The 48 Hours episode “What Happened to Rachael?” investigates the murder of 33-year-old schoolteacher Rachael DelTondo. On Mother’s Day 2018, she was shot at close range multiple times in the driveway of her parents’ home in the small town of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania (population 9,000). CBS News correspondent Erin Moriarty investigates and reports that DelTondo’s death was the sixth homicide in Beaver County in 2018. One of those six has been listed as being solved.
Moriarty interviews Rachael’s mother, Lisa DelTondo, who claims that Rachael told her she was cooperating with state police who were investigating alleged corruption in the Aliquippa Police Department and had received death threats. Many theories surround the unsolved homicide.
The landlocked city of Aliquippa (population 9,000) near Pittsburgh was a steel town and was known as the home of many future NFL football players including Mike Ditka and Tony Dorsett, among others. When the mill owned by the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company closed in Aliquippa during the 1980s, many of the city’s businesses left, leaving the city economically depressed: close to 22 percent of the current population are living below the poverty line (close to 2,000 people). Note: In the 1930s and 1940s, during the height of the steel industry, the population of Aliquippa averaged 26,000. 48 Hours airs Saturdays at 10 pm on CBS.
