Althea Lyons, 26, a woman, was found shot to death inside her apartment at the Christiana Court complex off State Route 4 in Stanton, Delaware, on the morning of December 4, 1981. Police were dispatched around 6:45 a.m. after a caller reported hearing three or four gunshots. Inside, officers discovered Lyons and her new boyfriend, 27-year-old postal letter carrier Tyrone Whittle, both killed by a 12-gauge shotgun. Also in the apartment was the body of the gunman, identified by detectives as 36-year-old Willie Andrews, who turned the weapon on himself after shooting the couple in what investigators described as a jealous-rage murder-suicide. Lyons worked as a bus driver for DART, and Andrews was employed at the Chrysler assembly plant in Newark. Two young children—Lyons’s six-year-old daughter and three-year-old son—escaped after the first shots and ran to a neighbor; police later learned that the older child witnessed the attack.
Detectives determined that Lyons had been separated from her husband; he was the father of her daughter, while Andrews was the father of her son. With Andrews dead at the scene, there were no arrests in the case, and authorities publicly framed the killings as a domestic violence incident driven by jealousy. Separate memorial records note Lyons and Whittle as gun-violence victims in Stanton on the same date, aligning with the murder-suicide reported by county police.
