In the autumn of 1994, in Arlington, Texas, a quiet suburb between Dallas and Fort Worth, a group of worried friends contacted police about a woman they had not seen or heard from in days. The woman was Emelita Reeves, a Filipina who had married an American named Jack Reeves in 1987 after meeting him through a mail-order bride magazine. He had brought her to Texas promising a better life. When patrol officers went to the Reeves home to check on her, Jack told them Emelita had run off with a lover.
He claimed she did this all the time and insisted everything was fine. The officers accepted his story, but Detective Evans, temporarily assigned to missing persons cases, did not. Emelita’s friends told him that she would never have left her young son voluntarily. They were certain something was wrong.
According to them, Emelita had been isolated and unhappy in her marriage, and she had been planning to divorce Jack. Just days after she vanished, her car was found abandoned in a hypermarket parking lot. The vehicle was unlocked, which was unusual because Emelita always locked it. Her son’s car seat had been removed, and the driver’s seat was pushed far back, positioned for a much larger person.
Emelita was tiny and would have needed the seat close to the steering wheel to reach the pedals. She could not have driven the car in that condition. Someone else had left it there. Detective Tommy Leonor joined the case, and the two detectives began pulling at the threads of Jack Reeves’ story.
They learned from Emelita’s close friend Monalisa that Emelita had been involved in a relationship with her, and also that she was having an affair with a man named Tony. Both were investigated. Tony had an alibi and passed a polygraph, and Monalisa was cleared as well. But Tony raised a chilling point: Emelita had been afraid of Jack and desperately unhappy with him.
When detectives brought Jack in for a formal interview, he was overly eager to talk. He revealed that he had been married before, to a woman named Sharon Reeves in the early 1970s. According to Jack, she had committed suicide with a gunshot wound. He also mentioned a second wife, Myong, whom he had met while stationed in South Korea as a US Army sergeant.
Jack said she had drowned at Lake Whitney after falling off a flotation device in about four feet of water while he was searching for crickets to use as fishing bait. Two dead wives and one missing wife. The detectives began to suspect that Jack Reeves was either the unluckiest man alive or a killer. The medical examiner, Dr.
Jeffrey Barnard, was called in to re-examine Sharon’s death. The original case had been closed by a justice of the peace who accepted the husband’s account and did not order an autopsy. The police report stated that Jack had claimed he and Sharon had intercourse, he went to shower, and when he came out she was dead. He said she had sat on the edge of the bed, placed a shotgun against her chest, and pulled the trigger with her toe.
The toe in question had a cut on it. Investigators were skeptical, and they decided to exhume Sharon’s body. On December 14, 1994, Sharon Reeves’ sealed casket was opened in Dr. Barnard’s morgue.
Her body was covered in mold but had mummified, leaving the remains examinable. Barnard studied the gunshot entrance wound, but the funeral home had washed the body, obscuring any soot or residue that would reveal the range of fire. However, what he could determine was the trajectory. The shot had entered the left side of her chest at a substantial angle.
A self-inflicted shotgun wound to the chest is usually directed straight on. This trajectory was anything but that. To prove how the gun had to have been held to produce such a wound, investigators conducted a reconstruction with a woman who had similar arm and foot measurements to Sharon’s, using a similar shotgun. The demonstration showed that Sharon could not have reached the trigger while holding the weapon in the position required to create the wound track.
The cut on her toe also pointed away from suicide. Barnard believed it was a postmortem artifact, a wound created after death to make the scene look like a self-inflicted shooting. His conclusion was clear: Sharon Reeves had been murdered. Investigators also looked into the death of Myong, Jack’s second wife.
Her sister had noticed bruises and scratches on Myong’s body at the funeral home and had requested an autopsy. Jack had her cremated immediately, making an investigation impossible. The death was ruled accidental, and without a body, it could not be reopened. But the pattern was now unmistakable.
Jack Reeves had been suspected of killing a wife in the 1970s, another in the 1980s, and now his third wife was missing. Frustrated and running out of options, the detectives put Jack under surveillance. When Jack learned that investigators were asking questions about his past wives, he angrily came to the station, claiming he had proof that Emelita was still alive. He said she was sending money to her parents in the Philippines.
A quick check of the bank records revealed that Jack himself had made the transfers. He was trying to manipulate the investigation. Jack then challenged the detectives to search his home for blood. By 1994, DNA evidence was still new and little understood, but Detective Evans decided to use it to his advantage.
He told Jack that he would search the house using DNA technology, which could detect microscopic traces left behind by a decomposing body. Jack agreed, but asked them to come another night. That night, surveillance teams watched his home. The next morning, a crew arrived to rip out parts of his carpet.
The detectives stopped playing games. They obtained a warrant and arrested Jack Reeves, charging him with the 1978 murder of Sharon Reeves. When the judge read the charge, Jack nearly collapsed, insisting he had no idea what anyone was talking about. Shortly after the arrest, investigators received word from a Texas Ranger that hunters had found a shallow grave near Lake Whitney containing a female body.
Detectives knew immediately it was Emelita. Animals had scattered the remains, but dental records confirmed her identity. One year after she was reported missing, she was declared dead. Her skeleton showed no gunshot or stab wounds.
Emelita’s small son, who was four years old at the time of her death, was interviewed by forensic psychologists. He made statements about his parents fighting, choking, and things happening in the bathroom and bathtub. Taken to the area near Lake Whitney, the boy walked confidently off the road to a spot deep in the woods and pointed out a hole in the ground before the investigators even noticed it. He could only have known that place if he had been there before.
The investigators believed he had witnessed his mother’s murder. Forensic analysis of soil and water found diatoms, microscopic algae, in the area of Emelita’s torso and lungs that did not match the water at Lake Whitney. That meant she had drowned somewhere else, and the evidence pointed toward the bathtub in Jack’s own home. Jack Reeves was convicted of the murder of Sharon Reeves and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Then he was tried for the murder of Emelita. The jury heard how a small child had been taken to the remote grave and had watched his mother buried there alone. Jack Reeves was convicted and sentenced to 99 years in prison. The sentence ensured he would never be free again.
The detectives and the medical examiner who had spent years pulling the case apart believed they had stopped a killer who had claimed at least three wives over three decades. The science had held, and the dead had been given a voice.