Who killed Jack Wheeler, Part 2: A final, confusing 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.

Part Two: Few clues, many theories.