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

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 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.

>> Leopus Cookie Jr. has been sentenced to death after his 2017 killing spree, murdering eight people across the valley. From Phoenix to Glendale and Aenddale, 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 gurnie 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 mourning. 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 wrapped 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 back to the very beginning of Cleopus Cookie Jr.

 If you’re drawn to stories of justice, tragedy, and the people who reach a point of no return, make sure to subscribe to No Way Out. Cleopus Emanuel Cookie Jr. was born on March 25th, 1982 in Tucson, Arizona. The surname already meant something in that city. His grandfather, Roy El 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 Crypts. 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 a rival 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 and 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, Ting 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 Cooks he returned to in the summer of 2017 was a workingclass 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 wrapped 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 wrapped 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 wrapped 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 Builtmore, 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 Cookiey’s plans for himself.

 One of them, Parker Gregory Smith, he 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 play Bola, the same Cleophys, 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. 5 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 towards 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 5 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 a 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 Salem 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 Bonafasio Realel. Jesus Bonafasio Real was 25 years old and lived in a Vondale, 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 Aendale apartment, Jesus Real was at home. He was resting on a chase, 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, had gone. Avandale 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 9 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 Gracela 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 in 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 shay 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 Lator 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 Sem 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 2 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.

 Cameron was found in a grassy field in the area, gravely wounded, and emergency crews treated him and rushed him to a hospital. He held on through that day. The next day, he was pronounced dead. A 21-year-old father with an infant son and another on the way had come to a Glendale complex for a meeting and left it carried by paramedics.

 His young family was now a family without him. The backpack he had carried was gone, taken by the man who walked away across the field. And the description of that man, vague and partial, gave investigators almost nothing to hold. The killing of Cameron, like the others, entered the records as a Glendale shooting with a fleeing suspect and little more.

 The proximity to Beckford’s death, both in place and in time, was the kind of detail that might mean something or might mean nothing in a metro area where apartment complexes saw regular violence. Two young men shot near the same Glendale ground within about 48 hours could be coincidence in a city that size.

 Nothing yet pulled them firmly together. That same day, December 15th, the violence did not wait the days it had waited before. Only about 90 minutes after Cameron was shot and roughly 2 m away, the next person crossed into the path of the man with the gun. This time it was a woman alone arriving at her own apartment complex at the end of her own day.

 and what happened to her broke from the pattern of quick shootings into something that took longer and reached further. Maria Vienno was 43 years old and the mother of two daughters. One of them, Adriana Rodriguez, would describe her as the one true support system in her life, the center that held things together. Venueva was a grown woman with a family that leaned on her.

 Moving through her days in the Glendale area with the steady weight of someone other people counted on. On the evening of December 15th, 2017, she drove toward her apartment complex near the 5100 block of North 58th Avenue. It was the simple end of a day. A woman returning home, pulling into the complex where she lived. She was expected.

 People knew her movements, knew where she should be, the ordinary accountability of a person with a family and a routine. About 90 minutes earlier and roughly 2 mi away, Christopher Cameron had been shot at another complex. Now, at Villanuva’s, surveillance cameras captured what happened. As she arrived, a man approached her.

 The footage showed the stranger closing the distance to her, and then it showed the two of them leaving together in her own vehicle. The man driving away with Villanuva in the front passenger seat. She had been taken. A woman pulling into her own apartment complex at the end of an evening was now in the passenger seat of her own car.

 Driven off by a man the cameras could not name. Carried away from the place she lived and the family that expected her. The vehicle moved out into the Phoenix night with her inside it. No longer in control of where she was going or what came next. Concern moved quickly. The Glendale Police Department opened a missing person case.

 She had last been seen driving into her complex near North 58th Avenue, and then she was gone. Vanished from her own evening with her car and herself unaccounted for. Her family and the police searched for a woman who had simply been coming home. The search did not last long before it ended in the worst way.

 The next morning, Villaina was found in an alley in South Phoenix, west of the airport, a part of the city away from the complex where she had been taken. She had been fatally shot. She had also been sexually assaulted. Her body left partially unclothed in the alley. A mother of two daughters taken from her own doorstep was found discarded in a Phoenix alley at the start of a new day.

 This killing broke the shape of the others. The parking lot, the street robbery, the apartment shootings, those had been fast. A confrontation and a gunshot. Villaina’s death had stretched across a kidnapping, a drive, an assault, and a killing. The violence widening into something that took time and movement and left her far from where it began.

 The man had not simply approached and fired. He had taken her, driven her, assaulted her, and left her in an alley. The man left physical evidence of himself on her. His DNA was present, a biological signature carried at the scene. A piece of the man himself deposited in the act. In the moment that evidence sat where all the other evidence sat, collected, logged, waiting, attached to no name the public knew.

 But unlike a casing or a stolen necklace, this was the man’s own body recorded against the woman he had killed. The missing person case became a homicide. A woman who had been coming home was now a body in an alley, and the man who had driven off with her in her own passenger seat had returned to the wider city.

 The car she had been taken in and its keys had passed into his keeping, along with everything else he had gathered across those December days. The pace of the month was now relentless. Two killings on December 15 alone, 90 minutes and 2 mi apart. The man at the center of all of it still showed nothing. his circle could read as alarm.

 He went on as himself, the artist, the man of God, the devoted son, even as the alley west of the airport gave up Villaina’s body and the count of the dead climbed. 2 days after that alley, the killings came home to the apartment on East Highland Avenue where it had all started from and to the two people who had given Cookie a roof. Renee held a particular place in her son’s account of himself.

 He called her a rock. He called her a great lady. In the version of his life Cookie presented to the world, his mother was the steady center, the woman he loved and honored, proof of his own goodness. Whatever else moved through him, he spoke of her with affection that sounded real to the people who heard it.

 But the household had its strains, and the neighbors had heard them. Kie had lived there for months, and in that time, arguments had risen between him and the people who had taken him in. Some of those arguments turned on heavy, frightening themes. Edward Nun had been heard telling Cookie to get out, that he was trouble, using words like Satan.

 There had been Rose before and after them. Cookie had always left for a while before returning. The arrangement held, but it held over a fault line. On December 17th, 2017, that fault line broke. Inside the apartment, an argument rose again, and this time it carried words about devils and demons. Voices loud enough for neighbors to hear through the walls.

 There were heavy thuds, the sound of furniture knocking against a wall. There were sharp, loud bangs. A woman screamed. The familiar pattern of a household quarrel tipped into something the neighbors registered as violence. When it was over, Renee Cookie and Edward Nun were both dead inside their own home, fatally shot at close range.

 The two people who had given Cleopus Cookie a place to live, the mother he called his rock, and the stepfather who had told him he was trouble, had been killed in the apartment where they had taken him in. The home that had been the steady point at the center of his life became the scene of the deaths of the two people who kept it.

 A neighbor’s report of shots fired sent police toward the East Highland Avenue address. The call went out as a shooting in progress at the cluster of condos and an officer turned toward the apartment where inside the bodies of Renee and Edward lay near the front of their home. The killings that had moved across the metro for 3 weeks from a parking lot to a west Phoenix street to Avandale to Glendale to an alley by the airport had come back to the apartment they had started from.

 The man inside was still there. Unlike every killing before it, where he had approached and then gone, vanishing into the city before anyone arrived. This time the killing had happened in his own residence and the police were already on their way to the door. There was no walking away across a field or driving off into the night.

 The scene and the man were about to occupy the same small space at the same moment. The arguments the neighbors had overheard gave the deaths of Renee and Edward a texture the other killings lacked. These were not strangers in a car or a guard on a street. This was the home, the mother, the stepfather, the household that Cookie had described as his anchor.

 The man who spoke of his mother as a rock had been in the apartment when she was killed. The stepfather who had called him Satan and Trouble had been killed in the same rooms. It was the evening around the time the light goes out of a Phoenix December sky. An officer was approaching the cluster of beige condos at 1320 East Highland Avenue, responding to a call of gunfire with no knowledge yet of the three weeks of deaths spread across the metro or the man who tied them together.

 The officer knew only that shots had been reported at an apartment and that someone beyond a door was likely badly hurt. What that officer found at the door turned a routine shots fired call into the moment the entire month came to a point. Officer Brian Oment was the first to reach the apartment. Arriving at 7:50 in the evening on the shots fired call.

 As he came up to the residence in the cluster of beige condos, he saw the doorway. There was a heavy presence of blood at the entrance and yet no trail of it leading up to the door. no path explaining how it had gotten there. The picture told him someone beyond that door was seriously hurt and he judged there was no time to wait for backup.

The door was locked. Ament banged on it and announced that police were present. After a moment, the lock clicked and the door opened to reveal Cookie standing behind a still locked screen door. The man told the officer that nothing was going on and that nobody else was inside, but he kept his right hand behind his back out of the officer’s view and at one point he appeared to fling something off to his right away from the door.

 Amended him to raise his hands and come out. Cookie began to reach toward something to his right, then stopped himself. He cracked the door and squeezed through the gap, careful never to give the officer a clear view of what lay behind him in the apartment. The officer asked him where all the blood had come from. Cookie scanned both of his own arms, settled on a small wound on his hand, and presented it.

 The officer judged it to be no worse than a paper cut. Cookie said he was much better now. When Aomet told him he was going to be detained, the man’s manner changed. He turned to face the officer, puffed up his chest, balled his fists, and pressed his arms tight against his sides. He began to yell. He called himself the strongest man alive. He threatened to cut the officer’s throat.

 The officer was still alone without backup with a raging man a few feet away and two people unaccounted for behind a bloodied door. Aimett kicked Cookie in the midsection and backed off to create distance. Cookie got up and came forward, shouting that he controlled the gun. The officer’s own pistol was still holstered. Rather than draw it, he unclipped his stun gun, ordered Cookie to the ground, and when the man refused, fired it.

 The electrical lead struck Cookie’s chest and brought him down, and he stayed there, the lead still pinned to him. Backup arrived. While other officers moved to clear the condo, a sergeant stood guard over Cookie and the man’s anger surfaced again in strange declarations. He said he was Donald Trump.

 He repeated it and then he said he had done this for Donald Trump. A pair of officers zip tied him and loaded him into a police Tahoe. And even there, the statements kept coming. He told an officer he was a 33deree Mason, that they had no right to detain him, that they could not cage him, that he knew what was going on.

 Inside the apartment lay the answer to the blood at the door. Author had to push against the door with his full weight to get in because two bodies blocked the way just beyond it. Renee Cookie and Edward Nun lay near the front of their home, both killed by gunfire at close range. Officers and forensic specialists moving through the rooms found evidence of violence throughout the apartment.

 A scene that matched the heavy presence of blood the first officer had seen at the entrance. The man in the back of the Tahoe had been arrested at the scene of his mother’s and stepfather’s deaths. Found inside their home with blood on him and a wound on his hand. having tried to tell the first officer that nothing was wrong and no one else was there.

 He had threatened the officer, claimed control of a gun, invoked the president and the Masons, and resisted until a stun gun put him on the ground. For the moment, that was the whole of it. A double homicide in a Phoenix apartment, a son arrested inside, two people dead near their own front door. The officers booking Cleopus Cookie Jr.

 that night were processing the killing of a mother and a stepfather. They did not yet know that 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 now a single terrible scene. What the officers had also recovered sitting in the apartment around the bodies were objects that did not belong to that home.

 On the sofa in the living room lay a handgun. Among the items were keys to a vehicle that was not the family’s. And around Cookie’s own neck hung a necklace. These things found in the rooms where Renee and Edward had died were about to turn one homicide scene into the key that unlocked all the others. In the days after the arrest, investigators turned to the gun.

 Phoenix had recently joined a federal effort, a justice department-led initiative built around a national network for tracking ballistics. The technology rested on a simple fact about firearms. When a gun fires, it leaves unique markings on the shell casing it ejects, marks as individual as a signature.

 The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives maintained a national database of images of those markings, and police could enter casings recovered from crime scenes into it to search for matches. When investigators had a gun but no casings, they could test fire it in a lab and create their own image to compare.

 The system was fast in a way older methods had not been. What had once taken weeks of forensic work could now return results in hours. With the Glock from the sofa and the casings collected across the scattered December scenes, investigators ran the comparisons. The markings spoke. The same weapon tied scene to scene. Within roughly 48 hours of arresting Cookie, the ballistics work had linked him beyond the apartment.

 The Glock taken from Richards had been used in the killings of Latory Beckford in Glendale, Christopher Cameron at the Glendale field, and Maria Villanoeva found in the alley. One stolen gun connected a security guard’s death, to three more killings across the metro. The casings that had sat in separate files, each tied to its own scene, now pointed to a single firearm in the possession of a single man.

 The investigators kept going. They had two weapons in play because Cookie had used two 9mm pistols across the spree. They bolstered the ballistics with other kinds of evidence. There was the DNA recovered from Villaina’s body, a biological match to the man in custody. There was cell phone data, the records of where phones had traveled and when, mapping movements against the killings.

 There was surveillance footage, including the cameras that had captured Villanuva’s abduction from her complex. There was the stolen property itself, the necklace, and the keys. Physical links between Cookie and the dead. Piece by piece, a double homicide in an apartment grew into something far larger. The two friends shot in the parked car near Indian School Road.

 The security guard killed and robbed on a West Phoenix Street. The man shot at close range in his Aendale apartment. The young man training for the ambulances killed in a Glendale courtyard. The young father shot at the Glendale field. The mother taken from her complex and found in the alley. And Cookie’s own mother and stepfather dead near their front door.

The same man stood at the center of all of it. The count reached nine killings across three weeks in Phoenix and the suburbs of Glendale and Avandale from November 27th to December 17. All of the victims had been shot. They spanned ages and backgrounds and ethnicities, men and women with no connection to one another, some known to Cookie and some complete strangers.

The only thread that ran through every scene was the man now in custody and the weapons and stolen items tied to him. Investigators had cracked a series of killings the public had never even known was a series. There had been no announcement of a serial killer at work. No warning to the city because no one had connected the scattered deaths until the gun on the sofa pulled them together.

A routine shots fired call at an apartment had become the key to three weeks of unsolved homicides. Now the police had the man, the weapon, and the physical links. What they did not have was an account from Cookie himself. In January, detectives sat down across a table from him to get one. In January 2018, nearly a month after the arrest, a Phoenix police detective named Paul Dalton sat down with Cleopus Cookie in an interview room.

 The conversation ran about 3 hours, and across it, Cookie built a portrait of himself that bore no resemblance to the scenes investigators had assembled. He presented a man of God reformed by his years in prison, someone who looked for the light in people, and drew the light out in return. He talked about the women who were drawn to him.

He said people, especially women, saw the light in him and he boasted of thousands of friends on Facebook and a high school nickname of Playboy. He spoke of his mother with open love, calling her a rock and a great lady. The man across the table described his own life as a rising one, an artist on his way up, a person who had left his old world behind. He felt envied.

 He said he was winning out there. Dalton had interviewed many people who had killed and he had a way of working toward the truth beneath a person’s self-presentation. He asked Cookie whether there might be two of him, one light and one dark. Cookie rejected it. There was only one Cookie, he said. The detective also tested whether the man heard voices, whether something in his mind pulled him toward what he had done.

 Cookie dismissed it flatly, despite the statements he had shouted at his arrest. In the interview room, he appeared composed. Then Dalton began to put the dead in front of him. He set down a photograph of Maria Vanoeva, 43 years old, a mother of two daughters, a woman taken from her own apartment complex, and found in a South Phoenix alley the next morning.

 He told Cookie the woman was dead and that Cookie’s own DNA had been found at the scene. The composure cracked. Cookie reacted with force, insisting he would never leave a woman dead, that it was not what he did, that he had never been that kind of person. He demanded to know what he could possibly gain from killing an innocent woman who helped him.

 He reached for his music as a defense of his character. He told the detective that if you listen to his songs, anything he said about a woman was about building her up. He said he loved women, that he could never do something like that. He pointed to the love songs he had written, the verses to the woman he called his queen and the light of his life, Liliana Vasquez, the woman he had been seeing, whose brother had welcomed him as family.

 Yet his catalog also held a song about using a woman and then leaving her in the dirt to die. An image that sat against the way Villaina had been found. Dalton confronted him about Jesus real. 25 years old, Liliana’s brother, the man who had offered to put money into Cookie’s music and had treated him as one of his own.

 Cookie called him a brother. He said he had heard about Real’s death from Liliana. He spoke about how close they had been, how Real had trusted him around his sisters, how the family had accepted him despite the difference in their backgrounds and his record. about the killing itself. He offered almost nothing.

 He said only that Real had told him he was going to invest in his music. And then a few days later, people were saying Real was no longer around. The detective showed him photograph after photograph and each face had been a life. Parker Smith, 21, and Andrew Remlard, 27, the two friends from the parked car. Remlard, a husband and a father.

 So Richards, 31, the security guard walking home. Latory Beckford, 29, who had been training to ride the ambulances. Christopher Cameron, 21, a young father. And the two from the apartment on East Highland Avenue, Renee Cookie, 56, his mother, and Edward Nun, 54, his stepfather. Dalton presented a booking photo of Cookie taken 2 days after the arrest and told him he saw no sunshine in that face. Cookie said only that it hurt.

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

 No reason at all. He returned to his refrain about his own success, the better life he was living, the envy he believed surrounded him. He was winning out there, he repeated. He had no reason to do harm. The man who had been arrested inside his mother’s apartment, wearing a dead man’s necklace with a dead man’s gun on the sofa and a kidnapped woman’s keys in the rooms, sat across the table and denied the whole of it.

 The interview ended without an admission, but the detective had drawn out something close to a window into the man. The salesman’s pitch he kept making about his own goodness, set against the evidence stacked around him. Dalton saw through the pitch. He called Cookie in effect a salesman, a man selling a version of himself that the facts would not buy.

 On January 18th, 2018, the Phoenix Police Department laid the case before the public. 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 that ran from November 27th to December 17th across Phoenix, Glendale, and Aendale, taking nine lives. A sergeant told reporters there was a distinct possibility Cookie had killed others not yet identified and asked the public for help because for several of the killings there was no established motive and no connection between Cookie and the people he killed.

 Some he had known, others were strangers. No single reason united them. The break came from ballistics. The system returned results from shell casings within hours instead of weeks. And that speed exposed the connections between cases that had looked unrelated. The gun recovered on the sofa run through the national network had turned a single apartment scene into the solution to a string of homicides.

 The announcement carried a strange weight. Phoenix had lived through serial shooting fear before. But those cases had unfolded in the open with the public aware a killer was loose. Cookie’s spree had drawn no publicity while it happened because no one knew the killings were connected. The city learned of the danger only after it had been caught.

Cookie had already been indicted on firstdegree murder in the December 17th deaths of his mother and stepfather. The killings he was arrested for. Now police tied him publicly to seven more. He was a prohibited possessor, a felon barred from any firearm, and the charges carried the weapons, the robbery, and the assault that ran through the spree.

The families now had a name to attach to their losses. Anthia Wint, Beckford’s mother, found some measure of closure in the arrest, though it could not bring her son back. He had carried such a will for life, and she could not grasp that he was simply gone. The closure and the open wound sat side by side.

 As Cookiey’s name went public, his King Playbola videos found an audience. People searched out the clips of him rapping on his couch and the comment sections filled with revulsion as listeners set the violent lyrics against the killings. The producer who had recorded him, who had chocked the lyrics up to the genre and never felt unsafe around the quiet, serious artist he drove home from sessions, was stunned.

Among the nine sat one death that stood apart. The killing of Jesus real, the man Cookie called a brother. The household at its center had its own reckoning with the law. The killing of Jesus real had moved differently from the start. When Avandale police came to the apartment on December 11th, they found him dead, shot at close range on the chase.

 The phone charger sat plugged in beside him, but the phone was gone and there were no shell casings on the floor. The scene had been emptied of the small evidence the other killings left behind. The people who should have raised the alarm had not. Real’s sister Liliana Vasquez discovered his body and rather than call police, she left.

 She drove to pick up her sister, Gracel Vasquez. The missing phone surfaced later at a nearby motel in the company of the two sisters. In the hours after Real’s death, the household that had welcomed Cookie moved away from the scene and carried the dead man’s phone with them. As the case became public, police booked the two sisters and a third woman, Desiree Coronado, the mother of real son, on suspicion of tampering with evidence and hindering the investigation.

Three women close to both the dead man and to Cookie had in the eyes of investigators worked against the effort to solve the killing. Liliana had been the bridge into the family. The woman Cookie called his queen. But that bond was already failing. He was seeing other women, one of them pregnant, and she had grown distant.

 By the time of the killing, she had not seen him for days. Questioned from jail, she held back, saying she knew nothing about what happened to her brother or whether Cookie was involved and that she had told Avandale police everything. Set against her flight and the phone at the motel, that was what had landed her in custody.

 The detectives had a reason to press her. The fragments recovered from real could have come from a 9mm pistol, the same kind used across the spree, the same kind taken from the security guard 9 days earlier. A description of that gun from someone close to Cookie could tie Real’s death to the same hand. But Cookie gave them nothing.

 He spoke of Real warmly, a brother, a man whose family had accepted him despite his record, who had meant to invest in his music and then was no longer around. The death in his telling had simply occurred near his life. Real’s case diverged on a question of proof. The missing casings, the emptied scene, the silence of those closest to it left it on weaker ground than the killings anchored by the gun and the DNA.

 Prosecutors concluded there was no reasonable likelihood of conviction, and the three women were never indicted. Real’s killings stood as the one death police attributed to Cookie that no court would weigh. So, the case settled on eight killings, not nine. Eight scenes held together by ballistics, DNA, stolen property, surveillance, and cell phone data, all pointing at one man.

 The work moved from the streets to the courthouse. With Cookie charged and held, the case entered the slow machinery of the Maricopa County courts. He faced eight counts of first-degree murder along with kidnapping, armed robbery, and sexual assault charges from the spree, and prosecutors made clear they would seek the death penalty.

 The man who had cast himself as a reforming artist now faced the most serious case the state could bring. He insisted the allegations were false and pleaded not guilty, calling himself a music artist wrongly accused who wanted his day in court. In a handwritten letter to a judge in January 2020, he wrote that he was in the utmost hurry to prove the charges were false accusations and that the best way was a not-uilty verdict.

 He signed the page as a music artist, not a rapist and not a murderer. But the case did not move at the speed he demanded. Eight killings with mountains of forensic evidence across multiple scenes and jurisdictions made for a heavy case on both sides. Then the pandemic slowed the courts.

 The postponement stacked up and the delays interfered even with the experts ability to evaluate Cookie. The calendar turned from 2018 to 2019 to 2020 and on the evidence waited. The families of the eight dead waited. One fight turned on the science that had cracked the case. The defense challenged the ballistics matching that had linked the gun on the sofa to multiple scenes, pointing to a controversial 2016 report that questioned the reliability of firearms identification, the discipline of matching markings on casings and bullets to a single weapon. They sought

to keep it out or to undercut it before a jury. The reliability of the links became a contested point. Cookie was not the only accused serial killer in the Phoenix courts. Then his case ran alongside that of Aaron Saledo, a former bus driver charged in a separate series that had killed nine people over a span ending in July 2016.

 A case that leaned on the same ballistic science and faced the same challenge. Two of the most prolific accused killers in the valley’s recent history sat in the same system. Both facing death, both pleading not guilty. The history reached back further. In 2015, 11 freeway shootings had frightened the metro, striking vehicles without serious injury, and the only person charged saw the charges dismissed and won a court order clearing his name.

 Cookie’s case joined that history as another entry. Set apart by the fact that his spree was solved only after it ended. The trial dates kept being set and pushed. The court eventually aiming at 2025. The evidence held. The gun, the DNA, the stolen necklace and keys, the surveillance footage, the cell phone records, the eight scenes, none of it had weakened.

 After more than 7 years of waiting, in the spring of 2025, the case at last reached a Maricopa County courtroom. On May 5th, 2025, the trial began, more than seven 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 laid out its theory.

 The people Cookie killed shared one thing. Everyone had been vulnerable at the moment they died. The prosecutor framed it as a classic, “Who done it?” then answered the question himself, pointing across the room and naming the man at the defense table. The case would rest on DNA, ballistics, cell phone data, stolen property, and witnesses.

 The spine was the one that had cracked the case years earlier. Cookie found with blood on him at the scene of his mother’s and stepfather’s deaths. Days before, the security guard, Sem Richards, killed and robbed, his necklace and gun traced to Cookie. That gun then connected to several more killings. The defense answered with a different frame.

Cookie’s attorney reminded the jurors of their duty to stay impartial, then went at what the state had to prove. The prosecution had pointed to no motive, he said, calling the offenses random and unrelated. The jury had heard nothing about premeditation, the deliberate forethought firstderee murder required.

The state said Cookie had simply walked up and shot the first two men, but there was no rhyme or reason to it. Without motive and without premeditation, the defense argued the case for first-degree murder did not hold. The defense also questioned the reliability of the state’s witnesses. The man who had written that he was a music artist and not a murderer now had attorneys arguing the state could not prove he had killed with the planning the law demanded.

 The trial settled into a long rhythm. Across the months, the prosecution walked the jury through the eight killings and the evidence behind each. The ballistics matching casings and bullets to the weapons, the DNA recovered from Maria Villanuva, the surveillance footage of her abduction, the cell phone records mapping movement against the killings, the stolen necklace and keys.

 A detective testified about what neighbors had reported over hearing the night of the final killings. The argument about devils and demons inside the apartment. The state presented eight deaths as the work of one man across a 3-week span. Lives that ranged across age, background, and ethnicity. Some known to him and some strangers with no single motive, but a single hand, and the physical evidence to prove it.

 On September 25th, 2025, the jury convicted Cleopus Cookie Jr. on every count. All eight first-degree murders, the kidnapping of Maria Villanuva, the armed robbery counts, the attempted sexual assault. Across 14 charges, the jury found him guilty. Cookie looked down at the defense table as the verdicts were read.

 The man who had insisted for more than seven years that the allegations were false, who had called himself a music artist and not a murderer, heard a jury reject all of it. The science, the stolen property, the surveillance, the DNA, and the testimony had carried every count. The families met the verdict with a grief.

 The guilty findings could not lift, only acknowledge. Adriana Rodriguez, Villaina’s daughter, spoke through tears, saying the family was finally getting closure, a day they had feared would never come, and that Cookie had taken her mother, the only support system she had. Eric Hampton, a friend of Renee Cookie and Edward Nun, who had watched Cookie grow up, came to see whether the defendant would show any sympathy. He found none.

 He had thought maybe Cookie had a little heart, he said. But the man had none at all to do these things and worst of all to kill his own mother. He called him a monster. The conviction settled guilt, not fate. Because prosecutors sought the death penalty, the same jury would decide his punishment, and the sentencing phase was set to begin within days on September 29th.

 First, the court handled the lesser counts. On November 14th, 2025, Cookie was sentenced for the non-murder charges, more than 9 years in total, layered onto a man already convicted of eight killings. Then came the gravest question. The panel was instructed to weigh aggravating and mitigating factors, the balance the law requires before the ultimate punishment.

 The prosecution pressed the weight of eight killings of vulnerable people taken across a metro area of a mother and a stepfather shot in their own home. The defense offered what mitigation it could for a man facing death. The jury had to decide whether an aggravating circumstance existed that warranted it. They deliberated into December.

 The families who had waited more than 7 years for the trial waited again. In the middle of December 2025, the jury reached its decision. The verdict was read on December 18th, 2025 in Maricopa County Superior Court, closing a case that had run from a 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. For those six killings, it found the aggravating circumstances warranted the ultimate punishment. On the other two, the jury did not agree. Those were the killings of his mother, Renee Cookie, and his stepfather, Edward Nun, the two who had taken him into their home on East Highland Avenue.

 The panel that had sentenced him to death for six killings, hung on the punishment for the deaths of his own mother and the stepfather, who had told him to get out. The split left the two domestic killings unresolved. The county attorney now had a choice. seek a sentencing retrial on those two before a new jury or set aside the death penalty effort and let a judge impose life.

 For six killings, the sentence was settled at death. For the two closest to him, the matter stayed open. The county attorney spoke in stark terms. Anyone who questioned 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 upon 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 through. Alongside the six capital sentences sat the nine plus years already imposed for the non-murder charges. The legal weight against him was now nearly total. For the families who had carried their losses since late 2017, the sentencing marked a kind of conclusion, even as it returned none of the dead.

 The man who had spent the trial maintaining his innocence heard himself sentenced to death six times over. The artist, the man of God, the son who called his mother a rock, had been found to be the person who killed eight people and condemned to die for six of them. The reading did not close the case. Kie and his defense team moved at once to the next stage of the legal fight and the two hung counts left unfinished business for the prosecution.

The verdict was an ending and at the same time the start of the long road that follows a death sentence. In the immediate aftermath of the December 18th sentencing, Cookie and his defense team submitted an appeal. A death sentence in Arizona begins a lengthy review and his lawyers move to begin it without delay.

The conviction and the sentence would now be examined by higher courts. The appeal reopened the questions the trial had answered. The defense had fought the ballistics evidence, pointing to the 2016 report on the reliability of firearms identification and had argued the state showed no motive and no premeditation, that the killings were random and unrelated.

 Those arguments now passed to the courts that would review whether the trial was conducted properly and whether the evidence supported the verdicts. Alongside it sat the two hung counts. The jury had not agreed on punishment for the killings of Renee Cookie and Edward Nun and the county attorney faced the choice of a sentencing retrial or letting a judge impose life.

 The two deaths that had brought police to the apartment, the killings that cracked the entire case open, now formed the loose end of the process. The case also left behind the one killing that never reached a courtroom. Jesus real, the man Cookie called a brother, had been counted among the nine in 2018, but prosecutors found no reasonable likelihood of conviction and never charged it.

 a death tied to an emptied scene, missing casings, a vanished phone, and the silence of those closest to it. And the broader question stayed open. Police had said from the start there was a distinct possibility Cookie had killed others not yet identified, and that unsolved investigations continued. The count the public knew rested only on the scenes the ballistics and DNA had tied together.

 Whether the full reach of his violence had been measured, the authorities left unanswered. His case also stayed linked to that of Aaron Saledo. The the former bus driver accused in a separate series whose trial had been pushed into late 2026 in the same system on the same kind of ballistic science. The persona Cookie had built did not survive the evidence.

The King Playbola videos still sat online, their comment sections full of revulsion. The violent lyrics now read against the eight people he had been convicted of killing. The man of God, the reformed prisoner, the artist who believed the Builtmore lifestyle was calling him, had been found to be the person at the center of three weeks of death.

 What remained beyond the legal machinery were the people he had taken and the lives that stopped in those weeks while his continued but only as far as a cell. Cleopus Cookie Jr. did not leave the courtroom with any future left to build. He left it condemned to die six times over and was moved on to Arizona’s death row, the place the state keeps the men it intends to put to death. for the eight lives he took.

 The law set a single answer for him. Execution. Arizona is carrying that sentence out again. After a troubled execution in 2014, the state paused for years, but it resumed putting the condemned to death in 2022, again in 2025, and it has executions scheduled into 2026. The machinery that had stalled is running.

 One by one, the men ahead of Cookie on the row are being taken to the death chamber, and the line is moving toward him. The prosecutor who convicted him left no doubt about where it ends. Death, she said, was the only just punishment for him, and she pledged to do everything in her power to see it carried through. The state that sentenced him means to kill him for what he did, and it has shown warrant by warrant that it will.

The road there is long. Cookie’s appeal is already filed and the review that follows a death sentence climbs through the state and federal courts over years. Arizona’s recently executed inmates spent an average of more than 25 years on the row before the end came. So Cookie will wait. He will grow older inside a cell.

 His case grinding through court after court. But the appeals are a delay, not a door out. The sentence stands. The state intends to enforce it, and the men who went before him show what waits at the end of that wait. When it comes, it will be the same end they met. An execution carried out by the state of Arizona.

 Cookie, who spent 16 years in prison for the death that began his record and walked out determined to be someone the world would notice, will leave prison only once more and only to be put to death. The people he killed were given no road at all. No cell, no appeal, no years. Parker Smith and Andrew Remlard, Sem Richards, Latory Beckford, Christopher Cameron, Maria Villanuva, and Renee Cookie and Edward Nun.

 Their lives ended in November and December of 2017. His will end in an execution chamber on a date the state will set. That is where the road runs for Cleopus Cookie Jr. The verdict named what he did. The sentence named what will be done to him. This is no way out.