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.

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