Capano showed no emotion. He turned to his mother and mouthed, “It will be all right.”
The execution date was set: June 28, 1999, three years and one day after Anne Marie Fahey had been murdered. Capano was to die by lethal injection.
An automatic appeal delayed his execution. He claimed that the sentence should be set aside because he’d had ineffective counsel and because the jury had not been unanimous in the sentence. This appeal was denied and a new date was set: June 7, 2005.
Capano gained a lot of weight in prison, reportedly from using steroids. He developed a stomach disorder and cardiovascular disease. In his controlling way, he continued to challenge the courts.
His execution date passed and in January 2006, the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed his conviction but remanded the case for a new sentencing hearing. The jury would have to be unanimous, the justices stated. The DA decided to leave it alone. Capano received an automatic life sentence without the possibility of parole. In 2008, he ended his appeals. He didn’t last much longer.
On September 19, 2011, at the age of 61, the disgraced attorney died in his sleep in his prison cell at the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center.
Loose Ends
THIS STORY GRABBED ME AT ONCE. I’d met a friend of the victim, a fellow cadet in the 1966 class of the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, the subject of a Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Long, Gray Line. This victim, Jack Wheeler, was one of the story’s key subjects. Shortly after, I learned about the bizarre circumstances surrounding his murder in 2010.
I should mention a spoiler: this murder is unsolved. It’s a cold case, with strange angles, just looking for productive leads. It seems solvable. As yet, we don’t know what happened, or why.
John Parsons Wheeler III, from a long line of military men, was politically well-connected. He’d enjoyed government posts under three Republican presidents and was the driving force behind getting the Vietnam War Memorial in DC funded and built. He was employed in defense technology during the holiday season in 2010 when he told his second wife, Katherine, that he had to leave their New York City townhouse and go to Washington. He’d stay in New Castle, he said, in their historic home in Battery Park. It wasn’t like him to miss the holidays, but he’d said it was important. He didn’t act differently. He seemed fine to her. It was business as usual.
Several days passed and he didn’t call. That wasn’t necessarily strange, as they both had busy lives. When Katherine called him, the call went to his voice mail. She wondered if Jack expected to be back for a wedding on New Year’s Eve. He didn’t get there, and he didn’t call to explain why. By then, he was dead.
On the morning of New Year’s Eve, Wheeler’s body was discovered in the Cherry Island Landfill in Wilmington, dumped by a trash pick-up truck out of Newark. Police contacted his daughter from his first marriage, who went to tell Katherine. They were shocked. Katherine wondered if someone with a political agenda had targeted him. (Many conspiracy theories have arisen with this same theme, considering how outspoken Wheeler was against the current president.)
The investigation turned up details of many of Wheeler’s movements during his last days alive, but there are gaps. Important ones. On December 26, he boarded an Amtrak train in Manhattan, bound for DC. On December 28, he got on a train from DC to the Wilmington depot, which was near the New Castle house. During this time period, he posted opinions on some forums and did not seem distraught or stressed about anything.
That night, firefighters were called to an unfinished house across the street from Wheeler’s. They found a smoldering smoke bomb. Police turned up information that this house was at the center of a feud between Wheeler and its owners Frank and Regina Marini. Some sources (but not most) say that Wheeler’s cell phone was picked up in this house. A neighbor says he saw an adult male with Wheeler’s build throw the bomb. He couldn’t be sure it was Wheeler.
The house blocked Wheeler’s view of the river. That was one thing. But it also didn’t fit the historic demeanor of the place. The Wheelers got more than eighty local residents to sign a petition opposing its construction. They formed a "Save Battery Park" group. Still, construction proceeded. A judge ruled that it could be placed there if the Historic Area Commission made an exception for it. This decision was still pending.
So, Wheeler had enemies, potentially several.
On the morning of December 29, he parked his car at the Amtrak station, got into a cab, and rode north for 12 blocks to 11th and Orange, where the DuPont Hotel stood. He did not check in. No one knows what he was doing or to whom he might have spoken until 6 PM that evening. By then, he was back in New Castle, where he entered a pharmacy, Happy Harry’s, and asked the pharmacist for a ride to Wilmington. The pharmacist thought this was peculiar. He said he could call a cab, but Wheeler abruptly left. He might have been home, because someone entered his house and broke dishes, opened a window, and spread scouring powder around, but took nothing of value. One neighbor heard a very loud TV going inside Wheeler’s house for quite a while.
Wheeler showed up in Wilmington later that evening. He went to the New Castle County Courthouse parking deck, three blocks from the Amtrak station. A video shows him there, walking around, looking disheveled and holding one of his shoes, which apparently was ripped. He told the attendant, who thought he seemed confused and disoriented, that he was looking for his car and for his briefcase, which had been stolen. The attendant thought that maybe he had dementia and didn’t quite know where he was. Or he was drunk. His suit looked been slept in. Wheeler repeatedly denied that he’d been drinking. Finally, he left.
Where he spent the night is unclear, but the next day, he was in downtown Wilmington. He arrived at a law firm, Connolly Bove Lodge & Hutch, and asked if he could speak with one of the partners. But he didn’t stay. He ambled over to Rodney Square, close to a dangerous area of town. He was now wearing a sweatshirt. A police officer asked if he needed assistance and he said he didn’t. The officer wasn’t so sure, but didn’t press it.
Wheeler’s next known whereabouts is the landfill, the following morning. A spotter who watched what the trucks dumped there saw the body. He called the police. They traced the trash hauler to Newark, 13 miles from Wilmington. It turned out from the truck’s records that Wheeler’s body had to have been placed in one of the large commercial dumpsters. Police believed he’d been murdered. At first.
Wheeler’s family went at once to Newark. The police confiscated their credit cards, financial records, phone records, and Wheeler’s computer. Katherine discovered items on her card that she didn’t recognize. She was startled to see charges for two plane tickets to Madrid, Spain. She hadn’t been to Spain and she hadn’t purchased those tickets. She didn’t think Jack had done it, either.
Police began to theorize that Wheeler had died from natural causes: a heart attack. But then the Delaware medical examiner found evidence of blunt force trauma. A month after Wheeler’s body was found, he ruled this to be the cause of his death.
It seems odd that it took so long to make this determination. It should have been obvious to the first responders. Wheeler was killed with a blow to the head and tossed into a commercial dumpster. They should have known this from day one. It’s peculiar that there was any confusion.
The Wheeler family offered a reward of $25,000 for information. No one responded. This gave Katherine the impression that the incident was not some random act from a thief or a thug on the seedy side of Wilmington. It seems obvious that Wheeler’s body had been moved from Wilmington by car over ten miles to place it into the dumpster. To her, this confirmed a targeted hit.
Yet Wheeler did have a lousy sense of direction, as his wife attested. When she saw him in the videos, looking confused, to her he seemed normal. But we can ask, does it appear this way to her because she’d already formed a theory about a hit man that skewed her perceptions? Possibly. Still, Wheeler’s doctor agreed with her. Wheeler had typically been oblivious about his appearance and se
emed to have an Asperger’s-like condition. He also took medication for bipolar disorder. Despite his sharp mind for military details, he could get befuddled in ordinary situations.
You can find all kinds of oddball theories about what happened to Jack Wheeler online. Some are clearly just paranoid political rants. Others try to be balanced. Still, for a man so visible for most of his life, he seemed oddly invisible on the day he died.
So, we leave the First State with this sad, mysterious case, and hope that someone who reads this might come forward with some new facts or suspects.
DON’T MISS BODIES OF EVIDENCE, NOTORIOUS USA’S FIRST BOX SET and New York Times bestselling collection about the criminals from our neck of the woods (the Pacific Northwest). Also check out Unnatural Causes, a box set that covers the crimes of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. Like all of our collections, Bodies of Evidence and Unnatural Causes, are available as an e-book on most formats, as well as in paperback and as an audio book.
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