John P. Wheeler III Homicide Case 'Might Never Be Solved'(Updated 4/17/2011)

Slaying of Ex-Pentagon Official John P. Wheeler III 'Might Never Be Solved'

As case gets colder, there are lots of theories -- but few leads

April 10, 2011

DelawareOnline.com - More than three months after former Pentagon official John P. Wheeler III's corpse tumbled out of a garbage truck at the Wilmington landfill on New Year's Eve, authorities still have no suspects and so many unanswered questions that they acknowledge being stymied.

Even a $25,000 reward offered by Wheeler's family -- an incentive that often produces a flurry of useful tips or a suspect's identity -- has not led to any worthwhile leads.

Investigators have pinpointed the 66-year-old Wheeler's movements in Wilmington about 13 hours before his body was discovered on the morning of Dec. 31, the victim of "blunt force trauma" suffered in an assault.

But police still haven't determined whether he was killed in random attack or robbery on Wilmington's rough East Side, where he was last seen heading, or the victim of something more sinister, like a political assassination.

Upon close examination, though, both of those theories are fraught with nagging questions, said two forensics experts who reviewed the publicly available facts in the case, plus all the holes, for The News Journal.

If he was mugged in Wilmington, where Wheeler was last seen 13 hours before his body was found, why would someone risk transporting a dead body to Newark, where police said he was put into a trash bin?

If he was targeted by an enemy, why was he wandering around New Castle and Wilmington, where witnesses described him as disoriented, in the two days before the slaying?

While authorities are withholding a few details about their investigation, they admit there's much they still don't know.

Detectives can document Wheeler's strange behavior during the hours preceding his death, but don't know where he died. Though Wilmington seems like the logical place, it could have been in Newark, where he was dumped, or somewhere else.

They aren't sure which trash bin the killers used -- only that it was one of 10 in Newark that a garbage hauler emptied during the early morning hours of Dec. 31.

They haven't determined where Wheeler spent the evening of Dec. 29, when he was in a Wilmington parking garage, looking in vain for his car, carrying one of his shoes and telling an attendant his briefcase had been stolen.

They don't know how he got to Wilmington that night after going an hour earlier to a pharmacy near his home in New Castle, six miles away, asking employees for a ride they could not provide.

The mystery, while compelling for the public, is a worst-case scenario for police, said Jim Fisher, a crime author and former FBI agent and criminal justice professor who lives in western Pennsylvania.

"This case is a homicide investigator's worst nightmare," Fisher said. "They have no time of death, no place of death, no murder weapon, no eyewitnesses, no stock suspects and no motive. You have absolutely nothing but the bizarre behavior of a man who ends up in a landfill. This case might never be solved."

Some observers, among them his widow and former military colleagues, have speculated that someone targeted the opinionated Yale Law School graduate, who suffered from bipolar disorder and didn't hesitate to antagonize those with whom he disagreed.

Wheeler had helped found the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and was working on cyber-defense issues as a Pentagon consultant when he was killed.

Newark police, who are leading the investigation that involves the FBI and Wilmington police, continue grasping for clues.

"I do not want to speculate on whether or not this was a random attack or something planned," Newark police spokesman Lt. Mark A. Farrall said late last week. "At this point, we just don't know."

But with few if any leads, authorities are beseeching the public for help in solving a crime that has received worldwide media coverage.

"We're seeking any information that may be relevant to our investigation," Farrall said.

Walter F. Rowe, who chairs the Department of Forensic Sciences at George Washington University, said he doesn't envy the challenge police face, calling it "the worst kind of situation."

'They would just leave you'

Criminologists Rowe and Fisher believe the killer was someone Wheeler encountered by accident in Wilmington, as opposed to someone who hunted him down.

"The guy must have wandered into a bad situation and got himself killed, and then the people disposed of the body," said Fisher, who taught criminal justice for nearly three decades at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.

But if his slaying was the result of a mugging of a vulnerable, argumentative old man, why would the killer take the trouble and risk to move the corpse and put it into a car, where Wheeler's DNA and clothing fibers might be left behind, and drive to Newark, they asked.

"If somebody wanders into a bad neighborhood and gets mugged, they aren't going to put him in a Dumpster," Fisher said. "I can't see that making any kind of sense whatsoever.

"Normally they would just leave you. Once you put him in your car, you are creating incriminating evidence. The victim takes part of the scene with him and leaves part of himself in the car, whether it's hair or blood or fiber."

If the killing was a robbery gone bad, police haven't released details that would tend to support one. For example, officials won't say whether Wheeler's treasured West Point ring and Rolex watch, which he usually wore, was discovered on his corpse. If the items were found, why would the attackers pass on valuables if the motive was money?

Police and prosecutors said they won't release such details because they don't want to compromise the investigation, a position the forensic experts called prudent because a potential witness or accomplice who provided such information might not be believable if they had seen it in media reports.

Rowe said robbers might have left the ring and watch with Wheeler because pawning such personal and distinguishable items -- perhaps the watch had Wheeler's initials -- could be traced back to them.

Robbery might not even have been the motive, Fisher speculated, wondering whether the crime had racial overtones. Wheeler was white and the vast majority of people living in Wilmington's East Side are black.

"Maybe they were black guys and he said something and they took offense," he said. "He didn't show them respect and they got into a tussle and they killed him."

Rowe said an argument could have preceded the beating, rather than a robbery, noting that Wheeler appeared confused in the downtown parking garage Dec. 29 and witnesses who saw him several blocks away on Dec. 30 described him as disoriented.

"He's kind of off the wall for whatever reason and he encounters somebody and they get into an altercation and he gets knocked down and gets hit on the head," Rowe said. "The person who did it didn't want this body found near where they live."

But where did the lethal beating take place? If the crime didn't occur in Wilmington, could Wheeler have gotten a ride to his New Castle home about halfway between Wilmington and Newark, and been killed en route? Still, why dump him in Newark? Was he killed in Newark?

"We have not located a crime scene yet," Farrall said.

That fact alone poses serious problems for investigators.

"Without a crime scene," Fisher said, "they have no physical evidence to link the killer to the murder."

'Hit men ... make-believe'

Some of those closest to Wheeler suspect the crime is proving so hard to solve because it was committed by a hit man.

Maybe Wheeler was initially poisoned, one version of the assassination theory goes. The attack that didn't kill him but caused him to act erratically while the killer waited for a convenient time to finish the job.

Soon after Wheelers' death, his old friend, John McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, told Fox News "this had to be a professional hit job."

Asserting that Wheeler knew government secrets from having "some of the highest security clearances," McInerney said the fact that Wheeler ended up in the landfill "tells me someone deliberately went out and got him."

Wheeler's widow, Katherine Klyce, also has gravitated toward the notion that his death was planned.

In a February interview with the online magazine Slate, Klyce theorized that her reward offer, made days earlier, was not leading to tips "because they've already been paid."

She called the fact that his body was found "a miracle," adding, "That just sounds like a pro to me."

Beyond knowing Pentagon secrets, Wheeler had made enemies over his three-plus decades in Washington, where he served in the last three Republican presidential administrations.

During his drive to create the Vietnam memorial in Washington in the early 1980s, he met vehement opposition by advocating a controversial design -- a long stone wall engraved with the names of fallen soldiers -- that has become one of America's revered monuments.

An outspoken conservative, Wheeler didn't hesitate to ridicule the arguments of those he disagreed with, especially during exchanges on a chat room for West Point's class of 1966.

He was in a heated and years-long dispute with Frank and Regina Marina, a couple building a home across from his in New Castle that partially blocked his view of the Delaware River.

At Mitre Corp., the McLean, Va., defense consultant where Wheeler had worked since March 2009, officials said he focused on cyber-defense issues but would not reveal anything else about his projects.

In one widely circulated conspiracy theory that spread on Internet sites and blogs, the man who was considered an authority on biological and chemical weapons was killed because he was about to expose secret Pentagon poison-gas tests from spray planes. Those tests were purportedly responsible for the mysterious death of thousands of red-wing blackbirds who fell from the sky on New Year's Eve in Arkansas.

While that scenario has been widely derided as nonsense, any assassination theory in the Wheeler slaying defies basic logic, criminologists Rowe and Fisher said.

If someone had eliminated Wheeler for political or personal reasons, poisoning him and then clubbing him to death, why would the murder unfold in sloppy fashion over two days, when the killer might risk being seen on the same surveillance videos that captured Wheeler?

If it was a professional hit, why wouldn't the assassins wrap up his body in a rug or sheet before putting it in the trash bin, Rowe asked. If they had, once he was dumped in the landfill, no one would have seen a human body, he said.

Fisher said the Wheeler homicide -- while full of mystery and suggestions of "high-level intrigue and hidden motives" -- has none of the earmarks of a professional job.

"The last hours of this man's life suggest something totally different than he's approached by a hit man and killed," Fisher said.

In such cases, police often learn quickly that someone has a strong motive to kill the victim, or someone else comes forward and reports that he was approached to do the killing. Such cases are often solved because the mastermind hires a petty criminal who later becomes a state's witness in the slaying to get a break on another arrest, he said.

"Professional hit men," the former FBI agent said, "are the product of make-believe fiction."

Those who do exist, Fisher speculated, would not have disposed of the body, especially at a commercial trash bin where there might be a hidden surveillance camera.

"They make it look like a home invasion," Fisher said, "or a mugging and take the victim's watch and leave him dead on the street."

'They could get lucky'

Colm C. Connolly, a Wilmington lawyer and former U.S. Attorney for Delaware who is guiding Wheeler's widow through the investigation, said a premeditated slaying is just one of the scenarios Klyce is contemplating.

"She's struggling with this on many levels," Connolly said. "Her sense of loss is compounded by not knowing what happened. At times, she speculates it was a targeted killing and at times she thinks it was a random killing. She doesn't know what happened and the absence of any explanation as to what happened is a source of great frustration."

Though Newark has one detective working exclusively on the case, and other officers pitching in as needed, every day and week that passes without a big break reduces the likelihood of finding Wheeler's killer.

"Time is the investigator's enemy," Fisher said. "The longer it goes, the less likely it's going to be solved. I'm surprised that with a $25,000 reward, somebody hasn't talked."

In the face of such long odds, Wheeler's younger sister, Janet Gilani, remains an optimist.

Speaking to The News Journal on March 30 in Dover, where she was attending an event in her brother's honor, Gilani said she believes authorities will eventually uncover what happened to him.

"I'm taking the really big view that everything unfolds over time," Gilani said. "Over the course of history, three months is a drop in the bucket. The necessary information will come to light, and I know that in time we'll know what we need to know."

Rowe thinks the best chance investigators have isn't from shoe leather work or examination of microscopic particles, but from the arrest of someone who was involved or knows what happened.

Then, he said, investigators could perhaps link fibers or other potential evidence they have seized to the killer, their home or vehicle.

"The problem, though, is the forensic evidence might be very meager if the person had none or very limited physical contact" with Wheeler.

Besides, evidence could be tainted with debris from the bin or landfill, such as "paint chips, bacterial matter, fungal spores. food debris, everything," Rowe said.

"Finding something useful will be absolutely hellish. But they could get lucky."

Distraught Widow Claims John Wheeler 'was Killed by a Hitman'

Katherine Klyce claims her late husband, prominent Washington aide John Wheeler, was assassinated by a hitman in a targeted killing

February 18, 2011

The Daily Mail - Prominent Washington aide John Wheeler was assassinated by a hitman in a targeted killing, his widow has claimed. Katherine Klyce said the way her late husband’s body was dumped at a landfill site could only have been carried out by a professional.

The 66-year-old suggested his work with the Pentagon over his decades-long career could have made him enemies who wanted rid of him.

She also attacked the police investigation into his death and claimed it hard ‘made her life miserable’. Officers have confiscated personal items including credit cards and strange charges have been appearing on them in recent weeks including two flights worth $3,000, she said.

The body of Mr Wheeler, 66, a former Army officer who was instrumental in building the iconic Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in Washington DC, was discovered on a landfill in Wilmington, Delaware, on New Year’s Eve.

Landfill workers found him on New Year’s Eve when a garbage truck containing his body completed its run at the Cherry Island landfill and threw his body out. He had been put into a commercial dumpster in Newark, Delaware, about 12 miles from his home and 15 miles from Wilmington, where it was picked up by a garbage truck and taken to the landfill site.

Ms Klyce told Slate.com:

‘I think perhaps no one has been on the reward because they've already been paid.

‘The way they disposed of his body, it's a miracle anybody ever found it. That just sounds like a pro to me.’

Turning to the police she said they had been ‘so bad’ and ‘made my life miserable’. After Mr Wheeler’s death, the whole family went to Newark police station for interrogation.

‘They treated us like criminals, all of us. They were rude,’ she said. ‘They just don't have a clue. I think they wish it would all just go away.’

The two flights on her credit card were from New York to Madrid totalling $3,000. It is not clear if these were made by any police officers or by a third party.

Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force officer, agreed that Mr Wheeler could have made some powerful enemies during his career.

‘A man with that experience, it could have been foul play to get some of the secrets he had,’ he said.

Detectives are still clueless as to how Mr Wheeler died but they have turned their attentions towards an ongoing row with his neighbour Frank Marini over his ongoing project to build a home next to theirs. Mr Wheeler reportedly tried to stop the plans in court and said that the house was too big for the area. Delaware police have admitted that a smoke bomb was placed under the same neighbour’s house last week but have not released any more details.

Career: A Harvard and Yale graduate, he had served as a military advisor to three presidents and lived in New Castle with his wife, a silk importer. Mr Wheeler had been special assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force during the presidency of George W Bush. While working at the Pentagon Mr Wheeler wrote a manual on the effectiveness of biological and chemical weapons and recommended that the US should not use biological warfare. Although critics initially blasted the design of the Vietnam memorial, which he was instrumental in creating, it has become one of Washington's most visited sites since its unveiling in 1982.

Life After Death

John Wheeler was found in a Delaware landfill on New Year's Eve. His widow discusses Wheeler's life, his death, and her frustration with the investigation.

February 17, 2011

Slate.com - The last time Katherine Klyce saw her husband, John Wheeler, she was mad at him. It was the day after Christmas, and she was looking forward to a relaxing few days at home in New York City.

"I like the week between Christmas and New Year's because you can lie around and go to the movies," said Klyce. But Wheeler said he had to go to Washington, where he'd held numerous posts in the Reagan and both Bush administrations, and where he currently worked for a defense technology firm. Klyce was upset, but she didn't sense anything wrong. "He seemed just like Jack."

Nor was it a surprise when she didn't hear from him for a few days. Wheeler and Klyce, his second wife, had homes in New York City and New Castle, Del. Wheeler traveled a lot for work, so they weren't always in the same place at the same time. Klyce tried to call Wheeler a couple of times in the days after Christmas, but the calls went straight to voice mail.

"That just made me madder," she said.

They had plans to attend a cousin's wedding in Cambridge on New Year's Eve. When she couldn't reach her husband, Klyce went to the wedding without him.

It wasn't until Jan. 2, when she was back in New York, that she heard Jack was dead. His body had been found in a pile of trash at the Cherry Island Landfill in Newark, Del., the morning of New Year's Eve. Newark police had first called Kate Wheeler, Jack's daughter by his first marriage who currently lives in New York. Kate went to Klyce and Wheeler's Harlem apartment to tell Klyce in person.

"You hear it and you don't take it in," Klyce said in an interview. "It's like your brain doesn't absorb the news."

Since then, the news has sunk in. But if mourning wasn't painful enough already, it's even more so when there's no explanation. The details that have emerged fail to produce a complete picture of Wheeler's final days. There are bits of video from places he visited and pieces of testimony from people he spoke with before his disappearance, but they provide little understanding of whether his death was a random killing or, as Klyce suspects, a targeted operation. As the investigation has dragged on, Klyce has become increasingly frustrated with law enforcement.

"If you write anything, I hope you write that the cops just made our lives miserable," she said.

Some facts are relatively straightforward: On Dec. 26, Wheeler apparently boarded an Amtrak train from New York to Washington. Two days later, on Dec. 28, he hopped back on the train to Wilmington, Del., a 20-minute drive from the family's home in nearby New Castle.

Then things get hazy. At 11:30 p.m. the night of Dec. 28, firefighters discovered a smoke bomb in the half-built house across the street from Wheeler's house in New Castle. The new home has been the subject of a long-running dispute between the Wheelers, who moved to New Castle in 1999, and the owners of the property, Frank and Regina Marini. The police haven't named Wheeler as a suspect in the smoke bomb incident. But local news organizations have reported that police found Wheeler's cell phone in the new house.

The next morning, Dec. 29, a cabbie picked Wheeler up at the Amtrak station in Wilmington and dropped him off about 12 blocks north. He was then off the radar until 6 p.m., when Wheeler stopped by a pharmacy near New Castle called Happy Harry's. He asked one of the pharmacists for a ride back to Wilmington. The pharmacist offered to call Wheeler a cab, but Wheeler declined and left. Nonetheless, he somehow got to a courthouse in Wilmington, where he told a garage attendant that his brief case had been stolen and he was looking for his car. (His car turned out to be at the Amtrak station three blocks away.) The video of Wheeler shows him walking back and forth along the halls of the garage, holding one of his shoes in his hand. Wheeler seemed confused, according to a parking lot attendant he spoke with.

Wheeler spent part of the following day, Dec. 30, wandering around downtown Wilmington. That afternoon, he showed up at the offices of the law firm Connolly Bove Lodge & Hutch, asking to speak with a partner. (Colm Connolly, the Wheeler family's lawyer, works in the same building, but not at that particular firm, despite the similar name.) When the receptionist returned, Wheeler had left. Security cameras later caught Wheeler wandering around the Rodney Square area north of where he'd been, now wearing a sweatshirt and heading toward the city's relatively dangerous East Side.

What happened next is the big question. Wheeler's body was first discovered coming out of a dump truck at the Cherry Island Landfill in Wilmington by a spotter, there to keep an eye out for hazardous waste. The spotter called the Wilmington police, who then phoned the Newark police, since the truck's route originated in their jurisdiction. The cops quickly ruled Wheeler's murder a homicide. But if police know how Wheeler got from Wilmington to a dumpster 13 miles away along the Newark truck route that leads to the landfill, they're not saying.

The lack of communication has frustrated Klyce.

"They have been so bad," she said. "They've made my life so miserable."

After Wheeler's death, the whole family went down to the Newark police station for questioning.

"They treated us like criminals, all of us," said Klyce. "They were rude."

The cops confiscated credit cards, financial records, and Wheeler's computer. In recent weeks, some of her cards have had mysterious charges, including two plane tickets from New York to Madrid totaling $3,000, according to Klyce.

Conflicting information about the cause of death has also been a source of stress. Police first told her that Wheeler had probably died of a heart attack.

"You go up and down, up and down," she said. "Your brain says, maybe he would have had a heart attack soon anyway, to make it not so bad."

When the Delaware medical examiner finally announced the cause of death on Jan. 28—"blunt force trauma," possibly from a beating—the family heard about it from the media.

"I'm on the phone with his 90-year-old mother, she's asking me, 'Did he suffer when he died?,' and I can't tell her," Klyce said. Lt. Mark Farrall, a spokesman for the Newark Police Department, said that the police have "released as much as we can release without jeopardizing the investigation."

Despite the lack of communication from the police—or maybe because if it—Klyce is concerned that they're not devoting the proper resources to the case.

"They just don't have a clue," said Klyce. "I think they wish it would all just go away." (Farrall said that the Wheeler case is the "top priority" in the department's criminal division.)

So the family—Klyce, her two daughters, Wheeler's two children, Wheeler's sister and mother—tried a new approach. On Jan. 30, they announced a $25,000 reward for information that led to the arrest of Wheeler's killer. No one has responded.

The silence strengthens a hunch Klyce has had since the beginning: That Wheeler's death wasn't random.

"I think perhaps no one has been on the reward because they've already been paid," she said.

Then there's the way Wheeler's body was apparently moved from Wilmington to the dumpster in Newark.

"The way they disposed of his body, it's a miracle anybody ever found it. That just sounds like a pro to me."

Klyce isn't the only one to raise the possibility. Citing Wheeler's involvement in the military and government, Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force officer, told ABC News:

"A man with that experience, it could have been foul play to get some of the secrets he had."

Many news reports have described Wheeler as appearing "disoriented" and "disheveled" on the surveillance video.

"I kind of thought he had dementia or something," said a parking lot attendant who spoke to Wheeler.

Klyce saw the videos, and said Wheeler appeared normal—for Wheeler, at least. Wheeler's doctor, who has known him 40 years, agreed, according to Klyce. Wheeler had a terrible sense of direction.

"He was disoriented every day in his life," she said. "He couldn't walk from here to CVS without specifically drawn maps."

"He was probably most definitely lost," she added.

But she disputes the notion that he was crazy or demented. Wheeler, who was bipolar and took lithium for his condition, didn't always respond to social cues.

"He was a touch Asperger-y," she said. "He couldn't read faces. He couldn't gauge other peoples' reactions."

What about the shoe in his hand?

"He didn't care about clothes," she said. "Jack was oblivious. Nothing sartorially peculiar about Jack is out of the ordinary."

Wheeler, a member of West Point's class of 1966 who became a subject of Rick Atkinson's book The Long Gray Line, was an odd combination of purposeful and oblivious. He had a gift for persuasion, especially when fighting for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the design of which many of his military colleagues opposed.

"I told him, Jack, you're like a race horse," Klyce said. "If somebody puts you on the track, you'll win the race. But you'll never find the track unless someone puts you there."

James Fallows, a journalist and friend of Wheeler, called him "a complicated man of very intense (and sometimes changeable) friendships, passions, and causes."

Wheeler did have enemies, says Klyce. But they were not the kind to leave someone in a dumpster. As CEO of the Deafness Research Association (Wheeler wasn't deaf), he enraged deafness advocates by telling them that cochlear implants were inevitably going to erase deaf culture. Numerous people opposed his vision for the Vietnam Memorial, including one future senator who once called up and told Wheeler's then-5-year-old son that he would kill his father, according to Klyce. But the memorial was built pretty much according to architect Maya Lin's design, which Wheeler supported, and the debate over it has long since subsided.

Wheeler was most recently in a disagreement with Frank and Regina Marini, the couple who were building the house across the street from Wheeler's house in New Castle. Wheeler objected not just because the new house would block their view of the Delaware River, but because he was annoyed that they were building on a historic battery where cannons sat during the War of 1812, Klyce said.

Wheeler threw himself into the legal fight over the Marini house.

"He was a very intense person," said Klyce. "Everything he did he was intense about."

First, the Wheelers got 82 fellow residents to sign a petition opposing the construction. In 2006, they formed a "Save Battery Park" group. In 2009, they accused the Marinis of improperly uprooting trees. Still, construction proceeded, and in December, a judge ruled that it can continue if the Historic Area Commission makes an exception. Klyce blames their failure to block construction on local politics:

"It's a corrupt little town."

Klyce said she doesn't know anything about the smoke bomb incident on Dec. 28.

"I think it'd be nutty—not to say that Jack wasn't capable of nuttiness—to do anything that would cause that much damn trouble when you don't have to."

In the weeks since Wheeler's death, thinking about the case—and dealing with logistics like changing bank accounts and organizing the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, scheduled for April 29—has become Klyce's full-time job. Klyce founded a Cambodian textile company, Takeo Textiles, in 2004. But she's had to set that work aside for now. The energy she dedicates to the case, she says, is "whatever's not dedicated to sleeping."

Klyce knows it's not easy. In 1995, her sister was murdered in her Memphis home by her son's drug dealer. Finding the killer took 10 years. Klyce testified at the sentencing trial and attended subsequent parole hearings.

"It never ends," she said. "People don't understand that about murders."

Last time around, though, she had Jack to help her through it.

"This is worse," she said. "For a week or so, I'd wake up and expect Jack to be there. And then I wouldn't want to wake up at all because I knew he wasn't going to be there. Some days I'd wake up early and the sun would be coming up and I'd want to try to stop it. How does the sun have the audacity to shine when Jack's not here to look at it? It has to wait for him to get here."