He was a man with a bad leg and a big smile, and Bobby Joe Jenkins didn’t think much about him when things went bad in the summer of 1999.
Why would he? The man bought candy and ice cream for the youngsters and was the social butterfly of their poor east valley apartment complex, always bumming around for cold drinks and hot meals, Jenkins said. He was constantly drunk and a bit of a womanizer, but everybody knew and liked him.
http://liarcatchers.com/missing_persons_investigations.html
“He would try to play around, grabbing the women, chasing people even though he couldn’t run,” said Jenkins, 54. “But he would try anyway.”
Jenkins was the one who came up with the nickname: “Criptoe,” because of the man’s pronounced limp. It stuck.
He considered the man a friend, even if his eye sometimes wandered too close to Jenkins’ home.
“My sister used to tell me all the time, ‘Tell your friend to stop staring at me,’ ” Jenkins said. “It made her uncomfortable.”
But Jenkins had no reason to suspect him when his sister suddenly disappeared that August, and neither did the police.
He didn’t think much about Criptoe again until he saw his mugshot in the news on Wednesday morning, when he was shocked to learn that he and his sister had been living next to Nathan Burkett, a convicted killer whom police were calling one of Las Vegas’ first known serial killers.
Now Jenkins thinks about Criptoe. And he wonders about his sister.
Brigitte Mitchell Thomas, 33, disappeared on Aug. 19, 1999, from the Regatta Apartments at 2101 Sandy Lane, near Pecos Road and Lake Mead Boulevard.
Thomas left behind six children, her mother and her grandmother. She hasn’t been seen since.
Neighbors saw Thomas leave the complex in a blue truck with a pool company logo on the side, supposedly with a black man from Los Angeles and a Hispanic man from Mexico.
The story didn’t seem odd to Jenkins, at least at first. Although his sister often stayed with him, she was known to stay with friends in the complex, and it wasn’t unusual for her to be gone for days.
Jenkins last saw Thomas on Aug. 17, 1999, two days before the pool truck sighting.
His sister wasn’t perfect. Thomas smoked cocaine, Jenkins said, and at first that’s what police suspected. Jenkins recalled a conversation with a Las Vegas police detective about 12 to 14 months after Thomas went missing.
“He tells me, ‘She’s just on a smoking spree. She’ll be back.’ Well, it’s been almost 13 years,” he said.
The family reported her missing on Aug. 26, a week after she was last seen. It was clear to Jenkins then that something was wrong.
He began to doubt the pool truck story when one of the men from the truck came back to the neighborhood.
Jenkins and a large group confronted the man, who broke down in tears and vehemently denied everything. Jenkins believed him. Those beliefs were furthered after he learned a detective had interviewed the man and apparently cleared him, he said.
“I figured that if he had something to do with her being missing, he wouldn’t be coming back over there, right?”
Joyce Hamilton, 62, was one of the last neighbors to see Thomas.
“Brigitte was alone. I saw her go into her house, and she took a shower, changed clothes and left. When I saw her, she was by herself.”
A few candlelight vigils were held in the following months.
Many neighbors helped canvass the city in search of Thomas, plastering posters with her face from Henderson to the Strip, even though she never really left the area around her home.
Jenkins doesn’t remember hearing much from Burkett during that time. But he was still living at his apartment, just a few doors away.
Burkett, 65, was extradited from Mississippi last week and charged with murder in two Las Vegas cold-case killings: the death of 22-year-old Barbara Ann Cox on April 22, 1978, and the death of 27-year-old Tina Gayle Mitchell on Feb. 20, 1994.
Police said DNA linked him to both killings. Burkett also has been questioned by police in the 1994 killing of Alethea Maria Williams, a Los Angeles woman who was found dead in the same location Mitchell’s body was found.
Burkett has been convicted of killing at least two other people. Records show he served time in prison for manslaughter in Mississippi in the 1980s after his mother was found burned to death.
He was also arrested by Las Vegas police on a murder charge in October 2003. Valetter Jean Bousley, 41, was found dead on Sept. 4, 2002. Burkett beat the murder charge, but was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in Bousley’s death and served six years in prison.
In four of the five cases, the women were strangled.
“Mr. Burkett is a serial killer,” Lt. Ray Steiber said earlier this week. “He hasn’t committed one homicide in Las Vegas, not two, but we know he’s at least committed three.”
CASE CLOSED IN 2000
Jenkins had no idea about Burkett’s past when they met in 1996, two years after police say he killed Mitchell. They kept in contact until about 2002, when Jenkins moved from the Regatta apartments. That was the same year Burkett choked Bousley to death.
Police haven’t linked Burkett to Thomas’ disappearance, and the status of the missing person investigation is unclear.
Police spokesman Bill Cassell said the case was closed in 2000 after a relative said they had spotted Thomas, but was reopened five years later when the relative admitted they hadn’t seen Thomas.
Jenkins said the police statement confused him. None of his relatives ever reported seeing Thomas, he said, and he doesn’t know why police would have closed the case.
“Sounds like a mistake,” he said.
Police did not release the missing person report on Friday, but said the case doesn’t appear to fit the pattern of the other cases linked to Burkett, in which the bodies of women were found out in the open.
“We do not have any information at this time that would tie the two cases together,” Cassell said.
Jenkins, who has not yet spoken to investigators about his theory, said the coincidences were staggering.
“Hearing about all those other women, I don’t know. She knew him good enough to walk off somewhere with him.”
Cassell encouraged Jenkins to speak to detectives. “If we receive any new information in the future that would indicate a connection, we would pursue it aggressively,” he said.
‘CRIPTOE’ WAS STRONG
Only in retrospect has Jenkins thought hard about Burkett, the man he knew long ago as “Criptoe.”
That memorable limp doesn’t feel so endearing anymore. It feels deceiving.
Jenkins had forgotten how strong Burkett was . He would always greet the neighborhood kids with a cast-iron grip. It would be a game, to see if Burkett could shake their hand into submission.
“He don’t let go till they drop to their knees. And they’d be saying, ‘You’re not going to get me to my knees this time, Criptoe.’ And, well, they’d get to their knees quick. I have no doubt he choked those women. He could choke out an NFL player.”
Hamilton said she lived near Burkett for about six years . She was one of several former neighbors who called Jenkins after the news reports to ask about Criptoe and wonder, “What about Brigitte?”
Hamilton recalled how her stepsister let Burkett take her little daughter to a convenience store on the corner. The entire community was very trusting.
Hamilton shuddered when asked about it now. “We never imagined he could be anything like this,” she said.
Jenkins said he can’t get one fact out of his mind. On at least three occasions, Jenkins saw Burkett walking through the complex with a shovel on his back. When asked where he was going, Burkett would only say he had a job to do.
“I’d say to him, ‘Man, you know you don’t got no job,’ ” Jenkins said.
Burkett never used the front entrance to the complex, Jenkins said, instead preferring a side gate leading to empty lots with no cars and plenty of desert.
Jenkins said he hopes detectives reexamine his sister’s case as they are in other unsolved homicides in Las Vegas, even though she hasn’t been found and any evidence would be circumstantial.
But living across from a man police say is a serial killer is a pretty big circumstance, he said.
“If he did do something to her, and I keep thinking about those damn shovels, let me know where she’s at so we can get this over with. I mean, there’s nothing police can do without a body. No DNA without a body.”
Contact reporter Mike Blasky at mblasky@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0283.
TRACING BURKETT’S MOVEMENTS
1978: Las Vegas police believe a killing spree began when Barbara Ann Cox, 22, was found strangled in a parking lot outside apartments at 211 W. Bonanza Road. Nathan Burkett was interviewed by police but was apparently not a suspect at the time.
1983: Five years after Cox’s death, Burkett was sentenced to prison in Mississippi for the killing of his mother, who was burned to death.
1992: Cox was scheduled to be released from prison.
1994: Police believe Burkett’s move back to Las Vegas coincided with the February killing of Tina Gayle Mitchell, 27, who was found behind a home on H Street near Washington Avenue. She had been strangled. Two months later, the body of Los Angeles woman Alethea Maria Williams was discovered in the same place Mitchell’s body had been found. Williams also had been strangled. Burkett has been questioned by police in her death but not charged.
1996: Burkett moved to the Regatta apartments near Lake Mead Boulevard and Pecos Road, neighbors said. He lived in the area until about 2002.
1999: Brigitte Mitchell Thomas, 33, disappeared from the Regatta apartments in August. She lived next door to Burkett and her family believes the cases could be linked. Police have not named Burkett a suspect.
2002: Valetter Jean Bousley, 41, was found dead on Sept. 4 outside a church on F Street near Monroe Avenue. She had been strangled.
2003: Burkett was arrested by Las Vegas police on a murder charge in October. He pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Bousley’s death. Officials took a sample of his DNA.
2009: Burkett was released after six years in prison.
2010: In January, Las Vegas police detectives reviewed Mitchell’s cold case. In May, Cox’s sister Connie Bainbridge called Las Vegas police and asked about her sister’s death. Detective David Culver was assigned both cases and began to enter DNA found at the scenes into a national database.
2011: Burkett was identified as a suspect in Cox’s killing from his DNA in November.
2012: The Mississippi Bureau of Investigations located Burkett in Picayune in July. That same month, Burkett’s DNA also proved to be a match in Mitchell’s death. Burkett was arrested. Burkett was extradited to Las Vegas Tuesday on murder and sexual assault charges in Cox and Mitchell’s killings.
