August 11, 2026 • 59 mins
John Parsons Wheeler III -- Jack to his friends -- was a mover and shaker in the Defense industry. Over the course of his career he worked with three different Presidential administrations, and also built a reputation for his tireless charity work. So how can we explain the strange series of events that led to his untimely death, his body discovered in a landfill? Tune in to learn more in tonight's Classic episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist. Here's his story. The Jedi may not
tell you. It's about a guy named John Parsons Wheeler
the Third, or Jack to his palace.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Aw, now this guy Jack Wheeler, As you said.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Who is he? Oh? Yeah, yeah, that's a question that
everybody asked themselves the Bureau. This is a question Jack
probably asked himself because before his untimely demise, he was
a silent kingmaker in the defense world of the United States.
He worked with three different presidential administrations. He was also
(00:39):
very well known for philanthropy. But then a strange series
of events led to his passing.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Oh my god, I'm an old political article from twenty
eleven about how he died from blunt force trauma and
how that was Like what how did he die like that?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
How did such an important guy get found in a landfill?
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Oh, I can't wait for this one. Let's revisit.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Yes, from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history
is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now
or learn this stuff. They don't want you to know.
A production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Max,
My name is Nola.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
They called me Ben. We were joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission Control decandt here in spirit.
Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that
makes this stuff. They don't want you to know. We
are delving into a true unsolved mystery today. If you're
(02:01):
a younger person, you might not have heard of John
Parsons Wheeler, the Third unless you saw the recent Netflix
reboot of Unsolved Mysteries. It's a story that largely disappeared
from mass media headlines in a very weird way. I mean,
you've heard of Elisa Lamb, but have you heard of
(02:23):
John Parsons Wheeler. Here are the facts. First things first,
whether or not you have ever heard of this man.
If you live in the US, his career has probably
impacted you in some way. He's one of those guys who,
it seems like since his early days, he was destined
(02:44):
for the heights of the military political class.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Oh yeah, an absolute heavyweight and a sharp guy to boot.
John Parsons Wheeler, the Third Jack to his Pals, was
born on December fourteenth, nineteen forty four, in Laredo, Texas,
and he was to some degree kind of destined to
follow in the footsteps of those that came before him
in his family line, and was in fact groomed for the.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Type of illustrious political.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
And military career many would only ever dream of. He
came from a long line of these career military men,
including one relative who served in both the Confederate Army
and then later the United States Army.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah, he ended up going to the US Military Academy,
which you may know as West Point. That's the way
it's generally referred to. Very prestigious place if you were
going to go that route. And then he was a
fire control platoon leader in New Jersey back in the
mid to late sixties, and he ended up getting a
Bachelor of Science degree from that institution.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Yeah. Important note about his classmates, his cohort at West Point.
Many of these men would go on to lose their
lives in Vietnam, and his experiences with the war had
a tremendous influence on his career, his personal beliefs, and
(04:09):
possibly debatably, the end of his life. This class at
West Point is documented in a book written by a
former Washington Post journalist named Rick Atkinson. The name of
the book is The Long Gray Line. This book spends
a lot of time on Wheeler himself. If you read it,
(04:31):
and Wheeler had a copy of it at his home.
He served as a staff officer in Vietnam. He served
with the Office of the Secretary Defense. He served with
the Joint Staff before he left service in nineteen seventy one.
His schooling is particularly interesting because it was his gateway
(04:54):
to the upper echelons of American society. He enrolled in
Harvard Business School in sixty nin got a master's in
Business admin. He got a degree in law from Yale
in seventy five, and he worked with fancy law firms
in DC, the ones that kind of blur the line
between private and public power. They're often called white shoe
(05:18):
law firms. You may hear them referred to as such.
He served as a clerk for George E. McKinnon. He
was a high level official for the SEC Securities and
Exchange Commission. This guy had his finger in a lot
of pies. He was during this time at the SEC
side note he was investigating major cases of insider trading.
(05:42):
So long story short. He was accepted by the often
invisible ruling class of this country, and he moved extensively
in this circle.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Well, and he's also if anyone knew of his work,
if you're imagining the people on the other side of
those investigations, he was already potentially making enemies just putting
it out there.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah, great point, Matt. Let's talk a little bit about
his career, because the space he occupies is a bit alien.
I think to a lot of the general public. You
could describe him as a defense consultant, but that is
a very vague term.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Yeah, it seems almost like a gray area kind of
where I could encompass a whole lot of things that
maybe aren't public knowledge.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah, exactly, Noel, So he was known for working in
that often unexamined, liminal space between the FEDS and private
companies and then charities and nonprofits, and of course, as
longtime listeners know some of those organizations, not all, but
some of them are much more closely related than they
(06:56):
would have you believe, according to you their FAQs on
their website for most of the people in the US.
Wheeler's most notable, well known work is his assistance in
the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC in
nineteen eighty four. He's instrumental in making that happen. He
(07:16):
worked for a cavalcade of different institutions and organizations, Amtrak,
Mothers Against Drunk Driving, three different three different Republican administrations,
Reagan and then Bush, and then Bush again when that
guy put his son into office. And he also worked
(07:37):
for the Miner Corporation. Remember that last one. It's going
to be important later. His career was not without controversy,
especially moving in and out of so many institutions. Maybe
we can talk a little bit about his roles with
charities and with businesses as well.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
He was extremely active in various nonprofits. I think that's
probably the way to put it, very specialized nonprofits. And
he was the founder and CEO of this thing called
Vietnam Children's Fund. By many accounts, at least if you
look online, appears to be a great organization, at least
the forward facing things about it. He worked with President Bush,
(08:21):
like we said, the father to create this thing called
the Earth Conservation Corps. He also served as president and
CEO of the Deafness Research Foundation. I mean, just listen
to what we're saying here. This man was non stop
working with organizations that appear to be for the greater
or the greater good. At least that that's the way.
(08:42):
That's the way it seems. He also had a really
solid rep for, oh yeah, this is great, a solid
rep for turning failing businesses around. Now that sounds sounds
great right on paper, But when you turn a failing
business around, like, what does that really mean?
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Right? Like?
Speaker 2 (08:58):
What do you have to do to.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Turn a failing business around? It's when you start hearing
like corporate buzzwords like pivot, you know.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Yeah, and it could be you know, and it could
be everything from specializing in you know, making a company
specialize in one small thing that is a profit center,
and then getting rid of a whole bunch of other
things that a company does, such as the case with Macy's.
Macy's you'll remember from the mall when you were a kid,
and some places now I think they're Macy's unless they're
(09:27):
all gone, I can't remember. But he turned that business around.
He got him out of bankruptcy, right, which may have
entailed layoffs.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
That's the elephant in the room, the badger in the bag.
There under euphemisms like streamlining, pivoting, or focusing. But he
did manage to write this ship a small note about
Vietnam Children's Fund. By the way, they build elementary schools
in Vietnam, and they do a pretty great job at it.
(09:57):
They're still around. If you want to learn more, you can.
You can just find them online. But perhaps the most
unpredictable aspect of Wheeler's post military career was this late
stage professional plot twist. He was well into his sixties
when he developed an intense interest in cybersecurity, and that's
(10:19):
what led him to the Miter Corporation. It also it
also turned him into one of those guys who always
has a briefcase inexplicability, always has a briefcase.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
This was in there.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Huh huh? Who is no telling? No, literally we don't know.
But behind the scenes, you know, we have to realize
that this person was a human being and he struggled
with his own demons. He suffered from depression and bipolar disorder.
That's not speculation. He received diagnosis in this regard, and
(10:55):
this resulted in these bouts of frenetic action and then
unpredictable at times drastic mood swings. But you know who's perfect.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Well, he's he's clearly a workaholic, right and I'm sure
in many ways that helped him, at least if you
watched the I think we mentioned it the Unsolved Mysteries episode,
as well as you read online stuff that has been
written by his wife. He thrived quite a bit from
that energy that he got, not necessarily from bipolar disorder,
(11:30):
but just that existed within him inherently.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Right, Right, someone defining themselves by their continual actions, right,
there must always be a goal to pursue. He's not
really a kickback and smell the morning dew with a
nice hot cup of coffee kind of guy. He's got
stuff to do. But given his track record, and given
the success and the benefits of the work he does,
(11:57):
his legacy seems assured until one strange day in November,
very last day of twenty ten, December thirty. First, there
are some workers at the Cherry Island landfill near Wilmington, Virginia.
They see the body of an elderly man plummet from
(12:18):
the back of a garbage truck onto a heap of trash.
This turns out to be the body of John Parsons
Wheeler the Third. He was sixty six years old. Today's episode,
what happened? We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
(12:41):
Here's where it gets crazy. Officially, this death has been
ruled a homicide. However, it is a homicide that comes
with a lot of unanswered questions. And the further you
dig into this story, the stranger it becomes. So maybe
we start with the relevant details. Should we start with
(13:02):
the landfill? What do you think?
Speaker 3 (13:04):
I think that's a perfect place to start. When these
workers found Wheeler's body, he had the look of having
been severely beaten. He was wearing a white shirt, black pants,
and a black jacket, and an important detail, he was
wearing a class of nineteen sixty six ring from the
West Point Military Academy. And the thing that was unusual
(13:28):
about it is that he still had things like that
clearly very valuable ring that any average street mugger would
have taken. Not to mention the absolute lack of care
that went into quote disposing of this body. I mean,
it was really just dumped in plain view.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
We're going to talk about this later on, but just
to end up where his body ended up, it was
either someone taking great care to put a body in
a dumpster and hope that it never be discovered again,
because it's actually quite unlikely that they would have discovered
him amongst all the trash that was dumped that day
from the truck. The other side of the coin is
(14:11):
if his body was dumped by somebody or just put
into a dumpster like that. You're right that there's a
lack of care in that. I don't know, it's weird.
It's both sides, right, it's a lack of care, but
it's also it appears to show intent. I guess if
someone actually did put him in there to try and
hide a body.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Yeah, that's the thing. It's alarmingly easy to dispose of
an organism in a landfill, especially a large one. You
just you have to work out the timing and you
have to you know, like the day of the week
when a lot of dumps come in. Things like that.
(14:52):
This should not be confused or mistaken as confused for
mistaken as advice on where to put bodies. We are
not giving you that. We are saying that the average
I would say, not pre planned or orchestrated mugging or
murder doesn't usually resultant in the perpetrator having the presence
(15:12):
of mind to dispose of the body. You know what,
I mean, if if you are robbing someone, the robbery
goes wrong and you stab them, wound them, maim them,
or shoot them, your first instinct is going to be
to leave the scene immediately rather than sit around and think, hey,
(15:33):
should I stash this in some bushes Assassin's creed style
or something like that. It just it doesn't often happen
that way. So Wilmington is on the case. Authorities contact
the police in Newcastle, Delaware, where the Wheeler family has
a second home, and the Virginia Police informed the Delaware
(15:54):
police of this a few days earlier, just after Christmas,
around December twenty eighth, Wheeler had told his wife he
had to spend a few days working on an important
project at the miner corporation. He told her he'd be
staying at the Metropolitan Club in downtown Washington, and they
(16:14):
argued about this. We know they argued, this is not speculation,
because we can see the email and text records, and
he was emphasizing this was important. He even talked to
his therapist about the argument. He was trying to trying
to smooth things out diplomatically until the point that he
fell completely out of contact with her, and then police
(16:38):
found a series of phone calls that made this seem
like more than an accidental death or a mugging.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
That's right, but more than offering any real solution to
just raised a significant number of new questions to the
circumstances surrounding Wheeler's death. One call from December twenty eighth,
the day Wheeler traveled to Washington, d C. Came from
a resident of Newcastle named Scott Morris, who saw at
(17:09):
eleven thirty pm what he described as quote, the darkened
silhouette of a man standing in the frame of the
house under construction across the street, methodically lighting what looked
like small balls of fire and tossing them onto the floor.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Really descriptive and kind of eerie. The police called to
the scene didn't find any damage of note, but Morris
remained disturbed by what he saw. The sense of desperation
and the purpose of what was going on in this
scene really stuck with him. He described it as creepy.
(17:51):
He says, the figure appeared very calm, and when he finished,
he turned very deliberately and walked away toward the path
along the Delaware River.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Yeah, so we know the thing about eyewitness accounts is
that they they're essentially combo meals, right. The main entree
in these combo meals is going to be the factual
description of what happened. But the side order, you know,
the fries and the drink are the person's own perspective
(18:22):
and opinion put on put upon what they saw. So yes,
for Morris, this appears to be purposeful. He somehow, from
body language, because he didn't speak to this person, he
somehow believed or got the sense that they were quite deliberate.
(18:45):
But that doesn't necessarily mean they are because he didn't
talk to them, right, and he didn't see who it was.
That's a hugely important detail here. But another hugely important detail.
That construction site was something Wheeler was involved in an
anti shagonistic way. It was an on He was part
of an ongoing legal dispute over the construction of this
(19:07):
particular house, and he was going hard on the paint too.
He hated the idea of it being built Partially, yes,
it would block his home's view of the land and
the water, but from his perspective, at least the way
he explained it, the area was historic because back in
the day early colonists and then later revolutionaries built a
(19:32):
defense battery on that land. So to him, building anything
on that land other than perhaps a monument to those
earlier forces was profoundly offensive. It was a kind of sacrilege.
But then we have to ask ourselves, was that sincere
or was that just like his rationalization for this construction
(19:52):
that he hated, you know what I mean? Anyway, he
was involved.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Well, he was involved, and he was trying to stop it.
His wife says that he was essentially on a mission
to stop this thing. And we know from just from
his past life and in his actions everything that he's done,
he sees something as a goal and he goes for it,
and that's again like his mission, right, so you can
imagine that he was very feeling, very very strongly about this.
(20:19):
And from what I've read, this incident appears to have
been like smoke bombs that weren't gonna didn't seem to
cause any damage really to the house, didn't seem to
cause anything else besides this disturbance. But the weird thing
is that John Wheeler's cellular phone was recovered in that house,
(20:42):
the house that was under construction where the silhouetted man
or person lighting, smoke bombs, was found or was seen
let's say, very strange.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, leaving the accusations of his involvement or his guilt
in this instance, leaving those all to the side. The
timeline becomes really weird when we think about when he
had the phone and when he didn't, how the phone
got from him to that place in place on the
banks there. And then there is another call police discover
(21:16):
on December thirtieth, the day before Wheeler's body is found.
There's a guy named Rob Dill DLLL. He is one
of the Wheeler's neighbors there in Newcastle, and he reports
that someone has broken into the Wheeler's home. I believe
he's the same neighbor also who said they had a
(21:36):
TV on very loud when he knew there was no
one home. He was just doing any thing neighbors do,
keeping an eye on the house. He had noticed a
window a jar in the Wheeler house and the exterior door,
the storm door was closed, but the interior door was
(21:57):
also a jar. And then he found he found some weird,
weird stuff when he went into the interior. There was
a disarray in the kitchen, you know, like somebody had
been rooting through things in a hurried manner. John had
a ceremonial sword and shield. They were covered with powder
(22:18):
by the sink. Rob Dill notices a footprint in powder
in front of the sink, and when the police show up.
The weird thing is that nothing seems to have been stolen.
Stuff was messed with, but no one took expensive electronics.
No one took, you know, some of the art that
the Wheelers had, the kind of stuff you would normally
(22:41):
steal if you were just a garden variety B and
E dude. But there was one detail that caught their attention.
Amid all this disarray, investigators found a book on the
kitchen counter. The book was open, as if someone had
been reading it before they left. Can you guess what
(23:01):
the book is? If you guessed the long gray line,
you are correct. Yeah, man.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
And just the fact that his ceremonial sword and shield
we're hanging out down there. I mean, that's a it's weird. Spices,
some comment maybe, or whatever the white substance was, and
those things. I don't know. It's weird. It's tough because
initially what that sounds like to me is frantically searching
(23:32):
for something in your own house and then maybe finding
it or not finding it and getting upset and leaving.
That's where forget or you know there's something I've hidden something,
or I know I've hidden something, but I'm not sure
where it is. I think it might be under the sink,
and like just pulling everything frantically out from drawers and
(23:55):
from under the sink.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
That's what it sounds like to me. Rather like, as
you said, for all the reason you've already stated been
rather than someone going into the house and robbing it,
unless they were just trying to leave a message of some.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Sort, right, unless there was possibly someone from his past. Right,
this is the thing. We don't know what page the
book was on, you know, when it was open. Was
it indicating a specific somehow significant passage unknown at this time.
But then also we see an alternate possibility that maybe
(24:31):
Wheeler himself is panicked or he's hurried for some reason,
because when people are hurrying from their own house, they
don't always close the windows or the doors, right, because
the logic is, it's my house, I'll just come back
into it. Right. So the initial investigations tell us increasingly
(24:52):
strange things on January third, just a few days after
the discovery of his body, you p reported Wheeler's death
was ruled a homicide, but a friend of his that
he knew through the legal circles he moved in noted,
this is just not the kind of guy who gets murdered.
(25:13):
This is not the kind of guy you find in
a landfill. But the official cause of death again, his homicide,
and that was specified in several obituaries that came out
shortly after.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
So according to his obituary in the Washington Posts, well,
I'll just read you a quote quote, the cause of
death was blunt force trauma inflicted by unknown assailants in Wilmington, Delaware,
not far from his home in Newcastle, Delaware. But as
these investigations continued, many more troubling details started to rise
(25:48):
to the surface. Wheelers seemed to not only have been beaten,
but beaten to the point of like the beating inducing
a heart attack I can only imagine, and several eyewitnesses
would report that Wheeler had been seen in really rough
shape holding a shoe his shoe, stumbling around under duress
(26:11):
in Wilmington, Delaware. He was telling people in this unsolved
Mysteries that we talked about. The top of the show,
they interview some of the folks that saw him, and
he claimed to have lost his briefcase, or rather even
even more so, had it stolen.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yeah, this is what he's stolen.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
And he kept repeating it like he was in some
kind of fugue state, whether it's suffering from some sort
of mental breakdown or just dazed from having been attacked,
or you know, in disheveled and all that. But it
really does, the plot does thicken. There's some footage you
can see, Uh, he's on camera from his kind of
you know, wander, and you can see that he's kind
(26:55):
of pacing around frantically. He's holding the shoe. It almost
looks like he's mumbling to himself. He looks very disoriented
on these CCTV videos and he claims to have been
robbed and needed a ride out of town.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
And this is my side note here, but when you
first look at the footage, you see an you see
an elderly man that does appear to be out of
sorts for one reason or another. And in my mind,
initially what I see is disorientation, like a disoriented person.
I don't maybe I don't know where I am. I'm
confused about what's going on and why I'm here. That's
(27:32):
what it looks like. But according to people who knew him, well,
there's several interviews outside of that Unsolved Mysteries show that
include his wife and several people that knew him and
his wife speaking about others words, but they all say
that he looked in distress as though he was what
(27:54):
did they I think, Ben, you kind of put it
that way, hunting or being hunted, essentially, like he was
in distress for one reason or another. That's their opinion.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Right, Yeah, And that's a phrase we'll use later in
the episode because it does encapsulate exactly how he was behaving.
And again we see the issue with eyewitness reports. People
are putting their own perspective over the events, or it's
a better way to say it is they're seeing the
same events through the lens of their own perspective and
(28:28):
their preconceptions. Here's the thing. This doesn't appear to have
come out of nowhere, because email records show that on
December twenty ninth, he had contacted his colleagues at the
Miterer Corporation reporting a home break in. He said that
his cell phone had been stolen, his badge, his ID badge,
(28:51):
his security fob, and his briefcase. There's a mystery here.
We know as records for cab calls, we have interviews
with cab drivers who spoke with him, you know, his
records for emails and texts. But after he reported his
phone being stolen, it's not clear where he was sending
(29:13):
these other emails from or how he was sending them.
Was it an internet cafe or something like that. We
simply do not know. There are no further reports of
him until six pm, when he walked into the nearby
Happy Harry's pharmacy. This was like his you know, it's
like his CVS or his Walgreens down the street or
right eight I guess, depending on where you live, Dwayne Reid,
(29:35):
if you're in New York, I'm just naming pharmacies at
this point.
Speaker 4 (29:38):
But he.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Knows the people who work there. He is friends with
one of the pharmacists, and he comes in and he
asks this guy if he can get a ride to Wilmington,
and multiple times people try to offer him assistance, and
for varying reasons, he always turned the assistance down.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
It's strange did we talk about why he wants to
go to Willington. At least according to that documentary or
that Unsolved Mysteries episode, it's because his car was parked
somewhere where he left his car park somewhere and he
wanted to go find it, but he wasn't quite sure
where it is, and according to his wife and others,
he would he was constantly losing his car essentially after
(30:25):
he would park it.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Yeah, DC is a tough place to park in, I
mean a lot of the North East in general. But
also he was doing something that I think will be
familiar to a lot of people who park their car
for a long time during quarantine. He just hadn't been
around his car for a minute, right, so he wasn't
quite sure where he put it. That doesn't The important
(30:49):
thing here is that's losing your car in that way
is not indicative of an unwell mental state.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yes, and that's the story that he was giving to
people to for the reason and to get to that area.
But we're not, I don't know, we can't definitively prove
that's why he needed to get to.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Wilmington, right, Just that that's what he said to some people,
but not all. That's a very good point. So he
looks particularly rough when he's in one parking lot talking
this parking attendant. He has one shoe on the other
is ripped and in his hand, and it turns out
that he is in the wrong deck. His car is
(31:27):
in a different nearby parking deck are he eventually leaves
the scene. There are no further sightings of him until
December thirtieth, when he visits a high rise to speak
with a senior partner at a law firm. He leaves
before he actually meets with this person, but he also,
(31:48):
according to someone else in the office, asked for money
to take the train somewhere before he left. Surveillance cameras
captured him exiting the building. He was walked east toward
a place called Rodney Square, and this leads if you
walk past Rodney Square, this leads to an area of
(32:08):
the city that is known for historically high rates of crime.
That footage is the last time John Parsons Wheeler is
seen alive.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
The next morning, he's found dead in that landfill. It
is interesting to note as well, it appears that he
may have spent the night underneath that building where there
are there's a series of tunnels essentially that go throughout
the area, and he was definitely seen on camera down there,
and he was also seen in the same clothes he
(32:39):
was wearing earlier. And then when he exited the building, somehow,
for some reason, he had gotten a hold of a
black hoodie right put that on and wore that out
of the building the next night.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
And then then folks who knew him, his wife for example,
who were interviewed for that Unsolved Mystery episode, said that
was just completely out of character for him, not something
he would have ever worn. But it was also very cold,
for sure, But it's like it didn't belong to him.
He got it from somebody or some somewhere found it or.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Something, yeah, or maybe picked it up paid cash, because
he did have cash on him to the very end
of his life and beyond. So when his body has
found at the landfill, police in Newark, New Jersey ended
up taking the case because there's evidence that the trash
truck that had his body in it made stops in Newark,
(33:31):
which means that Wheeler's body somehow ended up in a
dumpster about thirteen miles away from where he was last seen.
On video or where he's last provably seen. As far
as the information Law enforcement has released, how much have
they released? Not all of it, not by a long shot.
(33:52):
We're going to pause for word from our sponsor, and
then we're going to dive into some of the theories
and remaining questions regarding the death of John Parsons Wheeler.
We're back earlier. We noted that whomever was throwing smoke
(34:14):
bombs at that construction site, whoever they were, they weren't
throwing explosives. You know, this wasn't C four. They weren't
lighting fires. The smoke bombs didn't really have the capacity
to do permanent damage.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
No. I mean, we kind of all know what smoke
bombs are. The kind of things you can buy at
a joke shop or a fireworks shop, and they're sort
of considered like the wimpiest of fireworks, but they make
cool plumes of colored smoke, which you would have thought
that the eyewitness people would have mentioned the smoke bombs.
I mean, they put out a lot of smoke, and
(34:52):
it's usually brightly colored, like blues or purples or pinks
or whatever.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
But it was it was at eleven eleven thre thirty
PM when that was happening, right, So.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
He was described as being silhouetted, So wouldn't you would
have had to have some direct light to see the
effects there. But you're right, I mean these things they
don't even really explode. They just kind of light the
fuse and it sparks and then once it hits, it
really just starts shooting out the smoke. So they wouldn't
have done any damage. You can't really do a thing
with smoke bombs other than, you know, disappear if you're
(35:22):
like a cool ninja or something.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
So could he have made an enemy? I mean, he's
definitely involved where someone definitely wanted it to look as
if he were involved, because his cell phone ends up
at the construction site. So did he lie to the
Miter corporation and say that he had lost his cell
phone prior to this to try to escape culpability. Did
(35:46):
someone steal his cell phone and put it at the
construction site. That's a kind of complicated frame up, isn't it.
There would have to be a compelling reason to do that.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Or was the smoke bomb a signal for me? You know,
like was I mean that sounds silly, but maybe this
smoke bomb at a construction site was Maybe the construction
site was a quiet place to meet that he thought
would be you know, he'd be able to have a
confidential conversation. There's another question, like when you're talking about
the minor corporation materials, and I don't mean, you know,
(36:19):
I don't want to put anything on John. I don't
know what he was doing or what his motivations were,
but I can imagine all of those assets for a
company could be valuable to somebody.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Right, You're absolutely right, there's something else here.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
You know.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
We see a couple of points where this could have
been a simple robbery or a series of unfortunate, completely mundane,
non spionage related events. But there are some problems with
that too. So first, as you would pointed out earlier, Matt,
(36:57):
the body has things on it that a mugger would
have stolen. Very nice Rolex watch. He's got that class
ring from West Point. He still has cold hard cash
on his person. Why would robbers leave all those things
on a victim? If robbers they were, If there were
robbers at his home, what were they looking for? It
(37:19):
was certainly not high end art, It was not electronics,
other valuables. None of those were touched. They were just
searching frantically for turmeric apparently. But the problem here is
one of geography. Honestly, it's a series of bizarre disturbances.
And even if you do the footwork and look through
(37:40):
the documented timeline of where he went and when, you'll
see that this appears to be a man on the run.
He is either being hunted or believes he is being hunted,
or possibly at some parts of the timeline, he himself
is hunting someone, which leads us to ask the question,
(38:02):
are we talking about murder for hire?
Speaker 3 (38:04):
I mean, yeah, I mean, you know, you mentioned completely correctly, Ben.
Like the way this man looks, the way he's pacing
in this bathroom, it's like he's hiding from somebody. It's
like he's trying to escape some unseen assailant.
Speaker 4 (38:17):
You know.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
I mean that really, that's how it rings for me.
I don't know if you guys read it that way,
but I really got strong vibes that he was being chaste.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Yeah, I mean, I can imagine it. We have to wonder,
and again I end up going back to the Miter
corporation because he only worked for them for what two
years a year or two years two thousand and nine,
I think twenty ten until his death. He was just
a consultant with them, and who knows what consulting work
for the Miter corporation actually looks like, who knows what
(38:51):
information he was dealing with and had you know, privileged
knowledge too, And of gosh, I guess have to put
a giant it's not in a lie, it's it's my
own thoughts, and it's I wonder if his work with
a minor corporation had something to do with this.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Yeah, I don't think that's out of the realm of
possibility at all, because at this at this point, you know,
the US intelligence community is well aware of the asymmetrical
information warfare that countries like Russia and China and the
DPRK or North Korea are actively waging against the US.
(39:34):
And to be fair, the US is doing the same
thing with those countries with countries in the Middle East.
I mean, take a map, spin it around and just
throw a random dart at it, and you'll probably hit
a country that the US is fine on. So there
are a lot of state level actors that would be
(39:54):
very interested in his work at Miter Corporation. This takes
me back to that point we made earlier about having
a lot of potential enemies because he had a lot
of potential projects. It's a nexus of speculation, and there's
a really there's a disturbing part here that I wish
(40:15):
some of those documentaries we mentioned spent more time on.
And it's this. So we've talked about CCTV before, closed
circuit television. This stuff is, you know, generally right now,
it's not all interconnected. Right, So, like the pizza shop
on one side of the street may have a couple
(40:35):
of security cameras, and the cupcake factory or whatever on
the other side of the street may have their own
set of cameras, but they don't really share data. The
thing is, law enforcement can legally obtain those, especially in
the case of an investigation of a heinous crime like
a murder. Wilmington in particular is inundated with cameras. It
(40:58):
is lousy with cameras. There's so so many, and we
know that they're therefore, there has to be more footage
of John Parsons Wheeler on that faithful night. But if
you look at law enforcement statements, you just don't see
that footage, you don't see the vast majority of what
(41:18):
could be out there, And looking at the facts alone,
it's plausible that this investigation was at some point and
from some high level stonewalled. Now that doesn't mean that
someone you know working for miteror killed them, or working
for the CIA or you know, some other intelligence organization.
(41:39):
It just means that whoever murdered Wheeler, and whatever their
motivations for doing so were, there's something about the story
the US government actively does not want you to know.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Going even further than stonewalled, you could almost say manipulated
or compromised.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Right, Yeah, maybe can I put something out there?
Speaker 2 (41:58):
If I'm gonna this is insane, I'm just gonna say it.
Imagine the three of us. Imagine if for some reason,
iHeart was out to get us. All of our devices
are inextricably linked to iHeart. Doesn't mean they're tracking them necessarily,
(42:20):
but any use that we would have on our machines,
even on our phones, likely could be linked back to
that company in some way. And if we needed to
get away because we were being hunted for some reason,
we're not and we will never be by iHeart. A
good strategy maybe to get rid of all of those
(42:42):
potential links and devices. Sure, yeah, so I'm imagining that
there could be a scenario where John got rid of
all of that Miter Corporation stuff on purpose because he
wasn't trying to get away from somebody else. He was
maybe trying to get away from them.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
Yeah, or maybe maybe trying to do something like do
a burn the village to save the village strategy and
maybe brick his devices. He would have he would have
known how to actually brick one two, how to make
that information as close to irretrievable as possible. But that
missing briefcase, that's one of the keys here. Who's never
(43:21):
without it. It's never been found. All we know about
what could have been in the briefcase is that it
must have been related to his cybersecurity work at Miter.
Well not must have, but that's the most likely scenario.
We just don't know.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
You know. It reminds me of a show that I
worked on, Murder in Oregon, about the well, I mean,
it's it's conjectured by the folks who truly believe this
is what happened, That this public official was assassinated because
he knew too much about corruption in the Oregon State
prison system, and when he was killed, it was you know,
(44:02):
shocked up to being a mugging. He was stabbed in
the heart outside of his office building. But guess what
was missing when when they found his body a briefcase
full of the presentation materials. Back then it would have
been floppy discs before PowerPoint and cloud based stuff, and
(44:22):
supposedly that was never recovered, and that had this presentation
that he's about to give that was going to blow
the lid off of all this like literally cops like
smuggling meth out of prisons and into prisons and really horrible,
gnarly stuff. You know. Again, none of this has ever
been proven, but the case seems really strong and this
really has the same ring of that to me.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
Well, and he was going to meet some people at
the corporate offices right in that building.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
Yeay, he had been in the he had been meeting
wanting to meet with a legal team. He had also
been around the DuPont building at the same time. And
again he had emphasized to his family and to his
colleagues that he had to work even though it was
like the end of the year, like he had to
go in and knock out some incredibly crucial stuff with miter.
(45:14):
It is currently unknown whether the last several hours of
his life were spent in Wilmington or in Newark. There's
no conclusive murder scene that has been found, or at
least there's none that's been discussed with the public, and
if there's an exact time of death, that has also
not been released. In fact, going to my earlier theory
(45:38):
that there's some stonewalling or some oxcation here. On January
eighth of twenty eleven, just a few days after his
body was discovered, a Wilmington City councilman named Kevin Kelly
told police not to quote go overboard in investigating this
man's death at the time. Yeah, right, that's weird. It's like, okay, yeah,
(46:01):
look into this murder, but you guys, don't make it
a whole thing, you know.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
Just a high profile person who pass in a very
strange way. Mm hm, and you say, don't don't worry
about it.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
Yeah, chill bro Right. At the time of this recording
of our recording, any toxicology reports on Wheeler that may have,
you know, indicated some kind of substance in his body,
they are unavailable to the public. Medical examiners. I found
a couple sources saying that the examiners indicated they either
(46:34):
found no abnormal chemicals or nothing that played a role
in his demise. Because we have to remember, some substances
can be metabolized very quickly and they'll still have damaging effects.
But when you check the body afterwards, they'll be clean,
you know, and they'll have appeared to die of something
like asphyxiation or heart failure. Russia does polonium on purpose.
(46:58):
It's so that you know it's Russia. There are other
much much less apparent substances.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
What was the stuff not Navalney got hit with in
his underwear?
Speaker 1 (47:08):
Noviachok, novachok.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
That's the the whole point, at least according to that
phone call. If you believe it was that it would
be untraceable, you'd have no idea what.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
Happened, right, But then also, how much of an expert
is that guy If he's gonna talk about that stuff on.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
The phone, well he's so yeah, Okay, come on, he
was allegedly, at least according to his belief, was talking
to one of his handlers.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Okay, all right, but yeah, all right, well, far be
it for us to criticize someone else just trying to
do their job. So in some ways this case does
bear similarities to that still unsolved death of Elisa lam
We have video footage, we have records of communication. What
we do not have, however, is anything like an explanation.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Yeah, not even close.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
And unlike the case of Lamb, it appears the world
at large has moved on from the mysterious death of
John Wheeler.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
It really does seem that way. I'm thankful that Unsolved
Mysteries came back with this episode because it feels like
it's really jump started at least discussion online in a
lot of places because I think may it's been eleven
ten ten years, almost eleven years. No eleven years, God huh,
It's just it's been so long. And one of my
(48:34):
big questions coming away from this after reading everything, watching
all this stuff, there are two scenarios for me. One
is that he really was going through some kind of
mental state where he was either manic or super low
right where he was just going through something I'm not
(48:56):
confused is the wrong word, but he just what he
was focused on other things, and what we see in
the footage is him truly in a distressed, confused state
and he's not sure what's going on. He's trying to
find his car, then he gets lost. He has no
way to communicate because he doesn't have a cell phone's
he can't get back to his wife. Who would, you know,
(49:17):
like be his mental rock or another family member, somebody
familiar that would kind of help him. And he's cold,
he's in a different place. Maybe a car took him
to Newark and he didn't expect to go to Newark
for some reason, or somebody he got in a car
with with bad intentions took him to Newark instead of
(49:39):
where he wanted to go. And you know, that's one
potential thing. And along with that is maybe he was
cold and he climbed into a dumpster, which is a
common thing that occurs when it's very very cold outside
and there's no other place to go. Dumpsters are used
in that Unsolved Mysteries episode. There there's a few people
(50:02):
who work in that industry saying that, yeah, it's very
common for us to load the truck up to one
of these dumpsters, you put the forks in, and then
somebody will pop out the top or jump out the
side and be like who whoa whoa stop stop, I'm
in here, and I'm not saying that John Wood or
wouldn't do that. It's just a real possibility, right right.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
Yeah, Yeah, it's a real possibility, and it's an excellent point.
We do also need to point out that, you know,
the family, the survivors, his relatives, his friends, his colleagues
have all also you know, done their best hiring investigators,
putting out rewards for information, but still at this point
(50:42):
there seem to be no leads the like. The craziest
question is could could a government agency of some actor,
some state actor, or a faction thereof have targeted him
for his extensive high level knowledge. He knew a lot
of stuff.
Speaker 2 (51:01):
You know they did, Yeah, he really did.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
But the thing is he seems by all accounts to
be a real company man, like he's ideologically loyal. He
doesn't seem like he's the type to divulge secret intelligence,
to spill the to spill the espionage beans, or anything
like that. So then we have to ask, I don't
when you get all Jacob's ladder with this, but we
have to ask whether there might be a personal revenge
(51:26):
mode of at play. Could it have been something related
to Vietnam. There's no solid proof all that.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
Or or that house or the house that house across
the street where he was trying to shut that thing down.
The Yeah, I think that's a real possibility that he
made a personal enemy somehow, one way or another. If
the other thing I want to bring up with that dumpster,
just really quickly, I'm sorry that I didn't finish that
thought there. If you're in a dumpster like that, imagine
(51:53):
the physics of one of these big forklift trucks picking
up a dumpster if you're inside of it, and then
dumping it forced into the back of a truck. Then
also think about the fact that a lot of those
dump trucks have a compressor function on purpose to compress trash.
Imagine if you got stuck in there, accidentally, are caught unawares,
(52:16):
get dumped in there, and then get crushed to a
certain extent. The injuries that are shown on that report,
like crushed ribs, like he appeared to have been beaten up.
But I'm wondering this sounds so silly, and I don't
mean to discount the work of any corner of any
medical examiners. But like, I'm trying to imagine how much
(52:41):
damage would be done to a human body if it
went through that process. If you're in a lot of
fairly malleable trash, how much would a human body actually
get crushed? Would it be to the extent where you
wouldn't recognize the damage was being done because you would
have differing points hitting the body, right, Like, I know
(53:04):
it's weird to get into the physics of what that
would be like, but I'm just in my mind, like,
what if it was just him being in that compactor
that caused the damage? Tell me if that's stupid.
Speaker 1 (53:16):
I don't know, it's not stupid at all. But even
if the thing is, even if that's the case, it
doesn't explain some of those other things leading up to
their demise, Right.
Speaker 2 (53:27):
So.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
If it is, if it is something like that, it's
it's still I would say, no, less tragic. That's a
horrible way to go, especially when you're already having what
appears to be a very hectic and unpleasant series of days. Yeah,
it's quite it's quite possible. It's also possible that maybe
he was beaten before. Maybe maybe he was beaten near
(53:53):
to the point of death and then escaped into a
dumpster to hide. It is possible. Again, all the things
that we're saying right now are possible but not proven.
You know, there are questions that have just become tougher
to answer over time, because again, in my opinion, something
was up with the investigation on some level. What would
(54:16):
you say about that, Matt.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
Yeah, I mean from what we found there from Kevin Kelly,
that seems off. That seems really really off. This was
a high profile person that was you know, appeared to
be beloved in many circles, especially in the upper echelons
of at least the Republican Party, if not you know,
the without using the phrase deep state, the non elected
(54:43):
parts of the government.
Speaker 1 (54:46):
Right right, Yeah, one thing is for sure. Something about this,
if not the direct murder or a homicide or accidental death,
something about this appear orchestrated. It appears that someone had
a plan and whatever this was, it was not a
(55:07):
random break in and a random Mugging's something was at place.
Something was afoot. But what you know, Matt, I know
we're in deep water here because we're we're exchanging theories,
we're sharing possibilities, but without access to more information or
(55:29):
a deathbed confession or something. I think everybody is at
a loss to explain this. A lot of the things
we just mentioned are currently equally plausible or equally possible.
Speaker 2 (55:42):
I should say, well, we want to know what you think.
What happened to John Parsons Wheeler The third right to us.
You can find us on Facebook. You can find us
on Twitter. We're conspiracy stuff at both of those. On Instagram,
we are Conspiracy Stuff Show. You can also head on
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(56:04):
A you like that, it's just like our segment that's
been on the show since the beginning. You can go
over there and hang out with listeners just like you
have discussions. You will be surprised at how excellent an
online discussion can be about topics like this. It's it's wonderful.
Highly recommend it.
Speaker 1 (56:23):
And update from from the Here's where it Gets Crazy front.
Apparently there's talk about writing a stuff they don't want
you to know a piece of fan fiction. Yeah, yep,
so is it romantic? I don't know. We're we're not
in charge of This is from Holly, one of your
(56:44):
fellow listeners, So we will be having it. We will
be figuring it out at the same time you do. Folks.
One nice note, it looks like this might be used
potentially to raise money for some charities in the Marshall Islands.
So oh wow, so you can be for a good cause.
(57:07):
But yeah, that's that's the That's some of the stuff
that you will see on here's where it gets crazy.
If you are not given to exploring social media, totally
get it. You can call us directly. We have a
phone line that we are doing a great job at
now keep you track of It is one eight three
(57:29):
three st d w yt K. You call, you'll hear
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thou wilt shall be the whole of the telephone law.
But but we do have a concept for Yeah, but
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(57:50):
for you if you find yourself kind of like scrambling.
Speaker 2 (57:53):
Oh yeah, first thing, go ahead and tell us what
you want us to call you on air. Doesn't have
to be your real name. Whatever you want Malkovich is fine.
We'll just call everybody Malcavich then let us know if
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if you call in, we really want to use it
on the air. Just let us know if it's okay.
(58:16):
Then after that tell us your message. Try and keep
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(58:36):
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Speaker 5 (58:43):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (59:06):
Stuff they don't want you to know. Is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realist. Here's his story. The Jedi may not
tell you. It's about a guy named John Parsons Wheeler
the Third, or Jack to his palace.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Aw, now this guy Jack Wheeler, As you said.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
Who is he? Oh? Yeah, yeah, that's a question that
everybody asked themselves the Bureau. This is a question Jack
probably asked himself because before his untimely demise, he was
a silent kingmaker in the defense world of the United States.
He worked with three different presidential administrations. He was also
(00:39):
very well known for philanthropy. But then a strange series
of events led to his passing.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Oh my god, I'm an old political article from twenty
eleven about how he died from blunt force trauma and
how that was Like what how did he die like that?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
How did such an important guy get found in a landfill?
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Oh, I can't wait for this one. Let's revisit.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
Yes, from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history
is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now
or learn this stuff. They don't want you to know.
A production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Max,
My name is Nola.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
They called me Ben. We were joined as always with
our super producer Paul Mission Control decandt here in spirit.
Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that
makes this stuff. They don't want you to know. We
are delving into a true unsolved mystery today. If you're
(02:01):
a younger person, you might not have heard of John
Parsons Wheeler, the Third unless you saw the recent Netflix
reboot of Unsolved Mysteries. It's a story that largely disappeared
from mass media headlines in a very weird way. I mean,
you've heard of Elisa Lamb, but have you heard of
(02:23):
John Parsons Wheeler. Here are the facts. First things first,
whether or not you have ever heard of this man.
If you live in the US, his career has probably
impacted you in some way. He's one of those guys who,
it seems like since his early days, he was destined
(02:44):
for the heights of the military political class.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Oh yeah, an absolute heavyweight and a sharp guy to boot.
John Parsons Wheeler, the Third Jack to his Pals, was
born on December fourteenth, nineteen forty four, in Laredo, Texas,
and he was to some degree kind of destined to
follow in the footsteps of those that came before him
in his family line, and was in fact groomed for the.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Type of illustrious political.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
And military career many would only ever dream of. He
came from a long line of these career military men,
including one relative who served in both the Confederate Army
and then later the United States Army.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah, he ended up going to the US Military Academy,
which you may know as West Point. That's the way
it's generally referred to. Very prestigious place if you were
going to go that route. And then he was a
fire control platoon leader in New Jersey back in the
mid to late sixties, and he ended up getting a
Bachelor of Science degree from that institution.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
Yeah. Important note about his classmates, his cohort at West Point.
Many of these men would go on to lose their
lives in Vietnam, and his experiences with the war had
a tremendous influence on his career, his personal beliefs, and
(04:09):
possibly debatably, the end of his life. This class at
West Point is documented in a book written by a
former Washington Post journalist named Rick Atkinson. The name of
the book is The Long Gray Line. This book spends
a lot of time on Wheeler himself. If you read it,
(04:31):
and Wheeler had a copy of it at his home.
He served as a staff officer in Vietnam. He served
with the Office of the Secretary Defense. He served with
the Joint Staff before he left service in nineteen seventy one.
His schooling is particularly interesting because it was his gateway
(04:54):
to the upper echelons of American society. He enrolled in
Harvard Business School in sixty nin got a master's in
Business admin. He got a degree in law from Yale
in seventy five, and he worked with fancy law firms
in DC, the ones that kind of blur the line
between private and public power. They're often called white shoe
(05:18):
law firms. You may hear them referred to as such.
He served as a clerk for George E. McKinnon. He
was a high level official for the SEC Securities and
Exchange Commission. This guy had his finger in a lot
of pies. He was during this time at the SEC
side note he was investigating major cases of insider trading.
(05:42):
So long story short. He was accepted by the often
invisible ruling class of this country, and he moved extensively
in this circle.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Well, and he's also if anyone knew of his work,
if you're imagining the people on the other side of
those investigations, he was already potentially making enemies just putting
it out there.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah, great point, Matt. Let's talk a little bit about
his career, because the space he occupies is a bit alien.
I think to a lot of the general public. You
could describe him as a defense consultant, but that is
a very vague term.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Yeah, it seems almost like a gray area kind of
where I could encompass a whole lot of things that
maybe aren't public knowledge.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Yeah, exactly, Noel, So he was known for working in
that often unexamined, liminal space between the FEDS and private
companies and then charities and nonprofits, and of course, as
longtime listeners know some of those organizations, not all, but
some of them are much more closely related than they
(06:56):
would have you believe, according to you their FAQs on
their website for most of the people in the US.
Wheeler's most notable, well known work is his assistance in
the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC in
nineteen eighty four. He's instrumental in making that happen. He
(07:16):
worked for a cavalcade of different institutions and organizations, Amtrak,
Mothers Against Drunk Driving, three different three different Republican administrations,
Reagan and then Bush, and then Bush again when that
guy put his son into office. And he also worked
(07:37):
for the Miner Corporation. Remember that last one. It's going
to be important later. His career was not without controversy,
especially moving in and out of so many institutions. Maybe
we can talk a little bit about his roles with
charities and with businesses as well.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
He was extremely active in various nonprofits. I think that's
probably the way to put it, very specialized nonprofits. And
he was the founder and CEO of this thing called
Vietnam Children's Fund. By many accounts, at least if you
look online, appears to be a great organization, at least
the forward facing things about it. He worked with President Bush,
(08:21):
like we said, the father to create this thing called
the Earth Conservation Corps. He also served as president and
CEO of the Deafness Research Foundation. I mean, just listen
to what we're saying here. This man was non stop
working with organizations that appear to be for the greater
or the greater good. At least that that's the way.
(08:42):
That's the way it seems. He also had a really
solid rep for, oh yeah, this is great, a solid
rep for turning failing businesses around. Now that sounds sounds
great right on paper, But when you turn a failing
business around, like, what does that really mean?
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Right? Like?
Speaker 2 (08:58):
What do you have to do to.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Turn a failing business around? It's when you start hearing
like corporate buzzwords like pivot, you know.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Yeah, and it could be you know, and it could
be everything from specializing in you know, making a company
specialize in one small thing that is a profit center,
and then getting rid of a whole bunch of other
things that a company does, such as the case with Macy's.
Macy's you'll remember from the mall when you were a kid,
and some places now I think they're Macy's unless they're
(09:27):
all gone, I can't remember. But he turned that business around.
He got him out of bankruptcy, right, which may have
entailed layoffs.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
That's the elephant in the room, the badger in the bag.
There under euphemisms like streamlining, pivoting, or focusing. But he
did manage to write this ship a small note about
Vietnam Children's Fund. By the way, they build elementary schools
in Vietnam, and they do a pretty great job at it.
(09:57):
They're still around. If you want to learn more, you can.
You can just find them online. But perhaps the most
unpredictable aspect of Wheeler's post military career was this late
stage professional plot twist. He was well into his sixties
when he developed an intense interest in cybersecurity, and that's
(10:19):
what led him to the Miter Corporation. It also it
also turned him into one of those guys who always
has a briefcase inexplicability, always has a briefcase.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
This was in there.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Huh huh? Who is no telling? No, literally we don't know.
But behind the scenes, you know, we have to realize
that this person was a human being and he struggled
with his own demons. He suffered from depression and bipolar disorder.
That's not speculation. He received diagnosis in this regard, and
(10:55):
this resulted in these bouts of frenetic action and then
unpredictable at times drastic mood swings. But you know who's perfect.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Well, he's he's clearly a workaholic, right and I'm sure
in many ways that helped him, at least if you
watched the I think we mentioned it the Unsolved Mysteries episode,
as well as you read online stuff that has been
written by his wife. He thrived quite a bit from
that energy that he got, not necessarily from bipolar disorder,
(11:30):
but just that existed within him inherently.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Right, Right, someone defining themselves by their continual actions, right,
there must always be a goal to pursue. He's not
really a kickback and smell the morning dew with a
nice hot cup of coffee kind of guy. He's got
stuff to do. But given his track record, and given
the success and the benefits of the work he does,
(11:57):
his legacy seems assured until one strange day in November,
very last day of twenty ten, December thirty. First, there
are some workers at the Cherry Island landfill near Wilmington, Virginia.
They see the body of an elderly man plummet from
(12:18):
the back of a garbage truck onto a heap of trash.
This turns out to be the body of John Parsons
Wheeler the Third. He was sixty six years old. Today's episode,
what happened? We'll tell you after a word from our sponsor.
(12:41):
Here's where it gets crazy. Officially, this death has been
ruled a homicide. However, it is a homicide that comes
with a lot of unanswered questions. And the further you
dig into this story, the stranger it becomes. So maybe
we start with the relevant details. Should we start with
(13:02):
the landfill? What do you think?
Speaker 3 (13:04):
I think that's a perfect place to start. When these
workers found Wheeler's body, he had the look of having
been severely beaten. He was wearing a white shirt, black pants,
and a black jacket, and an important detail, he was
wearing a class of nineteen sixty six ring from the
West Point Military Academy. And the thing that was unusual
(13:28):
about it is that he still had things like that
clearly very valuable ring that any average street mugger would
have taken. Not to mention the absolute lack of care
that went into quote disposing of this body. I mean,
it was really just dumped in plain view.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
We're going to talk about this later on, but just
to end up where his body ended up, it was
either someone taking great care to put a body in
a dumpster and hope that it never be discovered again,
because it's actually quite unlikely that they would have discovered
him amongst all the trash that was dumped that day
from the truck. The other side of the coin is
(14:11):
if his body was dumped by somebody or just put
into a dumpster like that. You're right that there's a
lack of care in that. I don't know, it's weird.
It's both sides, right, it's a lack of care, but
it's also it appears to show intent. I guess if
someone actually did put him in there to try and
hide a body.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Yeah, that's the thing. It's alarmingly easy to dispose of
an organism in a landfill, especially a large one. You
just you have to work out the timing and you
have to you know, like the day of the week
when a lot of dumps come in. Things like that.
(14:52):
This should not be confused or mistaken as confused for
mistaken as advice on where to put bodies. We are
not giving you that. We are saying that the average
I would say, not pre planned or orchestrated mugging or
murder doesn't usually resultant in the perpetrator having the presence
(15:12):
of mind to dispose of the body. You know what,
I mean, if if you are robbing someone, the robbery
goes wrong and you stab them, wound them, maim them,
or shoot them, your first instinct is going to be
to leave the scene immediately rather than sit around and think, hey,
(15:33):
should I stash this in some bushes Assassin's creed style
or something like that. It just it doesn't often happen
that way. So Wilmington is on the case. Authorities contact
the police in Newcastle, Delaware, where the Wheeler family has
a second home, and the Virginia Police informed the Delaware
(15:54):
police of this a few days earlier, just after Christmas,
around December twenty eighth, Wheeler had told his wife he
had to spend a few days working on an important
project at the miner corporation. He told her he'd be
staying at the Metropolitan Club in downtown Washington, and they
(16:14):
argued about this. We know they argued, this is not speculation,
because we can see the email and text records, and
he was emphasizing this was important. He even talked to
his therapist about the argument. He was trying to trying
to smooth things out diplomatically until the point that he
fell completely out of contact with her, and then police
(16:38):
found a series of phone calls that made this seem
like more than an accidental death or a mugging.
Speaker 3 (16:46):
That's right, but more than offering any real solution to
just raised a significant number of new questions to the
circumstances surrounding Wheeler's death. One call from December twenty eighth,
the day Wheeler traveled to Washington, d C. Came from
a resident of Newcastle named Scott Morris, who saw at
(17:09):
eleven thirty pm what he described as quote, the darkened
silhouette of a man standing in the frame of the
house under construction across the street, methodically lighting what looked
like small balls of fire and tossing them onto the floor.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
Huh.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
Really descriptive and kind of eerie. The police called to
the scene didn't find any damage of note, but Morris
remained disturbed by what he saw. The sense of desperation
and the purpose of what was going on in this
scene really stuck with him. He described it as creepy.
(17:51):
He says, the figure appeared very calm, and when he finished,
he turned very deliberately and walked away toward the path
along the Delaware River.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Yeah, so we know the thing about eyewitness accounts is
that they they're essentially combo meals, right. The main entree
in these combo meals is going to be the factual
description of what happened. But the side order, you know,
the fries and the drink are the person's own perspective
(18:22):
and opinion put on put upon what they saw. So yes,
for Morris, this appears to be purposeful. He somehow, from
body language, because he didn't speak to this person, he
somehow believed or got the sense that they were quite deliberate.
(18:45):
But that doesn't necessarily mean they are because he didn't
talk to them, right, and he didn't see who it was.
That's a hugely important detail here. But another hugely important detail.
That construction site was something Wheeler was involved in an
anti shagonistic way. It was an on He was part
of an ongoing legal dispute over the construction of this
(19:07):
particular house, and he was going hard on the paint too.
He hated the idea of it being built Partially, yes,
it would block his home's view of the land and
the water, but from his perspective, at least the way
he explained it, the area was historic because back in
the day early colonists and then later revolutionaries built a
(19:32):
defense battery on that land. So to him, building anything
on that land other than perhaps a monument to those
earlier forces was profoundly offensive. It was a kind of sacrilege.
But then we have to ask ourselves, was that sincere
or was that just like his rationalization for this construction
(19:52):
that he hated, you know what I mean? Anyway, he
was involved.
Speaker 2 (19:56):
Well, he was involved, and he was trying to stop it.
His wife says that he was essentially on a mission
to stop this thing. And we know from just from
his past life and in his actions everything that he's done,
he sees something as a goal and he goes for it,
and that's again like his mission, right, so you can
imagine that he was very feeling, very very strongly about this.
(20:19):
And from what I've read, this incident appears to have
been like smoke bombs that weren't gonna didn't seem to
cause any damage really to the house, didn't seem to
cause anything else besides this disturbance. But the weird thing
is that John Wheeler's cellular phone was recovered in that house,
(20:42):
the house that was under construction where the silhouetted man
or person lighting, smoke bombs, was found or was seen
let's say, very strange.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, leaving the accusations of his involvement or his guilt
in this instance, leaving those all to the side. The
timeline becomes really weird when we think about when he
had the phone and when he didn't, how the phone
got from him to that place in place on the
banks there. And then there is another call police discover
(21:16):
on December thirtieth, the day before Wheeler's body is found.
There's a guy named Rob Dill DLLL. He is one
of the Wheeler's neighbors there in Newcastle, and he reports
that someone has broken into the Wheeler's home. I believe
he's the same neighbor also who said they had a
(21:36):
TV on very loud when he knew there was no
one home. He was just doing any thing neighbors do,
keeping an eye on the house. He had noticed a
window a jar in the Wheeler house and the exterior door,
the storm door was closed, but the interior door was
(21:57):
also a jar. And then he found he found some weird,
weird stuff when he went into the interior. There was
a disarray in the kitchen, you know, like somebody had
been rooting through things in a hurried manner. John had
a ceremonial sword and shield. They were covered with powder
(22:18):
by the sink. Rob Dill notices a footprint in powder
in front of the sink, and when the police show up.
The weird thing is that nothing seems to have been stolen.
Stuff was messed with, but no one took expensive electronics.
No one took, you know, some of the art that
the Wheelers had, the kind of stuff you would normally
(22:41):
steal if you were just a garden variety B and
E dude. But there was one detail that caught their attention.
Amid all this disarray, investigators found a book on the
kitchen counter. The book was open, as if someone had
been reading it before they left. Can you guess what
(23:01):
the book is? If you guessed the long gray line,
you are correct. Yeah, man.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
And just the fact that his ceremonial sword and shield
we're hanging out down there. I mean, that's a it's weird. Spices,
some comment maybe, or whatever the white substance was, and
those things. I don't know. It's weird. It's tough because
initially what that sounds like to me is frantically searching
(23:32):
for something in your own house and then maybe finding
it or not finding it and getting upset and leaving.
That's where forget or you know there's something I've hidden something,
or I know I've hidden something, but I'm not sure
where it is. I think it might be under the sink,
and like just pulling everything frantically out from drawers and
(23:55):
from under the sink.
Speaker 1 (23:56):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
That's what it sounds like to me. Rather like, as
you said, for all the reason you've already stated been
rather than someone going into the house and robbing it,
unless they were just trying to leave a message of some.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Sort, right, unless there was possibly someone from his past. Right,
this is the thing. We don't know what page the
book was on, you know, when it was open. Was
it indicating a specific somehow significant passage unknown at this time.
But then also we see an alternate possibility that maybe
(24:31):
Wheeler himself is panicked or he's hurried for some reason,
because when people are hurrying from their own house, they
don't always close the windows or the doors, right, because
the logic is, it's my house, I'll just come back
into it. Right. So the initial investigations tell us increasingly
(24:52):
strange things on January third, just a few days after
the discovery of his body, you p reported Wheeler's death
was ruled a homicide, but a friend of his that
he knew through the legal circles he moved in noted,
this is just not the kind of guy who gets murdered.
(25:13):
This is not the kind of guy you find in
a landfill. But the official cause of death again, his homicide,
and that was specified in several obituaries that came out
shortly after.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
So according to his obituary in the Washington Posts, well,
I'll just read you a quote quote, the cause of
death was blunt force trauma inflicted by unknown assailants in Wilmington, Delaware,
not far from his home in Newcastle, Delaware. But as
these investigations continued, many more troubling details started to rise
(25:48):
to the surface. Wheelers seemed to not only have been beaten,
but beaten to the point of like the beating inducing
a heart attack I can only imagine, and several eyewitnesses
would report that Wheeler had been seen in really rough
shape holding a shoe his shoe, stumbling around under duress
(26:11):
in Wilmington, Delaware. He was telling people in this unsolved
Mysteries that we talked about. The top of the show,
they interview some of the folks that saw him, and
he claimed to have lost his briefcase, or rather even
even more so, had it stolen.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yeah, this is what he's stolen.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
And he kept repeating it like he was in some
kind of fugue state, whether it's suffering from some sort
of mental breakdown or just dazed from having been attacked,
or you know, in disheveled and all that. But it
really does, the plot does thicken. There's some footage you
can see, Uh, he's on camera from his kind of
you know, wander, and you can see that he's kind
(26:55):
of pacing around frantically. He's holding the shoe. It almost
looks like he's mumbling to himself. He looks very disoriented
on these CCTV videos and he claims to have been
robbed and needed a ride out of town.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
And this is my side note here, but when you
first look at the footage, you see an you see
an elderly man that does appear to be out of
sorts for one reason or another. And in my mind,
initially what I see is disorientation, like a disoriented person.
I don't maybe I don't know where I am. I'm
confused about what's going on and why I'm here. That's
(27:32):
what it looks like. But according to people who knew him, well,
there's several interviews outside of that Unsolved Mysteries show that
include his wife and several people that knew him and
his wife speaking about others words, but they all say
that he looked in distress as though he was what
(27:54):
did they I think, Ben, you kind of put it
that way, hunting or being hunted, essentially, like he was
in distress for one reason or another. That's their opinion.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Right, Yeah, And that's a phrase we'll use later in
the episode because it does encapsulate exactly how he was behaving.
And again we see the issue with eyewitness reports. People
are putting their own perspective over the events, or it's
a better way to say it is they're seeing the
same events through the lens of their own perspective and
(28:28):
their preconceptions. Here's the thing. This doesn't appear to have
come out of nowhere, because email records show that on
December twenty ninth, he had contacted his colleagues at the
Miterer Corporation reporting a home break in. He said that
his cell phone had been stolen, his badge, his ID badge,
(28:51):
his security fob, and his briefcase. There's a mystery here.
We know as records for cab calls, we have interviews
with cab drivers who spoke with him, you know, his
records for emails and texts. But after he reported his
phone being stolen, it's not clear where he was sending
(29:13):
these other emails from or how he was sending them.
Was it an internet cafe or something like that. We
simply do not know. There are no further reports of
him until six pm, when he walked into the nearby
Happy Harry's pharmacy. This was like his you know, it's
like his CVS or his Walgreens down the street or
right eight I guess, depending on where you live, Dwayne Reid,
(29:35):
if you're in New York, I'm just naming pharmacies at
this point.
Speaker 4 (29:38):
But he.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Knows the people who work there. He is friends with
one of the pharmacists, and he comes in and he
asks this guy if he can get a ride to Wilmington,
and multiple times people try to offer him assistance, and
for varying reasons, he always turned the assistance down.
Speaker 2 (30:01):
It's strange did we talk about why he wants to
go to Willington. At least according to that documentary or
that Unsolved Mysteries episode, it's because his car was parked
somewhere where he left his car park somewhere and he
wanted to go find it, but he wasn't quite sure
where it is, and according to his wife and others,
he would he was constantly losing his car essentially after
(30:25):
he would park it.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Yeah, DC is a tough place to park in, I
mean a lot of the North East in general. But
also he was doing something that I think will be
familiar to a lot of people who park their car
for a long time during quarantine. He just hadn't been
around his car for a minute, right, so he wasn't
quite sure where he put it. That doesn't The important
(30:49):
thing here is that's losing your car in that way
is not indicative of an unwell mental state.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yes, and that's the story that he was giving to
people to for the reason and to get to that area.
But we're not, I don't know, we can't definitively prove
that's why he needed to get to.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Wilmington, right, Just that that's what he said to some people,
but not all. That's a very good point. So he
looks particularly rough when he's in one parking lot talking
this parking attendant. He has one shoe on the other
is ripped and in his hand, and it turns out
that he is in the wrong deck. His car is
(31:27):
in a different nearby parking deck are he eventually leaves
the scene. There are no further sightings of him until
December thirtieth, when he visits a high rise to speak
with a senior partner at a law firm. He leaves
before he actually meets with this person, but he also,
(31:48):
according to someone else in the office, asked for money
to take the train somewhere before he left. Surveillance cameras
captured him exiting the building. He was walked east toward
a place called Rodney Square, and this leads if you
walk past Rodney Square, this leads to an area of
(32:08):
the city that is known for historically high rates of crime.
That footage is the last time John Parsons Wheeler is
seen alive.
Speaker 2 (32:18):
The next morning, he's found dead in that landfill. It
is interesting to note as well, it appears that he
may have spent the night underneath that building where there
are there's a series of tunnels essentially that go throughout
the area, and he was definitely seen on camera down there,
and he was also seen in the same clothes he
(32:39):
was wearing earlier. And then when he exited the building, somehow,
for some reason, he had gotten a hold of a
black hoodie right put that on and wore that out
of the building the next night.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
And then then folks who knew him, his wife for example,
who were interviewed for that Unsolved Mystery episode, said that
was just completely out of character for him, not something
he would have ever worn. But it was also very cold,
for sure, But it's like it didn't belong to him.
He got it from somebody or some somewhere found it or.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
Something, yeah, or maybe picked it up paid cash, because
he did have cash on him to the very end
of his life and beyond. So when his body has
found at the landfill, police in Newark, New Jersey ended
up taking the case because there's evidence that the trash
truck that had his body in it made stops in Newark,
(33:31):
which means that Wheeler's body somehow ended up in a
dumpster about thirteen miles away from where he was last seen.
On video or where he's last provably seen. As far
as the information Law enforcement has released, how much have
they released? Not all of it, not by a long shot.
(33:52):
We're going to pause for word from our sponsor, and
then we're going to dive into some of the theories
and remaining questions regarding the death of John Parsons Wheeler.
We're back earlier. We noted that whomever was throwing smoke
(34:14):
bombs at that construction site, whoever they were, they weren't
throwing explosives. You know, this wasn't C four. They weren't
lighting fires. The smoke bombs didn't really have the capacity
to do permanent damage.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
No. I mean, we kind of all know what smoke
bombs are. The kind of things you can buy at
a joke shop or a fireworks shop, and they're sort
of considered like the wimpiest of fireworks, but they make
cool plumes of colored smoke, which you would have thought
that the eyewitness people would have mentioned the smoke bombs.
I mean, they put out a lot of smoke, and
(34:52):
it's usually brightly colored, like blues or purples or pinks
or whatever.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
But it was it was at eleven eleven thre thirty
PM when that was happening, right, So.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
He was described as being silhouetted, So wouldn't you would
have had to have some direct light to see the
effects there. But you're right, I mean these things they
don't even really explode. They just kind of light the
fuse and it sparks and then once it hits, it
really just starts shooting out the smoke. So they wouldn't
have done any damage. You can't really do a thing
with smoke bombs other than, you know, disappear if you're
(35:22):
like a cool ninja or something.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
So could he have made an enemy? I mean, he's
definitely involved where someone definitely wanted it to look as
if he were involved, because his cell phone ends up
at the construction site. So did he lie to the
Miter corporation and say that he had lost his cell
phone prior to this to try to escape culpability. Did
(35:46):
someone steal his cell phone and put it at the
construction site. That's a kind of complicated frame up, isn't it.
There would have to be a compelling reason to do that.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Or was the smoke bomb a signal for me? You know,
like was I mean that sounds silly, but maybe this
smoke bomb at a construction site was Maybe the construction
site was a quiet place to meet that he thought
would be you know, he'd be able to have a
confidential conversation. There's another question, like when you're talking about
the minor corporation materials, and I don't mean, you know,
(36:19):
I don't want to put anything on John. I don't
know what he was doing or what his motivations were,
but I can imagine all of those assets for a
company could be valuable to somebody.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Right, You're absolutely right, there's something else here.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
You know.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
We see a couple of points where this could have
been a simple robbery or a series of unfortunate, completely mundane,
non spionage related events. But there are some problems with
that too. So first, as you would pointed out earlier, Matt,
(36:57):
the body has things on it that a mugger would
have stolen. Very nice Rolex watch. He's got that class
ring from West Point. He still has cold hard cash
on his person. Why would robbers leave all those things
on a victim? If robbers they were, If there were
robbers at his home, what were they looking for? It
(37:19):
was certainly not high end art, It was not electronics,
other valuables. None of those were touched. They were just
searching frantically for turmeric apparently. But the problem here is
one of geography. Honestly, it's a series of bizarre disturbances.
And even if you do the footwork and look through
(37:40):
the documented timeline of where he went and when, you'll
see that this appears to be a man on the run.
He is either being hunted or believes he is being hunted,
or possibly at some parts of the timeline, he himself
is hunting someone, which leads us to ask the question,
(38:02):
are we talking about murder for hire?
Speaker 3 (38:04):
I mean, yeah, I mean, you know, you mentioned completely correctly, Ben.
Like the way this man looks, the way he's pacing
in this bathroom, it's like he's hiding from somebody. It's
like he's trying to escape some unseen assailant.
Speaker 4 (38:17):
You know.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
I mean that really, that's how it rings for me.
I don't know if you guys read it that way,
but I really got strong vibes that he was being chaste.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
Yeah, I mean, I can imagine it. We have to wonder,
and again I end up going back to the Miter
corporation because he only worked for them for what two
years a year or two years two thousand and nine,
I think twenty ten until his death. He was just
a consultant with them, and who knows what consulting work
for the Miter corporation actually looks like, who knows what
(38:51):
information he was dealing with and had you know, privileged
knowledge too, And of gosh, I guess have to put
a giant it's not in a lie, it's it's my
own thoughts, and it's I wonder if his work with
a minor corporation had something to do with this.
Speaker 1 (39:11):
Yeah, I don't think that's out of the realm of
possibility at all, because at this at this point, you know,
the US intelligence community is well aware of the asymmetrical
information warfare that countries like Russia and China and the
DPRK or North Korea are actively waging against the US.
(39:34):
And to be fair, the US is doing the same
thing with those countries with countries in the Middle East.
I mean, take a map, spin it around and just
throw a random dart at it, and you'll probably hit
a country that the US is fine on. So there
are a lot of state level actors that would be
(39:54):
very interested in his work at Miter Corporation. This takes
me back to that point we made earlier about having
a lot of potential enemies because he had a lot
of potential projects. It's a nexus of speculation, and there's
a really there's a disturbing part here that I wish
(40:15):
some of those documentaries we mentioned spent more time on.
And it's this. So we've talked about CCTV before, closed
circuit television. This stuff is, you know, generally right now,
it's not all interconnected. Right, So, like the pizza shop
on one side of the street may have a couple
(40:35):
of security cameras, and the cupcake factory or whatever on
the other side of the street may have their own
set of cameras, but they don't really share data. The
thing is, law enforcement can legally obtain those, especially in
the case of an investigation of a heinous crime like
a murder. Wilmington in particular is inundated with cameras. It
(40:58):
is lousy with cameras. There's so so many, and we
know that they're therefore, there has to be more footage
of John Parsons Wheeler on that faithful night. But if
you look at law enforcement statements, you just don't see
that footage, you don't see the vast majority of what
(41:18):
could be out there, And looking at the facts alone,
it's plausible that this investigation was at some point and
from some high level stonewalled. Now that doesn't mean that
someone you know working for miteror killed them, or working
for the CIA or you know, some other intelligence organization.
(41:39):
It just means that whoever murdered Wheeler, and whatever their
motivations for doing so were, there's something about the story
the US government actively does not want you to know.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Going even further than stonewalled, you could almost say manipulated
or compromised.
Speaker 1 (41:54):
Right, Yeah, maybe can I put something out there?
Speaker 2 (41:58):
If I'm gonna this is insane, I'm just gonna say it.
Imagine the three of us. Imagine if for some reason,
iHeart was out to get us. All of our devices
are inextricably linked to iHeart. Doesn't mean they're tracking them necessarily,
(42:20):
but any use that we would have on our machines,
even on our phones, likely could be linked back to
that company in some way. And if we needed to
get away because we were being hunted for some reason,
we're not and we will never be by iHeart. A
good strategy maybe to get rid of all of those
(42:42):
potential links and devices. Sure, yeah, so I'm imagining that
there could be a scenario where John got rid of
all of that Miter Corporation stuff on purpose because he
wasn't trying to get away from somebody else. He was
maybe trying to get away from them.
Speaker 1 (42:58):
Yeah, or maybe maybe trying to do something like do
a burn the village to save the village strategy and
maybe brick his devices. He would have he would have
known how to actually brick one two, how to make
that information as close to irretrievable as possible. But that
missing briefcase, that's one of the keys here. Who's never
(43:21):
without it. It's never been found. All we know about
what could have been in the briefcase is that it
must have been related to his cybersecurity work at Miter.
Well not must have, but that's the most likely scenario.
We just don't know.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
You know. It reminds me of a show that I
worked on, Murder in Oregon, about the well, I mean,
it's it's conjectured by the folks who truly believe this
is what happened, That this public official was assassinated because
he knew too much about corruption in the Oregon State
prison system, and when he was killed, it was you know,
(44:02):
shocked up to being a mugging. He was stabbed in
the heart outside of his office building. But guess what
was missing when when they found his body a briefcase
full of the presentation materials. Back then it would have
been floppy discs before PowerPoint and cloud based stuff, and
(44:22):
supposedly that was never recovered, and that had this presentation
that he's about to give that was going to blow
the lid off of all this like literally cops like
smuggling meth out of prisons and into prisons and really horrible,
gnarly stuff. You know. Again, none of this has ever
been proven, but the case seems really strong and this
really has the same ring of that to me.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
Well, and he was going to meet some people at
the corporate offices right in that building.
Speaker 1 (44:50):
Yeay, he had been in the he had been meeting
wanting to meet with a legal team. He had also
been around the DuPont building at the same time. And
again he had emphasized to his family and to his
colleagues that he had to work even though it was
like the end of the year, like he had to
go in and knock out some incredibly crucial stuff with miter.
(45:14):
It is currently unknown whether the last several hours of
his life were spent in Wilmington or in Newark. There's
no conclusive murder scene that has been found, or at
least there's none that's been discussed with the public, and
if there's an exact time of death, that has also
not been released. In fact, going to my earlier theory
(45:38):
that there's some stonewalling or some oxcation here. On January
eighth of twenty eleven, just a few days after his
body was discovered, a Wilmington City councilman named Kevin Kelly
told police not to quote go overboard in investigating this
man's death at the time. Yeah, right, that's weird. It's like, okay, yeah,
(46:01):
look into this murder, but you guys, don't make it
a whole thing, you know.
Speaker 2 (46:05):
Just a high profile person who pass in a very
strange way. Mm hm, and you say, don't don't worry
about it.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
Yeah, chill bro Right. At the time of this recording
of our recording, any toxicology reports on Wheeler that may have,
you know, indicated some kind of substance in his body,
they are unavailable to the public. Medical examiners. I found
a couple sources saying that the examiners indicated they either
(46:34):
found no abnormal chemicals or nothing that played a role
in his demise. Because we have to remember, some substances
can be metabolized very quickly and they'll still have damaging effects.
But when you check the body afterwards, they'll be clean,
you know, and they'll have appeared to die of something
like asphyxiation or heart failure. Russia does polonium on purpose.
(46:58):
It's so that you know it's Russia. There are other
much much less apparent substances.
Speaker 2 (47:05):
What was the stuff not Navalney got hit with in
his underwear?
Speaker 1 (47:08):
Noviachok, novachok.
Speaker 2 (47:11):
That's the the whole point, at least according to that
phone call. If you believe it was that it would
be untraceable, you'd have no idea what.
Speaker 1 (47:18):
Happened, right, But then also, how much of an expert
is that guy If he's gonna talk about that stuff on.
Speaker 2 (47:27):
The phone, well he's so yeah, Okay, come on, he
was allegedly, at least according to his belief, was talking
to one of his handlers.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Okay, all right, but yeah, all right, well, far be
it for us to criticize someone else just trying to
do their job. So in some ways this case does
bear similarities to that still unsolved death of Elisa lam
We have video footage, we have records of communication. What
we do not have, however, is anything like an explanation.
Speaker 2 (47:57):
Yeah, not even close.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
And unlike the case of Lamb, it appears the world
at large has moved on from the mysterious death of
John Wheeler.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
It really does seem that way. I'm thankful that Unsolved
Mysteries came back with this episode because it feels like
it's really jump started at least discussion online in a
lot of places because I think may it's been eleven
ten ten years, almost eleven years. No eleven years, God huh,
It's just it's been so long. And one of my
(48:34):
big questions coming away from this after reading everything, watching
all this stuff, there are two scenarios for me. One
is that he really was going through some kind of
mental state where he was either manic or super low
right where he was just going through something I'm not
(48:56):
confused is the wrong word, but he just what he
was focused on other things, and what we see in
the footage is him truly in a distressed, confused state
and he's not sure what's going on. He's trying to
find his car, then he gets lost. He has no
way to communicate because he doesn't have a cell phone's
he can't get back to his wife. Who would, you know,
(49:17):
like be his mental rock or another family member, somebody
familiar that would kind of help him. And he's cold,
he's in a different place. Maybe a car took him
to Newark and he didn't expect to go to Newark
for some reason, or somebody he got in a car
with with bad intentions took him to Newark instead of
(49:39):
where he wanted to go. And you know, that's one
potential thing. And along with that is maybe he was
cold and he climbed into a dumpster, which is a
common thing that occurs when it's very very cold outside
and there's no other place to go. Dumpsters are used
in that Unsolved Mysteries episode. There there's a few people
(50:02):
who work in that industry saying that, yeah, it's very
common for us to load the truck up to one
of these dumpsters, you put the forks in, and then
somebody will pop out the top or jump out the
side and be like who whoa whoa stop stop, I'm
in here, and I'm not saying that John Wood or
wouldn't do that. It's just a real possibility, right right.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
Yeah, Yeah, it's a real possibility, and it's an excellent point.
We do also need to point out that, you know,
the family, the survivors, his relatives, his friends, his colleagues
have all also you know, done their best hiring investigators,
putting out rewards for information, but still at this point
(50:42):
there seem to be no leads the like. The craziest
question is could could a government agency of some actor,
some state actor, or a faction thereof have targeted him
for his extensive high level knowledge. He knew a lot
of stuff.
Speaker 2 (51:01):
You know they did, Yeah, he really did.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
But the thing is he seems by all accounts to
be a real company man, like he's ideologically loyal. He
doesn't seem like he's the type to divulge secret intelligence,
to spill the to spill the espionage beans, or anything
like that. So then we have to ask, I don't
when you get all Jacob's ladder with this, but we
have to ask whether there might be a personal revenge
(51:26):
mode of at play. Could it have been something related
to Vietnam. There's no solid proof all that.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
Or or that house or the house that house across
the street where he was trying to shut that thing down.
The Yeah, I think that's a real possibility that he
made a personal enemy somehow, one way or another. If
the other thing I want to bring up with that dumpster,
just really quickly, I'm sorry that I didn't finish that
thought there. If you're in a dumpster like that, imagine
(51:53):
the physics of one of these big forklift trucks picking
up a dumpster if you're inside of it, and then
dumping it forced into the back of a truck. Then
also think about the fact that a lot of those
dump trucks have a compressor function on purpose to compress trash.
Imagine if you got stuck in there, accidentally, are caught unawares,
(52:16):
get dumped in there, and then get crushed to a
certain extent. The injuries that are shown on that report,
like crushed ribs, like he appeared to have been beaten up.
But I'm wondering this sounds so silly, and I don't
mean to discount the work of any corner of any
medical examiners. But like, I'm trying to imagine how much
(52:41):
damage would be done to a human body if it
went through that process. If you're in a lot of
fairly malleable trash, how much would a human body actually
get crushed? Would it be to the extent where you
wouldn't recognize the damage was being done because you would
have differing points hitting the body, right, Like, I know
(53:04):
it's weird to get into the physics of what that
would be like, but I'm just in my mind, like,
what if it was just him being in that compactor
that caused the damage? Tell me if that's stupid.
Speaker 1 (53:16):
I don't know, it's not stupid at all. But even
if the thing is, even if that's the case, it
doesn't explain some of those other things leading up to
their demise, Right.
Speaker 2 (53:27):
So.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
If it is, if it is something like that, it's
it's still I would say, no, less tragic. That's a
horrible way to go, especially when you're already having what
appears to be a very hectic and unpleasant series of days. Yeah,
it's quite it's quite possible. It's also possible that maybe
he was beaten before. Maybe maybe he was beaten near
(53:53):
to the point of death and then escaped into a
dumpster to hide. It is possible. Again, all the things
that we're saying right now are possible but not proven.
You know, there are questions that have just become tougher
to answer over time, because again, in my opinion, something
was up with the investigation on some level. What would
(54:16):
you say about that, Matt.
Speaker 2 (54:18):
Yeah, I mean from what we found there from Kevin Kelly,
that seems off. That seems really really off. This was
a high profile person that was you know, appeared to
be beloved in many circles, especially in the upper echelons
of at least the Republican Party, if not you know,
the without using the phrase deep state, the non elected
(54:43):
parts of the government.
Speaker 1 (54:46):
Right right, Yeah, one thing is for sure. Something about this,
if not the direct murder or a homicide or accidental death,
something about this appear orchestrated. It appears that someone had
a plan and whatever this was, it was not a
(55:07):
random break in and a random Mugging's something was at place.
Something was afoot. But what you know, Matt, I know
we're in deep water here because we're we're exchanging theories,
we're sharing possibilities, but without access to more information or
(55:29):
a deathbed confession or something. I think everybody is at
a loss to explain this. A lot of the things
we just mentioned are currently equally plausible or equally possible.
Speaker 2 (55:42):
I should say, well, we want to know what you think.
What happened to John Parsons Wheeler The third right to us.
You can find us on Facebook. You can find us
on Twitter. We're conspiracy stuff at both of those. On Instagram,
we are Conspiracy Stuff Show. You can also head on
over to our Facebook group Here's where it Gets Crazy.
(56:04):
A you like that, it's just like our segment that's
been on the show since the beginning. You can go
over there and hang out with listeners just like you
have discussions. You will be surprised at how excellent an
online discussion can be about topics like this. It's it's wonderful.
Highly recommend it.
Speaker 1 (56:23):
And update from from the Here's where it Gets Crazy front.
Apparently there's talk about writing a stuff they don't want
you to know a piece of fan fiction. Yeah, yep,
so is it romantic? I don't know. We're we're not
in charge of This is from Holly, one of your
(56:44):
fellow listeners, So we will be having it. We will
be figuring it out at the same time you do. Folks.
One nice note, it looks like this might be used
potentially to raise money for some charities in the Marshall Islands.
So oh wow, so you can be for a good cause.
(57:07):
But yeah, that's that's the That's some of the stuff
that you will see on here's where it gets crazy.
If you are not given to exploring social media, totally
get it. You can call us directly. We have a
phone line that we are doing a great job at
now keep you track of It is one eight three
(57:29):
three st d w yt K. You call, you'll hear
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You get three minutes. They belong to you. Do what
thou wilt shall be the whole of the telephone law.
But but we do have a concept for Yeah, but
we have a couple of recommendations that may be helpful
(57:50):
for you if you find yourself kind of like scrambling.
Speaker 2 (57:53):
Oh yeah, first thing, go ahead and tell us what
you want us to call you on air. Doesn't have
to be your real name. Whatever you want Malkovich is fine.
We'll just call everybody Malcavich then let us know if
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if you call in, we really want to use it
on the air. Just let us know if it's okay.
(58:16):
Then after that tell us your message. Try and keep
it as brief as you possibly can. If you end
up needing to, you know, tell a longer story or something,
we would recommend rather than leaving it on the voicemail,
go ahead and send us an email. And many of
you have been doing this already. Thank you so much
for listening and for just you know, doing this. It
(58:36):
really does help us out. We can we can get
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send us an email, it's really easy. Shoot us a message.
Speaker 5 (58:43):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (59:06):
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