If you’ve watched the first episode of Netflix’s “Unsolved Mysteries Vol. 2,” then you know a little about the mysterious 2010 disappearance of former presidential aide Jack Wheeler. But there’s one little detail that the episode left unexplained.
Someone picked up Wheeler from the pharmacy in New Castle, Delaware, and gave him a ride to a parking garage in Wilmington so he could retrieve his car. But who was that someone? It’s not the two men seen walking out behind him in the store’s security footage.
We know that the 66-year-old husband and father’s body was discovered in a Delaware landfill on Dec. 31, one day after his disappearance. He was last seen alive on 10th Street and Orange in Wilmington. Before that, he was spotted at the Wilmington parking garage, where he was presumably dropped off. Looking considerably more distressed on the parking garage’s security footage than he had been at the pharmacy earlier that day, he was wearing one shoe and carrying the other in his hand, claiming that his briefcase had just been stolen.
Law enforcement later found Wheeler’s car at a different parking garage than the one where he’d been dropped off. His briefcase was never found.
So why is it not revealed who drove him between the pharmacy and the parking garage? Could it provide useful information about his disappearance and potential murder, like what could have caused the change in his demeanor between point A and point B?
We asked “Unsolved Mysteries” co-creator Terry Meurer for answers.
“Jack went into the pharmacy and he asked the pharmacist, who he knew, to give him a ride to Wilmington. The pharmacist couldn’t leave the shop, so he offered to call Jack a cab. Jack said ‘No, thanks,’” Meurer told TheWrap.
Then she described a man and woman whose names aren’t mentioned in the Netflix series.
“He left the pharmacy, and there was a couple there, a man and a woman, and he asked them if they could give him a ride to Wilmington, and they did, and they dropped him off there,” Meurer said. “So we do know who that was, and they did not have anything to do with his disappearance.”
OK, so who is this mystery couple? And who were the two men who walk out of the store behind Wheeler?
“We were not able to speak to that couple,” Meurer said. “We were not able to do an interview with the Newark [Delaware] police department. So some of those details they would have because they were the law enforcement that spoke to that couple, but we don’t have any of those details.”
As for the two men seen walking out of the pharmacy behind Wheeler, Meurer doesn’t believe they were involved.
“I believe in that security footage, those people just happened to be walking out the door at the same time as Jack,” Meurer said. “Those people were not with him that we know of. They were just, I believe, customers in the pharmacy.”
There you have it. But Meurer did note her suspicion that something must have happened to Wheeler between the time he left the pharmacy and when he got to the parking garage in Wilmington that made him act differently.
Whatever happened in that unknown window of time may just hold the key to his murder.
“Unsolved Mysteries Vol. 2” is now streaming on Netflix.