Jack Wheeler

Jack Wheeler

Real Name: John Parsons Wheeler III
Nicknames: Jack
Location: Newark, Delaware
Date: December 30, 2010

Case

Details: Sixty-six-year-old Jack Wheeler was devoted to causes that were for the benefit of the United States. He was the executive director of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He had served in Vietnam; when he came back, he began planning a memorial for all those who fought and died there.
Jan Scruggs, founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, describes Jack as a very exceptional and bright person. Jack graduated from West Point in 1966, Harvard Business School in 1969, and Yale Law School in 1975. In 1982, as Jan was building the memorial, Jack provided the overall strategy guidance and was the chairman of the board. He was also the driving force behind financing its construction. Jan says the memorial would not have happened without him.
Jack was a well-known figure in Washington, D.C. circles and was considered a respected Pentagon insider. He was a presidential aide to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. In 2004, then-Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne hired Jack as his assistant. Michael says that Jack brought an “intensity” to life and always thought outside of the box.
Jack accomplished many feats throughout his life, despite his bipolar disorder. The disorder is marked by bouts of frenetic activity. On the reverse side, it caused him to be very impulsive and overly emotional. According to investigative journalist Steve Volk, it both propelled him forward and held him back. What he was able to get done was even more impressive because it was that much harder for him.
According to Jack’s wife, Katherine Klyce, he was passionate about everything he did. It did not matter if the subject was foreign policy or the city council. He put the same energy into everything he did. He and Katherine were married for thirteen years. They lived in a condo in Harlem, New York, and had a “beautiful, elegant” house on the edge of a historic park in New Castle, Delaware. He had two children from a previous marriage that he adored. Katherine also had two children from a previous marriage; he treated them like they were his own.
Jack’s stepdaughter, Meriwether Schas, remembers that he was a funny but also serious man. Katherine says that her life was never dull while she was married to him. Their marriage was full of “unexpected things” which she liked. She remembers that when they first met, they bonded over their love for ballet. She knew from the beginning that she was lucky to have him. She says that she loved him with all her heart.
At 9:56am on December 31, 2010, a body was found at the Cherry Island Landfill in Wilmington, Delaware. Detective Michael Lawson was called to the scene. As he approached the body, he observed that it was an older, White male. There were no obvious signs of injury. The man was wearing black pants, a white shirt, and some type of black garment that covered his upper torso area.
As Detective Lawson took a closer look, he saw a ring on the man’s hand. He had never seen that kind of ring before. It was from the West Point Military Academy, class of 1966. Right away, he could tell that the victim was someone of notoriety. He knew it was not a “typical homicide.” The victim was soon identified as Jack.
Jack’s murder stunned many of the country’s veterans and those who knew him. Volk says that many of the facts surrounding the murder “naturally confound.” It was big news at the time, a very sensational case. When Volk learned about it, he immediately assumed it was a “targeted murder,” something that the Mob would do. He suspected that the killer did not intend to have his body found.
Jan says that he has not felt that same since he learned of Jack’s murder. He says that everybody loved him. Jack’s attorney, Bayard Marin, says that the murder was a sudden shock. There was no indication as to why someone would want to kill him. Meriwether says that it is very hard to wrap one’s head around the murder. She believes that someone put him in the landfill because they did not want him to be found. She is surprised that they ever found him in the first place.
Katherine remembers when she got the phone call from Jack’s daughter; she told her that he was dead. Katherine could not understand it. She did not think it was possible for the world and her life to go on without him. When they went to the police station to view his body, it was covered from the chest down with a sheet. They were not allowed to see the rest of him because of his injuries.
Jack held many important positions throughout his lifetime and had a very strong network with the government. His contacts within the government were very strong. Because of his government service, investigators wondered if he had been the target of a “murder-for-hire” type situation.
From 1971 to 1972, Jack worked as a senior planner for Amtrak. From 1978 to 1986, he was assistant general counsel, special counsel to the chairman, and secretary of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). From 1983 to 1987, he was chairman and CEO of "Mothers Against Drunk Driving." From 1988 to 1989, he was part of then-President George H.W. Bush’s Transition Team. From 2005 to 2008, he was a Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force. From 2009 until his death in 2010, he was working as a consultant for the MITRE Corporation, a defense contracting firm. They specialize in artificial intelligence and military satellite systems. He was working in the area of cybersecurity and was considered an "authority" on cyber warfare. Nothing has been found to connect his work to his murder.
After Jack’s body was found, the location was cordoned off, and a thorough search was conducted. Detective Lawson had never searched for evidence in a landfill before this case. They took precautions to keep themselves safe from any dangerous material there. A main difficulty was trying to separate the trash from actual evidence. They looked for other pieces of clothing, a cell phone, and other evidence. However, nothing of value was found.
The body was positively identified as Jack’s that day. After learning that Jack had a house six miles away in New Castle, Detective Lawson contacted the New Castle City Police Department. He spoke with a detective who advised him that they were actually en route to Jack’s house, investigating a potential burglary.
Robert Dill knew Jack as a “temporary” next door neighbor. Jack was never at the house for very long; Robert eventually became the “caretaker” of it. He says that Jack was never one to sit down and casually talk with someone. He was always doing something or had something on his mind.
On the morning of December 30, 2010, Robert was talking to a neighbor when he noticed that Jack’s second floor rear window was open. He went over to Jack’s house to see what was going on. When he came inside, the storm door was closed, but the side door was ajar. As he came inside, he found the kitchen in disarray.
Kitchen chairs had been knocked over. A potted tree that had been sitting on a bay window had been tipped over. Spices were thrown all over the floor and table. There were several broken dishes in the sink. There was white powder on the floor in front of the sink. Robert believed it was Comet, because there was a can sitting on the counter. Jack’s ceremonial West Point sword and shield were also on the floor, covered with the powder. There was also a bare footprint in the Comet, right in front of the sink.
Robert was certain that a burglary had taken place based on the mess in the kitchen. He believed that someone had broken in through the side door. He called both Jack and Katherine, leaving voicemails for both of them. However, neither responded, so he decided to call the police.
Meanwhile, yet another investigation was occurring across the street from Jack’s New Castle house. A few days before his body was found, someone had set off a couple of smoke bombs at a house that was under construction. Fortunately, the damage was minimal. At the site, police found a cell phone; it was Jack’s. Police wanted to find out what the connection was, if any, between Jack’s death, the apparent burglary at his home, and the smoke bombing at the neighbor’s home.
The FBI was called into Jack’s case because of his past relationship with the Pentagon as an employee, and because he had worked for a couple of presidential administrations. The ATF and DEA also became involved. At least ten different agencies, federal, state and local, were running down every possible lead in the case.
Police began to reconstruct the final days of Jack’s life in hopes of finding out who killed him. During mid-December, 2010, he was working in Washington, D.C. On Christmas Eve, he traveled to New York. He celebrated Christmas Day with his family. They recall that everything seemed normal; he was in good spirits.
The next day, Jack told Katherine that he had to go back to work in D.C. She was annoyed because they normally spent the time after Christmas together, going to the movies with their children. At 7am on December 28, he left New York and took a train to D.C. During that ride, he was on his phone a lot. According to his family and coworkers, he “lived by the phone.” He sent several emails throughout the day. This helped investigators to piece together a timeline.
At 1:20pm, Jack arrived in D.C. and began working. Based on his phone records, he left D.C. later that day via Amtrak train. At 5:30pm, he arrived at his house in New Castle. At around 11:30pm, the “smoke bomb incident” occurred at the house across the street. A neighbor had heard an odd sound outside; when he looked out, he saw the silhouette of a man next to the house. When he saw smoke coming from it, he called the police and the fire department.
The next day, December 29, Katherine tried to call Jack but was unable to reach him. She did not understand why he was not able to answer his phone. She says that she had never not been able to reach him before. That morning, he emailed MITRE and told them that there had been a break-in at his home. He said that he had lost certain items that he would typically use for access to their business, including his wallet, key fob, badge, briefcase, and cell phone.
Katherine says that Jack’s cell phone was very important, as he used it for “everything.” She believes that he was very stressed after he lost it. For reasons unknown, he did not notify police or Katherine about the break-in. The loss of his cell phone also made it difficult for investigators to make a timeline of his movements. As a result, they had to rely on witness sightings (which are not always accurate) and surveillance footage.
Surveillance footage shows that at 6pm on December 29, Jack visited a pharmacy on the 29th in Old New Castle, just a few blocks from his house. He was a “familiar figure” there; whenever he was in New Castle, he would get his prescriptions filled there. But on that day, he asked the pharmacist for a ride to Wilmington, six miles away. The pharmacist noticed that he looked upset. The pharmacist offered to call him a cab, but he declined. Some pharmacy customers overheard the conversation and offered to take him there.
Investigators believe Jack wanted to go to Wilmington because his car was parked at the Amtrak station there. He had left it there when he went to New York for Christmas. Shortly after 6pm, the pharmacy customers drove him to Wilmington. The next sighting of him is at 6:42pm, when he shows up at the New Castle County Courthouse parking garage in Wilmington, looking for his car. However, he was in the wrong garage. His car was in a different garage several blocks away.
According to Meriwether, Jack had trouble finding his way around. She describes him as “directionally challenged.” She says that he liked to take walks in Madison Square Park because he knew where it was and it was shaped in a square, so it was difficult for him to get lost. Katherine says that he did not have a good sense of direction. He would often lose things. He would park his car and not be able to find it. On several occasions, he came home in a cab because he forgot where he parked. He was usually too preoccupied with work to remember those things.
The footage at the parking garage shows that Jack was in a “completely different state” than what he was while in the pharmacy. He appeared to be agitated, disoriented, rambling, and in distress. He was wearing one shoe and holding the other in his hand. At times, he appeared to be peeking around corners or looking out of doors before he would go through them, as if he was being stalked.
Jack tried to enter the garage on foot, saying that he wanted to "warm up" before paying his parking fee. He told people in the garage, including the attendant, that his briefcase had been stolen and that he could not find his car. He also repeatedly told them that he was not intoxicated. One witness said that he told her that his parking ticket was inside his briefcase. She asked him where his briefcase was, and he said it was stolen from him. She asked him how it was stolen, but he kept saying “My briefcase was stolen. It was stolen.”
It is still not known what may have caused Jack to become so distressed in the forty minutes from the pharmacy to the parking garage. Meriwether says that when she saw the footage, she felt that he did not look like himself. She believes that he was trying to get away from something or someone. She thinks that since he did not have his phone and could not find his car, he became more afraid.
Katherine says that Jack’s bipolar disorder may have been the reason why he was acting so strangely. She says that most of the time she was with him, he was normal. Every once in a while, he would get “a little manic.” He was diligent about taking his pills. However, she notes that bipolar disorder is mysterious and very unpredictable. Volk says that Jack might have had a mental break. Or, he could have been physically attacked. Volk theorizes that Jack’s foot may have been injured in a scuffle, which led to him taking his shoe off.
After the video from the parking garage, Jack was not seen for about twenty hours. The next sighting of him occurred on the afternoon of December 30, the same day Robert found his house in disarray. Surveillance footage shows Jack in the basement of the Nemours Building, an office complex at the corner of 11th and Orange in downtown Wilmington. Investigators later found evidence that he spent the night and part of the next day in this basement. At one point, Jack went to a law firm in the building. He asked to speak to a partner of the firm. However, he left before he had the chance to meet with anyone.
The surveillance footage showed Jack in the “tunnel” below the building and in some of the hallways. There are many hallways, access ways, and alleyways in this building. There was a lot of ground to cover for investigators to look and see where Jack may have gone into. Some of the employees of the building said they had seen something in the stairwell that could have been where somebody would have stayed. Investigators were not able to find any of his personal effects there.
No one knows exactly why Jack went to the Nemours Building. He apparently had no connections to it. Volk believes that Jack’s activities indicate that he was trying to hide and find a “careful” way out of town. Jack reportedly asked someone for a ride to Philadelphia. Volk speculates that Jack may have wanted to go there so he could get on an Amtrak train to New York.
At 8:30pm on December 30, surveillance footage shows Jack exiting the building. He was wearing a dark-colored hoodie that apparently did not belong to him. At around 8:40pm, surveillance footage shows him walking east past the Hotel DuPont toward Rodney Square and the high-crime streets . This was the last confirmed sighting of him.
Katherine, Meriwether, and Jack's children tried calling him several times. Katherine says that when she was unable to reach him, she did not know what to do. He had never gone two days without being in touch. She felt that something was wrong, but she did not let her mind wander too much. She did not want to believe that anything bad happened to him.
At 9:56am on December 31, a little over twelve hours after Jack was last seen, his body was found in the landfill. Mike Grabowski, a commercial garbage truck driver, says that day started out as normal. He went to the landfill that morning and dumped out the trash from his truck. As he was about to leave the area, he received a call from the dispatcher, saying that they had found a body in the trash pile. When he got back to the landfill, he saw the body laying there, sticking up out of the pile. He says that it “freaked” him out.
In a normal murder investigation, police have a crime scene to examine and look for clues. However, in Jack’s case, there was no crime scene to be found other than the landfill. After combing through tons of trash, investigators determined that the trash surrounding Jack’s body had come from the city of Newark, Delaware, fourteen miles southwest of the landfill. The case was then turned over to Newark police.
The Newark Police Department were able to come up with a particular garbage truck that they believed picked up Jack’s body. They zeroed in on a couple of commercial dumpsters on its trash route. A forensic unit went out and swabbed the dumpsters. They were able to come up with a partial DNA match to Jack in one of the dumpsters.
To Katherine’s knowledge, Jack had no connections to Newark. She did not understand why he ended up there. Oddly, he was last seen in Wilmington, fourteen miles from Newark. It was also in the opposite direction of where he was walking. So how did he end up in a dumpster in Newark?
Investigators tried to figure out how Jack left Wilmington and ended up in Newark. A witness came forward, saying that they had seen Jack in a taxicab at around 11pm on the night of December 30. According to the witness, Jack agreed to share the cab when he heard that it was going to Newark. Investigators note that it is possible that the witness was mistaken and that the man in the cab may have just looked like Jack. They note that he may have taken a train from Wilmington to Newark.
Several garbage truck drivers told investigators that it was fairly common for people to go into dumpsters and either sleep there or warm up during the winter months. Mike says that there have been times when he has gone to pick up a dumpster and a person jumps out of the top or climbs out the side door. He says that sometimes he can hear the person yelling, but sometimes he cannot.
One theory involving Jack’s death is that he crawled into the dumpster to escape the winter cold but was picked up by the garbage truck and killed accidentally (either by the fall or by the truck’s compactor). Meriwether says that theory seems preposterous to her. She notes that the medical examiner’s report concluded that Jack was murdered.
According to Volk, the autopsy report showed that Jack was severely beaten. He says that it is not consistent with a fall from a dumpster. There are several severe injuries listed, such as: punctured lung, broken ribs, and bleeding in the head. He also received bruises to the face and orbital bones, temples, and mouth. Volk says that the places where Jack was injured make sense if someone was “pummeling” him and driving him down to his knees. The cause of death is listed as “blunt force trauma.” The manner of death is listed as “homicide.”
To Bayard, it seems like Jack was the victim of a severe beating. What he does not understand is why someone would want to beat him so severely. He thinks it is possible that someone targeted Jack. However, he is not sure who that “someone” would be. He also thinks it is possible that Jack was in the “wrong place at the wrong time.”
One of the big questions in Jack’s case is whether his murder was related to what happened in New Castle on the night of December 28: the “smoke bomb” incident. One theory is that he was the one that set off the smoke bombs. At the time of his death, he was in a housing dispute with people across the street who were building a “big house” in historic Battery Park. The house partially blocked his view of the Delaware River. But more importantly, he did not want someone to build a private home on land he considered to be public, sacred, and historically significant.
Katherine says that Jack liked being in the New Castle area. It was quiet and old-fashioned. They were both very unhappy about the house being built across the street. They even filed a lawsuit to halt its construction. She says that he was very “fired up” about it. He apparently got it into his head that “this can’t happen,” and that it was a “sacrilege.” She notes that bipolar disorder can make a person more emotional and illogical.
Volk believes that if Jack did commit the smoke bombing, he probably became very upset when he returned home and found that his cell phone was missing. He believes that Jack, who was always very “hard on himself”, flew into a panic and started flinging stuff around.
It is not known if the incidents at Jack’s house and his neighbors had anything to do with his death. It is also not known if the person who killed Jack just happened across him when he was wandering around Newark. Some believe that he was robbed and beaten to death. Volk does not think so because the way Jack’s body was found does not fit with a “random mugging.” Street muggers who kill their victims will usually leave the body where it drops; they do not hide it or load it into a dumpster. The other problem with the “robbery” theory is that when Jack was found, he apparently had some cash left on him. He also still had his Rolex and his West Point ring.
Some believe that Jack's bipolar disorder could have led him into harm's way. Others believe there could be something more sinister involved and that his death could be connected to his government work. Meriwether does not think that his murder was a random act. She finds it strange that no one has come forward with any tips or leads, even after they put out a reward. She and Katherine wonder if the people with information have “already been paid.”
Investigators believe that there are people who may have wanted Jack dead. Volk notes that Jack always carried his briefcase with him which held his security clearance. Prior to his death, he told people that it had been stolen. Investigators have searched for it extensively, but have never been able to find it. They hope that any witnesses who may have seen or assisted Jack before he died will come forward.
On April 29, 2011, Jack was laid to rest with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Katherine says that she was proud of him for all of the good work he had done in his life, and for who he was. She says that his life was devoted to service, especially service to his country. She notes that his whole life was focused on being useful; that is what he wanted. She also says that he was a good person. She says that she misses him greatly.
Meriwether says that Jack was silly, fun, and kind; she felt good when she was around him. She says that he was remarkable and full of love. He cared deeply about everything he did, and took it to heart. He had the “largest heart” of anyone she knew. She misses him greatly as well.
Delaware Crime Stoppers is offering a cash reward for information leading to the arrest of subject(s) responsible for Jack’s death.
Suspects: None known; there are several theories regarding the motive for Jack's death. Some believe that he was the victim of a robbery gone wrong. Others believe that his death was related to his government work.
Extra Notes: This case was first released on October 19, 2020 as a part of the second volume of the Netflix reboot of Unsolved Mysteries.
Results: Unsolved
Links:

• Jack Wheeler on Unsolved.com
• Jack Wheeler on Wikipedia
• Ex-Presidential Aide's Body Found in Landfill - January 3, 2011
• Who killed Jack Wheeler? - April 9, 2011
• He helped build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. How did he end up dead in a landfill? - May 23, 2017

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