On May 14, 1994, the body of 32-year-old Althea Williams Grier, a female visitor from Los Angeles, was discovered in Las Vegas, Nevada. She was found under a clothesline outside an apartment complex near Washington Avenue and H Street. Her death was determined to be the result of strangulation with an object, possibly an electrical cord or a belt. The grim discovery was hauntingly familiar to investigators; just three months earlier, in the exact same location, the body of another woman, Tina
Gayle Mitchell, had been found, also strangled. While Mitchell's body had been partially concealed with towels from the clothesline, Althea's was left uncovered.
For years, Althea's murder remained a cold case, one of several unsolved homicides of women in the Las Vegas area. The similarities between her death and Mitchell's led police to believe the same person was responsible, but a lack of sufficient DNA evidence from the scene of Althea's murder hampered their ability to identify a suspect. The break in the case would not come for nearly two decades, and it would arrive through advancements in forensic science that connected a suspect to other brutal killings.
The perpetrator was Nathaniel Burkett, a man with a long and violent criminal history. Born in Picayune, Mississippi, in 1946, Burkett, who sometimes went by the nickname "Criptoe" due to a limp from childhood polio, had a record of arrests for battery, domestic violence, and kidnapping. In 1982, while living in Mississippi, he doused his own mother, Ruby, with gasoline and burned her to death, for which he was convicted of manslaughter and served time in prison. After his release in 1992, he returned to Las Vegas.
The mystery of who killed Althea began to unravel in 2009 when the Las Vegas Metro Police Department received a grant to use DNA testing on cold cases. In 2011, forensic scientists found a match between DNA evidence collected from the 1978 murder of 22-year-old Barbara Ann Cox and the 1994 murder of 27-year-old Tina Gayle Mitchell. The DNA profile belonged to Nathaniel Burkett, whose sample was in the national database from a prior conviction. He had been convicted of voluntary manslaughter for the 2002 strangulation death of 41-year-old Valetter Jean Bousley in Las Vegas and served six years in prison.
Based on the DNA hits in the Cox and Mitchell cases and the powerful circumstantial evidence and similar modus operandi in Althea's case, police arrested Burkett in Mississippi in July 2012. He was extradited to Las Vegas to face three counts of murder. Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty but later withdrew the option after learning that Burkett, then in his late 60s, was in the early stages of dementia and had a low IQ.
In October 2018, Nathaniel Burkett pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder. One count was for the slaying of Barbara Ann Cox in 1978, and the other count accounted for the 1994 deaths of both Tina Gayle Mitchell and Althea Williams Grier. He was sentenced to 10 years to life in prison, with prosecutors confident he would die behind bars. Burkett was incarcerated at the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, where he died in January 2021 at the age of 74. His conviction finally closed the case on the murder of Althea Williams Grier, bringing a long-delayed measure of justice nearly a quarter-century after her life was taken.
