In the spring of 1978, Barbara Ann Cox, a vibrant 22-year-old woman, was living in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her older sister, Connie Bainbridge, remembered her as an attractive and street-smart person who was good with children and possessed a captivating "sparkle in her eye." Friends and family recalled that everybody liked Barbara, drawn to her magnetic personality.
But the promise of her young life was brutally extinguished on April 22, 1978, leaving her family with decades of unanswered questions and a grief that would span generations.
On that Saturday, Barbara’s nude body was discovered at an apartment complex in the 200 block of West Bonanza Road, not far from where she lived. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled. The discovery was made by the girlfriend of a man named Nathaniel Burkett, who lived in the complex. When police arrived, they found Burkett nearby, intoxicated and carrying a bottle of whiskey. He was belligerent and repeatedly denied any involvement in the murder. Deemed unfit for interrogation, he was taken back to his apartment, and with no direct evidence to tie him to the crime, the investigation into Barbara's death soon went cold.
For more than three decades, Barbara’s case remained one of Las Vegas's many unsolved homicides. Her family, however, never gave up hope. In 2010, her sister made a crucial phone call to the Las Vegas Metro Police Department's Cold Case Team, pleading with them to take another look at Barbara's murder. This call coincided with a major effort by the department, funded by a federal grant, to re-examine cold cases using modern DNA technology. In 2011, forensic investigators found a link; DNA evidence from Barbara's case matched the DNA found at the scene of another unsolved murder from 1994, that of 27-year-old Tina Gayle Mitchell.
The DNA profile from both murders eventually led investigators back to the man they had encountered on the day Barbara's body was found: Nathaniel Burkett. Known by the nickname "Criptoe" due to a limp from childhood polio, Burkett had amassed a horrific and violent criminal history in the years since Barbara's death. In 1982, while living in his home state of Mississippi, he murdered his own mother, Ruby, by dousing her with gasoline and setting her on fire. He was convicted of manslaughter for her death and served just over eight years in prison before being released in 1992 and returning to Las Vegas. His violent spree continued with the murders of Tina Mitchell and Althea Williams in 1994 and Valetter Jean Bousley in 2002, all by strangulation.
In August 2012, at the age of 62, Nathaniel Burkett was arrested in Mississippi and extradited to Las Vegas to finally face charges for the murders of Barbara Ann Cox and Tina Mitchell. He was later charged with the murder of Althea Williams as well. For Barbara's family, the arrest was a painful but necessary step toward justice. "It's hard, but I'd really like to know what (Barbara's) last words were," her sister Connie told a reporter. "I don't understand their sick minds."
Initially, prosecutors sought the death penalty, but after it was determined that Burkett was in the early stages of dementia and had a low IQ, they withdrew the possibility. In October 2018, Burkett, then 68, entered a guilty plea to two counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of Barbara Ann Cox and the two women he killed in 1994. This type of plea acknowledged that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict him. He was sentenced to 10 years to life in prison, a term prosecutors expected he would not outlive. Nathaniel Burkett died in the Northern Nevada Correctional Center on January 19, 2021, bringing a final, quiet end to his reign of terror.
