The story of Ruby Burkett’s death is a tragedy that for decades was seen as an isolated act of horrific violence. Only years later would it be understood as the first known murder committed by her son, a man who would go on to become a serial killer. Ruby, a female resident of Picayune in Pearl River County, Mississippi, was the mother of several children, including a son named Nathaniel and a daughter named Charlene.
On April 13, 1982, Ruby’s life came to a brutal and terrifying end
at the hands of her own son. At her home in Pearl River County, Nathaniel Burkett doused his mother with gasoline and set her on fire. The act was one of unimaginable cruelty, and it marked the beginning of a long and violent criminal history that would span two states and more than two decades.
In the immediate aftermath, local authorities investigated the horrific crime. Nathaniel Burkett was arrested, and in December 1982, a grand jury in Pearl River County indicted him on a capital murder charge. However, the charge was later reduced to manslaughter. In 1983, he was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in the Mississippi Department of Corrections. The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in 1986. After serving a portion of his sentence, Burkett was released from prison in 1992 and moved to Las Vegas, Nevada.
For years, the murder of Ruby Burkett remained a closed case, a singular horror confined to the records of Pearl River County. But Burkett’s violence was far from over. In Las Vegas, he began a new chapter of terror. On February 20, 1994, the body of 27-year-old Tina Gayle Mitchell was found raped and strangled, less than a mile from where Burkett had committed his first known murder in Nevada years earlier. On May 14, 1994, he murdered 32-year-old Althea Williams. In September 2002, he strangled 41-year-old Valetter Jean Bousley behind a church. For this crime, he was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in 2003 and served six years in prison.
The full scope of Nathaniel Burkett's crimes only began to surface years later, thanks to advancements in forensic technology. In 2009, the Las Vegas Metro Police began using a federal grant to run DNA tests on evidence from cold cases. A DNA sample Burkett was required to submit in 2004 was entered into a national database. In 2011, forensic examination linked the 1978 murder of 22-year-old Barbara Ann Cox to the 1994 murder of Tina Gayle Mitchell. The DNA evidence from both scenes pointed directly to Nathaniel Burkett.
In July 2012, Las Vegas investigators tracked the now 65-year-old Burkett to a shed behind his sister's home in Carriere, Mississippi, just miles from where he had murdered his mother three decades earlier. He was arrested and extradited to Nevada to face charges for the cold case murders. Las Vegas police soon labeled him a serial killer, responsible for at least five murders and suspected in another disappearance. Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty but later withdrew it after learning Burkett was in the early stages of dementia and had a tested IQ as low as 55. In 2018, Burkett pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder for the deaths of his Nevada victims and was sentenced to 10 years to life in prison. He died in prison from complications of COVID-19 on January 19, 2021.
