The final, haunting images of Jack Wheeler come from surveillance cameras in various corners of Wilmington, Del.

He shuffles through a parking garage and a downtown office building. He can't find his car and says someone stole his briefcase. He limps from the picture, holding one shoe, and heads into the cold December night wearing a sport coat.

Hours later, his body falls from a garbage truck into a landfill. Authorities determine that the 66-year-old man had been beaten to death. More than three months later, police still don't know who killed Jack Wheeler or why, or where the murder happened.

Speculation over his death has become a morbid cottage industry. Enter "John Wheeler conspiracy theories" into Google and see what comes up.

Steve Wright owns a sandwich shop in downtown Wilmington near where Wheeler was last seen. Wright doesn't know what happened – other than the publicity was bad for business – but he succinctly sums up all the Internet chatter.

"He worked for the government and he knew too much," Wright said.

Jack Wheeler was a defense consultant, a respected Pentagon insider, a passionate advocate for Vietnam veterans and a valued member of three presidential administrations. At one point, he published an influential paper on biological warfare and was also an authority on cyber warfare, reports say.

Opinionated and driven, he was successful in almost everything he set out to do.

Peninsula residents — make that Peninsula teenagers — saw this potential early on: The Hampton High School Class of 1962 voted their classmate most likely to succeed. A son in a military family, he spent those high school years living at Fort Monroe.

The surveillance tape of the disoriented, disheveled Wheeler is all the more difficult to fathom considering the type of person Wheeler was, friends say.

Should Wheeler be lost in Wilmington? He was only minutes from his historic home in New Castle that overlooks the water, yet he went to the wrong parking garage in an attempt to retrieve his car. His wife, in her only interview (with Slate.com), said she didn't find this unusual. Wheeler had a terrible sense of direction.

But the man known for his laser-like focus appeared confused and rambling, unable to communicate exactly what was bothering him.

The last snippet of tape shows him heading toward a section of town that is considered dicey, city residents say. So besides conspiracy theories, his murder could have been the result of a tragic, but more conventional run-in with a thug.

The publicity has faded since his body was found on Dec. 31, but his friends still wonder.

"People like Jack Wheeler do not get murdered," says one longtime friend, Richard Radez. "To find his body being dumped out of a trash truck in a landfill in Delaware, you say, 'What the hell is this?'"

'A West Point thing'

John Parsons Wheeler III had great potential coming out of Hampton, where he lived at Fort Monroe with his mother, Janet, and his father, an Army colonel known as Big Jack.

He could have gone to Yale University or the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He chose the latter, and his experiences became featured in "The Long, Gray Line," the 1989 classic by Rick Atkinson.

The book, which won a Pulitzer Prize, profiles Wheeler and several other members of the West Point Class of 1966. They stood at the crossroads of history, their families rooted in World War II, their eyes on the war in Vietnam.

Radez was a year behind Wheeler, a member of the Class of '67. He recalls with a chuckle the first time they met.

"I was standing out by the barracks when this yearling came up and upbraided me," Radez says.

Wheeler noted that the buttons on Radez's uniform were not properly aligned with his belt buckle and fly cover. The proper alignment was known as being tangent.

"This is a West Point thing," Radez explained. "It is designed to force people to concentrate on very small details. You can make a little mistake and it can cost people their lives. It is a zero defect kind of society, and it ought to be."

Later, the two became fast friends.

"The problem Jack had, he had a hard time being a tough guy," Radez said. "After a while, you get to know each other and it gets to be a relaxed relationship."

The two would meet later at Harvard Business School – the next stop for a pair of West Point graduates who had the smarts. They graduated in June 1969 and Jack received orders to go to Vietnam. Radez arrived in country a few months later.

Neither man saw combat, but they got to know each other even better, putting their college degrees to use in the business side of managing a war.

"You work 10 hours a day and at night you go over to the officers' club and have a beer and listen to a horrible Filipino band play," Radez said.

They eventually went their separate ways, but Radez got a call years later when Jack began working on a memorial to Vietnam War veterans. Although both men had relatively easy tours in Vietnam, the West Pointers of 1966 had been particularly hard hit.

And Jack had lost friends over there.

"Jack brought the benefit of a very creative mind," said Radez, "and a network of contacts he knew how to leverage, and a determination to get the job done. I can say, straight from the heart and with total conviction, if it had not been for Jack Wheeler, this nation would not have had the Vietnam memorial on the Mall."

Machine gun fingers

Art Schulcz was another classmate of Wheeler's at West Point. He described his friend as a man of strong opinions, but not one to impose his views on someone.

"He had a viewpoint but he listened to people," Schulcz said. "He would try to find common ground, try to get people to agree instead of trying to get to 51 percent."

One way they kept in touch was through email and a message board for the Class of '66. Schulcz perused the board from time to time, and Jack was always known as someone who would fire back quickly on his Blackberry whenever someone sent him a message.

"There was a joke about that ability," Schulcz said. "Some of us referred to him as having machine-gun fingers."

Around 5 o'clock on Tuesday, Dec. 28, Wheeler dashed off a message to the alumni board, responding to a discussion about college sports, complaining about what he saw as the NCAA's corrupt management.

It was opinionated – typical Jack, as Schulcz would later think. There was nothing to suggest he was under stress.

Shortly after that, Jack Wheeler's Blackberry went dead.

Part Two: A confused walk through Wilmington

One of the last people to see Jack Wheeler alive was Sammy Abdelaziz, who manages parking garages in the city of Wilmington.

On Wednesday evening, Dec. 29, he received a call from a concerned employee at the New Castle County Courthouse parking garage. There appeared to a be a homeless man there, asking for help.

"She said he had one shoe on and the other one in his hand, and he had a wrinkled suit, stuff like that," he said.

Abdelaziz went looking and found Wheeler by the garage exit. He asked Wheeler if he needed help. Wheeler said he was looking for his car. By that time, he was wearing both shoes, but his suit was dusty and wrinkled, as if he had been sitting somewhere, or fallen down, or had worn it for a couple of days, Abdelaziz said.

Wheeler didn't have his parking ticket, which meant that Abdelaziz couldn't pinpoint the location of his car. Then the conversation took a different turn.

"Actually, I lost everything," Wheeler said. "I got robbed. They took my briefcase."

"He was just shaking his head," Abdelaziz said. "I was willing to give him a ride. You can drive around to the garages and see where his car was. But he was kind of shaking his head and looked disoriented. He was just lost."

Wheeler, who graduated from Hampton High School and went on to a successful career that included service to three U.S. presidents, was in the middle of a fateful odyssey that was partly captured on surveillance cameras in downtown Wilmington and partly documented by interviews with people in New Castle, where he lived.

All of it has been previously documented in media reports, most notably the News Journal of Wilmington, which has covered the case extensively.

The mystery begins on Tuesday, Dec. 28. Wheeler reportedly spent the day in Washington, D.C. — he worked for a company in McLean, Va. — then is believed to have taken a train to Wilmington, Del.

At 5:10 that afternoon, he posted a message on a forum for the West Point Class of 1966, part of a discussion about the management of college sports. Art Schulcz, a college classmate, took note of the post but saw nothing amiss in its contents.

That night, there was a disturbance across the street from Wheeler's home in New Castle. Someone tossed a smoke bomb into a house that is under construction.

At the time, Wheeler was involved in a bitter legal dispute with the owners of the unfinished house, which he said did not conform to the rich history of his neighborhood. The person who threw the smoke bomb has not been identified.

There is no indication where Wheeler spent the night, but he resurfaced at 9 a.m. the next day. He was in Wilmington – again, or maybe he never left – and took a cab from the Amtrak station to the corner of 11th and Orange streets, at the Hotel Dupont.

The cab driver, Roland Spence, told the News Journal that Wheeler talked during the ride and seemed observant. Nothing appeared amiss. Records indicate Wheeler didn't check in at the hotel, police said.

Around 6 p.m., Wheeler showed up at Happy Harry's Pharmacy near New Castle and asked the pharmacist for a ride back to Wilmington. The pharmacist, who considered the request strange, offered to call a cab. Wheeler declined the offer and left.

At the garage

Forty minutes after leaving the pharmacy, Wheeler turned up at the New Castle County Courthouse parking garage, carrying his shoe in one hand, looking disheveled and disoriented. That's when he told Abdelaziz that he'd been robbed, that someone had taken his briefcase. Police can't confirm the theft.

Again, it is not known where he spent the night, but the next day brings more twists.

In the morning, a neighbor noticed an open window in Wheeler's house in New Castle. He walked in and found smashed dishes and other wreckage. His first thought: a thief. But nothing seemed to be missing.

Later in the day, Wheeler was spotted back in the area of 10th and Orange streets in Wilmington. Surveillance video captured Wheeler walking inside the Nemours Building, a large office building in downtown Wilmington.

People approached him because he seemed confused or disoriented. He declined their help. He was wearing different clothes from the day before, having exchanged his sport coat for a blue hooded sweatshirt. He was last see at 8:42 p.m. Thursday. An exterior surveillance camera showed him walking past the Hotel Dupont and toward Wilmington's Rodney Square, a small park named for Caesar Rodney, who was Jack Wheeler's kind of guy.

On July 1-2, 1776, Caesar Rodney rode to Philadelphia through thunder and rain, despite ill health, to cast the deciding vote in the Delaware delegation for independence. He arrived with a dramatic flair, just as the vote was beginning.

Just beyond Rodney Square, the city of Wilmington takes a visible turn for the worse, with run-down homes and litter in the streets. A woman who runs a liquor store in the neighborhood, who won't give her name, says she often advises newcomers to walk the other way.

Charles Johnson is a lifelong city resident who says he knows the local streets. He stopped to chat with a reporter while pushing a shopping cart full of recyclables near the neighborhood store.

"I get scared walking down there – day or night, really," he said.

Friday morning dawned, the last day of 2010, and at 4:20 a.m. a garbage truck began making its rounds in Newark, about 15 miles from Wilmington. It stopped to empty a number of Dumpsters.

Police believe one of those Dumpsters contained Wheeler's body, because at 9:56 a.m., the garbage dumped its load at the Cherry Island Landfill in Wilmington. Wheeler's body was spotted in the trash.

Newark police are investigating the case because investigators determined the body came from there. To date, they do not have a suspect or a murder scene.

They don't know how Wheeler made it from Rodney Square to Newark, much less how he ended up in a Dumpster, only to get hauled back to Wilmington.

'I should have pushed'

After Wheeler's body was discovered, the media published his photo. Abdelaziz got a call from the employee who had phoned him Wednesday night. The man wandering around the garage had been murdered.

"It hit me real hard," Abdelaziz said. "It all came back in my mind. I was talking to him less than 48 hours ago. Maybe if I did help him – or if he was cooperative – he would have ended up somewhere better than he did."

In an interview, he went back and forth over the encounter.

"That little bit of conservation – it made me feel bad," he said. "I should have pushed more, but I did what I could."

That was the story from Wilmington. In New Castle, there is another view.

Copyright © 2011, Newport News, Va., Daily Press

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