The story of Billy Sproates and John Charbonneau’s murder involves a love triangle between an uncle, his nephew, and Linda Lou Charbonneau. Linda Lou was sentenced to die for killing John and Billy, but that conviction was later overturned. So, is Linda Lou Charbonneau still in jail?
To understand what happened to John and Billy — John’s nephew — it’s crucial to explain that Linda Lou was first married to John, but they divorced in 1997. Linda Lou then started a relationship with John’s nephew, Billy, and they married. But within a few years, Linda Lou lived with Billy’s uncle, but Linda Lou and Billy never divorced. And as that strange domestic arrangement continued, in 2001, people started disappearing.
Billy Sproates was the first to vanish
Linda Lou, John, and Billy Sproates all lived in rural Delaware. In 2001, Sproates had plans to go deer hunting with his brother, but he never showed up. Sproates’ brother checked with Linda Lou, his wife, but she said she hadn’t seen her husband in weeks. They had separated, she said, and Linda Lou was living with John in the meantime.
According to Linda Lou, when she returned to try and reconcile with Sproates, she found a note that said he left her for another woman. But a few weeks later, Delaware police performed a welfare check on John Charbonneau: He was also missing.
The body in the backyard
Once Delaware police arrived at John Charbonneau’s home, they found a body in the backyard buried in a shallow grave. His hands were bound, and it was later determined that whoever it was had been stabbed, injured with blunt force trauma to the head, and buried alive, evidently, as dirt was discovered in the victim’s lungs.
It wasn’t John’s body, though. It was his nephew, Billy Sproates, and John remained missing. Strangely enough, curtains were taken down inside John’s home, and the cabinets were stripped from the walls. John naturally disapproved of his ex-wife’s marriage to his nephew, Linda Lou told the police. Could that be the motive for murder?
Linda Lou’s daughter and boyfriend were interrogated
With John Charbonneau missing and Billy Sproate dead, Delaware police interviewed Linda Lou’s daughter Melissa Rucinski, John’s stepdaughter, whom he helped raise, and her boyfriend, Willie “Tony” Brown, broadening the cast of characters. They said John had jury duty, which was true, but where he went after that remained a mystery.
Around that same time, Rucinski was caught using John’s bank cards, and based on that, the police got a search warrant for Billy Sproates’ home where Linda Lou, Rucinski, and Brown were living. Police found blood everywhere inside the house, and in Linda’s van — but was it John’s blood, or Sproates’?
Melissa Rucinski’s ex-husband
At that point, Billy Sproates was confirmed dead, blood discovered inside his home was undergoing tests to determine who it belonged to, and Sproates’ uncle — his wife’s ex-husband — had vanished. Police, however, were still no closer than before to solving who killed Sproates, or what might have happened to John Charbonneau.
But a few months later, Delaware police received a tip that broke the case wide open: Melissa Rucinski’s ex-husband, John Rucinski, behind bars for burglary, told the police that Linda Lou and Melissa approached him to kill John in the past, but he refused. Their motive for doing so, John Rucinski said, was to collect on John Charbonneau’s disability payments.
The truth comes out
A year after Billy Sproates died, in 2002, test results of the blood found inside his home revealed that the blood inside the house was Sproates’, and the blood from Linda Lou Charbonneau’s van was John Charbonneau’s. Finally, Melissa Rucinski confessed: Linda Lou plotted with her daughter and her boyfriend, Tony Brown, to stage a home invasion.
Following the plan, Brown beat John to death while Linda Lou watched, and Melissa and Brown then drove into the wilderness and buried the body. All three then killed Sproates to cover up the crime. It was later revealed that John died before Sproates, and Sproates told his family that he believed Linda Lou had killed him.
At first, Linda Lou received the death sentence for her role in the double-murder plot, but that conviction was overturned on a technicality, and she was retried and sentenced to 20 years just for only John’s murder. She was released in July 2022. Melissa, meanwhile, is scheduled for release in April 2024, and Brown continues to serve a life sentence at Delaware Correctional Facility.
