Sheldon Jeter Jr. was stalking Rachael Deltondo and keeping notes about where she had been and who she was with. He wrote her a letter professing his love. He lied to police about what he was doing at the time she was killed. Location data from his cellphone puts him in the area of her murder. Security footage shows him changing his clothes after her death.
DelTondo got a text message just moments before she was killed and the caller’s car was spotted near the crime scene right after she died — but it wasn’t Jeter. When police looked at that man’s phone, all of the contact information, text messages, and call history involving DelTondo had already been deleted.
These are just some of the blockbuster allegations made by detectives in court filings obtained exclusively by BeaverCountian.com after being unsealed nearly six years after the 2018 Mother’s Day murder of DelTondo (Timeline: The Murder Of Rachael DelTondo).
The trove of search warrant applications were filed by law enforcement in the days, months, and years after DelTondo’s murder. They served to provide information about the investigation to county judges in efforts to obtain third-party records relevant to their case.
Under Pennsylvania law, the executed search warrants remained sealed for 60 days. County prosecutors then filed for extensions every 30 days thereafter, month-after-month for more than five years, keeping the documents out of public view as their case remained unsolved. That was until August 2023, when then-district attorney David Lozier publicly named Jeter as his office’s prime and only suspect in DelTondo’s killing having excluded all others, although he said there was not yet enough evidence to justify an arrest.
Jeter, through his attorneys, has denied any involvement in DelTondo’s murder. He was separately convicted for the May 2020 first-degree murder of Tyric Pugh, a close family friend. He is currently serving a life sentence at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Camp Hill. His conviction remains on appeal before the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
As part of Lozier’s statements to the press about Jeter, he also announced he was going to allow the seals on search warrants in the case to laps. A change in administration, a backlog of work in the Clerk of Courts Office, and the sheer volume of filings then needing to be organized and docketed by county personnel, meant it was months before the documents became available.
BeaverCountian.com has now pored over those court filings, many of which provide further validation of this publication’s prior reporting. Here are some of the new insights revealed for the first time about law enforcement’s still ongoing, but admittedly stalled, investigation into the murder of Rachael DelTondo:
