The Rapper Who Slaughtered His Own Blood: Inside Arizona’s Final Countdown to Execute Cleopus ‘Cookie’ Jr. for the Savage Murders of His Family

The defendant should be sentenced to death.  Exactly eight years and one day after killing his mother and stepfather, Cleopus Cookie learned his fate in court.  December 18th, 2025, Maricopa County Superior Court. A jury for person stands. In her hands is a piece of paper that eight families have waited almost exactly eight years to see written on. Cleopus Emanuel Cookie Jr.

sits at the defense table. 43 years old now, older than he was the last time he walked free. Older by a long stretch than he was the last time anyone who loved him believed the best about him. The verdict comes down one line at a time. Death. Death. Death. Death. Death. Six sentences of execution.

six separate agreements from 12 separate jurors that this man should be put to death for what he did to six separate human beings. Two more counts, the ones closest to him, the killings inside his own home, will not be decided today. On those, the jury cannot agree. They are hung, deadlocked, unfinished business the court will have to return to. But six is enough.

Six is the state of Arizona telling Cleopus Cookie Jr. in the only language the law has for this that it intends to kill him. In the gallery, nobody is celebrating. People are crying quietly. The particular kind of crying that happens when a wound that’s been open for 8 years finally gets a name put on it.

One daughter will later say through tears that her mother was the only real support she had in this world. And that support was taken from her on a cold December night in 2017 by a man who walked up to her in her own apartment parking lot and put her in her own car. Outside the courthouse, the Maricopa County Attorney will tell reporters that anyone who questions whether the death penalty is ever justified needs to look no further than this case.

That it took a particular kind of evil to prey on the vulnerable the way this man did. That death is the only just answer. To understand how the state of Arizona arrived at that sentence, how one man ended up condemned to die six times over in a single afternoon, we have to go back, not to this courtroom, not even to 2017.

We have to go back almost 30 years to a boy in Tucson carrying a family name that meant something good and slowly, deliberately making sure it would come to mean something else entirely. This is true crime matters. This is the story of Cleopus Cookie Jr. Cleopus Emanuel Cookie Jr. was born March 25th, 1982 in Tucson, Arizona. The Cookie name meant something in that city before he was old enough to understand why.

His grandfather Roy Cookie had spent decades as a recognized civil rights organizer across southern Arizona. the slow, unglamorous, often dangerous work of pushing a community toward something better than it had been. It was the kind of work that cost a man plenty and earned him real respect in return. By the 1960s, Roy Cookie’s name was attached to progress.

To the patient, decades long project of change. His grandson inherited the surname. He inherited none of what had built it. There isn’t much on the record about Cleopus Cookie Jr.’s early years. No honor role, no sports trophies, no teachers note in a file somewhere describing a bright, promising kid. Just an Arizona upbringing, a respected family name, and a city that, like most cities, offered some young men a way up, and quietly steered others toward the streets.

For Cookie, the pull went toward the streets. By his teenage years, he’d fallen into the orbit of a Phoenix gang, the Westside City Crypts, a world that measured a man by an entirely different code than the one his grandfather had spent his life building. The model young Cookie actually wanted to become wasn’t his grandfather.

It was an uncle, a man who dressed sharp, drove nice cars, kept beautiful women close. To a teenage cookie, that was what success looked like. Not the decades of patient work it took to change a city. Just the surface of having made it. The clothes, the car, the woman on your arm, the way other people looked at you when you walked into a room.

Hold on to that appearance over substance. It’s going to be the throughine of everything that follows. The music career, the reformed man persona, all of it. Cookie spent his whole adult life building the appearance of a good man on top of something else entirely. In the year 2000, at 18 years old, Cookie fell in with three other young men on a plan.

Rob a Phoenix strip club called Mustang Sally’s at gunpoint. One of the four was someone who mattered to him. A close friend. Someone he’d grown up alongside. Someone who’d spent stretches of his own childhood living inside the Cookie family home. The kind of friendship that runs back through your whole life. The robbery went sideways almost the moment it started.

A man working behind the bar drew his own weapon and fired. The bullet found Cookie’s friend. He died on the floor of the club they’d come to rob. The man who fired was never charged. He defended himself and the law agreed with him completely. But Arizona’s felony murder statute doesn’t require you to have pulled the trigger.

If you take part in a dangerous felony and somebody dies in the course of it, even somebody on your own side, even somebody killed in self-defense by an innocent third party, the law can hold you responsible for that death anyway because you chose to be there. Because your decision to commit the felony set the chain of events in motion, another member of the group was tried and convicted on that same felony murder theory.

Cookie, under an agreement with prosecutors, pleaded guilty to manslaughter with armed robbery counts standing beside it. He would insist for years afterward, that he was no killer, that the death of his friend was a wound that had happened to him, a tragedy he’d absorbed, not something his own choices had produced. He never seemed to fully reconcile the fact that the robbery itself had been his decision to make.

In November 2001, 19 years old, the doors closed behind him. 16 years is a long stretch of a young man’s life to spend inside a cell. And Cookie’s prison file, more than 450 pages of it by the time he walked out, tells you plenty about how he spent it. more than 20 serious disciplinary writeups. Fighting, refusing direct orders, disorderly conduct, drug possession, assault on staff.

Whatever institution held him, it met resistance from him again and again, year after year, and he answered its discipline with more of his own. One thing in that file cuts the other way. Somewhere inside all of that, Cookie earned his GED, a completed high school equivalency, the single clear step forward in a record otherwise built out of infractions.

And by his own account, something darker happened to him in there, too. He said a member of the prison staff sexually assaulted him during those years. He said it left him angry. Whatever the full truth of it, he carried both that grievance and the temper his record had already shown all the way to the door. Freedom didn’t arrive all at once.

In 2015, after roughly 14 years, the system let him out and he immediately started building the identity he’d carry for the rest of his life. A rapper’s persona, calling himself Ting Playbola. At first, recording verses, posting videos. For a stretch of months, he was a free man chasing a music career among the women and studios and streets he’d left behind at 19. It didn’t last.

He violated the terms of his release, and the gate closed behind him again. The identity he’d started building stalled out exactly where it stood. He went back to finishing the sentence. The robbery at Mustang Sally’s had fastened to him almost 15 years earlier. On July 28th, 2017, the doors opened on that case for the very last time.

Cleopus Cookie Jr. walked out of an Arizona prison. A free man, 35 years old, 16 years measured against a single deadly robbery he’d insist for the rest of his life that he never should have been blamed for. The Phoenix Cookie came back to in the summer of 2017 was a workingclass sprawl of low apartment blocks and wide, hot streets.

He came back to it with almost nothing of his own. No home, no car, barely any money. So he moved into the apartment his mother Renee and his stepfather Edward Nun kept on East Highland Avenue, a tight cluster of beige condo buildings in the center of the city. Living there cost him almost nothing. He found side work in construction, sold cell phones for a while, pulled in around $300 in a good week, and with his rent already covered by family, that money was entirely his to spend on the life he’d decided he was going to build. That life

centered on music. He’d already decided he was going to be a rapper, and he already had the name picked out, King Playbola. He found a small home studio operation online run out of a house by a producer named Daniel and started showing up to record. Cookie didn’t own a car and wasn’t comfortable with computers, so he got there however he could.

Sometimes the bus across town, sometimes a girlfriend dropping him off, occasionally bringing her kids inside first to see the recording equipment before she left him to it. In the booth, the producer found him quiet, serious. He’d record for an hour or two, say little else, and on the ride home, he’d often pull headphones over his ears and disappear into the music for the whole trip. Easy to be around.

Cookie mentioned once that he’d sold drugs earlier in his life, framed it as a mistake he’d left behind him. A man, in his own telling, trying to point himself somewhere better. He never once made the producer feel unsafe. The songs told a rougher story than the man in the room. Under the King Playbola name, Cookie wrapped about drugs, about money, about violence, about women.

He posted a handful of videos to YouTube, mostly just him on a couch, delivering verses straight to the camera. One track called Monster framed killing as a kind of business, rapping about living above the law entirely. Another, a nod to his home state, rhymed about cutting down rivals until there was nothing left of them.

To the producer, who’d worked with plenty of artists leaning on the same imagery, it read as nothing more than genre, a posture, a way of selling toughness that had nothing to do with the man riding the bus home with his headphones on. Off the mic, Cookie wore an entirely different version of himself. 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 back out of them.

He spoke about his mother with what sounded like real affection. A rock, he called her. A great lady. He kept a wide circle of women around him and bragged about the thousands of friends he had on Facebook. His old high school nickname had been Playboy, and at 35, he still wore it like a banner. He wrote soft, tender love songs to a woman he called his queen, the light of his life.

And in that same catalog, without any apparent sense of contradiction, he’d written a verse about using a woman and then leaving her in the dirt to die. When people around him raised the obvious question, whether there might be two versions of Cleopus cookie, one bright and one shadowed, he rejected it flatly every time.

“There was only one,” he said. His ambitions were starting to find small footholds that fall. He landed a handful of gigs at the Rhythm Room, a real Phoenix music venue, getting his name in front of actual audiences for the first time. A man he’d grown close to, the brother of a woman he was seeing, had even offered to put money behind the King Playbola project to help push it further.

For a man 4 months removed from a 16-year sentence, it looked on the surface like real forward motion. He chased a fuller life on the side, too. 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 Builtmore, one of Phoenix’s more polished addresses, the kind of place that signals money just by its name.

to Cookie. Those afternoons confirmed something he badly wanted to believe. That this lifestyle was calling him, that he belonged over there among people who lived well, a long way from the neighborhoods he’d actually come up in. He felt envied, and by every account, he liked the feeling. By late November of 2017, Cleopus Cookie Jr.

had been free for almost 4 months. He had his music, his women, his side jobs, his mother’s couch to sleep on, and the conviction, in his own words, that he was winning out there. The calendar was turning toward the anniversary of the night at Mustang Sally’s, the robbery that had taken 16 years of his life. That date arrived, and it passed.

The next evening, an ordinary Monday, in a wide, flat city, two young men were about to become the first names on a list nobody in Phoenix knew was being written yet. November 27th, 2017. Parker Gregory Smith, 21, and his friend Andrew Remlard, 27, who went by Andy, were spending the evening together. The ordinary kind of friendship that fills up a young person’s nights in a big, flat city.

Remlard had built something real for himself already. A wife, a young son at home, the daily anchors of a man still early in his adult life, but already responsible for people who depended on him. Neither man had any quarrel with the wider world. No entanglement that marked them out.

No thread investigators would ever be able to draw between them and whoever was coming. They’d simply parked near the intersection of 16th Street and Indian School Road, a busy corridor lined with strip plazas and apartment complexes, the kind of place where a parked car draws exactly zero attention. Late evening, engine off, or maybe still running, the night settling in around them.

What happened next happened fast, and it happened for no reason anyone would ever be able to name. Both men were shot to death as they sat inside the car. There was no robbery to explain it. Nothing taken, nothing missing that anyone could point to. No argument overheard through a rolled down window. No relationship, however distant, that investigators could draw between the two friends and whoever had approached them.

They were simply there. And then they weren’t. A call came in that night. Officers found Remlard and Smith shot to death in the parked car, and there was almost nothing at the scene to work with beyond the bodies and the spent evidence of gunfire. The city absorbed it the way large cities absorb this kind of thing, as one more violent night filed as a double homicide. No clear lead.

Remlard left behind a wife without a husband and a son who would grow up without a father in the room. Smith, only 21, left behind people who’d watched him grow into a young man with his whole life still ahead of him. There were no answers for either family, only the fact of the killing and total silence around its cause.

And 5 mi away at a small home studio, a quiet, serious man was still showing up for his recording sessions, still telling anyone who’d listen that he was reformed. rising, a man of God, chasing a music career. Nothing about him in those days drew a second look from anyone. 5 days went by this way. Gigs still booked, studio sessions still running.

On the evening of December 2nd, a man named Sy Richards, 31, was making the short, familiar walk toward his girlfriend’s apartment in West Phoenix. He worked as a security guard which put a uniform on him and at times a firearm at his side that night a 9mm Glock handgun. He also wore a necklace that meant something to him personally. Richards was not a soft target.

He handled security for a living. He knew how to carry himself on a dark Phoenix street. Nothing about the short walk announced any danger at all. It was interrupted anyway. Near an apartment complex, another man came at him. And this time, unlike the parking lot five nights earlier, it wasn’t a shot from a distance.

The two met face to face, close enough to put hands on each other, and the encounter turned physical. A real struggle between two grown men. Richards fought. He knew how. It didn’t matter. When it was over, Richards had been fatally shot, and the man who’ fought him didn’t leave empty-handed. He took Richards’s Glock, and he took the necklace from around his throat.

To responding officers, the scene read plainly. A violent robbery that had ended in death. A man down, his weapon gone, his jewelry taken. The kind of case a large city logs and works without any reason to connect it to anything else. There was no obvious thread running from Sy Richards back to two friends shot in a parked car five nights before.

Different case, different file, different tragedy, its own open wound. The man who walked away from that fight now carried two firearms, his own and Richards’s stolen Glock, untraceable to him in any way the public could see. He folded it into his life as easily as he’d folded in everything else. Sessions, women, plans. The stolen necklace became just one more possession among his things.

That Glock is the detail to hold on to. Every killing after this one is going to run back through it eventually. But for now, in the second week of December 2017, it’s just a stolen gun in the hands of a man nobody suspects of anything. In the apartment on East Highland Avenue, Cookie’s mother and stepfather went on with their lives.

Their grown son under their roof, the household holding the appearance of a family that had taken in a son finding his footing. Neighbors had noticed real tension underneath. Arguments that flared and then settled over and over, but the arrangement held. Cookie’s relationships ran deeper than his music and his rotating circle of women. One in particular mattered.

A man he described without irony as a brother. someone whose own family had accepted Cookie completely despite his prison record, despite everything that separated them. That man was Jesus Bonafasio Rayal, 25, who lived in Aendale with his sisters. Cookie had become close to the whole household through one of them, Liliana Vasquez, the woman Cookie called his queen, the one his love songs were written for.

Rail had taken to Cookie completely, trusted him around his sisters, offered to invest actual money in the King Playbola project. The real household had folded Cookie into their lives the way few families would have given where he was coming from. But the relationship between Cookie and Liliana had been coming apart for weeks.

He was seeing other women, one of them now pregnant, and Liliana had started pulling away, going days at a stretch without seeing him at all. By the second week of December, the bond that had tied Cookie to the Real family through her was thinning fast. On December 11th, 2017, Jesus Reel was resting on a shay inside his Aendale apartment.

His cell phone charger sat plugged in beside him. A small ordinary detail of an ordinary day. The man he called a brother came into the apartment. Real was shot at close range while he rested. The killing was quiet in method. When it was over, his cell phone was gone from beside him, even as the charger stayed plugged in, waiting for a phone that would never come back.

No shell casings were left behind at all. Aendale police found him dead. missing phone, no casings on the floor, a scene that had been unusually deliberately emptied of the small evidence the other killings had left scattered behind them. What happened next made it stranger still. Real’s sister, Liliana, was the one who found his body.

She didn’t call police from the apartment. She left, drove to pick up her other sister, Gracella Vasquez, and the two of them moved away from the scene together. Real’s missing phone surfaced later at a nearby motel in the company of both sisters. Whatever the two women understood about who had been in that apartment, they didn’t bring it to police that night.

Asked about it later, Cookie offered almost nothing of substance. He acknowledged Real had meant to invest in his music. He said that a few days afterward, people were telling him Real was no longer around, spoken about at a careful distance, like something that had simply occurred in the vicinity of his own life rather than at his own hands.

As the broader case developed, police would eventually book Liliana, her sister Gracella, and a third woman connected to Real’s household on suspicion of tampering with evidence and hindering the investigation. But when it came time to actually charge Rial’s death to Cookie, prosecutors concluded there wasn’t a reasonable likelihood of conviction.

No casings to match ballistically, no clean physical link, just a warm, brotherly relationship, a missing phone, and a household that hadn’t behaved the way grieving families usually do. Jesus Real’s killing would end up standing apart from the rest of this story. The one death investigators believed belonged to Cleopus Cookie Jr.

that no court would ever weigh. 2 days later, the killing moved to Glendale and it stopped waiting 5 or 9 days between victims. It sped up. December 13th, Lator Beckford, 29, had set his life towards something that mattered. Training to become an ambulance worker, the kind of career you choose because you want your hours to count for someone else.

His mother, Anthia Wint, knew him as a young man full of drive, a strong will for life, not a figure of the streets, a person aiming at a profession built entirely around rescue. In the common area of a Glendale apartment complex, a shared space where residents and visitors pass through all day, Beckford was shot to death. It was over quickly.

No robbery story attached, no plain motive, no relationship investigators could draw between him and whoever pulled the trigger. The weapon that killed him was a 9 mm pistol, the same caliber as the Glock stolen from Cai Richards 11 days earlier. In the moment, in the separate file of a standalone Glendale homicide, that detail sat completely unexamined.

A bullet isn’t a name. It was just a casing logged into a system waiting for something to give it meaning beyond one scene. December 15th, roughly 48 hours later, about a mile away, Christopher Cameron, 21, arrived at a different Glendale apartment complex. He was a young father, an infant son just months old, another child on the way.

He’d come expecting to complete a transaction, an exchange arranged with someone else, the kind of ordinary meeting that happens at complexes like this all the time. Instead of the exchange he expected, he was shot multiple times. A witness caught a glimpse of a man removing a backpack from Cameron before walking away on foot.

Thin description, a black man with short hair, somewhere in his 30s. Cameron was found gravely wounded in a nearby grassy field. Paramedics rushed him to a hospital. He held on through the day. The next day, he was pronounced dead. A 21-year-old father with a son who would never really know him and another child on the way who would never know him at all.

90 minutes after Cameron was shot and roughly two miles away on that same night. Maria Villanuva, 43, mother of two daughters, drove toward her own apartment complex near the 5100 block of North 58th Avenue at the end of an ordinary day. The kind of routine ending a day usually has. People knew where she was supposed to be.

Surveillance cameras caught what happened as she arrived. A man closed the distance to her and then the footage showed the two of them leaving together in her own vehicle. Him driving her in the passenger seat. She’d been taken from her own doorstep. Glendale police opened a missing person case almost immediately. She’d last been seen driving into her own complex and then she was simply gone.

Her car and herself unaccounted for. Her family and police searched through the night for a woman who’d only been coming home. The search didn’t stay a missing person case for long. The next morning, Van Noeva was found in an alley in South Phoenix, west of the airport, a part of the city entirely separate from where she’d been taken. She had been shot.

She had also been sexually assaulted. Her body was left partially unclothed in that alley. This killing broke the pattern the others had set. The parking lot, the street robbery, the two Glendale shootings. Those had all been fast. A confrontation, a gunshot, gone. Villain Noeva’s death stretched across a kidnapping, a drive, an assault, and finally a killing far from where it had all begun.

The man responsible had not simply approached and fired this time. He’d taken her, driven her, assaulted her, left her in an alley. And this time, he left something of himself behind, too. His own DNA was recovered from her body. A biological signature carried at the scene. For now, that evidence sat exactly where all the other evidence had sat, collected, logged, waiting, attached to no name the public knew.

Two killings in one night, 90 minutes and 2 mi apart. Three deaths in Glendale within 48 hours. And still, still nothing publicly tying any of it to a single man. Through all of it, the man at the center showed nothing his circle could read as alarm. He kept recording, kept riding the bus, kept telling the people around him that he was winning out there.

2 days after Villinoea’s body was found in that alley, the killing came back to where it had started, the apartment on East Highland Avenue, and the two people who had given Cookie a roof over his head. Renee held a particular place in her son’s account of himself. He called her a rock, a great lady. In the version of his life Cookie presented to the world, she was the steady center, proof of his own goodness.

Whatever else moved through him, the affection he expressed for her sounded genuine to the people who heard it. But the household had real strain under that surface, and the neighbors had heard it plenty of times. Edward Nun had been overheard telling Cookie to get out, that he was trouble, at times, invoking words like Satan.

There had been arguments before. Cookie had always left for a while and always come back. On December 17th, 2017, that fault line finally gave way. Inside the apartment, an argument rose again, and this time it carried talk of devils and demons loud enough for neighbors through the walls to hear.

Heavy thuds, furniture knocking against a wall, sharp, loud bangs. A woman screamed. When it was over, Renee Cookie and Edward Nun, the mother he called his rock, the stepfather who’d told him he was trouble, were both dead inside their own home, shot at close range. The apartment that had been the one steady point in Cookie’s post prison life had become the scene of the two people who’d kept it running for him.

A neighbor’s report of shots fired sent police toward the East Highland Avenue address. Officer Brian Ament arrived first at around 7:50 that evening with no knowledge yet of three weeks of unconnected deaths spread across the metro or of the man who tied them all together. As he came up to the cluster of beige condos, he saw a heavy presence of blood right at the entrance and no trail leading up to it.

No path explaining how it had gotten there. The picture told him someone beyond that door was seriously hurt and he judged there wasn’t time to wait for backup. The door was locked. A men banged on it, announced police. After a moment, the lock clicked and the door opened to reveal Cookie standing behind a still locked screen door.

He told the officer nothing was going on, that nobody else was inside while keeping his right hand carefully out of view. and at one point flinging something off to his side away from the door, Ament ordered him to raise his hands and come out, Cookie began reaching towards something to his right, stopped himself, cracked the door, and squeezed through the gap.

Careful never to give the officer a clear view of whatever lay behind him in the apartment. Asked where all the blood had come from, Cookie scanned both his own arms, settled on a small cut on his hand, and presented it. Ament judged it to be no worse than a paper cut. Cookie said he was much better now.

When Ament told him he was going to be detained, everything about him changed. He turned to face the officer, puffed his chest out, baldled his fists, pressed his arms tight against his sides. He started yelling, calling himself the strongest man alive, threatening to cut the officer’s throat. Ament was alone. No backup yet.

A raging man a few feet away and two people unaccounted for behind a bloodied door. He kicked Cookie in the midsection to create distance. Cookie got back up and came forward again, shouting that he controlled the gun. Rather than draw his own weapon, Ament reached for his taser instead. ordered Cookie to the ground and when he refused, fired.

The lead struck Cookie’s chest and brought him down. Backup arrived. As other officers moved to clear the apartment, a sergeant stood over Cookie, whose anger kept surfacing in strange declarations. He said he was Donald Trump. Said it again, said he’d done this for Donald Trump. Once zip tied and loaded into a patrol Tahoe, the statements kept coming. He was a 33rd degree Mason.

Officers had no right to detain him. They couldn’t cage him. He knew exactly what was going on. Inside, Ament had to push against the door with his full weight to get it open. Two bodies were blocking the way just beyond it. Renee Cookie and Edward Nun lay near the front of their own home, both killed by gunfire at close range.

Officers and forensic specialists moving through the rooms found evidence of violence throughout. A scene that matched the blood the first officer had seen at the doorway. And scattered through that scene were three objects that didn’t belong to the household at all. A handgun on the living room sofa. A set of car keys matching no vehicle the family owned.

A necklace hanging around Cookie’s own neck. That night, the officers booking Cleopus Cookie Jr. believed they were processing a double homicide. A son arrested at the scene of his mother’s and stepfather’s deaths. They had no idea the man in their custody was tied to a string of deaths spread across three cities and three weeks.

The apartment on East Highland Avenue was for the moment a single terrible scene. What they’d also recovered was about to turn it into the key that unlocked all the others. In the days after the arrest, investigators turned to the gun on the sofa. Every firearm leaves microscopic individual markings on the shell casings. It ejects, a kind of signature unique to that weapon.

Phoenix had recently joined a federal ballistics tracking network, a national database of those markings, which meant casings recovered from crime scenes could be run through the system and compared in hours instead of weeks against other casings or against a suspect weapon test fired specifically for comparison.

Investigators ran the Glock from the sofa against every casing collected across the scattered December scenes. The markings spoke. Within roughly 48 hours of Cookie’s arrest, ballistics had linked that single stolen weapon to the killings of Lator Beckford in Glendale, Christopher Cameron at the Glendale Field, and Maria Villanuva found in the South Phoenix alley.

One gun stolen off a dead security guard now connected four separate killings that had sat in four separate files. Investigators didn’t stop there. Because Cookie had used two 9mm pistols across the spree, they layered in every other kind of evidence they had. Villain Noeva’s body had carried his DNA, a direct biological match.

Cell phone records placed him where the killings happened, when they happened. Surveillance footage showed her abduction from her own complex, frame by frame, and the stolen property itself. The necklace, the car keys, sat as physical links between Cookie and the dead, found right there in his mother’s living room.

Piece by piece, a double homicide in a single apartment grew into something far larger. Two friends shot in a parked car. A security guard robbed and killed. A man who’d called Cookie his own brother. A young man training for the ambulances. A young father meeting someone for an exchange. a mother taken off her own doorstep and finally Cookie’s own mother and stepfather dead near their own front door.

Nine killings across three weeks spread through Phoenix, Glendale, and Aendale between November 27th and December 17th, 2017. Victims spanning every age and background, men and women, some of them known to Cookie and some of them complete strangers. The only thread running through every single scene was the man now sitting in custody and the weapons and stolen items traced directly back to him.

No one had ever announced a serial killer working through Phoenix that winter. No warning had ever gone out to the public because nobody had connected the scattered deaths until the gun on the sofa pulled them together after the fact. A routine shots fired call at one apartment had become the key to three weeks of homicides the city hadn’t even known were related.

In January 2018, nearly a month after the arrest, Phoenix detective Paul Dalton sat down across a table from Cookie. The conversation ran roughly 3 hours, and across it, Cookie built a portrait of himself that bore almost no resemblance to the scenes investigators had assembled. He described a man of God reformed by his years in prison.

Someone who looked for the light in people and drew it back out of them. He talked about the women drawn to him. Boasted about thousands of Facebook friends and his old Playboy nickname. He spoke of his mother with what sounded like open love, a rock, a great lady. Dalton, who’d interviewed plenty of people who had killed, tested the story.

He asked Cookie whether there might be two of him, one light, one dark. Cookie rejected it outright. There was only one Cookie, he said. Dalton also asked whether he heard voices, whether something pulled at his mind. Cookie dismissed that too, despite everything he’d shouted at the moment of his arrest.

Then Dalton started putting the dead in front of him. He set down a photograph of Maria Villainuva, 43, mother of two, taken from her own complex found in an alley the next morning, and told Cookie her death was tied to him through DNA. The composure that had held through the whole interview cracked. Cookie insisted with real force that he would never leave a woman dead, that it wasn’t who he was.

He reached for his music as a defense of his own character, telling the detective that if you actually listen to his songs, anything he’d ever said about a woman was about building her up. He said he loved women. He pointed to the verses he’d written for Liliana Vasquez, the woman he called his queen.

His catalog also held a verse about using a woman and then leaving her in the dirt to die. an image that sat unavoidably against exactly how Venewa had been found. Dalton asked him about Jesus real. Cookie called him a brother again. Said he’d heard about the death from Liliana. Described how close they’d been, how Rail had trusted him around his sisters despite everything separating them.

about the actual killing. He offered almost nothing, only that Real had told him he was going to invest in the music. And then a few days later, people were saying he was no longer around. The detective kept going, photograph after photograph. Parker Smith, 21. Andrew Remlard, 27, a husband and father.

Cella Richards, 31, the security guard walking home. Lator Beckford, 29, training for the ambulances. Christopher Cameron, 21, a young father. And finally, Renee Cookie, 56, and Edward Nun, 54, his own mother and stepfather. Dalton showed him a booking photo taken 2 days after his arrest and told him he saw no sunshine in that face.

Cookie said only that it hurt. Dalton laid out the scope of it plainly. Every one of these people had been linked to him in their deaths through science or physical evidence, and that was a great many people to be connected to. Cookie held his line through all of it. He had nothing to do with any of it. No reason to hurt any of these people. No reason at all.

He returned again and again to his refrain about his own success. The better life he was building, the envy he believed surrounded him. “He was winning out there,” he said. The interview ended without an admission. But Dalton had drawn out something close to a window into the man, a salesman’s pitch about his own goodness, set directly against evidence that simply would not buy it.

On January 18th, 2018, the Phoenix Police Department laid the case out for the public for the first time. At the front of the room stood a display of nine homicide victims, their photographs arranged together, all linked to one convicted felon. Until that moment, the city had no idea the scattered deaths of late 2017 belonged to a single hand.

Police announced that Cleopus Cookie Jr., 35, was responsible for a spree running from November 27th to December 17th across Phoenix, Glendale, and Aendale, nine lives at that point before Jesus Real’s case was later set aside. A sergeant told reporters there was a distinct possibility Cookie had killed others not yet identified and asked the public for help since for several of the killings there was still no established motive and no clear connection between Cookie and the people he’d killed.

Some he’d known well, others were complete strangers. No single reason united any of it. The break again had come from ballistics, a system that could return results in hours instead of weeks, exposing connections between cases that had looked on their face entirely unrelated. The announcement carried a strange weight for a city that had lived through fear of serial violence before.

Those earlier cases had unfolded in the open, with the public aware a killer was loose. Cookie spree had drawn no public attention at all while it was happening because nobody had known the killings were connected. Phoenix learned about the danger only after it had already been caught.

Cookie had already been indicted on firstdegree murder for the December 17th deaths of his mother and stepfather. Now police tied him publicly to seven more. As a felon, he was barred from possessing any firearm at all, and the charges that followed carried the full weight of the spree. Weapons, robbery, kidnapping, sexual assault.

As Cookie’s name went public, the King Playbola videos found a very different audience than they’d ever had before. People searched out the clips of him rapping on his couch and comment sections filled with revulsion as listeners set the violent lyrics against the killings. The producer who’d recorded him, who’d chocked the lyrics up to genre, who’d never once felt unsafe around the quiet, serious artist he used to drive home from sessions, was stunned.

He’d insist for years that the allegations were false. He pleaded not guilty and in a handwritten letter to a judge in January 2020 wrote that he was in the utmost hurry to prove the charges were false accusations and that the best way to do that was a not-uilty verdict. He signed the letter as a music artist, not a rapist and not a murderer.

The case did not move at the speed Cookie demanded. eight killings, mountains of forensic evidence, multiple scenes, multiple jurisdictions. It made for a genuinely heavy case on both sides before anything else slowed it down. Then the pandemic arrived and it slowed every court in the country, stacking postponement on top of postponement, interfering even with the ability of experts to properly evaluate Cookie for the defense.

One fight in particular turned on the very science that had cracked the case wide open. The defense challenged the ballistics matching that had linked the sofa gun to multiple scenes, pointing to a controversial 2016 report that had questioned the broader reliability of firearms identification. The discipline of matching microscopic markings on casings and bullets back to a single weapon.

They fought to keep that evidence out, or at least to undercut its credibility in front of a jury. Cookie’s case wasn’t running alone through the Maricopa County system, either. It moved alongside that of Aaron Cedo, a former bus driver charged in a separate string of killings that had claimed nine lives over a span ending in mid 2016.

A case leaning on that same ballistic science, facing the exact same challenge. Two of the most prolific accused killers in the valley’s recent history, sitting in the same courthouse, both facing death, both pleading not guilty. The history around it ran even deeper. Back in 2015, 11 freeway shootings had frightened the whole metro area, striking vehicles without serious injury.

And the only person ever charged in that case saw the charges dismissed and won a court order clearing his name entirely. Cookie’s case joined that history as one more entry, set apart mainly by the fact that his spree wasn’t solved until after it had already ended. Trial dates were set, then pushed, then set again.

The court eventually settled on a target of 2025, nearly 8 years after the killings themselves. Through all of it, the evidence held its shape. the gun, the DNA, the stolen necklace and keys, the surveillance footage, the cell phone records. Eight scenes, none of it weakening with time. On May 5th, 2025, the trial finally began.

More than 7 years after the killings, Cookie, now 43, sat at the defense table before a jury of 22, 10 of them alternates, seated for a trial expected to run for months. The state’s theory was simple. Every person Cookie had killed shared exactly one thing. They had all been vulnerable in the moment he found them. The prosecutor framed the case as a classic who done it, then answered his own question by pointing directly across the room and naming the man at the defense table.

The case, he told the jury, would rest on DNA, ballistics, cell phone data, stolen property, and eyewitness testimony, with the spine of it being the gun found on that sofa, and the man found standing over his own mother’s and stepfather’s bodies with someone else’s blood already on him. The defense answered with a different frame entirely.

Cookie’s attorney reminded the jury of their duty to stay impartial, then went directly at what the state actually had to prove. There was no motive, he argued. The killings were random, unconnected, the work of chance rather than a single plan. The jury, he said, had heard nothing about premeditation, the deliberate forethought Arizona’s first-degree murder statute demands.

The state’s own version of events had Cookie simply walking up and shooting the first two victims with no rhyme or reason behind it at all. Without motive and without premeditation, the defense argued the case for first-degree murder simply didn’t hold together. The trial settled into a long rhythm across the following months.

The prosecution walked the jury through all eight killings one by one and the evidence tying each of them back to Cookie. The ballistics matching casings and bullets to the two weapons. The DNA recovered from Maria Villaina. The surveillance footage of her abduction. The cell phone records mapping his movement against every single killing.

The stolen necklace and keys. A detective testified about what the neighbors had overheard the night his mother and stepfather died. The argument about devils and demons carrying through the walls. On September 25th, 2025, the jury convicted Cleopus Cookie Jr. on every count. All eight first-degree murders. The kidnapping of Maria Via Noeva, the armed robbery counts, the attempted sexual assault, 14 charges in total, guilty on every single one.

Cookie looked down at the defense table as the verdicts were read out, one after another. The man who had insisted for more than seven years that the allegations were false, who had signed a letter calling himself a music artist and not a murderer, sat and listened to a jury reject every part of that story. Outside the courtroom, the family spoke through their grief.

Adriana Rodriguez, Maria Via Noeva’s daughter, said the family was finally getting closure, a day she’d genuinely feared would never come, and that Cookie had taken her mother, the only real support system she’d ever had. Eric Hampton, a family friend who’d watched Cookie grow up and who’d known Renee Cookie and Edward Nun for years, said he’d come to the trial hoping to see some flicker of sympathy in Cookie’s face. He found none at all.

He thought maybe the man had a little bit of heart in him somewhere, he said, but there was nothing there to do these things and worse than all of it, to kill his own mother. He called him a monster. Conviction settled his guilt. It didn’t settle his fate. Because prosecutors had sought the death penalty, the same jury that convicted him would now decide his punishment.

And the sentencing phase opened within days on September 29th. First, the court dealt with the lesser counts. On November 14th, 2025, Cookie was sentenced on the non-murder charges, more than 9 years in total, layered onto a man already convicted of eight killings. Then came the gravest question of all. The jury was instructed to weigh aggravating factors against mitigating ones.

The careful balance Arizona law requires before a court can hand down the ultimate punishment. Prosecutors pressed the sheer weight of it. Eight killings of vulnerable people across an entire metro area, including a mother and stepfather shot to death inside their own home. The defense offered whatever mitigation it could for a man now facing execution.

The jury had to decide whether the aggravating circumstances of each killing rose to the level the law required. They deliberated into December. The families who had already waited more than 7 years for a trial waited once more. On December 18th, 2025, the verdict was read in Maricopa County Superior Court, closing out a case that had run from a single shots fired call in 2017 to a capital sentencing more than 8 years later.

The jury sentenced Cleopus Cookie Jr. to death for six of the eight murders. Parker Smith, Andrew Remlard, Cel Richards, Latory Beckford, Christopher Cameron, and Maria Villanuva. For those six, the jury found the aggravating circumstances clearly warranted the ultimate punishment. On the other two, his mother Renee Cookie and his stepfather Edward Nun, the two who had taken him into their own home, the jury could not agree.

The panel that had just sentenced him to death six times over hung on the punishment for the two people closest to him in the entire world. The split leaves the county attorney with a choice still ahead. Seek a new sentencing trial on those two counts before a fresh jury or set the death penalty effort aside on those two and let a judge impose a sentence of life instead.

For six killings, the sentence is already settled at death. For the two closest to him, the matter stays open. The county attorney spoke in stark terms outside the courthouse. Anyone who questions the need for the death penalty, she said, needed to look no further than this case. It took a particular kind of evil to pray on the vulnerable and take the lives of eight innocent people.

Death was the only just punishment, she said, and she pledged to see it carried all the way through. Cookie and his defense team moved immediately to the next stage of the fight. A death sentence in Arizona opens a lengthy mandatory review and his lawyers began that process without delay. The same arguments that shaped the trial.

The challenge to the ballistic science, the claim of no motive and no premeditation, now pass into the hands of the appellet courts, which will decide whether the trial was conducted properly, and whether the evidence truly supported every verdict. Alongside it sits the unfinished business of the two hung counts. The killings of Renee Cookie and Edward Nun.

The deaths that first brought police to that apartment door and cracked the entire case wide open. Still without a final sentence attached to them. The case also leaves behind the one killing that never reached a courtroom at all. Jesus real, the man Cookie called a brother, was counted among the original nine victims in 2018, but prosecutors ultimately found no reasonable likelihood of conviction and never filed charges.

A death tied to an emptied scene, missing casings, a vanished phone, and the silence of the people closest to it. And a broader question remains open, too. Police said from the very beginning that there was a distinct possibility Cookie had killed others not yet identified. The count the public knows rests only on the scenes that ballistics and DNA happened to tie together.

Whether the full reach of what he did has ever truly been measured is something the authorities have never fully answered. Arizona’s machinery for carrying out death sentences after a long pause following a troubled execution in 2014 resumed in 2022 continued again in 2025 and has more executions scheduled into 2026. The line is moving.

Inmates recently executed in Arizona spent an average of more than 25 years on death row before the end came. which means Cookie’s Road even now is likely to run for decades. His appeal is already filed. The review that follows will climb slowly through state and then federal courts year after year. But an appeal is a delay, not a door out.

Cleopus Cookie Jr. spent 16 years in prison for a death he never caused with his own hands and walked out determined to become someone the world would finally have to notice. Four months later, he began taking lives with his own hands, eight times over across three weeks in the winter of 2017. He will leave a prison cell only once more in his life and only to be walked into an execution chamber.

The people he killed were given no such road, no appeal, no years left to wait out, no second chance to be remembered for anything other than the worst day of somebody else’s life. Parker Smith, Andrew Remlard, Sy Richards, Jesus Reel, Latory Beckford, Christopher Cameron, Maria Villanuva, Renee Cookie, Edward Nun. Nine names, nine lives that ended across three weeks so that one man could keep telling himself for as long as anyone let him that he was winning. He wasn’t.