The jury’s verdict was delivered one line at a time, each one a sentence of death. Six times, the panel agreed that Cleopus Emanuel Cookie Jr. should be executed for the lives he took.
Two more counts, the killings of his own mother and stepfather, were left undecided, the jury deadlocked on those charges. The courtroom in Maricopa County fell into a quiet, heavy grief as the decision was read. Families who had waited eight years for this moment wept, the wound finally given a name.
The man at the center of it all, now 43 years old, sat at the defense table, older than he was when he last walked free. The verdict came down for the murders of Parker Gregory Smith, Andrew Remlard, Sy Richards, Lator Beckford, Christopher Cameron, and Maria Villanueva. For these six victims, the state of Arizona declared its intention to ππΎππ him.
The two killings inside his own home, those of his mother Renee and stepfather Edward Nun, remain unfinished business, a hung jury forcing the court to return to them later.
Outside the courthouse, the Maricopa County Attorney spoke with stark finality. Anyone who questions whether the death penalty is ever justified, she said, needs to look no further than this case. It took a particular kind of evil to prey on the vulnerable the way this man did.
Death, she argued, is the only just answer. The families of the victims, some still crying, stood in the gallery, their long wait for a resolution finally reaching a grim conclusion.
To understand how the state arrived at this sentence, we must go back nearly 30 years. Cleopus Emanuel Cookie Jr. was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1982.
His grandfather, Roy Cookie, was a respected civil rights organizer, a man whose name was attached to decades of patient work for change. His grandson inherited the surname but none of the legacy. By his teenage years, Cookie had fallen into the orbit of a Phoenix gang, the Westside City Crypts, drawn to a world that measured a man by a different code entirely.
In 2000, at 18 years old, Cookie and three others planned to rob a Phoenix strip club called Mustang Sally’s. The robbery went wrong when a bar employee drew a weapon and fired, killing a close friend of Cookie’s. Under Arizona’s felony murder statute, Cookie was held responsible for that death.
He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery, insisting for years that he was no killer. In November 2001, the doors closed behind him for a 16-year sentence.
Prison did not reform him. His file contained more than 20 serious disciplinary write-ups for fighting, assault on staff, and πΉπππ possession. He did earn his GED, a single step forward in a record otherwise built on infractions.
He also claimed that a prison staff member sexually assaulted him, leaving him angry. Whatever the full truth, he carried that grievance and his temper all the way to the door when he was released in 2017.
Freedom arrived on July 28, 2017. Cookie, now 35, moved into the apartment his mother Renee and stepfather Edward Nun kept on East Highland Avenue in Phoenix. He found side work in construction and sold cell phones, pulling in around $300 in a good week.
With his rent covered by family, the money was his to spend on the life he was determined to build. That life centered on music, a rapper persona he called King Playbola.
He found a small home studio run by a producer named Daniel and started recording. In the booth, Cookie was quiet and serious, never making the producer feel unsafe. The songs told a rougher story, rapping about drugs, money, violence, and women.
One track called Monster framed killing as a business. Another rhymed about cutting down rivals. Off the mic, he presented himself as a man of God, reformed by his years away, someone who looked for the light in people.
By late November 2017, Cookie had been free for almost four months. He had his music, his women, his side jobs, and his mother’s couch. On November 27, the anniversary of the Mustang Sally’s robbery passed.
The next evening, an ordinary Monday, two young men were about to become the first names on a list no one in Phoenix knew was being written. Parker Gregory Smith, 21, and Andrew Remlard, 27, were shot to death while sitting in a parked car.
There was no robbery, no argument, no relationship investigators could draw between the two friends and whoever had approached them. They were simply there, and then they weren’t. The case was filed as a double homicide with no clear lead.
Five miles away, Cookie kept showing up for his recording sessions. Five days later, on December 2, a security guard named Sy Richards, 31, was walking to his girlfriend’s apartment. He was robbed and shot to death, his 9mm Glock handgun and a necklace taken.
The stolen Glock became the key to everything that followed. On December 11, Cookie killed Jesus Bonafasio Rayal, a man he called a brother. Rayal had accepted Cookie into his family and offered to invest in his music.
He was shot at close range while resting, his cell phone taken. No shell casings were left behind. The killing was so clean that prosecutors later concluded they could not secure a conviction, and it was never charged.
Two days later, the killing moved to Glendale. On December 13, Lator Beckford, 29, a man training to become an ambulance worker, was shot to death in the common area of an apartment complex. The weapon was a 9mm pistol, the same caliber as the stolen Glock.
On December 15, Christopher Cameron, 21, a young father with an infant son, was shot multiple times during a transaction at another Glendale apartment complex. He died the next day.
Ninety minutes after Cameron was shot, Maria Villanueva, 43, a mother of two, drove toward her own apartment complex. Surveillance cameras captured a man closing the distance to her, then the two of them leaving together in her own vehicle. She was taken from her own doorstep.
The next morning, her body was found in an alley in South Phoenix. She had been shot and sexually assaulted. Her killer left behind his DNA, a biological signature that would later tie him directly to the scene.
On December 17, the killing came back to where it had started. Inside the apartment on East Highland Avenue, an argument rose between Cookie and his mother and stepfather. Neighbors heard talk of devils and demons, heavy thuds, and a woman screaming.
When it was over, Renee Cookie and Edward Nun were both dead inside their own home, shot at close range. A neighbor reported shots fired, and Officer Brian Ament arrived to find a heavy presence of blood at the entrance.
Cookie opened the door, insisting nothing was going on. He kept his right hand out of view and flung something to the side. When Ament ordered him to raise his hands, Cookie became enraged, puffing out his chest and threatening to cut the officer’s throat.
Ament kicked him to create distance and then used a taser to bring him down. Once in custody, Cookie made strange declarations, claiming he was Donald Trump and that he had done this for him.
Inside the apartment, officers found two bodies blocking the door. Scattered through the scene were a handgun on the sofa, a set of car keys, and a necklace around Cookie’s own neck. That night, officers believed they were processing a double homicide.
They had no idea the man in their custody was tied to a string of deaths across three cities. The gun on the sofa was the stolen Glock, and ballistics testing would soon link it to four other killings.
Within 48 hours of Cookie’s arrest, the ballistics network had connected the stolen weapon to the murders of Lator Beckford, Christopher Cameron, and Maria Villanueva. DNA from Villanueva’s body provided a direct biological match. Cell phone records placed Cookie where the killings happened.
The stolen necklace and keys were found in his mother’s living room. A routine shots fired call at one apartment had become the key to three weeks of homicides the city had not even known were related.
In January 2018, Detective Paul Dalton sat down with Cookie for a three-hour interview. Cookie built a portrait of himself as a man of God, reformed by prison, someone who looked for the light in people. He spoke of his mother with affection.
When Dalton asked if there might be two versions of him, one light and one dark, Cookie rejected it outright. There was only one, he said. Then Dalton began putting photographs of the dead on the table.
He showed Cookie a picture of Maria Villanueva and told him her death was tied to him through DNA. Cookie’s composure cracked. He insisted he would never leave a woman dead.
He pointed to his music as a defense, saying his songs were about building women up. His catalog also contained a verse about using a woman and leaving her in the dirt to die. Dalton showed him photograph after photograph, each one a life taken, and Cookie held his line through all of it.
He had nothing to do with any of it, he said. No reason to hurt any of these people. 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. On January 18, 2018, the Phoenix Police Department laid the case out for the public for the first time, displaying the photographs of nine homicide victims.
Cookie had already been indicted for the murders of his mother and stepfather. Now police tied him publicly to seven more. The city learned about the danger only after it had already been caught.
The trial did not begin until May 2025, more than seven years after the killings. The state’s theory was simple: every victim had been vulnerable in the moment Cookie found them. The defense argued there was no motive and no premeditation, that the killings were random and unconnected.
On September 25, 2025, the jury convicted Cookie on every count. All eight first-degree murders, the kidnapping of Maria Villanueva, the armed robbery counts, 14 charges in total. Cookie looked down at the defense table as the verdicts were read.
The man who had insisted the allegations were false sat and listened to a jury reject every part of that story. The sentencing phase began within days, and on December 18, the jury returned its decision on punishment.
Six sentences of death. For the murders of Parker Smith, Andrew Remlard, Sy Richards, Lator Beckford, Christopher Cameron, and Maria Villanueva, the jury found the aggravating circumstances warranted the ultimate punishment. On the killings of Renee Cookie and Edward Nun, the jury could not agree.
The split leaves the county attorney with a choice: seek a new sentencing trial on those two counts or let a judge impose life in prison instead.
Outside the courthouse, the county attorney spoke in stark terms. Anyone who questions the need for the death penalty, she said, needs to look no further. Death is the only just punishment.
Cookie and his defense team moved immediately to appeal, a process that will likely run for decades. Arizona’s machinery for carrying out death sentences has resumed, and inmates recently executed spent an average of more than 25 years on death row before the end came.
Cookie spent 16 years in prison for a death he never caused with his own hands. He 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.
Parker Smith, Andrew Remlard, Sy Richards, Jesus Rayal, Lator Beckford, Christopher Cameron, Maria Villanueva, Renee Cookie, Edward Nun. Nine names, nine lives that ended across three weeks so that one man could keep telling himself he was winning. He was not.
He just had not been caught.
