason: the records generated by that conviction were among the material that allowed cold-case detectives to connect him with the older deaths.
A few months after Burkett's release, in September 2009, the United States Justice Department awarded the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department a cold-case grant of nearly $500,000. The money paid for a review of the department's old homicide files. There were about 1,015 unsolved cases in them.
The detectives working through those files linked Burkett by evidence to the death of Barbara Ann Cox in November 2011. In July 2012 they linked him in the same way to the death of Tina Gayle Mitchell. The connection to the death of Althea Williams came later and by other investigative means.
By then Burkett was in Mississippi. On July 18, 2012, he was arrested in Carriere, near Picayune, with help from the Picayune police and an agent of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation. He was extradited from Picayune to Las Vegas and on August 7, 2012, booked into the Clark County Detention Center, where he was held without bail.
The police department announced the arrest the same day. Lieutenant Ray Steiber of the homicide bureau said detectives suspected Burkett in "many more" killings than the two charged, and the department contacted the FBI about similar cases elsewhere. In Mississippi, District Attorney Hal Kittrell of the 15th Circuit Court District said his office was reviewing its own cold cases and was investigating Burkett in connection with an unsolved death from 1980. "The fact that he's been taken off the streets is a great value to us," Kittrell said. No charge arising from the Mississippi inquiry is on record.
In August 2012 prosecutors charged Burkett with two counts of murder and two counts of sexual assault in the deaths of Cox and Mitchell, and said a third murder charge would follow for Althea Williams. His defense went to two special public defenders, David Schieck and Alzora Jackson.
Their first motion concerned publicity. In mid-August they asked the court to restrict pretrial coverage of the case and to stop police describing their client in public in the terms the department had used when it announced the arrest. The request went before Justice of the Peace Eric A. Goodman of Las Vegas Justice Court. At a hearing in September 2012 he signaled where he stood. "This is still America and we have First Amendment rights," he said. The next day he refused the motion outright. "I am not inclined to limit the press in any way whatsoever in this case or in any other case," he said. "That's just not what we do in this country." The prosecutor, Marc DiGiacomo, told the court that "none of their actions violated the rules here."
The preliminary hearing, set before Goodman, was continued on October 5, 2012, to December 7, to give both sides more time on the evidence. The case then passed to Clark County District Court.
On Wednesday, December 26, 2012, Burkett was arraigned before Hearing Master Melisa De La Garza on an amended complaint. It carried two counts of murder, a further murder count and one count of sexual assault. He pleaded not guilty and waived his right to a speedy trial. His lawyers said they would challenge the sexual assault count on the ground that the time limit for bringing it had expired.
Tina Gayle Mitchell's mother, then 63, was at the courthouse that day. Speaking outside, she asked only for an end. "Give me some closure before I die," she said. "Let it completely close."
The State intended to seek the death penalty. On January 29, 2014, District Judge Douglas Smith granted a defense request and moved the trial from March 17, 2014, to January 12, 2015. The case at that point stood as a capital trial on three counts of murder and one felony count of sexual assault, covering Cox in 1978 and Mitchell and Williams in 1994.
The January 2015 trial did not take place. The case was still awaiting trial nearly four years later.
What changed the case was Burkett's own condition. Prosecutors learned that he was in the early stages of dementia. A neuropsychologist who examined him measured his IQ at 59. The State withdrew its request for the death penalty.
On October 25, 2018, Burkett, then 68, appeared before District Judge Valerie Adair in Clark County District Court and pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. The form of the plea was narrow. He admitted only that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him. One count covered the 1978 death of Barbara Ann Cox. The second covered both 1994 deaths, those of Tina Gayle Mitchell and Althea Williams Grier. Asked at the hearing whether anyone had threatened him, he said he had not been threatened at all.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo, the prosecutor who had opposed the publicity motion in 2012, said he believed there were probably more victims than had been identified. The sentence expected under the agreement was 10 years to life, and prosecutors said they expected Burkett to die in prison.
Barbara Ann Cox's relatives had wanted a trial and a conviction for first-degree murder, and the plea deal angered them. Her sister, speaking after the hearing forty years after the death, said Barbara "didn't deserve that." A niece remembered her aunt as "always just a lot of fun" and said the effects of the death "go on and on and on."
For the Mitchell family, the plea came more than twenty-four years after Tina's death and nearly six years after her mother had asked the court for closure. The family of Althea Williams Grier has made no public statement that has been reported.
No sentence on the two second-degree murder counts has been reported, and no appeal from the plea is known. Burkett died in Nevada state custody on January 19, 2021. He was 74. His death was counted among those of 55 Nevada prisoners who had contracted COVID-19, a list the state Department of Corrections declined to publish by name.
His death closed the case without a trial. The deaths of Barbara Ann Cox, Tina Gayle Mitchell and Althea Williams Grier stand as second-degree murder convictions. The deaths of his mother and of Valetter Jean Bousley stand as manslaughter.
Nevada law divides murder into two degrees. First-degree murder covers the categories the statute lists; second-degree murder is defined simply as "all other kinds of murder." In the version of the statute in force in 2021, a person convicted of second-degree murder is guilty of a category A felony and is to be punished either by imprisonment "for life with the possibility of parole, with eligibility for parole beginning when a minimum of 10 years has been served," or by imprisonment "for a definite term of 25 years, with eligibility for parole beginning when a minimum of 10 years has been served." The sentence expected in Burkett's case, 10 years to life, falls within that range.
The case also followed the ordinary route of a Nevada felony prosecution in Clark County. The preliminary hearing and the early motions came before a justice of the peace in Las Vegas Justice Court; the arraignment, the trial settings and the plea came in Clark County District Court.
The cold-case review that reopened the 1978 and 1994 files was paid for by federal money. The 2009 Justice Department grant of nearly $500,000 was aimed at a backlog of about 1,015 unsolved Las Vegas homicides.
In Mississippi, the 1983 conviction went through the state's normal appellate path. The Pearl River County verdict was appealed to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which affirmed it in 1986.
The number of deaths is the central open question. Courts convicted Burkett in five deaths: three under the two second-degree murder counts and two as manslaughter. When he pleaded in 2018, authorities said they had linked him to at least five killings over more than forty years, a figure that matches those convictions. Police in 2012 spoke of "many more," and the chief prosecutor in 2018 said there were probably more victims. No further charge was brought in Nevada.
The Mississippi inquiry into an unsolved 1980 death produced no charge that is on record, and Burkett's connection to it is unproven.
The two sexual assault counts filed in 2012, and the one that remained in the amended complaint, were charges only. Burkett was never convicted of sexual assault, and the disposition of those counts under the 2018 agreement is not on record.
The 2018 plea was not an admission of the killings in his own words. He accepted only that the State had enough evidence to convict.
1975 onward: Burkett is arrested more than a dozen times in Las Vegas.
April 22, 1978: Barbara Ann Cox, 22, dies in Las Vegas.
Early 1980s: Burkett is charged with capital murder in Pearl River County, Mississippi, in the death of his mother.
August 10, 1983: He is found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years.
March 19, 1986: The Mississippi Supreme Court affirms the conviction and sentence.
1992: He is released in Mississippi.
February 1994: Tina Gayle Mitchell, 27, dies in Las Vegas.
May 1994: Althea Williams Grier, 32, of Los Angeles, dies in Las Vegas.
2002: Valetter Jean Bousley, 41, dies in Las Vegas.
2003: Burkett pleads guilty to voluntary manslaughter; sentence of 115 months.
July 2009: He is released in Nevada.
September 2009: A federal grant of nearly $500,000 funds the Las Vegas cold-case review.
November 2011: Detectives link him by evidence to the Cox death.
July 2012: Detectives link him to the Mitchell death.
July 18, 2012: He is arrested in Carriere, Mississippi.
August 7, 2012: He is booked into the Clark County Detention Center; police announce the arrest.
August 2012: He is charged with two counts of murder and two of sexual assault.
September 2012: Justice of the Peace Eric A. Goodman refuses the defense motion to limit publicity.
October 5, 2012: The preliminary hearing is continued to December 7.
December 26, 2012: He pleads not guilty to an amended complaint in Clark County District Court.
January 29, 2014: Judge Douglas Smith resets the capital trial to January 12, 2015.
October 25, 2018: He pleads guilty to two counts of second-degree murder before Judge Valerie Adair.
January 19, 2021: He dies in Nevada state custody, aged 74.