Unsolved Mysteries (2020) s02e01 Episode Script
Washington Insider Murder
1
[birds cry]
[vehicle approaching]
This brings back a lot of memories
of when I was last here
back on December 31st, 2010.
It's not every day
that you receive a phone call
regarding a body that's found
in the landfill.
In Wilmington, uh
we have, you know, uh, homicides,
we have robberies,
so this wasn't gonna be anything different
from what I was expecting.
As I was approaching the body,
I could observe
that it was an older white male.
There were no obvious signs of injury,
such as a gunshot wound or a stab wound.
He was wearing black pants,
and he had a white shirt,
and some type of a black garment
covering his upper torso area.
And as we took a closer look,
I noticed a ring that stood out,
uh, as no ring
that I had ever seen before.
The ring was a West Point ring.
I could tell right away
that this was someone of notoriety.
This was not our typical homicide
that we were dealing with in Wilmington.
[birds cry]
Now we turn to a just-discovered murder
that has stunned
a lot of this nation's veterans
and those who knew the victim.
His name was John Wheeler.
Jack's murder has all these facts
around it
that just naturally confound.
As of this point, there are no suspects.
We will continue to bring you
[man] It was big news at the time.
Detectives are still baffled this morning
by the murder
of a former White House aide
[man] A very sensational case.
Now to a murder
that's mystifying official Washington
A body found in a landfill,
and you just think to yourself,
"That's a targeted murder.
Sounds like something the Mob would do.
Nobody ever intended
this person to be found."
[reporter] Police discovered the body
last Friday morning at a landfill,
and over the weekend officially identified
the victim as John Wheeler.
[Steve] So, the sensational aspects
of Jack's murder
were what first attracted me.
But you could say
that I came for the murder,
but ended up staying for the man, right?
Because he lived
a really fascinating life.
Let me now introduce to you
Mr. John Wheeler.
[cheering and applause]
Thank you, Jan.
A lot of people claim to be patriots.
Jack was a patriot.
In our youth,
our hearts were touched with fire.
In the Vietnam War,
each American was touched with fire.
[Bayard] Jack was devoted to causes
that were for the great benefit
of the country,
such as being executive director
of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
John Wheeler served in Vietnam
and when he came back,
he began planning a memorial
for all those who fought and died there.
[man]
Well, Jack was a very exceptional person,
a graduate of West Point,
a graduate of Harvard Business School,
uh a graduate of Yale Law School.
I mean, this guy was extremely bright.
In 1982, as we were building
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
he provided the overall strategy guidance,
was the chairman of the board.
And how could it have happened
without him?
It wouldn't have happened.
It wouldn't have happened.
[man] I actually hired Jack in 2004,
when I got sworn in
as Secretary of the Air Force,
uh, within the, um,
George Bush administration.
Jack brought an intensity to life
that few of us manifest.
Jack thought outside of the box
before there was a box.
We need to expand our definition
of who's wounded.
Not just people killed by a ballistic
incident, by a bullet,
or wounded by a bullet,
it's gotta be, uh, people
who suffer after the war.
[Steve] He accomplished so much.
And he did it all with the equivalent
of a piano strapped to his back,
because he had bipolar disorder.
Bipolar disorder is marked
by bouts of, like, frenetic activity.
But there's also no doubt
that it has a really awful reverse side,
where he could be very impulsive
and overly emotional.
So, there's no question
it propelled him forward
and it held him back.
And what he did get done
is all the more impressive
because it was that much harder for him.
[distant siren and shouting]
[woman] Jack was passionate
about everything he did.
Whatever you ask him to do
or ask him about,
doesn't matter if it was
U.S. foreign policy,
or the guy next door who needed help
with the city council, or any
It just It didn't matter.
He would put the same energy
into everything he did.
Jack and I were married for 13 years.
We lived in Harlem
and we had a house in New Castle.
He had two kids that were twins
that he adored,
and I had two kids
and he treated my kids like they were his.
[woman] I met Jack when my mother,
you know, started dating him.
And he was a funny,
um, sort of cheesy,
but very serious man.
Being married to Jack means
you're never It's it's never dull.
It's full of unexpected things,
which I like.
When I first met Jack,
I remember talking to him
and saying something
about George Balanchine ballet.
And he said,
"I watched Balanchine choreograph Jewels."
And I said, "You did?"
Now, that's like saying to a drug addict,
"I have I have a lifetime supply
of anything you want."
[laughing] I mean, it it was
I 'Cause I I love Jewels.
And I love all Balanchine ballet.
A soldier who loves ballet.
I just thought how lucky I was.
Oh, I loved him with all my heart.
I really did.
[Jan] I was on my way to Washington,
and I got a call that Jack Wheeler
had apparently been murdered.
And, uh, I'll never quite be the same,
and a lot of people
who knew him never will.
You know, everybody loved him.
[Bayard] It was a sudden shock.
There was no indication as to why
someone would want to murder Jack Wheeler.
[Meriwether]
It's very hard to wrap your head around
that all of a sudden, you know,
Jack had been found in a landfill.
And it didn't make sense.
To find a body in a landfill,
seems to me like it would be a place
someone who didn't want him to be found
would put him.
And I'm very surprised
that we actually did find him.
Um, that to me is a miracle,
and one that we're very grateful for.
[birds cry]
[Katherine]
I'm not sure when I got the phone call.
Jack's daughter called me up and she said,
"Jack's dead."
I was incredulous. I didn't know
I couldn't make sense of it.
It just It didn't seem possible.
It didn't seem possible
that the world could go on without him.
[chuckles]
That can't be true.
How do you have a world without Jack?
That's
[chuckles]
[inaudible conversation]
[Katherine] I remember we went down
to see his body at the police station.
We went into the this room and
he was covered from
uh, the chest down with
a sheet,
and they would let us see
just his face and head,
and the rest of him we didn't see.
And probably that's just as well,
because from what I learned later,
he had been
pretty well
beaten up and tossed around.
[man]
This had to be a professional hit job.
The way he was dumped into that landfill
tells me that somebody
deliberately went out and got him.
Something is very, very wrong,
and a great tragedy to America.
[man] Jack had a very strong network
with government.
He worked as an assistant
to the Secretary of the Air Force,
uh, for a time,
and his contacts within the government
were extremely strong.
And because of his government service,
he may have been the target of a
murder-for-hire type situation.
[Steve] What we know
is that at the time of his death,
he was working as a consultant
for the Mitre Corporation,
which is a defense contracting firm.
They specialize in stuff
like artificial intelligence,
satellite systems for the military
Jack was working
in the area of cybersecurity.
He was working on the issues
that we're seeing now made manifest
with, you know,
Russia interfering with the election,
Russia and China supposedly hacking
into our power grid.
That's the stuff
that Wheeler was working on at the time.
The problem, though,
is that there's nothing to connect
those parts of his bio
to his actual murder.
The confounding part is that when
you reach into these things individually,
your hand just kinda goes
right through, right?
You get caught up in it,
and you can go down all these blind paths.
I think that what we have to do,
because this is such a mystery,
is absolutely remain open-minded.
[Michael Lawson] The body was here
for several hours that day.
We had to call out
the Evidence Detection Unit,
cordoning off the location,
and making sure that we did
a thorough search.
I had never searched
for evidence in a landfill
within my 23-year career,
um, and this being the first time,
we took precautions.
[birds cry]
Any kind of evidence
that you're actually looking for
could be contaminated
with the trash that's mixed in.
We're looking for
other pieces of clothing.
We're looking for,
potentially, a cell phone.
And we did not find anything,
um, other than just trash
that had been disposed of.
We were able to positively identify
the victim, John Wheeler, that day.
And after finding out
that this was Mr. Wheeler,
and that he had a house
in New Castle City
I immediately contacted
the New Castle City Police Department
and spoke with a detective,
um, who advised me that they were actually
en route to Mr. Wheeler's house,
investigating a potential burglary.
And that's when this investigation turned
a page
to something larger than finding
Mr. Wheeler at the landfill.
[church bell rings]
[man] I knew Jack
as a temporary next-door neighbor.
He was never here for very long,
but I got involved in being
the caretaker of the house.
Jack, he was just
an interesting character.
I always liked Jack.
He was never one to sit down
and just casually talk to you.
He was He was always doing something,
or had something on his mind.
So, anyhow,
I was talking to my neighbor,
and that's when I happened to notice
that Jack's second floor rear window
was open.
So, being the good neighbor,
I went over into the house.
Now, when I came in,
the storm door was closed,
but this door was ajar about like that.
And then I just walked in here
and kind of saw the turmoil
in the in the kitchen.
Uh, there there was a tree,
a tall tree sitting on that bay window,
and that was tipped over.
And spices were all over the place.
They were all over the floor,
all over the table.
There were a bunch of broken dishes
in the sink.
And right by my feet,
there was white powder on the floor,
and I could see it was probably Comet,
'cause there was a Comet can sitting here
on the on the counter.
And there was also
Jack's ceremonial West Point sword
and shield on the floor right here.
And then I did notice
that there was a bare footprint
in the Comet, right in front of the sink.
I was sure it was burglary,
because things were
in such a state of turmoil.
I figured somebody had broken in,
and probably through this side door.
[Steve] Jack's neighbor calls the police.
And the police happen to have just
been notified of the body at the
at the landfill,
and discovered Jack there.
So, you can imagine
it's a pretty frantic uh, scene.
So, to add to the confusion,
there's another investigation happening
across the street from Jack's house
in New Castle.
There are new clues
in the mysterious death
of former White House aide, John Wheeler.
This is new video you're looking at
from inside his neighbor's house
under construction.
[Steve] So, it turns out that just
a few days before Jack's body was found,
someone had set off
a couple of smoke bombs
at a construction site across the street.
There wasn't much damage,
but it's a weird turn in the story,
because police found
a cell phone at the site,
and when they examined it,
they discovered it was Jack Wheeler's.
So, you've got all these things
happening at once:
Jack's body found in a landfill
a burglary investigation at his house
and an investigation
into the smoke bombs across the street.
So, you have to wonder how, or if,
all these things are connected.
[distant birds cry]
[man] In 2010, I was the FBI agent
assigned to the Violent Crime Unit
in Wilmington, Delaware.
The FBI was called in
to the Jack Wheeler case
with regards to him having
a past relationship with the Pentagon
as an employee,
and the fact that he had worked
for a couple
of presidential administrations.
ATF was involved, DEA was involved.
We're talking, uh,
at least ten different agencies,
federal, state and local,
running down every possible lead.
Police are working now to reconstruct
the last few days of John Wheeler's life,
hoping that will help them solve
the mystery
of who killed this prominent advocate
for veterans, and why.
[horn toots]
[Katherine] The last time I saw him,
he had been in DC.
He came up to New York on Christmas Eve,
and we had Christmas Day,
and all the kids were there.
[Meriwether] We always go to my mom's
for Christmas dinner.
It was very much like it always is.
And Jack was in very good spirits.
[Katherine] The next day,
he said he had to go back to DC.
I was annoyed 'cause I thought
we were gonna go to the movies.
After Christmas, we'd gone to movies
that we'd missed.
And it was things
that we could do with the kids, too,
which was always nice.
[Meriwether] My mom was not happy
that he had decided
to leave after Christmas.
But that was Jack.
He was always working
and he always had 15 different things
happening at once.
[train horn blares]
[Scott] So, we know from the time
that he got on the train
and went into Washington, DC,
that Jack was on his phone a lot.
So, we knew from talking to people
that he worked with
and his family
that he lived by the phone,
which is a good thing for investigators
in piecing together a timeline.
[Steve] On December 28th,
Jack goes and works in DC
for only a day.
Later that day,
Jack's phone records show
he must have left DC,
and he comes home to New Castle.
Jack and Kathy kept this beautiful,
elegant home in New Castle,
right at the edge of a historic park.
And that night,
you've got this smoke bomb incident
across the street.
[phone ringing tone]
[Katherine] The next day,
I had tried to call him
and I couldn't reach him.
[ringing tone continues]
And I thought,
"Why would he not be answering his phone?"
I'd Never before
had I not been able to reach him.
[Joe] On the morning of December 29th,
Jack contacted Mitre,
where he was employed
and told them that there had been
a break-in at his home.
He told them he had lost certain items
that he would typically use
for access to their business
that he had lost his wallet,
his key fob,
his briefcase,
as well as his cell phone.
His cell phone was extremely important.
He used it for everything.
I'm sure he was very stressed
to have lost his cell phone.
[Steve] Of course, it is curious
that Jack doesn't notify the police
that there was a break-in,
and doesn't notify Kathy.
That's a little weird.
Once Jack loses his cell phone,
that also leaves investigators
in a bit of a quandary,
as they're trying to track him
and create a timeline of his movements,
because they can't use
the cell phone anymore.
Now that he didn't have his phone,
all they had were witness sightings,
which aren't always accurate,
and any surveillance footage
they could find.
[Scott] Video was obtained that showed
that Jack had been inside a pharmacy
on the 29th, in Old New Castle,
not far from Jack's house.
[Steve]
Jack's a familiar figure in this pharmacy.
This is where he gets
his prescriptions filled
whenever he's in New Castle.
But this time,
he's looking for a ride to Wilmington.
[Joe] There were a couple of people
that were in the pharmacy at the time,
that heard the conversation,
and offered to take Jack to Wilmington.
[Steve] Investigators believe
Jack wanted to get to Wilmington
to get his car, which was parked
at the Amtrak station there.
That's where Jack left his car
when he went to New York for Christmas.
And so he obtains a ride
around 6 p.m. into Wilmington.
And the next we know is around 6:42,
I think it was,
he shows up in a parking garage.
He's trying to find his car,
but he's in the wrong garage.
He's blocks from where his car
is actually parked.
[distant car horns blare]
Finding his way around
was challenging for him.
He was certainly directionally challenged.
That's why, for example,
he liked to walk around
Madison Square Park
multiple times for his exercise,
'cause he knew where it was,
and it was a square,
so it would be hard for him to get lost.
[elevator dings]
[Katherine]
He didn't have a good sense of direction.
He had almost no sense of direction.
[chuckles]
And
he would he would lose things.
He would park his car
and not be able to find it.
[distant horn blaring]
[Steve]
Jack was famous for coming home in a cab
on days that he'd driven to work,
because he would forget where he parked.
So, he constantly was
was misplacing his car
because he was so caught up
in his to-do list,
so caught up in whatever project
he was working on, that he just
It was like he didn't want
to devote any brain space
to remembering where something was.
At the parking garage,
the footage is haunting.
Jack is in a completely different state
than he was in
when he was at the pharmacy.
He appears in great distress,
he's agitated.
He's got one shoe off
and the other shoe in his hand.
And you could see that, at times,
he appears to peek around a corner
or look out a door
before he goes through it,
like he's scared he's being stalked.
And he tells the people
in the parking garage
that his briefcase has been stolen.
He said to me his parking ticket
was inside his briefcase,
so I said, "Where's your briefcase?"
He said his briefcase was stolen from him.
So, when I kept asking him
how was it stolen,
all he kept saying to me,
"My briefcase was stolen. It was stolen."
[Steve] That 40-minute time frame
between when Jack is seen at the pharmacy
and when he appears
in so much distress at the parking garage
is one of the fundamental,
foundational mysteries
surrounding his homicide.
When I saw the surveillance footage,
uh, it
didn't look like Jack.
It looks to me like he was trying
to get away from something,
or someone.
And I think not having his phone,
for example, was
or being able to find his car
uh, made him more afraid.
[Katherine] Jack had bipolar disorder,
and it may have been the reason
he was acting that way.
Most of the time I was with him,
he was, uh, just
regular old Jack.
Every now and then,
he would get a little manic, I guess.
He was pretty diligent
about taking his pills,
but bipolar disorder is mysterious
and very unpredictable.
[Steve] He might have had
some significant mental break,
and it's also possible
that he was physically attacked.
Maybe his foot was injured
in some sort of scuffle
and that's why he pulls off his shoe.
It seems like the central mystery,
and I would love to know what happened
during that 40-minute time span
between when Jack is seen at the pharmacy
and when he appears at the parking garage.
The next time Jack is picked up on camera,
according to the cops,
it's 20 hours later.
He's in the basement
of the Nemours Building,
which is an office complex
in downtown Wilmington.
Investigators later found evidence
that Jack spent the night
and part of the day in this basement.
[Scott]
So, this is the corner of 11th and Orange,
in downtown Wilmington,
where a lot of the police investigation
centered on Jack Wheeler's whereabouts,
that he had been seen
on surveillance camera
in the tunnel located underneath
where we're standing now,
and in a couple of shots in the hallways.
There are many hallways,
access ways, alleyways.
There is a fitness center,
employee lockers, et cetera.
So, there was a lot of ground to cover,
looking to see
where possibly Jack may have gone into.
Some of the employees
of the Nemours Building had said
they had seen something in a stairwell
that could have been
where somebody would have stayed.
We were not able
to find any personal effects
with, uh that would've told
law enforcement, "That belonged to Jack."
[Steve] There's some mystery over
why Jack would go to the Nemours Building.
No one really knows
what Jack's connection would've been
to that building or that basement.
He couldn't get to his car,
and so now it's like he's gone to ground.
His activities seem
more like a guy trying to hide
and figure out
a careful way out of town,
to At one point,
he's asking to go to Philadelphia,
potentially, I guess,
to get an Amtrak train to New York
where he might join Kathy.
And, um
it's it's just a mystery.
At 8:30 p.m.,
Jack shows up exiting the building.
Now he's wearing a dark-colored hoodie,
which is something the suited, you know,
Washington DC insider Jack Wheeler
had not worn
to anybody's knowledge before.
[Scott] This is the valet section
for the Hotel DuPont.
Jack moves quickly past,
probably walking along the same pathway
that I am walking
and comes into the view of one camera
continues on
through the overpass
and that is the last camera shot
that we have of Jack Wheeler alive.
[distant horns blaring]
[phone ringing tone]
[Katherine] When I couldn't reach him,
I was uncertain what to do.
I I didn't pace around and think,
"Oh, dear,
something terrible has happened."
I never
I thought, "Something's wrong," but
I just didn't let myself imagine
that something bad had happened,
or something terrible.
[man] December 31st, 2010.
It was just a typical day. It was cold.
I went to work,
went to the landfill,
went up top, dumped off.
I got off the scale
and I went around to jump on 495,
and my dispatch called me and said, uh,
"Go back to the landfill.
They found a body in the pile."
[birds cry]
When we got up top of the landfill,
all the bosses from the landfill
and everybody was coming up.
I seen the body there,
sticking up out of the pile.
It jolted you a little bit.
Kinda freaky.
Yeah, I was kinda freaked out.
I asked them guys to go cover him up,
they went and covered him up,
and we waited for the police to come.
[reversing alarm beeps]
[brief police siren]
[Scott] Any investigation of a homicide,
you have a crime scene,
you have somewhere to go.
And, early on,
there was no crime scene to be found,
other than the landfill.
After combing through
tons and tons of trash,
the investigators determined
that the trash
surrounding the body of Jack Wheeler
had come from the city of Newark.
That is when the case was turned over
to Newark police.
And so the Newark Police Department
were able to come up
with a particular trash truck
that they believed
picked up the body of Jack Wheeler.
They zeroed in on a couple of dumpsters
on its trash route.
The forensic unit went out
and started swabbing these dumpsters
and thereby were able to come up
with a partial DNA match
to Jack Wheeler to one of those dumpsters.
[Katherine] To my knowledge,
he had no connection to Newark, Delaware.
I was stunned. I would think, "What are
They must be making a mistake."
[Steve]
So, this is another big twist in the case,
because the last time Jack was seen,
he was in Wilmington,
14 miles away.
Different town,
and in the opposite direction
from where he had been walking.
So, how does he end up in a dumpster
in Newark, Delaware?
[Scott] A lot of time was spent
just trying to figure out
how Jack got out of Wilmington,
going south into Newark.
There is a witness that came forth
that had seen Jack in a taxicab.
According to this witness,
Jack Wheeler shared the cab
when Jack had heard
that the cab was going to Newark.
So, we have to go with that,
but you also don't want to ignore the fact
that the witness may have misidentified
just another individual
that looked like Jack Wheeler.
We don't want to lose the fact
that he could have taken a train
from Wilmington to Newark.
It is very frustrating
to not come up
with any one definitive answer.
[Mike] We're at the Delaware College
of Arts, where I usually run my route at.
We got two cans here,
one's an eight-yarder, one's a six-yarder.
You got the side doors here,
and you can tell the side door's
up real high on the eight-yarder.
And if you come over to the six-yarder
the side door over on the six-yarder
is kind of shorter,
to where somebody can climb in real easy.
Easier than the eight-yarder.
When we spoke to the trash-truck drivers,
they told us that it was fairly common
that people would go in there
and actually sleep.
Or people would go into those dumpsters
to find some warmth in the winter months.
[Mike] I'll drive up to a stop
and I'll go and put my forks in
and either somebody will pop up
through the top
or they'll climb out the side door.
We call 'em "hollers,"
'cause that's all they do,
they jump up out of the can
and they start hollering,
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" like that.
And sometimes you can hear 'em
and sometimes you can't.
[Steve]
So, there's been a theory of Jack's death
that maybe he wanders out into the night,
maybe he just gets cold
and crawls into a dumpster
to escape the winter.
[Meriwether] The theory that he crawled
into a dumpster to stay warm
seems completely preposterous to me.
I mean, in part
because of the medical examiner's report
that, you know
It concluded that he was murdered.
[Steve] When you look at the autopsy
and the degree to which he was beaten,
it's just not consistent
with a fall from a dumpster.
[Bayard] In the autopsy report,
there are listed severe injuries,
such as punctured lung, broken ribs,
and he had bleeding in the head.
[Steve] Bruises to the face
and orbital bones, temples, mouth
All these places
you'd expect somebody to
to hit you if they were pummeling you
and he gets driven down to his knees.
And when they describe the cause of death,
it's just "blunt force trauma."
[Bayard]
So, it seems like a severe beating.
What I don't get is
why would someone want to beat him
so severely?
Uh, is Was it targeted?
That's possible.
Who would target him?
That's
That would create a lot of speculation.
Was he in the wrong place
at the wrong time?
[Steve]
One of the big questions in the case
is whether or not Jack's murder
was related to what happened
in New Castle that night
when he came back from DC.
Late at night,
there is a smoke bomb incident
at this house across the street.
After this incident happens,
the police find Jack's cell phone,
and so one of the theories is
he's the one
who set off those smoke bombs.
Jack was a passionate guy.
At the time of his death,
he was in a housing dispute
with some people across the street
who were building a big house
on historic Battery Park.
If you talk to people about, um,
why he entered into this big legal effort
to stop that house from being built,
it was the history of Battery Park.
It was the idea that somebody
was going to build a private home
on what to him was, you know,
public land and sacred land.
[Katherine] Jack liked being there.
He liked being in New Castle a lot.
It was quiet and it was old-fashioned,
and Jack was sort of old-fashioned.
We were both very unhappy
about the house going up
across the street,
and he was very fired up about it.
He got it into his head
that this can't happen.
This is a sacrilege.
And bipolar disorder can make you
more emotional and illogical.
[Steve]
I could just imagine Jack being so upset
to come back to his house,
if he had done the smoke bombing.
Comes back to his house,
he realizes he doesn't have his phone,
realizes where it must be,
and now he's upset.
And Jack, who is very hard on himself,
just flies into a kind of panic,
and just starts flinging stuff around.
No one knows for sure
what happened in Jack's house that night.
And the whole case is so layered in
in various mysteries
that we have to, like,
be open to varying explanations.
But here's the thing,
Jack's personal distress doesn't explain
his murder.
Someone killed him,
and the question is
whether or not it was somebody
who just happened across him
when he was wandering around.
And that theory kinda gets blown apart,
because the circumstances
in which he's later found
don't fit with a random mugging.
Street muggers
who wind up killing their victims
leave the body where it drops,
they don't hide it
or load it into a dumpster.
The other problem with the robbery theory
is that when Jack's found,
he apparently had some cash left on him.
He has He's got a Rolex
and he's got his West Point ring.
It just seems unlikely
that in the case of a robbery,
they're gonna miss all that, right?
Particularly if they've taken the time
to hide the body.
[Meriwether] I don't think it was random.
I do find it
strange and unusual
that given the reward we offered
that no one came forward with any
tips or leads.
As my mom said,
perhaps because they'd already been paid.
But
we don't know.
That's what we wanna find out.
[Joe] We all have enemies.
And he may have been in a position
where people thought
that it would be better
if Jack was not on this Earth.
[Steve] He always carried this briefcase
around with him,
and he had a security clearance,
and that's where he'd keep that stuff,
and he claimed the briefcase was missing.
[woman]
When I kept asking him how was it stolen,
all he kept saying to me,
"My briefcase was stolen. It was stolen."
[Michael Wynne]
I would look at it and ask the question,
"What happened to the briefcase?"
'Cause we took many international trips,
and he was never without that briefcase.
[Scott]
Investigators did everything possible
to locate this briefcase.
But from everything
that investigators have searched,
in any other place
that Jack might have been,
we have not been able
to come up with this briefcase.
As an investigator,
I can't exclude any theory,
but somebody out there knows something,
came across Jack,
whether in an insignificant way or not.
Even if it's somebody
who was not intending harm,
but assisted Jack one way or another,
they need to call in order to help
investigators finally determine
what happened to Jack.
[band plays mournful music]
[Katherine] I was proud of him
for all the good work
he had done in his life.
And for who he was.
Uh, his life was
devoted to service
and, uh service to his country.
His whole life
[voice trembling]
was focused on a way to be useful.
That's what he wanted.
He was a soldier. He was always a soldier.
And he was good.
I've never known anybody so good.
Oh, God, do I miss him.
[inaudible conversation]
[Meriwether] He was silly and fun and
kind, and
it made you feel good to be around him
because of how remarkable he was,
and how full of love.
He
He cared very deeply
about everything he did,
and
took took it to heart.
He had
the largest heart of anyone I know.
So
I don't know, I just miss my dad.
[birds cry]
[vehicle approaching]
This brings back a lot of memories
of when I was last here
back on December 31st, 2010.
It's not every day
that you receive a phone call
regarding a body that's found
in the landfill.
In Wilmington, uh
we have, you know, uh, homicides,
we have robberies,
so this wasn't gonna be anything different
from what I was expecting.
As I was approaching the body,
I could observe
that it was an older white male.
There were no obvious signs of injury,
such as a gunshot wound or a stab wound.
He was wearing black pants,
and he had a white shirt,
and some type of a black garment
covering his upper torso area.
And as we took a closer look,
I noticed a ring that stood out,
uh, as no ring
that I had ever seen before.
The ring was a West Point ring.
I could tell right away
that this was someone of notoriety.
This was not our typical homicide
that we were dealing with in Wilmington.
[birds cry]
Now we turn to a just-discovered murder
that has stunned
a lot of this nation's veterans
and those who knew the victim.
His name was John Wheeler.
Jack's murder has all these facts
around it
that just naturally confound.
As of this point, there are no suspects.
We will continue to bring you
[man] It was big news at the time.
Detectives are still baffled this morning
by the murder
of a former White House aide
[man] A very sensational case.
Now to a murder
that's mystifying official Washington
A body found in a landfill,
and you just think to yourself,
"That's a targeted murder.
Sounds like something the Mob would do.
Nobody ever intended
this person to be found."
[reporter] Police discovered the body
last Friday morning at a landfill,
and over the weekend officially identified
the victim as John Wheeler.
[Steve] So, the sensational aspects
of Jack's murder
were what first attracted me.
But you could say
that I came for the murder,
but ended up staying for the man, right?
Because he lived
a really fascinating life.
Let me now introduce to you
Mr. John Wheeler.
[cheering and applause]
Thank you, Jan.
A lot of people claim to be patriots.
Jack was a patriot.
In our youth,
our hearts were touched with fire.
In the Vietnam War,
each American was touched with fire.
[Bayard] Jack was devoted to causes
that were for the great benefit
of the country,
such as being executive director
of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
John Wheeler served in Vietnam
and when he came back,
he began planning a memorial
for all those who fought and died there.
[man]
Well, Jack was a very exceptional person,
a graduate of West Point,
a graduate of Harvard Business School,
uh a graduate of Yale Law School.
I mean, this guy was extremely bright.
In 1982, as we were building
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
he provided the overall strategy guidance,
was the chairman of the board.
And how could it have happened
without him?
It wouldn't have happened.
It wouldn't have happened.
[man] I actually hired Jack in 2004,
when I got sworn in
as Secretary of the Air Force,
uh, within the, um,
George Bush administration.
Jack brought an intensity to life
that few of us manifest.
Jack thought outside of the box
before there was a box.
We need to expand our definition
of who's wounded.
Not just people killed by a ballistic
incident, by a bullet,
or wounded by a bullet,
it's gotta be, uh, people
who suffer after the war.
[Steve] He accomplished so much.
And he did it all with the equivalent
of a piano strapped to his back,
because he had bipolar disorder.
Bipolar disorder is marked
by bouts of, like, frenetic activity.
But there's also no doubt
that it has a really awful reverse side,
where he could be very impulsive
and overly emotional.
So, there's no question
it propelled him forward
and it held him back.
And what he did get done
is all the more impressive
because it was that much harder for him.
[distant siren and shouting]
[woman] Jack was passionate
about everything he did.
Whatever you ask him to do
or ask him about,
doesn't matter if it was
U.S. foreign policy,
or the guy next door who needed help
with the city council, or any
It just It didn't matter.
He would put the same energy
into everything he did.
Jack and I were married for 13 years.
We lived in Harlem
and we had a house in New Castle.
He had two kids that were twins
that he adored,
and I had two kids
and he treated my kids like they were his.
[woman] I met Jack when my mother,
you know, started dating him.
And he was a funny,
um, sort of cheesy,
but very serious man.
Being married to Jack means
you're never It's it's never dull.
It's full of unexpected things,
which I like.
When I first met Jack,
I remember talking to him
and saying something
about George Balanchine ballet.
And he said,
"I watched Balanchine choreograph Jewels."
And I said, "You did?"
Now, that's like saying to a drug addict,
"I have I have a lifetime supply
of anything you want."
[laughing] I mean, it it was
I 'Cause I I love Jewels.
And I love all Balanchine ballet.
A soldier who loves ballet.
I just thought how lucky I was.
Oh, I loved him with all my heart.
I really did.
[Jan] I was on my way to Washington,
and I got a call that Jack Wheeler
had apparently been murdered.
And, uh, I'll never quite be the same,
and a lot of people
who knew him never will.
You know, everybody loved him.
[Bayard] It was a sudden shock.
There was no indication as to why
someone would want to murder Jack Wheeler.
[Meriwether]
It's very hard to wrap your head around
that all of a sudden, you know,
Jack had been found in a landfill.
And it didn't make sense.
To find a body in a landfill,
seems to me like it would be a place
someone who didn't want him to be found
would put him.
And I'm very surprised
that we actually did find him.
Um, that to me is a miracle,
and one that we're very grateful for.
[birds cry]
[Katherine]
I'm not sure when I got the phone call.
Jack's daughter called me up and she said,
"Jack's dead."
I was incredulous. I didn't know
I couldn't make sense of it.
It just It didn't seem possible.
It didn't seem possible
that the world could go on without him.
[chuckles]
That can't be true.
How do you have a world without Jack?
That's
[chuckles]
[inaudible conversation]
[Katherine] I remember we went down
to see his body at the police station.
We went into the this room and
he was covered from
uh, the chest down with
a sheet,
and they would let us see
just his face and head,
and the rest of him we didn't see.
And probably that's just as well,
because from what I learned later,
he had been
pretty well
beaten up and tossed around.
[man]
This had to be a professional hit job.
The way he was dumped into that landfill
tells me that somebody
deliberately went out and got him.
Something is very, very wrong,
and a great tragedy to America.
[man] Jack had a very strong network
with government.
He worked as an assistant
to the Secretary of the Air Force,
uh, for a time,
and his contacts within the government
were extremely strong.
And because of his government service,
he may have been the target of a
murder-for-hire type situation.
[Steve] What we know
is that at the time of his death,
he was working as a consultant
for the Mitre Corporation,
which is a defense contracting firm.
They specialize in stuff
like artificial intelligence,
satellite systems for the military
Jack was working
in the area of cybersecurity.
He was working on the issues
that we're seeing now made manifest
with, you know,
Russia interfering with the election,
Russia and China supposedly hacking
into our power grid.
That's the stuff
that Wheeler was working on at the time.
The problem, though,
is that there's nothing to connect
those parts of his bio
to his actual murder.
The confounding part is that when
you reach into these things individually,
your hand just kinda goes
right through, right?
You get caught up in it,
and you can go down all these blind paths.
I think that what we have to do,
because this is such a mystery,
is absolutely remain open-minded.
[Michael Lawson] The body was here
for several hours that day.
We had to call out
the Evidence Detection Unit,
cordoning off the location,
and making sure that we did
a thorough search.
I had never searched
for evidence in a landfill
within my 23-year career,
um, and this being the first time,
we took precautions.
[birds cry]
Any kind of evidence
that you're actually looking for
could be contaminated
with the trash that's mixed in.
We're looking for
other pieces of clothing.
We're looking for,
potentially, a cell phone.
And we did not find anything,
um, other than just trash
that had been disposed of.
We were able to positively identify
the victim, John Wheeler, that day.
And after finding out
that this was Mr. Wheeler,
and that he had a house
in New Castle City
I immediately contacted
the New Castle City Police Department
and spoke with a detective,
um, who advised me that they were actually
en route to Mr. Wheeler's house,
investigating a potential burglary.
And that's when this investigation turned
a page
to something larger than finding
Mr. Wheeler at the landfill.
[church bell rings]
[man] I knew Jack
as a temporary next-door neighbor.
He was never here for very long,
but I got involved in being
the caretaker of the house.
Jack, he was just
an interesting character.
I always liked Jack.
He was never one to sit down
and just casually talk to you.
He was He was always doing something,
or had something on his mind.
So, anyhow,
I was talking to my neighbor,
and that's when I happened to notice
that Jack's second floor rear window
was open.
So, being the good neighbor,
I went over into the house.
Now, when I came in,
the storm door was closed,
but this door was ajar about like that.
And then I just walked in here
and kind of saw the turmoil
in the in the kitchen.
Uh, there there was a tree,
a tall tree sitting on that bay window,
and that was tipped over.
And spices were all over the place.
They were all over the floor,
all over the table.
There were a bunch of broken dishes
in the sink.
And right by my feet,
there was white powder on the floor,
and I could see it was probably Comet,
'cause there was a Comet can sitting here
on the on the counter.
And there was also
Jack's ceremonial West Point sword
and shield on the floor right here.
And then I did notice
that there was a bare footprint
in the Comet, right in front of the sink.
I was sure it was burglary,
because things were
in such a state of turmoil.
I figured somebody had broken in,
and probably through this side door.
[Steve] Jack's neighbor calls the police.
And the police happen to have just
been notified of the body at the
at the landfill,
and discovered Jack there.
So, you can imagine
it's a pretty frantic uh, scene.
So, to add to the confusion,
there's another investigation happening
across the street from Jack's house
in New Castle.
There are new clues
in the mysterious death
of former White House aide, John Wheeler.
This is new video you're looking at
from inside his neighbor's house
under construction.
[Steve] So, it turns out that just
a few days before Jack's body was found,
someone had set off
a couple of smoke bombs
at a construction site across the street.
There wasn't much damage,
but it's a weird turn in the story,
because police found
a cell phone at the site,
and when they examined it,
they discovered it was Jack Wheeler's.
So, you've got all these things
happening at once:
Jack's body found in a landfill
a burglary investigation at his house
and an investigation
into the smoke bombs across the street.
So, you have to wonder how, or if,
all these things are connected.
[distant birds cry]
[man] In 2010, I was the FBI agent
assigned to the Violent Crime Unit
in Wilmington, Delaware.
The FBI was called in
to the Jack Wheeler case
with regards to him having
a past relationship with the Pentagon
as an employee,
and the fact that he had worked
for a couple
of presidential administrations.
ATF was involved, DEA was involved.
We're talking, uh,
at least ten different agencies,
federal, state and local,
running down every possible lead.
Police are working now to reconstruct
the last few days of John Wheeler's life,
hoping that will help them solve
the mystery
of who killed this prominent advocate
for veterans, and why.
[horn toots]
[Katherine] The last time I saw him,
he had been in DC.
He came up to New York on Christmas Eve,
and we had Christmas Day,
and all the kids were there.
[Meriwether] We always go to my mom's
for Christmas dinner.
It was very much like it always is.
And Jack was in very good spirits.
[Katherine] The next day,
he said he had to go back to DC.
I was annoyed 'cause I thought
we were gonna go to the movies.
After Christmas, we'd gone to movies
that we'd missed.
And it was things
that we could do with the kids, too,
which was always nice.
[Meriwether] My mom was not happy
that he had decided
to leave after Christmas.
But that was Jack.
He was always working
and he always had 15 different things
happening at once.
[train horn blares]
[Scott] So, we know from the time
that he got on the train
and went into Washington, DC,
that Jack was on his phone a lot.
So, we knew from talking to people
that he worked with
and his family
that he lived by the phone,
which is a good thing for investigators
in piecing together a timeline.
[Steve] On December 28th,
Jack goes and works in DC
for only a day.
Later that day,
Jack's phone records show
he must have left DC,
and he comes home to New Castle.
Jack and Kathy kept this beautiful,
elegant home in New Castle,
right at the edge of a historic park.
And that night,
you've got this smoke bomb incident
across the street.
[phone ringing tone]
[Katherine] The next day,
I had tried to call him
and I couldn't reach him.
[ringing tone continues]
And I thought,
"Why would he not be answering his phone?"
I'd Never before
had I not been able to reach him.
[Joe] On the morning of December 29th,
Jack contacted Mitre,
where he was employed
and told them that there had been
a break-in at his home.
He told them he had lost certain items
that he would typically use
for access to their business
that he had lost his wallet,
his key fob,
his briefcase,
as well as his cell phone.
His cell phone was extremely important.
He used it for everything.
I'm sure he was very stressed
to have lost his cell phone.
[Steve] Of course, it is curious
that Jack doesn't notify the police
that there was a break-in,
and doesn't notify Kathy.
That's a little weird.
Once Jack loses his cell phone,
that also leaves investigators
in a bit of a quandary,
as they're trying to track him
and create a timeline of his movements,
because they can't use
the cell phone anymore.
Now that he didn't have his phone,
all they had were witness sightings,
which aren't always accurate,
and any surveillance footage
they could find.
[Scott] Video was obtained that showed
that Jack had been inside a pharmacy
on the 29th, in Old New Castle,
not far from Jack's house.
[Steve]
Jack's a familiar figure in this pharmacy.
This is where he gets
his prescriptions filled
whenever he's in New Castle.
But this time,
he's looking for a ride to Wilmington.
[Joe] There were a couple of people
that were in the pharmacy at the time,
that heard the conversation,
and offered to take Jack to Wilmington.
[Steve] Investigators believe
Jack wanted to get to Wilmington
to get his car, which was parked
at the Amtrak station there.
That's where Jack left his car
when he went to New York for Christmas.
And so he obtains a ride
around 6 p.m. into Wilmington.
And the next we know is around 6:42,
I think it was,
he shows up in a parking garage.
He's trying to find his car,
but he's in the wrong garage.
He's blocks from where his car
is actually parked.
[distant car horns blare]
Finding his way around
was challenging for him.
He was certainly directionally challenged.
That's why, for example,
he liked to walk around
Madison Square Park
multiple times for his exercise,
'cause he knew where it was,
and it was a square,
so it would be hard for him to get lost.
[elevator dings]
[Katherine]
He didn't have a good sense of direction.
He had almost no sense of direction.
[chuckles]
And
he would he would lose things.
He would park his car
and not be able to find it.
[distant horn blaring]
[Steve]
Jack was famous for coming home in a cab
on days that he'd driven to work,
because he would forget where he parked.
So, he constantly was
was misplacing his car
because he was so caught up
in his to-do list,
so caught up in whatever project
he was working on, that he just
It was like he didn't want
to devote any brain space
to remembering where something was.
At the parking garage,
the footage is haunting.
Jack is in a completely different state
than he was in
when he was at the pharmacy.
He appears in great distress,
he's agitated.
He's got one shoe off
and the other shoe in his hand.
And you could see that, at times,
he appears to peek around a corner
or look out a door
before he goes through it,
like he's scared he's being stalked.
And he tells the people
in the parking garage
that his briefcase has been stolen.
He said to me his parking ticket
was inside his briefcase,
so I said, "Where's your briefcase?"
He said his briefcase was stolen from him.
So, when I kept asking him
how was it stolen,
all he kept saying to me,
"My briefcase was stolen. It was stolen."
[Steve] That 40-minute time frame
between when Jack is seen at the pharmacy
and when he appears
in so much distress at the parking garage
is one of the fundamental,
foundational mysteries
surrounding his homicide.
When I saw the surveillance footage,
uh, it
didn't look like Jack.
It looks to me like he was trying
to get away from something,
or someone.
And I think not having his phone,
for example, was
or being able to find his car
uh, made him more afraid.
[Katherine] Jack had bipolar disorder,
and it may have been the reason
he was acting that way.
Most of the time I was with him,
he was, uh, just
regular old Jack.
Every now and then,
he would get a little manic, I guess.
He was pretty diligent
about taking his pills,
but bipolar disorder is mysterious
and very unpredictable.
[Steve] He might have had
some significant mental break,
and it's also possible
that he was physically attacked.
Maybe his foot was injured
in some sort of scuffle
and that's why he pulls off his shoe.
It seems like the central mystery,
and I would love to know what happened
during that 40-minute time span
between when Jack is seen at the pharmacy
and when he appears at the parking garage.
The next time Jack is picked up on camera,
according to the cops,
it's 20 hours later.
He's in the basement
of the Nemours Building,
which is an office complex
in downtown Wilmington.
Investigators later found evidence
that Jack spent the night
and part of the day in this basement.
[Scott]
So, this is the corner of 11th and Orange,
in downtown Wilmington,
where a lot of the police investigation
centered on Jack Wheeler's whereabouts,
that he had been seen
on surveillance camera
in the tunnel located underneath
where we're standing now,
and in a couple of shots in the hallways.
There are many hallways,
access ways, alleyways.
There is a fitness center,
employee lockers, et cetera.
So, there was a lot of ground to cover,
looking to see
where possibly Jack may have gone into.
Some of the employees
of the Nemours Building had said
they had seen something in a stairwell
that could have been
where somebody would have stayed.
We were not able
to find any personal effects
with, uh that would've told
law enforcement, "That belonged to Jack."
[Steve] There's some mystery over
why Jack would go to the Nemours Building.
No one really knows
what Jack's connection would've been
to that building or that basement.
He couldn't get to his car,
and so now it's like he's gone to ground.
His activities seem
more like a guy trying to hide
and figure out
a careful way out of town,
to At one point,
he's asking to go to Philadelphia,
potentially, I guess,
to get an Amtrak train to New York
where he might join Kathy.
And, um
it's it's just a mystery.
At 8:30 p.m.,
Jack shows up exiting the building.
Now he's wearing a dark-colored hoodie,
which is something the suited, you know,
Washington DC insider Jack Wheeler
had not worn
to anybody's knowledge before.
[Scott] This is the valet section
for the Hotel DuPont.
Jack moves quickly past,
probably walking along the same pathway
that I am walking
and comes into the view of one camera
continues on
through the overpass
and that is the last camera shot
that we have of Jack Wheeler alive.
[distant horns blaring]
[phone ringing tone]
[Katherine] When I couldn't reach him,
I was uncertain what to do.
I I didn't pace around and think,
"Oh, dear,
something terrible has happened."
I never
I thought, "Something's wrong," but
I just didn't let myself imagine
that something bad had happened,
or something terrible.
[man] December 31st, 2010.
It was just a typical day. It was cold.
I went to work,
went to the landfill,
went up top, dumped off.
I got off the scale
and I went around to jump on 495,
and my dispatch called me and said, uh,
"Go back to the landfill.
They found a body in the pile."
[birds cry]
When we got up top of the landfill,
all the bosses from the landfill
and everybody was coming up.
I seen the body there,
sticking up out of the pile.
It jolted you a little bit.
Kinda freaky.
Yeah, I was kinda freaked out.
I asked them guys to go cover him up,
they went and covered him up,
and we waited for the police to come.
[reversing alarm beeps]
[brief police siren]
[Scott] Any investigation of a homicide,
you have a crime scene,
you have somewhere to go.
And, early on,
there was no crime scene to be found,
other than the landfill.
After combing through
tons and tons of trash,
the investigators determined
that the trash
surrounding the body of Jack Wheeler
had come from the city of Newark.
That is when the case was turned over
to Newark police.
And so the Newark Police Department
were able to come up
with a particular trash truck
that they believed
picked up the body of Jack Wheeler.
They zeroed in on a couple of dumpsters
on its trash route.
The forensic unit went out
and started swabbing these dumpsters
and thereby were able to come up
with a partial DNA match
to Jack Wheeler to one of those dumpsters.
[Katherine] To my knowledge,
he had no connection to Newark, Delaware.
I was stunned. I would think, "What are
They must be making a mistake."
[Steve]
So, this is another big twist in the case,
because the last time Jack was seen,
he was in Wilmington,
14 miles away.
Different town,
and in the opposite direction
from where he had been walking.
So, how does he end up in a dumpster
in Newark, Delaware?
[Scott] A lot of time was spent
just trying to figure out
how Jack got out of Wilmington,
going south into Newark.
There is a witness that came forth
that had seen Jack in a taxicab.
According to this witness,
Jack Wheeler shared the cab
when Jack had heard
that the cab was going to Newark.
So, we have to go with that,
but you also don't want to ignore the fact
that the witness may have misidentified
just another individual
that looked like Jack Wheeler.
We don't want to lose the fact
that he could have taken a train
from Wilmington to Newark.
It is very frustrating
to not come up
with any one definitive answer.
[Mike] We're at the Delaware College
of Arts, where I usually run my route at.
We got two cans here,
one's an eight-yarder, one's a six-yarder.
You got the side doors here,
and you can tell the side door's
up real high on the eight-yarder.
And if you come over to the six-yarder
the side door over on the six-yarder
is kind of shorter,
to where somebody can climb in real easy.
Easier than the eight-yarder.
When we spoke to the trash-truck drivers,
they told us that it was fairly common
that people would go in there
and actually sleep.
Or people would go into those dumpsters
to find some warmth in the winter months.
[Mike] I'll drive up to a stop
and I'll go and put my forks in
and either somebody will pop up
through the top
or they'll climb out the side door.
We call 'em "hollers,"
'cause that's all they do,
they jump up out of the can
and they start hollering,
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" like that.
And sometimes you can hear 'em
and sometimes you can't.
[Steve]
So, there's been a theory of Jack's death
that maybe he wanders out into the night,
maybe he just gets cold
and crawls into a dumpster
to escape the winter.
[Meriwether] The theory that he crawled
into a dumpster to stay warm
seems completely preposterous to me.
I mean, in part
because of the medical examiner's report
that, you know
It concluded that he was murdered.
[Steve] When you look at the autopsy
and the degree to which he was beaten,
it's just not consistent
with a fall from a dumpster.
[Bayard] In the autopsy report,
there are listed severe injuries,
such as punctured lung, broken ribs,
and he had bleeding in the head.
[Steve] Bruises to the face
and orbital bones, temples, mouth
All these places
you'd expect somebody to
to hit you if they were pummeling you
and he gets driven down to his knees.
And when they describe the cause of death,
it's just "blunt force trauma."
[Bayard]
So, it seems like a severe beating.
What I don't get is
why would someone want to beat him
so severely?
Uh, is Was it targeted?
That's possible.
Who would target him?
That's
That would create a lot of speculation.
Was he in the wrong place
at the wrong time?
[Steve]
One of the big questions in the case
is whether or not Jack's murder
was related to what happened
in New Castle that night
when he came back from DC.
Late at night,
there is a smoke bomb incident
at this house across the street.
After this incident happens,
the police find Jack's cell phone,
and so one of the theories is
he's the one
who set off those smoke bombs.
Jack was a passionate guy.
At the time of his death,
he was in a housing dispute
with some people across the street
who were building a big house
on historic Battery Park.
If you talk to people about, um,
why he entered into this big legal effort
to stop that house from being built,
it was the history of Battery Park.
It was the idea that somebody
was going to build a private home
on what to him was, you know,
public land and sacred land.
[Katherine] Jack liked being there.
He liked being in New Castle a lot.
It was quiet and it was old-fashioned,
and Jack was sort of old-fashioned.
We were both very unhappy
about the house going up
across the street,
and he was very fired up about it.
He got it into his head
that this can't happen.
This is a sacrilege.
And bipolar disorder can make you
more emotional and illogical.
[Steve]
I could just imagine Jack being so upset
to come back to his house,
if he had done the smoke bombing.
Comes back to his house,
he realizes he doesn't have his phone,
realizes where it must be,
and now he's upset.
And Jack, who is very hard on himself,
just flies into a kind of panic,
and just starts flinging stuff around.
No one knows for sure
what happened in Jack's house that night.
And the whole case is so layered in
in various mysteries
that we have to, like,
be open to varying explanations.
But here's the thing,
Jack's personal distress doesn't explain
his murder.
Someone killed him,
and the question is
whether or not it was somebody
who just happened across him
when he was wandering around.
And that theory kinda gets blown apart,
because the circumstances
in which he's later found
don't fit with a random mugging.
Street muggers
who wind up killing their victims
leave the body where it drops,
they don't hide it
or load it into a dumpster.
The other problem with the robbery theory
is that when Jack's found,
he apparently had some cash left on him.
He has He's got a Rolex
and he's got his West Point ring.
It just seems unlikely
that in the case of a robbery,
they're gonna miss all that, right?
Particularly if they've taken the time
to hide the body.
[Meriwether] I don't think it was random.
I do find it
strange and unusual
that given the reward we offered
that no one came forward with any
tips or leads.
As my mom said,
perhaps because they'd already been paid.
But
we don't know.
That's what we wanna find out.
[Joe] We all have enemies.
And he may have been in a position
where people thought
that it would be better
if Jack was not on this Earth.
[Steve] He always carried this briefcase
around with him,
and he had a security clearance,
and that's where he'd keep that stuff,
and he claimed the briefcase was missing.
[woman]
When I kept asking him how was it stolen,
all he kept saying to me,
"My briefcase was stolen. It was stolen."
[Michael Wynne]
I would look at it and ask the question,
"What happened to the briefcase?"
'Cause we took many international trips,
and he was never without that briefcase.
[Scott]
Investigators did everything possible
to locate this briefcase.
But from everything
that investigators have searched,
in any other place
that Jack might have been,
we have not been able
to come up with this briefcase.
As an investigator,
I can't exclude any theory,
but somebody out there knows something,
came across Jack,
whether in an insignificant way or not.
Even if it's somebody
who was not intending harm,
but assisted Jack one way or another,
they need to call in order to help
investigators finally determine
what happened to Jack.
[band plays mournful music]
[Katherine] I was proud of him
for all the good work
he had done in his life.
And for who he was.
Uh, his life was
devoted to service
and, uh service to his country.
His whole life
[voice trembling]
was focused on a way to be useful.
That's what he wanted.
He was a soldier. He was always a soldier.
And he was good.
I've never known anybody so good.
Oh, God, do I miss him.
[inaudible conversation]
[Meriwether] He was silly and fun and
kind, and
it made you feel good to be around him
because of how remarkable he was,
and how full of love.
He
He cared very deeply
about everything he did,
and
took took it to heart.
He had
the largest heart of anyone I know.
So
I don't know, I just miss my dad.