Slaying of teacher hits 2-year mark
Beaver County DA: Virus slowed probe
After an elementary school teacher was gunned down in her Aliquippa driveway on Mother’s Day 2018, police had no trouble finding people to question.
One was victim Rachael DelTondo’s ex-fiance, Frank Catroppa, a successful local businessman. The couple’s relationship had ended poorly.
The other was Sheldon Jeter Jr., a onetime Aliquippa High School football player with whom Ms. DelTondo had a sporadic intimate relationship. A leaked police report documenting a late-night meeting the two had in a car while he was still a teen had led to her suspension from Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School.
Ms. DelTondo’s love life was messy. Few would debate the police strategy of focusing, at least initially, on her past lovers.
“I know if I were defending the case, Frank would be among the people that I would certainly want to subpoena given some of the speculation surrounding the case and his former relationship with her,” said Stephen Colafella, Mr. Catroppa’s lawyer, who denies that his client had anything to do with Ms. DelTondo’s death.
“The initial, knee-jerk reaction that Sheldon was somehow involved has proven not to be true,” said Mr. Jeter’s lawyer, Michael Santicola. Mr. Jeter was charged last month with fatally shooting a childhood friend. Mr. Santicola said his client was not involved in either killing.
Whatever police gleaned from
their early interviews with Ms. DelTondo’s former romantic interests — including Rashawn Bolton, Mr. Jeter’s brother — the information didn’t make for a quick arrest.
Indeed, more than two years later, Ms. DelTondo’s case plods on, remaining unsolved despite the publicity generated by being featured on a May 2019 episode of the true-crime TV show “48 Hours” called “What Happened to Rachael DelTondo?” That question still has not been answered.
“Who knows how the rest of the story unfolds? This is Beaver County after all, and this Rachael DelTondo story is going in 15 different directions,” said Gerald Benyo, a veteran criminal defense lawyer. “There’s so many things that don’t make any sense to me based on 25 years of criminal practice in Beaver County. It’s just such a strange, unique, weird case. ... It concerns me that it appears that a homicide took place and based upon the information released publicly there’s not much evidence at all pointing to who committed the crime.”
Investigators don’t have a murder weapon or an eyewitness.
“When no eyewitness comes forward and when there is no handgun in our possession, we have to use all sorts of other investigative and forensic tools,” Beaver County District Attorney David Lozier said recently.
“We have phone data, we have camera data, we have other computer devices that people might have had, we have witness interviews, we have computer analysis of data that we can do, or that other agencies can do with us, that allows us to bring all this information together to make sense to a judge in a preliminary hearing or to a jury.”
But the county’s top prosecutor isn’t at that stage yet.
No one has been named a suspect or deemed a “person of interest,” a vague term favored by law enforcement agencies. And Aliquippa’s police department has taken a major reputation hit, with a carousel of chiefs and various internal problems that reared up in the early stages of the investigation before the chief recused the force from the DelTondo case.
Ms. DelTondo spent her final hours on Sunday, May 13, 2018, getting ice cream in New Brighton with friends — Lauren Watkins, the then-17year-old daughter of an Aliquippa police sergeant, and Tyrie Jeter, another brother of Sheldon Jeter’s. The brothers texted with each other, with Sheldon asking where the group was, according to a search warrant in the case.
At 10:44 p.m. Ms. Watkins dropped Ms. DelTondo at the home she shared with her parents on Buchanan Street in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood and left with Tyrie Jeter. Four minutes later, the 33-year-old teacher was killed, shot multiple times in the driveway.
What happened in that four-minute gap?
“That’s the whole case,” Mr. Lozier said. “We have a pretty good idea.”
But he’s keeping it to himself for now.
Questions abound. Was Ms. DelTondo cooperating with the Pennsylvania State Police to investigate corruption in Aliquippa, a notion raised during the TV episode? Who was responsible for death threats her mother said her daughter had received? Did Ms. DelTondo fear the police and think they were following her, as her mother claimed? Was she the target of a crime of passion or a motive more sinister?
Ms. DelTondo’s parents declined to comment through their attorney, as did an aunt who spoke to “48 Hours” and would now say only that said she regrets it.
Mr. Lozier declined to talk about Ms. DelTondo’s relationships with men or the fact that she spent significant time with people half her age.
“I am not going to comment on the life or lifestyle of a homicide victim,” he said.
Some have speculated that Ms. DelTondo’s death involved the police. No evidence has surfaced to bolster concerns about law enforcement misconduct in the case.
“Do you think anyone in the police department was involved in any way in Rachael’s death?” Erin Moriarty, a “48 Hours” correspondent, asked Joseph Perciavalle III, a former assistant police chief who has a pending federal lawsuit against the city and top officials claiming they retaliated against him for blowing the whistle on misconduct.
“You just never know,” Officer Perciavalle said. “Aliquippa is a small community with New York problems.”
Mr. Colafella pointed to the arrival at the DelTondo home of Ms. Watkins’ father, Kenneth Watkins, shortly after the killing. He has since been demoted to patrolman from sergeant and has his own federal suit pending against Aliquippa.
Then-Sgt. Watkins approached the crime scene but was turned away because he had no immediate reason to be there, according to Mr. Lozier.
Mr. Colafella views the incident as benign but suggested that others might not.
“If you ask a lot of people in Beaver County, there would be some who would opine there has to be police involvement or did they do something to throw off the trail of the investigators,” Mr. Colafella said.
Mr. Lozier did not attribute any nefarious motive to the incident. “He was close to the DelTondos, as was his family,” he said.
But asked whether he could refute the rumor mill alleging police involvement, Mr. Lozier said, “No.”
“We’ve investigated every angle, including all of those, and I can’t comment on any of that until the case is filed,” he said.
One thing Mr. Lozier could dismiss was an allegation by a criminal named Wayne Cordes that, while in jail, he received a letter from Ms. Watkins, fingering police as Ms. DelTondo’s killer and indicating that she witnessed the murder — contrary to what she told detectives. While Mr. Lozier would not discuss Ms. Watkins’ statement to police, he said Mr. Cordes and his cellmate made up the story.
“You had two guys sitting in jail who stole a piece of paper and red pen, I think, from the infirmary and together they wrote this letter and snuck it out hoping to get a good resolution of their cases,” Mr. Lozier said. “... [T]he the guys who wrote the letter made it up out of whole cloth.”
Mr. Benyo, the veteran attorney, represented Mr. Cordes but said he could not independently verify the DA’s account of the letter, though he said he had no reason to doubt Mr. Lozier.
Despite the sometimes bizarre twists and turns of the case, Mr. Lozier said the investigation is in a “good place” — or at least it was, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We think we know what happened that night,” Mr. Lozier said recently. “We want to make sure that before we file charges, that we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt what happened.”
The investigation was moving along, Mr. Lozier said, and then the pandemic interrupted. Investigators from different agencies who would gather in person to discuss the case could no longer do so, and an online meeting wasn’t a sufficient replacement, he said.
“We are doing scores of virtual meetings and videoconferences and even court appearances every day in this courthouse. But some things aren’t suited” for that, Mr. Lozier said, declining to explain further.
“Honestly, I thought we would have been done,” Mr. Lozier said. “I thought we were at a good place a couple of months ago, but COVID-19 interrupted the ability of agencies to work together in the same room and in the collaborative manner that we need to do. So some of this review and cooperative effort is temporarily on hold.”
Mr. Lozier declined to say whether Mr. Jeter fits into his investigation. He said other law enforcement agencies are assisting, but he would not identify which ones. And he would not come close to revealing whether investigators have a likely culprit.
“I will not say that we have a suspect, I will not say that we have a person of interest, because I have a duty as the prosecutor to keep an open mind and to be able to accept the fact that while we think we know what happened, we could be wrong, and until we reach the point where we have sufficient evidence to justify filing charges, I will not name a suspect or person of interest in a homicide.
“What if I’m wrong? Then I’ve destroyed a person’s life.”
In an effort to put things in perspective with the DelTondo case, Mr. Lozier points to another homicide investigation handled by his office: the 2008 executionstyle double murder of Richard and Demetria Harper in the basement of their Beaver Falls home.
It took four years to arrest two suspects and another two for them to be convicted. Twelve years after the slayings, the case is still tied up in court on appeal.
“But this is not unheard of,” Mr. Lozier said recently of the length of time a homicide case can take, particularly a circumstantial one. “This is not ‘NCIS.’ It’s not resolved in one hour or even, sometimes, two episodes.”
When the DelTondo case will be resolved is anyone’s guess. And Mr. Lozier certainly isn’t telling. He said he understands that many families are hurting: the DelTondos, the Jeters, the Catroppas and the Watkinses. The nature of Aliquippa, a hardscrabble community of about 9,000 that has produced its fair share of famous athletes and notorious killers, means that there are webs of connections and closely guarded secrets.
“It’s a very small town. Everybody knows everybody else,” Mr. Lozier said. “So a lot of people are looking for answers.”
The question on everyone’s minds is when will he be able to provide them.
“I hope to have charges filed as soon as possible,” Mr. Lozier said, “but I can only do that when we’re satisfied that we have a case which we can prosecute and win.”