On February 20, 1994, the body of 27-year-old Tina Gayle Mitchell, a female, was found in Las Vegas, Nevada. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled, her body left not far from where another young woman had been murdered 16 years earlier. The discovery marked another chapter in a series of brutal killings that would haunt the city for years, leaving investigators with a growing fear that a serial predator was moving through its streets.
Tina’s death was not an isolated incident.
Just a few months later, on May 14, 1994, the body of 32-year-old Althea Williams Grier was discovered in the same vicinity. The similarities between the cases were alarming to police. Both women were known to frequent the Historic Westside area of Las Vegas. The brutal nature of the crimes pointed to a single, violent offender, but for years, Tina and Althea's cases, along with others, grew cold. There were few leads, and the killer remained a ghost.
The path to justice for Tina was long and began to unfold years later through advancements in forensic science. The break came when the Las Vegas Metro Police Department, using a federal grant, began re-examining cold cases with DNA testing. In 2010, detectives submitted biological evidence collected from the scene of Tina's murder to a national database. The results delivered a stunning breakthrough, linking her case to the 1978 murder of 22-year-old Barbara Ann Cox and pointing directly to one man: Nathaniel Burkett.
Burkett, who went by the nickname "Criptoe" due to a limp from childhood polio, had a long and violent criminal history that spanned decades and states. In 1982, while living in Mississippi, he had murdered his own mother by dousing her with gasoline and setting her on fire, for which he was convicted of manslaughter and served less than ten years in prison. After his release in 1992, he returned to Las Vegas. His criminal record also included a 2003 voluntary manslaughter conviction for the 2002 strangulation of 41-year-old Valetter Jean Bousley in Las Vegas, a crime for which he served six years. It was during this prison sentence that authorities collected the DNA sample that would ultimately connect him to Tina’s murder.
In August 2012, armed with the DNA evidence, homicide investigators tracked Burkett to southern Mississippi, where he was living in a garage. He was arrested and extradited to Las Vegas to face charges for the murders of Tina Gayle Mitchell, Barbara Ann Cox, and Althea Williams Grier. Las Vegas police lieutenant Ray Steiber publicly identified him as a "serial killer," stating, "He hasn't (just) committed one homicide in Las Vegas, not two, but we know he's at least committed three."
Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty, but the case took another turn when it was revealed that Burkett was in the early stages of dementia and had a very low IQ. In light of his diagnosis, the possibility of capital punishment was withdrawn. In October 2018, more than 24 years after Tina’s death, Nathaniel Burkett, then 68, accepted a plea deal. He pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, one of which encompassed the deaths of both Tina Mitchell and Althea Williams Grier.
Burkett was sentenced to a term of 10 years to life in prison. Though the sentence was far less than what many felt he deserved, prosecutors were confident that due to his age and failing health, he would die behind bars. Their prediction proved correct. Nathaniel Burkett died in the Northern Nevada Correctional Center on January 19, 2021, closing the final chapter on his decades-long reign of terror and bringing a measure of long-delayed justice for Tina Gayle Mitchell and the other women whose lives he had stolen.
