Arizona to Execute Rapper —He Murdered his own MUM ,STEP DAD & 6 OTHERS in 21 Days | Death Row US

Arizona to Execute Rapper —He Murdered his own MUM ,STEP DAD & 6 OTHERS in 21 Days | Death Row US

An Arizona jury has sentenced convicted serial killer Cleopus Cookie Jr. to the death penalty.

Cookie went on a crime spree years ago. This is back in 2017. Accused of killing eight people, including his mother and stepfather, and um this was in the span of three weeks. Kenzie Beach joins us live now with details.

Death penalty case.

Yeah. So, of the eight murders that Cleopus Cookie Jr. committed, this jury today is sentencing him to the death penalty for six of them. Now, this jury was a hung jury for two of the murders, the murders of Cleopus Cookie Jr.’s mother and stepfather.

It is the judgment of the court that you be sentenced to uh life in prison, uh to be executed uh by lethal injection.

Cleopus Cookie Jr. has been sentenced to death after his 2017 killing spree, murdering eight people across the valley. From Phoenix to Glendale and Avondale, a sentence the victim’s families have waited eight years for.

He took my mom, the only support system that I had.

He took away my grandkid’s dad. They will never know him.

He um hurt her in so many, so many ways.

Of that justice for the families of uh six of those convictions and coming back the way that they did. You know, it’s it’s a just a testament to the non-stop work that our detectives and our homicide bureau uh do day in and day out.

On December 18th, 2025, in a Phoenix courtroom, an Arizona jury sentenced Cleopus Emanuel Cookie Jr. to death. Then he sentenced him to death again and again, six times in all. He was 43 years old, condemned for the lives he had taken across three weeks in the winter of 2017, and the state of Arizona now means to carry that sentence out, to strap him to a gurney and end his life.

After more than 8 years, the law had spoken its last word on him, and the word was death. He had earned every one of those sentences in 21 days. In that span, Cookie killed eight people across Phoenix and Glendale. He walked up to a parked car and shot the two friends sitting inside it. He killed a security guard in a struggle on the sidewalk as the man headed home, took the gun off his body and the necklace from his throat, and turned that same stolen weapon on the people who came after.

A young man training to ride the ambulances. The young father who showed up expecting a quick exchange. A mother taken off her own doorstep, driven away in her own car, assaulted, and left in an alley before morning.

The ones who trusted him fared no better. A man who called him a brother, who had welcomed him into his family and offered to fund his music, was shot where he rested in his own home. And on the final night, in the apartment where his mother and stepfather had given him a bed, Cookie killed them both, then opened the door to the police standing outside, their blood still on him, and told them nothing was wrong. He had only cut his hand, he said. He was the only one home.

Behind that door lay two bodies. On the sofa sat a dead man’s gun. A murdered woman’s car keys were in the rooms, and a dead man’s necklace hung at his throat. Two days of ballistics work turned a single apartment into the answer to a whole winter of killings no one had even known were connected.

He thought none of it would ever touch him. He rapped on a couch under the name King Playbola about murder and money and living above the law, and he had a stage booked four nights after he killed his mother. When detectives spread the faces of the dead across the table, he looked at everyone and called himself a winner. A man who was envied, a man with no reason to harm a soul. The evidence stacked around him did not agree.

Now he sits on Arizona’s death row, waiting for the end the state has promised him. But to understand how a man 4 months out of prison left eight people dead in 3 weeks and turned a gun on the very people who took him in, we have to go back to the very beginning of Cleopus Cookie Jr.

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Cleopus Emanuel Cookie Jr. was born on March 25th, 1982, in Tucson, Arizona. The surname already meant something in that city. His grandfather, Roy L. Cookie, had helped lead the civil rights movement across southern Arizona, organizing and pressing for equal treatment through decades when that work carried real cost.

Roy was a recognized figure in the Tucson area from the 1960s onward, his name attached to the slow public work of changing a community rather than to anything that brought shame on it. The grandson inherited the name, and little of what built it. The record of his early years was thin. There were no school honors, no path through sports or study, nothing anyone thought to set down.

What there was: an Arizona upbringing, a family with a respected surname, and a city that offered some young men a way up and steered others toward the streets. For Cookie, the pull ran toward the streets. By his teenage years, he had moved into the orbit of a Phoenix gang, the Westside City Crips. That world kept its own measures of standing and its own codes at a far distance from the legacy his grandfather had built.

The boy who carried the Cookie name reached for a different kind of recognition than the one that had made the name known. The model he chose was close to home. An uncle he idolized stayed sharp in his clothing, drove the coolest cars, and kept the prettiest women around him. To the young Cookie, that uncle was success itself—success a person could see and wear and drive. It was measured entirely in surfaces, and it set the shape of what he wanted.

In the year 2000, that wanting took a specific shape. Cookie, 18, joined three other young men in a plan to rob a Phoenix strip club called Mustang Sally’s at gunpoint. One of the four was a close friend, a young man he had grown up beside, someone who had at times lived with the Cookie family. The bond between them ran back through childhood.

The group moved on the club, expecting money and a clean way out. It went wrong inside. A man behind the bar drew his own weapon and fired, and the shot killed Cookie’s friend. The robbery collapsed in that instant, one of the four dead on the floor of the club they had come to rob. The man who fired had acted to defend himself, and the law cleared him. No charge followed the person who pulled the trigger.

The death still reached Cookie. Under Arizona’s felony murder law, a person who takes part in a dangerous felony can be held responsible for a killing that happens during it—even a killing he did not commit, and even when the person who dies is one of his own. Because his friend died in the course of the robbery, the law made Cookie answerable for it. Another member of the group faced the same charge and was convicted on a felony murder theory.

Under an agreement with prosecutors, Cookie pleaded guilty to manslaughter with armed robbery counts standing beside it. He called himself no killer. He described the death as a wound, the loss of a young man he had grown up with and shared a home with, and he held that he could never do such a thing, even though the felony that produced the death had been his own choice to enter. In his account, the robbery was a mistake, and the death an agony—both of them things that had happened to him.

In November 2001, the prison doors closed behind him. He was 19. Inside, the record ran hard against any picture of a reforming man. The Arizona Department of Corrections file on him grew past 450 pages. He piled up more than 20 serious disciplinary cases: fighting, refusing orders, disorderly conduct, drug possession, assault on staff.

The institution that held him met him with discipline case after discipline case, and he answered each one with another. One thing in the file cut the other way. Cookie earned his GED behind bars, a completed high school equivalency, the single clear forward step in a stretch otherwise filled with infractions. The credential and the discipline cases sat in the same file side by side.

Something else marked his time inside. By his own account, a member of the prison staff sexually molested him during those years, and it left him angry. He carried both the grievance and the temper the record already showed.

Freedom came to Cookie in pieces, not all at once. In 2015, after roughly 14 years inside, the system let him out. He stepped back into Phoenix with the better part of his 30s still ahead of him and a plan already forming for what to do with the open air. He gave himself a name, King Playbola, and set about building a rapper’s identity, recording verses, and putting videos of himself online.

For a stretch of months, he was a free man chasing a music career out among the women, the studios, and the streets he had left behind in 2001. It did not hold. The terms of his release set conditions on how he was to live, and he broke them. A parole violation sent him back through the gate and into custody, the open road closing nearly as fast as it had opened.

The identity he had started to build stalled where it stood. The freedom he had tasted was pulled back, and he returned to serving out the sentence the robbery at Mustang Sally’s had fastened to him. He did more time. The months ran on inside the same system that had held him since he was 19, and the full weight of the sentence finally worked itself out.

On July 28th, 2017, the doors opened on that case for the last time. Cleopus Cookie Jr. walked out of an Arizona prison a free man at 35—16 years measured against a single deadly robbery. He turned back toward Phoenix, a free man with a music career he had already begun once and meant to take up again.

The Phoenix Cookie returned to in the summer of 2017 was a working-class sprawl of low apartment blocks and wide hot streets. And he moved back into it with almost nothing. He had no home of his own, so he settled into the apartment his mother and stepfather kept on East Highland Avenue, a tight cluster of beige condos in the central part of the city. Living there cost him little.

He found side work in construction, and for a time he sold cell phones, pulling in around $300 in a good week. With his rent covered by family, that money was his to spend on the life he wanted to build. That life centered on music. Cookie had decided he was going to be a rapper, and he gave himself the name King Playbola. He reached out online to a small home studio looking for someone who fit his budget, and he found a producer named Daniel who ran a recording operation out of his house.

Cookie did not own a car and was not comfortable with computers, so he got to the studio however he could. Sometimes he took the bus across town. Sometimes a girlfriend dropped him off, now and then bringing her young ones inside to see the recording equipment before she left. In the studio, he was quiet and serious. He would record for an hour or two and say little else, and on the ride home, he often pulled headphones over his ears and stayed inside the music the whole way.

The producer found him easy to be around. Cookie mentioned once that he had sold drugs in an earlier part of his life, but spoke of it as a mistake he had moved past, a man trying to point himself somewhere better. He never made the producer feel unsafe.

The songs themselves told a rougher story than the man in the room. Under the King Playbola name, Cookie rapped about drugs, about money, about violence, about women. He posted a handful of videos to a YouTube channel, most of them simple clips of him seated on a couch, delivering his verses to the camera.

In one track titled Monster, he framed killing as a kind of business and rapped about living above the law. In a clip called Azilla Hop, a nod to his home state, he rhymed about cutting down rivals until nothing was left of them. The producer who recorded him had worked with other artists who leaned on the same themes and thought nothing of it. It was a genre, a posture, a way of selling toughness.

Cookie wore other versions of himself, too. He told people he was a man of God, reformed by his years away, someone who looked for the light in people and drew it out of them. He spoke of his mother with open affection, calling her a rock and a great lady. He kept a wide circle of women around him and bragged about the thousands of friends he counted on Facebook. His high school nickname had been Playboy, and he carried that identity into his 30s like a banner.

He penned soft love songs to a woman he called his queen, the light of his life. He also rapped about something darker that sat oddly beside the love songs: lines about using a woman and then leaving her in the dirt to die. He moved between the two registers without apparent strain. When the subject of two Cookies ever came up—one bright and one shadowed—he rejected it flatly. “There was only one,” he said.

His ambitions were beginning to find small footholds. He landed gigs at the Rhythm Room, a Phoenix music venue, and started getting his name in front of audiences. A man he had grown close to—the brother of a woman he was seeing—had even offered to invest in his music and help push the career forward. For a man 4 months out of a 16-year sentence, it looked like motion in the right direction.

He chased a fuller life on the side. He spoke admiringly of an older, well-off woman named Ruth Anne, who let him drive her convertible Volkswagen, cooked him lasagna from scratch, and took him to the Biltmore, a kind of polished Phoenix address that signaled money. To Cookie, those afternoons confirmed something: that lifestyle was calling him. He believed he belonged over there among people who lived well, far from the neighborhoods he had come up in. He felt envied, and he liked the feeling.

By late November of 2017, Cookie had been free for almost 4 months. He had his music, his women, his side jobs, his couch, and his mother’s apartment, and the conviction that he was, in his own words, winning out there.

The calendar was turning toward the anniversary of the night at Mustang Sally’s, the robbery that had sent him away. That date arrived, and it passed. The next evening was the 27th of November, an ordinary night in a wide, flat city, and across town, two young men were spending it together.

The first two names belonged to young men who had nothing to do with prison, music, or Cleopus Cookie’s plans for himself. One of them, Parker Gregory Smith, was 21 years old. The other, Andrew Remlard, who went by Andy, was 27. The two were friends, the ordinary kind of friendship that fills a young person’s evenings in a big flat city. And on the night of November 27th, 2017, they were together.

Remlard had built a small family. He had a wife and a young son at home, the daily anchors of a man still early in his adult life. The two friends had no quarrel with the wider world, no entanglement that marked them out. They were simply present in Phoenix that night, sharing a car. They had parked near the intersection of 16th Street and Indian School Road, a busy central corridor lined with strip plazas and apartment complexes, the kind of place where a parked car draws no attention.

It was the late evening. The two sat together inside the vehicle, the engine and the night around them, doing nothing that would later be explained—nothing that connected them by any clear thread to the man who approached.

What happened in that parking lot happened fast. Both men were fatally shot as they sat in the car. There was no robbery that explained it cleanly. No argument anyone overheard that gave it shape. No relationship between the two friends and a killer that investigators could name. They were found inside the vehicle where they had been sitting. Their evening ended without warning and without reason that anyone could offer.

A call came in to police that night, and officers found Remlard and Smith shot to death in the parked car near 16th Street and Indian School Road. There was little to work with at the scene beyond the bodies of two young men and the spent evidence of gunfire. No suspect description carried any weight. No motive surfaced. Two friends had been killed sitting in a car, and the city absorbed it as one more violent night in a place that saw too many of them.

For the families, the loss had no frame to hold it. Remlard left a wife without a husband and a young son without a father—a household rearranged in an instant by a stranger’s choice. Smith, at 21, left people who had watched him grow into a young man, with his life still opening in front of him. There were no answers to give them, only the fact of the killing and the silence around its cause.

In the hours and days that followed, the deaths of Smith and Remlard sat in the records of the Phoenix Police Department as a double homicide without a clear lead. The city did not connect the two young men in the car to anything larger. There was no announcement, no warning, no sense among the public that the parking lot near Indian School Road marked the beginning of anything. It was a terrible, isolated crime processed as such, filed as such.

The man who had approached the car moved back into the ordinary surface of his days. He went on recording music, riding the bus to the studio, keeping his women close, telling anyone who listened that he was reformed and rising. Nothing about his manner in those days drew suspicion. The producer who recorded his verses noticed no change in him. The people in his circle saw the same King Playbola, the same Cleopus, the man of God with the soft love songs and the hard lyrics, planning his next gig at the Rhythm Room.

The calendar moved into December. The gigs were still booked. The studio sessions continued. Cookie kept riding the bus across town to record, kept his women close, kept telling the people around him that he was winning out there. Five days went by this way.

On the evening of December 2nd, the streets of West Phoenix were going about their business. Among the people out in them was a man making the short, familiar walk toward someone he loved. He was Sele Richards, 31 years old, and he worked as a security guard, a job that put a uniform on him and at times a firearm at his side. He carried a 9mm Glock handgun, a working tool of the trade, and he wore a necklace that meant something to him. On that night, he was on his way to his girlfriend’s apartment, covering the short, ordinary distance between his evening and her door.

Richards had a life built around routine and the people in it. The walk to his girlfriend’s place was the kind of small journey a person makes without thinking, the ending of a day. He was a grown man who handled security for a living, comfortable on a Phoenix street after dark, his Glock with him, the necklace at his throat. Nothing about the walk announced danger.

It was evening, not long before 8:00, when that walk was interrupted. Richards was near an apartment complex in West Phoenix when another man came at him. There was no shot from a distance this time, no figure waiting in a parked car. The two met face to face, close enough to put hands on each other, and the encounter turned physical.

Richards and the man who confronted him fought. It was the struggle of two grown men at close range, a hands-on collision on the pavement, each one working against the other. Richards was no soft target. He carried a weapon for a living and knew how to hold himself on a dark street, and the fight was a real one, but it did not go his way.

When it ended, Richards had been fatally shot. The man who had fought him did not leave empty-handed. He took two things from the security guard before he went: the 9mm Glock handgun Richards carried and the necklace at his throat. The scene left behind carried the plain marks of a robbery—a man down, his weapon gone, his jewelry taken.

Richards was found near the complex, critically hurt, and he died there on the West Phoenix ground he had been crossing to reach the woman he loved.

Officers found Richards near an apartment complex, critically wounded, and he died at the scene. The signs around him pointed to robbery. His handgun was gone. There were indications a struggle had taken place. A working security guard walking to see the woman he was with had been killed and stripped of his weapon and his jewelry on a West Phoenix street.

For the police handling the call, it read as a violent robbery that had ended in death—the kind of crime a large city logs and works without immediately tying it to anything else. There was no obvious connection between Richards and any other recent killing. The two young men shot in a parked car five days earlier belonged on paper to a separate case in a separate part of the city. Richards’s death was its own tragedy, its own open file, its own grieving circle of people who had expected him home.

The man who walked away from that fight now carried a second firearm. He already had his own weapon. Now he had Richards’s Glock as well, a 9mm pistol taken from a dead security guard, untraceable to him in any way the public could see. He folded it into his life as easily as he had folded everything else. He went back to his sessions, his women, his plans, the stolen necklace one more possession among his things.

Cookie moved through early December with the same outward steadiness. He spoke to the people around him about his music, about the women who admired him, about the better life he believed was opening to him. The man who had fought Sele Richards on a Phoenix street and the man who recorded love songs to his queen were again the same single person, untroubled in any way his circle could detect.

In the apartment on East Highland Avenue, his mother and stepfather went about their lives with him under their roof. The household held the appearance of a family taking in a grown son finding his feet. There were tensions in that home that neighbors had noticed over the months—arguments that flared and then settled—but the arrangement continued. Cookie came and went, sometimes staying with one of the women he was seeing, sometimes returning to his mother’s couch.

The relationships in his life ran deeper than his music and his women. One man in particular had become close to him: someone he described as a brother, a man whose family had accepted Cookie despite his prison record and the difference in their backgrounds. That man had offered to put money into Cookie’s music career. He trusted Cookie around his sisters. He treated him as family.

That man’s name was Jesus Bonifacio Real. Jesus Bonifacio Real was 25 years old and lived in Avondale, a suburb on the western edge of the Phoenix metro area. He shared an apartment with his sisters, and the household had folded Cleopus Cookie into its orbit through one of them. Real’s sister, Liliana Vasquez, was a woman Cookie loved and called his queen. Through that relationship, Cookie had become a regular presence around Real and the rest of the family.

Real had taken to Cookie. The two had grown close enough that Cookie spoke of him as a brother, and Real returned that warmth with something concrete: he offered to invest in Cookie’s music to help push the King Playbola project forward. He trusted Cookie around his sisters. The family had accepted him into their lives despite his record and the things that set them apart.

To Cookie, Real represented both friendship and opportunity—a man who believed in his future and was willing to back it. The relationship between Cookie and Liliana, though, had been coming apart. She had begun pulling away from him because he was seeing other women, and one of those women had become pregnant. The closeness between them frayed. She grew distant and stopped caring the way she once had. By the second week of December, she had not seen Cookie for stretches of days, and the bond that had tied Cookie to the Real household through her was thinning.

On December 11th, 2017, inside the Avondale apartment, Jesus Real was at home. He was resting on a chaise, a man at ease in his own living space. The cell phone charger sat beside him, plugged in and waiting, the small detail of an ordinary day. The man he called a brother, the man his sister had been seeing, came into the apartment.

Real was fatally shot at close range while he rested. The killing was quiet in its method. When it was over, his cell phone was gone, taken from beside him even as the charger remained plugged in next to where he lay. No shell casings were left at the scene. A young man who had offered to invest in a friend’s music, who had welcomed that friend into his family, was dead in his own apartment. And the man who had been treated as a brother was gone.

Avondale police came to the apartment and found Real dead, shot at close range, his phone missing, and no casings on the floor. It was a separate jurisdiction from the Phoenix cases, a suburban department working a killing inside an apartment with little obvious to connect it outward. There was no immediate line drawn between this death and a security guard killed in West Phoenix nine days earlier, or two friends shot in a parked car before that.

But the people closest to Real did not behave the way grieving families usually do. His sister Liliana was the one who discovered his body. Rather than calling police from the apartment, she left. She went to pick up her sister Graciela Vasquez, and the two moved away from the scene. Real’s missing cell phone did not simply vanish into nothing; it surfaced later at a nearby motel in the company of the sisters.

The choices the two women made in those hours pointed at something they knew or feared. A brother lay dead, his phone taken, and instead of summoning help, his sister gathered her own sister, and the phone traveled to a motel. Whatever the sisters understood about who had been in that apartment, they did not lay it in front of the police that night.

The killing of Jesus Real stood apart from the others in one lasting way: it was the death of a man who had taken Cookie into his family, who had opened his home and his trust and offered money for the music. The closeness made it different from the parking lot and the street robbery. This was not a stranger or a chance encounter. This was a brother, by Cookie’s own word, shot at close range on a chaise in his own home.

Cookie, asked later about Real, said almost nothing of substance. He acknowledged the man had meant to invest in his music and then, as he put it, was no longer around a few days afterward. He spoke of the death at a distance, as something that had simply happened in the vicinity of his life rather than at his hands. The Real household absorbed a loss it would not fully report, and December moved on.

Two days passed. The northwest stretch of the metro, the Glendale area, went about its business. And somewhere in it was a young man with a steady ambition. He was Latory Beckford, 29 years old, and he had set himself toward a job that meant helping people in their worst moments. He was working toward becoming an ambulance worker, training his life in the direction of emergency medicine—the kind of career a person chooses when they want their hours to count for something.

He lived in the Glendale area, the northwest stretch of the Phoenix metro. And on December 13th, 2017, he was at an apartment complex there. Beckford had a mother named Anthia Wint who knew her son as a young man full of drive, someone with a strong will for life. He was not a figure of the streets in the way that phrase is usually meant. He was a person aiming at a profession built on rescue, putting in the work to get there. His days were the days of a young man with a plan—the ordinary forward motion of someone in his late 20s building toward a future in a uniform that arrives when things go wrong for other people.

On that December day, in the common area of the Glendale apartment complex, Beckford was fatally shot. The killing happened in a shared space of the complex, a place where residents and visitors passed through, and it was over quickly. A young man training to save lives lost his own in the open ground between apartment buildings.

He was found shot to death in that common area. There was no clear robbery story attached, no plain motive, no relationship that investigators could immediately draw between Beckford and a killer. He joined a growing set of Glendale and Phoenix deaths that, taken separately, looked like the ordinary violence of a large metropolitan area, and that no one had yet gathered into a single shape.

For Anthia Wint, the loss took her son in the middle of his climb. The weapon that ended Beckford’s life was a 9mm pistol—it was the same caliber as the Glock taken from Sele Richards on a West Phoenix street 11 days earlier. But in the moment, in the separate file of a Glendale homicide, that detail sat unexamined. A bullet is not a name. The casing left behind, the projectile recovered—these were pieces of physical evidence logged into a system, waiting for something to give them meaning beyond a single scene.

The man moving through these killings still carried two firearms. He had his own weapon, and he had the Glock he had taken from Richards. He used them across the scattered deaths in different parts of the metro on different days against people who had no connection to one another: a pair of friends in a car, a security guard, a man who had called him brother, a young man training for the ambulances. There was no pattern of victim type, no single neighborhood, no thread of relationship that ran through all of them. That absence of pattern was itself the thing that kept the cases apart.

Cookie carried on. The recording, the gigs, the women, the couch at his mother’s apartment—all of it continued without visible disturbance. To the people around him, he remained the same man, charming and devout in his own telling, focused on his rise.

Within roughly 48 hours, and only about a mile away, another Glendale apartment complex—the same northwest landscape of buildings and open ground—went about an ordinary day. A young man came to it with a simple purpose: he had arranged to meet someone there for an exchange, the kind of meeting that happens at such complexes all the time.

He was Christopher Cameron, 21 years old, and he was a father. He had an infant son just months into his life and another on the way, a young family forming around him at the start of his 20s. That family gave his days their weight. He was a young man with people depending on him, the responsibilities of fatherhood arriving early and the future of his household riding on him.

On December 15th, 2017, Cameron came to a Glendale apartment complex. The arrival had a purpose: he expected to complete a transaction, an exchange arranged with another person. It was the kind of meeting that happens at apartment complexes across a metro area every day, a planned encounter at a known location. He arrived expecting an ordinary completion of an ordinary arrangement.

The complex sat about a mile from where Latory Beckford had been killed roughly two days earlier, the same northwest Glendale landscape of apartment buildings and open grounds. Cameron came to meet the person he believed he was dealing with. Instead of the exchange he expected, he was shot multiple times. Witnesses in the area caught glimpses of what followed. A man was seen removing a backpack from Cameron before leaving the scene on foot. The description that reached police was thin: a black man with short hair, somewhere in his 30s, fleeing the complex.