Missing man's family says his spirit contacts them
By KYLE PEVETO
The Daily Sentinel

On a warm June afternoon, Freda Wheeler stood on the porch of her
trailer, smoked a cigarette and gazed across a field sprouting
dandelions, staring past the spot where she says her husband's ghost
likes to sit.
Michael, her husband, left the trailer distraught three years ago and
never returned. No one knows if he is dead or alive there is no evidence
either way.

Freda Wheeler holds missing photos of her husband, Michael, who
disappeared more than three years ago.
 She keeps a tape of the ghost cued in the videocassette recorder in
her bedroom. A shadowy figure on the edge of a couch resembles the shape
of a man sitting, crouched.
"Immediately when I saw this," she said, pointing to the outline on the
television screen, "I knew it was Michael."
First contact

One night in March, Freda's 4-year-old granddaughter, Destiny, noticed
the apparition. While getting ready for bed, she watched a live feed
from the surveillance camera outside their home — months earlier,
Freda and her daughter-in-law became frightened and installed the
device. Destiny began yelling for her mother that a man was sitting in
the yard.
Freda and the rest of Michael's family say he was murdered, and his
spirit cannot rest.
Michael's sister, Lavita Wheeler-Naylor, began consulting an Internet
psychic last year. She "chats" with a woman named Caroline, who
transacts under the moniker Irish Angel of Light on a Web site called
Kasamba. Caroline claims to have spoken with Michael's spirit about the
location of his body. Caroline has even faxed a map of the area where
she says he is buried, a caliche road near a creek in Nacogdoches County
the opposite direction from where his car was found.

Lavita spends her time off from work searching for the plot of ground
where her brother's body may lie. She scours multiple maps of the county
looking for roads that match the combination of left and right turns and
landmarks the psychic described.
Though skeptics can refute the psychic's communications and the ghostly
videotape, no one can doubt that after three years, Michael's
disappearance still haunts the Wheeler family.
"With Michael, he's letting me know he's still there," Freda said, her
pale blue eyes framed by red-tinted brown hair. "He knows I'm really
insecure, and he made a promise he'd never leave me ... I know it's not
going to be easy when we do find him, but at least we'll know, and maybe
it will give him some rest."
Last seen

Freda was one of the last people to see Michael late the night of
Saturday, June 7, and early on the morning of Sunday, June 8, 2003. He
drove up to their home, frantic, talking manically about two cars
following him. Lavita said Michael had been up for three days and acted
paranoid, the tail end of a meth binge. Turning out all the lights in
the trailer, he paced back and forth, peeking out windows and telling
Freda about the black truck and the blue sport utility vehicle that
tailed him through the night.
"I've seen Michael when he was really upset," Freda said. "But that
night I've never seen him like that."

About 4 a.m., they walked to the teal Mazda sedan he drove. Michael told
Freda he loved her and to protect herself and the family. Then, Freda
said, he looked out toward FM 225, which runs in front of their home in
Douglass, and said, in a cryptic fashion, "I wonder what they would do
if I ran right through the middle of them?"
The teal Mazda, Freda's car that Michael drove, was spotted a few days
later in a wooded area in San Augustine County. Nacogdoches County law
enforcement officials recovered the vandalized car Friday, June 13.

Freda reported Michael missing to the Precinct 1 constable and the
Nacogdoches County sheriff's office two days after he did not return
home. She said the officers acted unconcerned and told her that he had
probably "found himself a girlfriend."
With no apparent leads, Bill Ball — then the constable for
Precinct 1, which includes the area where Michael lived in Douglass
— enlisted the help of several local law enforcement agencies. He
said the Texas Rangers and the Nacogdoches and San Augustine County
sheriff's offices were searching for the man. Game wardens searched the
wooded area, and the now-defunct Deep East Texas Narcotics Trafficking
Task Force worked on the case.

Michael was a large man, standing 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighing
about 240 pounds. He had black hair and blue eyes, and at the time he
disappeared, he wore a moustache and a ponytail. Scars and tattoos of
skulls adorned his forearms.

Troubled past
When he went missing, he was on parole after serving time for burglary
of a habitation he had been an accomplice to a theft at his mother's
house. He also struggled with an addiction to methamphetamine that began
when he lived in Long Beach, Calif., in the early 1990s. Michael had
attended counseling, his family said, and he went to Narcotics Anonymous
and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Michael also had been treated for bipolar disorder at the Burke Center
in Nacogdoches. His addiction to meth exacerbated the paranoia
associated with his mental illness, Lavita said.
On his record, Michael may have seemed like a rough man, but his family
said he was loving, caring for his family and every stray animal he ever
saw. Dozens of stray dogs populated his yard.
"Before he ever went to prison or got messed up with drugs, he was my
son," said Anne Wheeler.

The Wheelers describe Michael as a "kid at heart" who loved to play
video games and go fishing. After a divorce from his first wife, he was
unable to see his two daughters, who live with their mother in
Corsicana. Lavita said he treated his nieces like they were his
children, approving their dates and trying to protect them. He enjoyed
practical jokes, a compulsion Freda said his ghost shares, claiming that
her keys get hidden and that doors will mysteriously not open.
Michael enjoyed drawing tattoo-style pictures, and next to Freda's bed
hangs one of his works, a cloth adorned with an arrow-punctured heart
and a scroll above it that reads: Love Forever.

In the months after Michael disappeared, his family posted fliers around
bars and clubs he might visit across East Texas, anywhere he might have
once gone.
The search
The Wheelers have turned to every one they know to try to find Michael
— attempting to gain closure with his death, they said. They call
the sheriff and constable's offices often for updates and call on the
media to publicize his disappearance. Each member of the family has a
theory about Michael's death.
Stressed by the search for answers, the family pushes local law
enforcement to solve the case.

"He was on parole. To them, he was just an ex-con," Freda said. "He
didn't have a lot of money, and he was a male. If he was a young female,
real pretty and everything, and the momma and daddy had a lot of money,
it would have been all over the TV. I feel like they just didn't care.
He wasn't a part of their family, so why should they care?"
The constable's office is still investigating the case said Precinct 1
Constable Shane Johnson, who insisted that investigators have recently
made progress in the case. He said he coule not release any details.
Johnson said he understands the family's need to learn what happened,
but with little evidence and few leads, the case remains far from
solving. Nacogdoches County Sheriff Thomas Kerss said no concrete
evidence has been found to resolve the investigation.

"A lot of cases, unfortunately, remain a mystery until you get something
concrete," Kerss said. "I can understand the frustration and the agony
the family is going through."
Freda works as a clerk at Wal-Mart and lives in the trailer in Douglass
with her daughter, Kimberly, and her granddaughter, Destiny. On the
three-year anniversary of Michael's disappearance, she took a vacation.
Trying to stay busy, to stop her mind from wandering, she canned plums
picked from a tree outside her house.

"I'm just closed up," she said, her voice softening. "I don't go out
very much. I'm just basically holding myself together. I should just get
over it and live on but how do you live on when you don't know where
he's at?"