Posted on 06/26/2002 8:49:11 PM PDT by chance33_98
Background: The Quad Mom Murder Email story to a friend
Most of San Antonio met Sheila Bellush just a few weeks before Christmas in 1995, when TV reports showed her and her husband Jamie celebrating the birth of their quadruplets, which were San Antonio's first set in years.
A year later, cameras would be back to cover little Francis, Timothy, Joseph and Courtney's first birthday, full of singing and celebration.
But there were no songs or laughter November 7, 1997, just a frantic 9-11 call from Sheila's daughter Stevie to Sarasota, Florida dispatchers.
The 13-year-old had returned from school to find her mother's blood-soaked body in the doorway of the kitchen. Sheila had been shot in the face, then slashed and stabbed.
"It was just a horrendous scene," said Lt. Bill Stookey with the Sarasota Sheriff's Department. "Something that really impacts hard core deputies like us you would say."
Sheila had struggled to live. She left a trail of blood as she tried to reach the phone. and and had even pulled it off the hook. But she couldn't call for help, and bled to death in her kitchen. "We knew there was a bloody struggle," Stookey said. "The quads were obviously present during the homicide." Sheila had dressed the quads in little lifejackets, readying them for a swim in the pool. The toddlers, just a month shy of their second birthday, wandered the house alone for hours, leaving tiny blood-covered footprints throughout the home. Stevie would find them huddled beside their mother's body.
Later, one would tell family, "Mommy had a boo-boo. A bad man did it." Stevie would say, even from the beginning, that she suspected her father, Allen Blackthorne -- Sheila's ex-husband.
"She was probably targeted by someone who knew her," Stookey said the day of the crime.
Sheila's husband Jamie would also point to Blackthorne.
"It will not surprise me that Allen Blackthorne was behind this entire crime," he said.
But police would first arrest Joey del Toro, after lifting his fingerprints from Sheila's clothes. Del Toro fled to Mexico, but was arrested there and brought back to the United States after prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty. He would eventually plead guilty to the murder.
But the trail started leading back to Blackthorne when Del Toro said his cousin, Samuel Gonzalez, had hired him to kill Sheila.
Gonzalez pointed the finger at Daniel Rocha, saying Rocha hired him for a golfing buddy who wanted his ex-wife killed.
Rocha would eventually testify that that "golfing buddy" was Allen Blackthorne.
Two and a half years after Sheila's death, prosecutors convinced a San Antonio jury that Blackthorne had masterminded Sheila's death. He was was convicted of conspiring to commit a murder for hire and with arranging an act of domestic violence over state lines.
Sentenced to two life terms, Blackthorne was sent to Federal Prison, and immediately started planning his appeals, saying he had been misjudged from the start.
Yet when a supposedly advanced animal with a highly developed brain such as a human being kills another human being or many other human beings we immediately feel the need to take another route and rehabilitate them.
Liberals did away with the penal system a long time ago. Incarceration as a deterrent doesn't work for most criminals. To these career criminals jail is just some place you go when you can't make a few years rent.
Capital punishment is all we have left in order to enforce any laws!
I was in S.A when this happened.
What this article doesn't explcitly say is that Del Toro spent a good bit of time in a Mexican jail while the U.S. begged for his extradition. Finally, the U.S. caved and agreed to not push the needle.
What occurred to me at the time was that maybe that was the best place for him.
We should have stood up at the border and hollered loud and long that we wanted him for trial and execution, if guilty.
If the Mexicans are so hot to keep him alive, then let THEM feed him for life.
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