Deputy’s killer remains free 37 years later
Just after midnight, two nights before Christmas 1984, Cheryl Vallecillo dropped her 40-year-old husband at a Chalmette restaurant to collect a $3,000 gambling debt. An hour later, late-night diners heard a shot and saw a yellow Chevrolet pickup truck speed from the parking lot, leaving Raul David “Butch” Vallecillo, a former detective with the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff’s Office, lying dead in the gravel with a 25-caliber slug in his skull, two inches behind his right temple.
On New Year’s Day, Cheryl began raising reward money, and in July 1985, she and an army of former and present sheriff’s deputies distributed 2,000 posters across town offering a $1,000 reward leading to an arrest. Nearly four decades later, Crimestoppers still offer the same fruitless reward, and Butch Vallecillo’s killer remains unidentified.
Moments before his murder, Butch sat at the bar inside Lou’s Seafood and Lounge at 703 East Judge Perez Drive. Next to him sat a white man between 35 and 40 years old. The sheriff’s office released a composite sketch of the man in 1985 based on descriptions given by four customers in the bar, but the barmaid remembered him as 6-foot-2, weighing about 230 pounds, with a potbelly, brown hair, and a brown beard and mustache. She said he wore a red flannel shirt and blue jeans.
Serving the two men, the barmaid overheard the bearded one telling Vallecillo, “Give me a break, Val. You know how much these horses cost me this year.”
“Sorry,” Butch answered back. “But I’ve got less than two bucks on me.”
Minutes later, according to another restaurant patron, the bearded man stood and, touching both palms to his pants pockets, he said, “Damn. I think I’ve locked my keys in the truck. Walk outside with me.” The eavesdropping restaurant patron, a locksmith, volunteered to help and followed the two gamblers outside.
At the yellow Chevrolet, the bearded man opened the door, saying, “Stupid me, I left it unlocked.” But as the locksmith turned to walk back to the bar, he heard the bearded man say, “Don’t move,” and looking back, he saw the bearded man pointing an automatic pistol at Butch. The locksmith waved him off and walked back into the restaurant.
Inside, he asked the barmaid to call the sheriff’s office. As she dialed, they heard a pop. Outside, they found Butch Vallecillo bleeding on the ground and the yellow 1976 to 1979 model Chevrolet truck speeding across the lot and turning west on Judge Perez Drive. The driver’s side door of the truck appeared dented, and the tailgate had rusted. The license plate displayed green numbers on a white background.
Doctors at De La Ronde Hospital in Chalmette pronounced the victim dead on arrival at 1:35, Sunday morning, December 23, 1984.
Distributing fliers in 1985, Cheryl Vallecillo told reporters her husband worked with the sheriff’s office from 1977 until 1984 when Sheriff Jack Stephens took office. He applied to work with the new sheriff, but for political reasons, she said, he never got a call back and took work as an electrician and part-time taxicab driver. She said she believed the political differences between her husband and the sheriff prevented detectives from thoroughly investigating her husband’s murder and making an arrest.
On July 18, 1985, Cheryl told reporters she had called the sheriff’s office multiple times since March, asking for an update on the case, but no one had returned her calls. She said her interactions with the sheriff’s office left her bitter. “I’ve cooperated with them fully,” she said. “They could at least level with me about what’s going on.”
Days later, Chief of Detectives Steve London denied knowledge of communication problems between the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff’s Office and Mrs. Vallecillo. He said detectives phoned her recently to say that, based on interviews with several witnesses, his department now had a suspect in the case.
By week’s end, a news release provided more details. “We are awaiting a response from the district attorney’s office regarding our report,” Sheriff’s spokesperson Peggy Poche wrote. However, Cheryl Vallecillo told reporters that happened much earlier in the year, just after New Year’s, and that District Attorney John F. Rowley told her then that the investigator’s insufficient report would not convince a grand jury to indict the suspect.
Approached by reporters in July, Rowley refused to say when he received the report, adding, “Reports are just reports. If the case was solid enough to substantiate an arrest, why wasn’t there an arrest? I don’t deal with reports. I deal in arrests.”
In a New Year’s Day news conference, Peggy Poche told reporters the sheriff’s office had two leads but no clear motives. “None of the leads homicide investigators are working on have any connection to Deputy Vallecillo’s work with our office,” dismissing rumors of Butch’s death being a revenge killing for an arrest he made one year earlier. She also confirmed that robbery had not been the motive.
Today, another deputy with the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff’s Office, Raul David Vallecillo, Jr. also serves the public as district fire chief and EMT for the City of New Orleans. He was 6 years old when the bearded man murdered his father and today says he prays daily that someone will come forward to help solve his father’s murder.