Valetter Jean Bousley, a 41-year-old hotel maid living and working in Las Vegas, Nevada, was a woman whose life was cut tragically short by a man who had moved between states, leaving a trail of violence that spanned decades. On September 4, 2002, her path crossed with a predator who had killed before and would kill again. That day, Valetter was lured behind a church on F Street, where she was attacked and strangled to death.
Her case would initially go cold, another unsolved homicide in a bustling city, leaving her family and community without answers.
For months, the investigation into Valetter’s murder yielded few leads. The break in the case came unexpectedly in March 2003 from an inmate in the local jail. This man told police that he had witnessed Valetter with a man on the day she was killed. He saw her follow the man behind the church near Monroe Avenue. About ten minutes later, he saw the man walk away from the area alone. This crucial eyewitness testimony pointed investigators toward a suspect with a long and disturbing criminal history: Nathaniel Burkett.
Burkett, known as "Criptoe" because of a limp from childhood polio, was no stranger to law enforcement. His record of violence was extensive, beginning long before he encountered Valetter. Originally from Picayune, Mississippi, Burkett had numerous arrests in Las Vegas starting in the 1970s for offenses including battery, kidnapping, robbery, and sexual assault. His history of murder began in 1978 with the strangulation of 22-year-old Barbara Ann Cox in Las Vegas. In 1982, back in Mississippi, he murdered his own mother, Ruby, by dousing her with gasoline and setting her on fire. For that crime, a capital murder charge was reduced to manslaughter, and he was sentenced to 20 years, only to be released in 1992.
Upon his release, Burkett returned to Las Vegas and continued his reign of terror. In 1994, he raped and strangled two more women, 27-year-old Tina Gayle Mitchell and 32-year-old Althea Williams. He was also the prime suspect in the 1999 disappearance of 33-year-old Brigitte Mitchell Thomas. When police arrested him in October 2003 for Valetter’s murder, they were dealing with a man who had repeatedly slipped through the cracks of the justice system. Despite being charged with murder for Valetter's death, Burkett pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter. He was sentenced to a maximum of 115 months and ultimately served six years in prison.
During this prison sentence, a critical step was taken that would finally ensure Burkett could not harm anyone again: a sample of his DNA was collected and entered into law enforcement databases. After his release in 2009, Burkett moved back to Mississippi. However, cold case investigators in Las Vegas were re-examining the unsolved murders from the 1970s and 1990s. In 2012, the DNA sample Burkett had been required to give definitively linked him to the murders of Barbara Ann Cox and Tina Gayle Mitchell. Authorities tracked him to a garage in southern Mississippi and extradited him to Nevada to face justice for his past crimes.
Now recognized as a serial killer, Nathaniel Burkett faced new charges for the cold case murders. Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty, but this was later withdrawn after it was determined he was in the early stages of dementia and had a very low IQ. In 2018, Burkett, then in his late 60s, pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and one count of voluntary manslaughter for the string of killings. He was sentenced to 10 years to life in prison. This final conviction ensured that he would, as prosecutors intended, die behind bars. Nathaniel Burkett died in the Northern Nevada Correctional Center in 2021, closing the final chapter on a life defined by brutal violence against women.
