The Bottom of the Cliff
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Hi, it's Phoebe. I wanted to let you know that on Tuesday, April 8th, I'm hosting a trivia night on Zoom along with Lauren Spohr. Our whole team is putting together questions. And of course, there'll be prizes. If you'd like to be there, join Criminal Plus. You can learn more about it at thisiscriminal.com slash plus. Here's the show.

Between 1962 and 1971, the United States government sprayed more than 19 million gallons of herbicides in Vietnam. Parts of Cambodia and Laos were also sprayed. The military wanted to strip the leaves from trees, making it hard for the Viet Cong to hide from U.S. military airplanes and to kill all the crops, eliminating sources of food.

It was called Operation Ranch Hand, and its informal motto was, Only you can prevent a forest. The most common herbicide was Agent Orange, produced for the U.S. government by several companies, including the Monsanto Corporation and Dow Chemical. Agent Orange got its name because its barrels were marked with an orange line. And it makes people very sick. By some estimates, 400,000 Vietnamese people died from exposure,

The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates that 3 million people were harmed, including hundreds of thousands of babies born with birth defects. In 1988, an Air Force researcher wrote a letter to Senator Tom Daschle, quote,

We never considered a scenario in which our own personnel would become contaminated with the herbicide. But a lot of U.S. soldiers were exposed, an estimated 2.6 million. In 1991, Congress began to offer funding and treatment to American soldiers who served in Vietnam and had certain diseases.

And they later introduced a special program to help children whose parents were deployed to Vietnam and whose exposure may have caused the child to be born with spina bifida, a condition where the backbone and spinal cord don't properly develop. Those children can get benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs. One of them was Kelly Riston. She was a VA beneficiary. She had spina bifida. She received in-home health care.

Her home health care services were not skilled services. They were basic meeting needs of the beneficiary, such as helping her shower, brushing her hair, preparing meals for her, cleaning her home, things of that nature. Tom Dominski first heard about Kelly Wriston in 2017. He's the resident agent in charge at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Inspector General in Pittsburgh.

He was brought in because something didn't seem right with the way the health care worker, Julie Wheeler, was billing the government. She was billing the VA for eight hours a day, seven days a week, which would be 56 hours of care per week.

Kelly Wriston and Julie Wheeler already knew each other. It was actually her sister. So Julie Wheeler was claiming to VA that she provided home health care services for her sister. However, some witnesses claimed that maybe she was providing 10 to 15 hours of care per week.

The beneficiary's husband acknowledged to us that through the course of a year approximately, he would estimate that Julie Wheeler only provided a total of eight hours of care over a year. She was being paid $736 a day. And it was right around $470,000 total that she had received from VA. And she was never there. Basically, no, ma'am.

So tell me a little bit more about how did she get caught? I mean, how did the red flag happen? So the red flag came from our Office of Community Care, which is run out of Denver, Colorado, through the Veterans Health Administration. Caregivers would fax that office basically statements monthly showing what hours they were there and what kind of care they provided. And those statements were used to reimburse the home health care people.

So the paperwork that was being submitted was being faxed from West Virginia to Denver. I determined that that fax number was registered to a business by the name of Lincare in Beckley, West Virginia. And I found out that Julie Wheeler was employed there. I was able to subpoena and review her employment records, which showed that she worked at Lincare Monday through Friday from 8:00 to 4:30.

At the same time, she was billing the VA for care, again, seven days a week. But importantly, she was billing and acting as if she was taking care of Kelly Monday through Friday as well from 8 to 4. Impossible. Correct.

I learned through her employer that the VA was somewhat backed up in their payments to reimburse Julie for the care that she had provided for a few months. So when Julie received her initial VA payment, it was about $130,000.

And according to the folks at Lincare, the day that it hit her bank account, based on, you know, the review of records that I conducted, she never returned to work. She never called. And she had worked there for about seven years. She just stopped showing up. So it kind of showed, you know, when she got her money, she never went back and continued the fraud scheme. When did you reach out to Julie Wheeler or was that the next step?

In July of 2018, I took several agents to try to see what kind of care was being provided. And when we went to the home where Kelly, the VA beneficiary, was living, we found that it appeared she was living in a garden shed. It had some electrical wires running to it. It had a garden hose running through the window. So we were really concerned about her. They didn't know where she was.

And the group of agents that went with me, we ended up going to Julie Wheeler's house next, where we found them all together. And we conducted simultaneous interviews by separating everyone. And myself and another agent spoke to Julie Wheeler. And what did Julie Wheeler say? So one of the things we noticed right away, she had at least $100,000, if not $150,000 in

and new vehicles in the driveway. There was a brand new Ford Mustang convertible, a Chevy Tahoe, a Jeep Wrangler, and a brand new Harley Davidson motorcycle. So when we interviewed Julie, that was one of the questions we asked her. You had a pretty modest income from Lynn Care. How can you afford all these vehicles? Initially, she stuck with her story that she did take care of her sister.

She said she made an error with the billing because she went there after work for eight hours a day and not before work and said, you know, I'm wrong. I shouldn't have written eight to four because I was at work. Eventually, she broke down a little bit and said, well, you know, it's a lot to take care of her. She requires a lot of care. I also have a home and I have a husband and two teenage children that I have to care for as well.

So she acknowledged some of the fraud initially, but it wasn't until the second time we interviewed her, which would have been the next year, I believe, in 2019 in August. She had a new job because the VA was no longer paying her. We talked to her, and she acknowledged that she was only caring for Kelly a few hours a week. And so what happened next?

We go to the United States Attorney's Office, which was in Charleston, West Virginia, for this particular case. Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Goese was assigned to review our report and our evidence and potentially prosecute Julie Wheeler. My name is Eric Goese. I'm an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of West Virginia. In February of 2020, Julie Wheeler pled guilty to federal health care fraud and

Her sentencing was scheduled for June. She was facing up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine and would be ordered to pay restitution, potentially as much as $469,000. But at least part of the structure of the plea agreement was so that the defense lawyer could argue that she should receive a lesser sentence even than the guidelines suggested.

And that was at least part of the strategy, as told to me by defense counsel. A couple of weeks before her sentencing, on May 31st, she and her husband, Rodney Wheeler, and their 17-year-old son visited the Grand View Overlook in the New River Gorge National Park in West Virginia.

This is a scenic overlook. There's a protective fence around the overlook, and it captures just a beautiful view of sort of a horseshoe bend of the new river. And it's a very steep drop-off, so it's nearly 1,000 feet from the overlook down to the river, and it's a series of ledges. It's ledges and deciduous trees. It's very beautiful in the fall in a very steep area. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back.

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Last night around 8 p.m., it was reported that a woman fell off of the main overlook in the Grandview area of the New River Gorge National River. At this time, she has not been located, but Newswatch reporter Anna Saunders was on the scene today as crews continued their search. "The call came in just before dark last night when we arrived on scene and we had a witness that said that someone went over the edge."

Just after 8 p.m. on May 31, 2020, Rodney Wheeler and his teenage son called 911 to say Julie Wheeler had fallen over the cliff.

She had stepped over the overlook, was sitting with her feet dangling or something to that effect, and had slipped off and fallen, and both individuals spoke to the 911 operator. But for Rodney Wheeler's point of view, he said, you know, help, my wife is missing. She's fallen off the Grandview overlook. Well, that triggered a massive effort because it was later in the day there was an initial effort to find her that was supplemented by a

helicopter resources provided by the Army National Guard where they use thermal imaging. But the search ultimately involved hundreds of volunteers looking. So it went into the evening and then to the very next day. And when I say hundreds of volunteers, I mean hundreds of volunteers, everyone from professional fast rope teams to the state police, fire departments,

And they turned out in force to try to locate her. I had just gotten off work when I got a phone call about an individual, reporting an individual had fallen from the Grandview Overlook. Stanley Wilson is a deputy chief ranger with the National Park Service. It was explained to us that there were three of them, a juvenile and Rodney and Julie,

We're just walking. They had parked in an area called the North Overlook, and they had walked a trail that connects the two overlooks. And according to Rodney, he had walked with his family almost to the overlook when he turned and went back to get the vehicle to move it around. The area is set up so that there's two parking lots. And so he's basically parked fairly far away from the main Grandview Overlook.

And his statement is that he went back to get the vehicle because Julie and the juvenile were thirsty and he was going to move the vehicle closer because he felt they were tired too. And so according to Rodney, he goes back to get the vehicle. He drives to the main overlook. He exits his vehicle and starts to walk out the trail to the main overlook. And that's when he's met by the juvenile coming up the trail reporting that his mother has fallen off the cliff. And then he went on to say that

the juvenile and the mother had went around a barrier to sit and almost dangle their feet from the cliff edge. And when they thought they heard Rodney coming back, they wanted to get back on the proper side of the fence. And that when Julie stood up, she noticed that she had dropped an earring and bent to pick the earring up. And when she did, she fell from the cliff. How did the search begin? So,

We put folks in the end of the woods with just headlamps and packs and just sent them walking down around the trail. We did have a rescue team with ropes respond and they were able to anchor ropes to the top and repel from the cliff down to where we would see this impact zone. And so we had a mixture of folks walking, you know, in kind of it's a very thick area so that

Just getting folks in there was a little bit troublesome because they had to work their way through this thick underbrush. And it was dark. And it was dark, yes. Well, it was getting dark, but it did get dark on these folks. And interestingly, the West Virginia State Police Aviation happened to be out. And they were there on scene fairly quickly. And they had the infrared FLIR system and spotlights installed.

And so they were able to illuminate that area and then they were able to use the FLIR to, you know, look for thermal imaging. And it was dangerous conditions. You know, we had these low flights with this helicopter. Now, you know, just kind of perched on the side. And, you know, it's certainly hate to work under helicopters at low altitude like that. But, you know, also the folks on those ropes at one point had to

to the aviation asset and to leave the area because when they came in, the rotor wash was so that it was swaying the ropes and they were starting to get tossed about. There was a phone that was discovered at the bottom of the cliff and a shoe, a single shoe. And Rodney confirmed that those two items belonged to Julie, but otherwise nothing else. And you weren't picking up any, you know,

heat sensors from the infrared on the helicopter. That's right. And then some of the folks that were doing the search itself, you know, they talked about how even the terrain right there at the cliff, at the bottom of the cliff and the area around that wasn't disturbed. So other than a shoe and a cell phone, we had really nothing else there. So we just continued the search until we exhausted that at about 1 a.m.,

They went back the next morning. So the National Park Service, joined by the Beaver Volunteer Fire Department, West Virginia State Police, the Raleigh County Sheriff's Department, Jancare Ambulance, and the Fayette County Vertical Rescue Team were all on scene for day two as teams rappelled down both sides of the overlook. Everyone on hand to search for a local woman who reportedly fell off the cliff.

The Raleigh County Sheriff's Department sent in the bloodhound team. They were able to find the woman sent at the overlook using her items, but from there it was time for another rappel. This time crews doing a grid search from top to bottom, 1,400 feet from the park's tallest peak all the way down to the river. Still nothing. This is still under investigation with limited details as the search is ongoing. Reporting in Grandview, I'm Anna Saunders, Newswatch.

I was talking with one of the rangers that was on scene and he said that they were still searching. And I asked if they searched at the bottom of the cliff, you know, just kind of off the cuff. And he said, of course we did. And, and so, you know, it was just, it was just odd. You know, it's, if you fall from this point to this point, we look there and, um, I don't know. I'll say that, um, you know, we do a lot of search and rescue and, um,

And in this particular one with, you know, such a 70 feet is, you know, it's a pretty quick fall, but there was nothing there, no disturbance or anything at the bottom of that cliff. Rodney Wheeler posted to Facebook asking the public for support. Support and privacy, you know, the post itself, you know, it struck me a lot at least that he would so quickly do that. I have it and I can read it. Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Gohs.

The Facebook post stated, quote, I have been getting a lot of private messages, so I feel it's best that I address this. The accident at Grandview yesterday involved my wife. They haven't found her yet, but I'm holding out hope that she will be found and she is okay. I am heartbroken and lost right now, but I have to have faith. Please give us time to work through this, and please keep us in your thoughts and prayers, quote.

Investigators asked Rodney and their son to come back to the Grandview Overlook to show them what had happened. So there was an actual reenactment to what did you see, what direction, to try to figure out what exactly happened because it wasn't adding up. Investigators were already getting clues that something was amiss. There was a strong effort to not be callous because...

You could find a body, but the investigator I spoke with directly, who was Stan Wilson of the National Park Service, kept repeating, something doesn't add up here. This isn't right. It's only 100 feet to the top of the overlook. It's a series of ledges. There's no impact crater. There's no broken branches. There's no blood trail there.

The body wouldn't have disintegrated. It couldn't have hit the river from this location, so there's no issue of dragging for the body. And unfortunately, it's a sidebar, but it's very important. The National Park Service's expert in recovering bodies some miles from the Grandview overlook is the New River Gorge Bridge. That is unfortunately a suicide hotspot.

And the National Park Service is often tasked with recovering bodies from people who choose to end their own life from that bridge or that location. So they develop some expertise in terms of what you would typically see. And it's hard-won expertise, but they knew that something just didn't add up. There were simply no signs of her. We'll be right back.

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By the end of the second day of searching, there is still no trace of Julie Wheeler. Here's Deputy Chief Ranger Stanley Wilson. You know, folks really started to kind of give it a second look over. And so we were working with state police on, you know, on...

what our next step should be and discovered that Julie was actually awaiting sentencing in federal court. Certainly it drew our attention and caused us to pause

Well, it was first reported to me that she was missing and there was some concern that she may have killed herself. Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Goes. And I spoke to the criminal chief briefly about that. That sometimes happens. It's pretty rare, but it's happened a couple of times in my career.

And once the agent told me that they couldn't find a body, you're thinking, well, sentencing is coming up. They're looking for the body. But the more it didn't add up, the more you were thinking this isn't just simply a missing person, that this is someone trying to go on the run, not show up for sentencing. Duck court. So I recall receiving a telephone call from the prosecutor, Eric Goese.

We were scheduled to attend the sentencing not that long after May 31st of 2020 regarding Julie Wheeler, and he had told me that it was reported that she fell into the New River Gorge National River from the Grandview Overlook. Tom Dominski from the Department of Veterans Affairs. I have been to that park many times and watched.

I could see somebody falling there if they weren't careful. There are no railings, and it is a very high point in West Virginia in the mountains. But, you know, I suspected immediately that, you know, this is something that she was potentially doing to avoid sentencing. Officers from the Federal Probation Department, along with the West Virginia State Police, decided to visit Rodney Wheeler at home.

And actually, they walked through the home and of course nothing was found there. And so then after it was over, West Virginia State Police decided to do a search warrant for all cell phones in the home. And when the trooper went into the bedroom, he opened up the closet door and he looked and in the floor he could see human legs. Julie was found hiding in her closet. Just sitting there in the closet?

So it was explained that she was laying, and so he shuts the door, and he's with another trooper, and he tells the other trooper to place handcuffs on Rodney, and when he opens the door again, Julie comes out with her hands raised and asking for forgiveness. Stanley Wilson interviewed both Julie and Rodney later that day. Julie confessed to the whole scheme that...

She just, she didn't want to go to prison. And she thought this was her way out. And I asked her, you know, why she picked Grandview. And she said it was because of this vast view that you could see. And she wondered how we could, how we could search that entire area in a lifetime. Did you ask her why she just stayed in the house? I did. And she said she didn't really have a plan. She said that she thought she would just stay for a little while and just restart.

How old was she? She was 43 at the time this happened. So that would have been an awful long life to be on the run. It was a very poorly thought out plan. If she had simply not shown up in court, a warrant would have been issued for her arrest in the United States Marshal Service, who is excellent at tracking down people who don't show up for federal court or obstruct federal proceedings.

would be looking for. There would be an active search. I suppose the plan was if she was missing and presumed dead, then people would not look for her. But yes, that is an awfully long life to live. However, I would hesitate to speculate what was going on in her mind other than the statement she gave after saying she was just desperate to not be sentenced and hatched this plan involving her family members so that she could go into hiding and resume a new life in

in Florida was one of the locations that was discussed. So did that mean that the Wheelers had put the shoe and the cell phone at the bottom of the gorge? So Rodney confessed that he and the juvenile had stood at the top of the rock, and he had handed the juvenile the two items and watched as they were thrown from the cliff. Julie Wheeler told Stanley Wilson that she had not gone to the overlook at all,

It was just her husband and teenage son. Julie told me that she had mastermind, that's her word, that she had mastermind this plan and that she didn't know what was special about May 31st, but she said she looked at her husband earlier that day and said, today's go day. And so that's what set the plan in motion. She was arrested, along with her husband, and pled guilty to conspiring to obstruct justice.

Eric Gose prosecuted the case. She still needed to be sentenced for her original conviction for health care fraud. Judge Copenhaver reminded everyone that the theft from the spina bifida aspect of this case should not be overshadowed by her ruse in faking her own death, that her conduct was egregious and atrocious in stealing money.

that was needed by a spina bifida victim by not providing that person services. But the ancillary enhancements resulted in her receiving a 42-month sentence to be followed by three years of supervised release and restitution in the amount of exactly $289,055 for the spina bifida healthcare fraud. Of course, she was also sentenced after that for the separate indictment

for obstructing justice. An additional year. So her total sentence was 54 months. Her husband was sentenced to two months in prison. To be followed by six months of home confinement, to be followed by three years of supervised release. Their 17-year-old son was a minor and not charged.

And frankly, the juvenile's story is of some note. His statement said he was pressured a lot by his mother to come up with this scheme. He initially didn't want to go along with it. And his mother kept repeating to him, well, I guess I'll just go to jail then, and ultimately kind of guilt-tripped him into it. ♪

When you hear about a case like this and see what they tried to pull off, do you just think, what were you thinking? How did you think this was going to go? I'll be as candid as I know how. I've never heard of a scheme like this. All of us in this business have had people who don't show up to court. That's pretty normal. I've never seen anyone go through some sort of elaborate hoax to fake their own death to get out of sentencing.

I've never seen anything quite like it. Julie Wheeler is out of prison. We tried to reach her for this story, but didn't hear back. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. This episode was mixed by Michael Rayfield.

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These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus. We're on Facebook and Twitter at Criminal Show and Instagram at criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.