This weekend tens of thousands of people will head to Washington DC and visit the number of monuments dedicated to those that have served. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has seen the man who co-founded its build death turn into a conspiracy theory – PB/TK
He helped build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. How did he end up dead in a landfill?
Kathy Klyce was worried. Her husband, Jack Wheeler, a prominent consultant and former Pentagon official, had been out of touch for a few days. They had argued about his decision to head to Washington on Dec. 28, 2010, while she stayed at their condo in New York, but silence from her normally voluble husband was unusual.
She was stunned when her stepdaughter arrived, on Jan. 2, 2011, to tell her police from Newark, Del., had called: Jack was dead, they said. And the details Klyce learned when she traveled to Delaware were shattering: Jack had been beaten severely and suffered a heart attack. His body had been discovered in a landfill after being dumped from a trash truck. His killing was a shocking end to a lifetime of service.
John “Jack” Parsons Wheeler III, intense, brilliant and troubled, had built a distinguished résumé in his 66 years. He graduated near the top of his class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, earned a business degree from Harvard and a law degree from Yale, served in Vietnam and co-founded the organization that built the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, known as the Wall, which draws more than 5 million visitors per year. He carried out projects for Presidents Carter and Reagan, helped guide Macy’s out of bankruptcy, built 51 schools in Vietnam, and worked as a national director of Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Deafness Research Foundation. Later in his career, he served as special assistant to the secretary of the Air Force, Mike Wynne, and as a national security consultant to the research and development firm Mitre Corp. By then portly and sporting a thin ring of gray hair, he forged an interest in cybersecurity, a remarkable professional turn for a man in his 60s.
He accomplished all this while fighting a decades-long battle with depression and bipolar disorder, which triggered bouts of frenetic activity and dramatic mood swings. He left behind a rich legacy and one of the most perplexing murder mysteries in America — a kaleidoscope of clues, potential culprits and conspiracy theories.
The case includes several intriguing tangents: an attempted arson in which Wheeler is the prime suspect; a chaotic scene discovered at Wheeler and Klyce’s second home, in New Castle, Del.; and numerous eyewitness sightings of an uncharacteristically rumpled Wheeler, wandering around the nearby city of Wilmington, Del., telling people his briefcase had been stolen. But more than six years after his death, there are still no answers. “We have been waiting to hear something,” says Klyce, “but no call ever comes.”
Continue to washingtonpost.com article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/he-helped-build-the-vietnam-veterans-memorial-but-his-2010-killing-remains-unsolved/2017/05/23/91442c74-2927-11e7-b605-33413c691853_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_wheeler-1220pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.d51eb3784f30
