Slaying saga twists, turns

Poor weather, help from friends and a hard-fought extradition battle in Mexico keep a suspect in a Sarasota slaying out of U.S. reach for 20 months.

By LEANORA MINAI

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 1, 1999

Two days after Sheila Bellush's murder, Florida investigators had evidence linking Jose Luis Del Toro Jr. to the crime scene.

They had the license plate of the car he was driving. A good description from a gas station clerk who said she offered Del Toro directions to Bellush's street. Even a photocopy of his Texas driver's license.

But they didn't have him.

Call it bad luck for Sarasota detectives or good luck for Del Toro, but poor weather conditions, Del Toro's friends and a decision by law enforcement agencies early on not to issue a nationwide alert for him kept detectives a day behind the fugitive.

Records and interviews about the case show for the first time what happened as law enforcement tried to catch Del Toro.

Complicating his capture was jurisdictional politics. While U.S. authorities stood outside the motel where Del Toro was hiding, four days after the murder, they couldn't touch him because they don't have authority to make arrests in Mexico.

And even after his capture, a plan to deport Del Toro fell apart.

Just hours before he was to be turned over to Texas Rangers at a border crossing, U.S. officials say Mexican authorities suddenly changed their minds, sparking a 20-month tug of war over extradition.

To get the former south Texas high school football star back on U.S. soil, Sarasota County prosecutors had to promise Mexican officials that they wouldn't seek the death penalty.

"There were so many things that happened along the route to complicate things," said Sarasota County sheriff's Lt. Ron Albritton, a lead investigator since the Nov. 7, 1997, killing. "It just wasn't good guys chasing bad guys."

Today, Del Toro is in the Sarasota County Jail, awaiting trial on a first-degree murder charge. The two middlemen in the murder-for-hire plot, Daniel Rocha and Samuel Gonzales, are serving time in state prison. Rocha got life; Gonzales, 19 years.

Authorities say Allen Blackthorne, Sheila Bellush's ex-husband, is suspected of hiring the men for the hit.

Blackthorne lives in San Antonio, Texas. He says he is innocent. He has not been charged with any crime.

"The entire case is a situation of nobody getting what they wanted," Albritton said.

Bullet found in suspect's room makes the rounds

While investigators got some good breaks -- tips and a laundry list of evidence, including Del Toro's fingerprint on a clothes dryer in the Bellush home -- they had their share of bad breaks, too.

It started with a mysterious .45-caliber bullet found by a Hampton Inn housekeeper the afternoon Sheila Bellush was killed.

Linda Gimbrone was making the bed in Del Toro's room in the early afternoon of Nov. 7, 1997, in Sarasota. She pulled the blankets over the mattress and stepped on something hard.

"I bent down and picked it up, and it was a live bullet," said Gimbrone, 52.

That bullet, which one employee described as "heavy-duty," passed through the hands of another maid, a general manager and the motel's maintenance director before a worker who didn't have ammunition for his own gun took it home.

No one considered the discovery unusual enough to call police that day.

"We find a lot of things in rooms," said Michael Whitley, 32, the maintenance director.

About the time the bullet was found, Del Toro was at a Chevron gas station, asking for directions to Bellush's street.

A clerk scrawled the route to Markridge Road on a tan piece of paper. After examining a map for eight to 10 minutes, Del Toro drove 3 miles to the Bellushes' neighborhood in a white Mitsubishi Eclipse.

Neighbors saw a man, later identified as Del Toro, walking along the remote road in black boots and green camouflage clothes. One resident scribbled down the number of his license plate.

That would help later.

Investigators say Del Toro, who sports a bulldog tattoo on his left arm, climbed through a window of Bellush's house. He waited for Sheila Bellush, 34, to come inside from the pool. He confronted her with a chrome .45-caliber pistol, shot her in the face and cut her throat in front of her quadruplet toddlers. She died on the kitchen floor.

Authorities say the copper casing found in the Bellush home matched the caliber of bullet found in Del Toro's hotel room.

Stevie Bellush, Sheila Bellush's 13-year-old daughter from her marriage to Blackthorne, found her when she got home from school just after 4 p.m.

Investigators keep case hush-hush for a while

Because neighbors had jotted down his license plate number, investigators in Sarasota knew the day after the murder that Del Toro was someone with whom they wanted to talk, according to court records.

They started checking area motels for guests who registered under "Del Toro."

They also released a composite sketch of an unnamed man and asked the public for help identifying him. They cautioned, "This subject is not a suspect."

Three days after the killing -- Nov. 10 -- Sarasota officials had enough hard evidence to get an arrest warrant. But they waited almost 24 hours before notifying the news media that Del Toro was a wanted man.

A nationwide BOLO (Be On the Lookout) -- an alert to the public and law enforcement agencies -- was not issued for Del Toro until Nov. 11, shortly before a news conference in Sarasota.

By then, Del Toro was in Piedras Negras, Mexico.

To this day, Sarasota officials defend their strategy, saying they would work the case the same way if they had it to do over again.

Albritton, Sarasota's lead investigator, said last week that detectives did not put out a nationwide alert early because they wanted to catch Del Toro by surprise.

By not issuing an alert, detectives were able to quietly gather a dream cache of evidence and hunt down the other players in the conspiracy, he said.

"Once this hits the news, everybody's going to know, and it would certainly make a capture of him much more difficult," Albritton said. "Did we miss an opportunity because we didn't put out to the world that we were looking at this guy as a suspect? No."

Sgt. Mike Ring, a homicide investigator for the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, said it is not uncommon for detectives to hold back on issuing alerts.

"It's a coin toss," Ring said. "If you put out a BOLO, you stand a chance of losing evidence in the case."

Albritton said that in the Del Toro case, a BOLO wasn't immediately issued because two days after the killing, Texas authorities found Del Toro's car outside an Austin apartment. They thought Del Toro was inside.

"The BOLO is a logical conclusion if you absolutely have no idea where he is," Albritton said.

Texas Ranger Joe Hutson had his eyes fixed on the Austin apartment, thinking Del Toro would come out. At one point, Hutson called Sarasota authorities to ask what to do if he spotted Del Toro.

"At that time, all I knew is they were looking for that car, and it was possibly involved in a homicide in Florida," Hutson said. "Our information was real sparse."

In fact, Del Toro wasn't there. He was 90 minutes away in San Antonio.

Once the nationwide BOLO was issued, Del Toro already was in Mexico.

Jamie Bellush, Sheila Bellush's 37-year-old widower, said he wouldn't second-guess authorities.

"I'm not law enforcement," he said from his home in New Jersey last week. "All I know is they got the guy in jail in Sarasota."

Del Toro makes his getaway -- with help

Del Toro had help before and after he slipped across the border.

Several days before the killing, his girlfriend, Anna Morales, introduced him to a friend who had a gun. Del Toro told Morales he needed the gun "to take care of some business."

She didn't call police.

After Del Toro killed Bellush, investigators say, he hopped on the interstate and began calling friends in Texas from a cell phone. He talked with his girlfriend, past loves and Gonzales, one of the men in the murder-for-hire scheme.

Del Toro called former girlfriend Carol Arreola, a criminal justice major. He told her he was in Atlanta and that he needed her to call his grandmother and ask her to charge an airline ticket from there to Austin.

"He told me that he had done something that was very wrong," said Arreola, 22.

Del Toro didn't elaborate then. She didn't call police.

Later, Del Toro would tell her he was a "hit man," according to court records.

"He just said that he's never gonna forget what it was to see a woman to that, you know, to that point," Arreola told investigators.

When Del Toro got to Austin, he stayed at Arreola's apartment, then went to San Antonio with his cousin and co-conspirator, Gonzales, to party. Before he took off for the border, he drank beer, snorted cocaine and dropped $700 cash on clothes at a mall.

Morales might have provided the most help for Del Toro. She called him while he was partying in San Antonio.

"They're looking for you," Morales told Del Toro, according to court records. "Don't go to your grandma's house ... don't come here because they're probably watching."

Del Toro got Gonzales to drive him to a Greyhound bus station in San Antonio. He bought a $16 ticket to Laredo and walked across the border into Mexico.

Before leaving, Del Toro asked Morales to go by the Austin apartment where he went after he left Sarasota. He wanted her to burn his blood-spattered camouflage clothes, break into his car and toss the gun in the bushes.

"I will," she told him.

But when Morales went by the apartment, Texas Rangers were waiting. She started cooperating.

"I couldn't decide whether to go with the morally right thing," she said. "Then I figure, well, what if it was my mother?"

U.S. authorities frustrated at every turn

Things didn't break right for U.S. authorities in Mexico.

Del Toro's girlfriends cooperated with investigators in Piedras Negras, but there were obstacles: bad weather, empty promises and resistance from Mexican officials.

Four days after the murder, on Nov. 11, Del Toro was at the La Quinta Inn in Piedras Negras. The United States sent Hispanic-looking Austin police and Texas Rangers to stake out the motel with Mexican authorities.

The motel was under constant surveillance. Authorities knew Del Toro, now an illegal alien in Mexico, was making phone calls to friends from a cellular phone. But he wasn't picked up.

One record says, "Authorities ... are responding to the area." But he wasn't caught, and many investigators were frustrated that Mexican officials didn't simply apprehend him and escort him to the border like they routinely do in non-drug cases.

"They could have deported him if they wanted to," said Albritton, the lead Sarasota investigator.

He said workers at the La Quinta Inn didn't go out of their way to help, either. They wouldn't reveal Del Toro's room number, even to Mexican authorities.

Kevin Smith, an attorney for the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., said Sarasota sheriff's officials and Texas Rangers could not apprehend Del Toro because they have no authority to make arrests in Mexico.

"If someone had done that, they'd be subject to kidnapping charges in Mexico," Smith said.

Meanwhile, Del Toro was making phone calls to his girlfriend, Anna Morales, her father and Gonzales. He asked Morales to meet him at Jean's bar in Piedras Negras. She agreed.

The plan: Mexican and U.S. authorities would watch the bar, and Morales would draw him out, maybe persuade him to surrender.

"Good luck for Joey," Albritton said. "The weather turns bad."

A plane carrying Morales and U.S. authorities was caught in a storm and had to land in another city. Because of the delay, Morales got to the bar too late. Del Toro had come and gone.

Finally, an arrest, and a battle over extradition

On Nov. 17 -- 10 days after the killing -- the FBI placed Del Toro at an apartment in Monterrey, Mexico. The FBI and Department of Justice were confident Del Toro would be arrested and then brought to the border and turned over to U.S. officials, according to records.

The paperwork was in order. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents and nearly two dozen Mexican police were outside Del Toro's hiding place.

At 4:57 p.m., Nov. 20, 1997, Del Toro was arrested at the apartment.

The last U.S. authorities heard he was on his way to an INS office for processing, and that he would be brought to the border at 2 p.m. the next day. Texas Rangers were waiting on the other side.

Then, the complication.

The Mexicans announced that since the United States first filed papers asking them to arrest Del Toro, it made the deportation request moot. Del Toro was taken to a prison in Mexico City.

The U.S. extradition treaty with Mexico, signed in 1978, requires states to waive the death penalty before Mexico will send a murder defendant back for prosecution. Mexico doesn't have the death penalty.

Officials have their own theories about what sparked the extradition fight, including, according to Albritton, meddling from "people up the ladder" in Mexico.

Many people, including representatives at the Department of Justice, are at a loss for why Mexico didn't summarily deport Del Toro for being in Mexico illegally.

Jose Zabalgoitia, spokesman for the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C., said that when the United States formally requested Mexican officials to arrest Del Toro, the extradition process was instantly triggered.

"If we could have handed him over the next day we got him, we would have done so," he said. "But we had to follow due process. Why blame us for that?"

Waiting drags on before authorities get Del Toro

At first, Mexico said it would send Del Toro back within 60 days. But the wait turned ugly, and two months turned into 20.

Before television cameras, Sheila Bellush's widower, Jamie Bellush, took to the steps of the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C. He called on American citizens to boycott Mexico.

"I will be contacting members of the House to cut off funding to the Mexican government," he wrote to Mexican officials last year.

For months, news stories were written and aired. Members of Congress urged peers to rewrite the extradition treaty.

Investigators say Del Toro was lucky to have an extradition lawyer, appealing court rulings in Mexico on grounds that the extradition treaty with the United States was unconstitutional.

The Department of Justice is now investigating how Del Toro financed his defense in Mexico.

"From what I understand, he had the best extradition attorneys working for him," said Charlie Roberts, an assistant state attorney in Sarasota County. "We're not sure who paid for them."

The case seemed to be dragging until officials renewed lobbying efforts to bring Del Toro back to the United States.

In June, Congress held a hearing on the relationship between the United States and Mexico on extradition matters. A deputy attorney general testified. So did Sheila Bellush's husband.

"Why are we here today?" Jamie Bellush asked the audience. "Why isn't Del Toro sitting on death row in Florida? Why has my family been subjected to continued anguish and been denied justice?"

On July 12, a congressman in Washington, D.C., got a call from Attorney General Janet Reno.

Del Toro had exhausted his appeals in Mexico. He would be on a chartered jet bound for Miami in a few hours. By 1 a.m. July 13, Del Toro was back on U.S. soil.

It just so happened that the week Del Toro was extradited, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was in Mexico on a trade mission.

Maybe that was the stroke of luck U.S. authorities needed.

"You can "what if' every case to death," said Sarasota sheriff's Sgt. Tim Carney. "It's water under the bridge. The positive news is we got this guy in our jail."

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