As the owner of a chain of sexpresso coffee stands, a regular at nude dance clubs, and a man married five times to four wives, Bill Wheeler just might have to admit he was a womanizer. When it came to the ladies, his sister Pat Thurbush says, "Bill just had no brains. These women could talk him into anything, then turn around and blackmail him. He was looking for love and never found it."
Matthew Williams
Bill Jr. is continuing his father's legacy of titillating morning jolts.
Wheeler was last seen on May 26 in Vegas.
Related Content
More About
Now no one can find him. As far as anyone seems to know, or is willing to admit, Bill the woman's man has fallen off the face of the earth—or deep into it. By sunset on Wednesday, May 26, 2010, the man who became infamous for mixing lust with his lattes no longer seemed to exist. Somewhere under a darkening Nevada sky, he suddenly went missing.
Wheeler arrived at Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport around 10 that morning, with the city already approaching 70 degrees. He lived two lives—one as proprietor of an Everett background-investigations agency and five Grab-N-Go coffee stands that were busted for prostitution in Snohomish County, and another as a distant husband to a wife in Vegas, where he ran a few businesses and owned two homes.
Wheeler's brother-in-law, Mark Tetzlaff, picked him up at the airport about 10:15 and drove to Wheeler's wife's home in Spring Valley, west of the Vegas Strip. En route, as Tetzlaff remembers it, Wheeler talked on the phone to his wife, Carol Wheeler, who was off somewhere in town with their adopted son—who was also Bill's hereditary grandson.
Wheeler owned the four-bedroom, $730,000 cul-de-sac home off Pioneer Avenue where Carol, 56, lived with the adopted grandson, 8, and her own two grown sons. Attracted by Vegas' weather and sinful allure, Wheeler had established a branch of his Everett background-checking agency there a decade earlier, and operated a sexpresso stand that eventually went tits up. Of the two Vegas homes he invested in, the Pioneer Avenue residence was understood to be Carol's, who preferred the Nevada life. Bill Wheeler had married, divorced, and remarried her, then apparently discovered happiness by living 1,200 miles away from her.
Tetzlaff and Wheeler went to the garage and began working on a white Mercedes Bill stored there and was thinking of driving back to Seattle. Friends and family say it was Wheeler's intention to relocate his vehicles and other assets to Everett as part of a plan to divorce Carol—though he hadn't told Carol yet. The sedan wouldn't start, but Wheeler was able to fire up another stored vehicle, a tan 2003 Toyota Tundra. Tetzlaff eventually left for work, and Carol arrived later. She would tell police and friends that she and Bill talked amiably about money and family issues, then he left.
At his second home, a vacant four-bedroom rental a few miles away off West Tropicana Avenue, Wheeler loaded a $15,000 espresso machine onto the Tundra's bed. He had salvaged the machine from the failed Vegas stand and planned to install it at a new sexpresso outlet in Snohomish County, he told friends. Sometime that night, Wheeler, his truck, and his coffee machine supposedly left for Seattle. It's unclear which route he took, but it turned out to be a road to oblivion.
Three days later, along Quarry Road outside Victorville, California, about a mile off I-15 between Vegas and Los Angeles, Wheeler's Tundra was found sitting in the desert sun, a burned-out hulk. Its windows were blown out from heat that turned the tan truck a scorched gray. The charred espresso machine was still in the truck's bed, where a flammable substance had been used to start the fire. There was no sign of Bill Wheeler or his remains.
It took only a few days for his family to divide into two camps: Half thought Wheeler was dead, half thought he ran away. He could be pardoned for disappearing, if that is the case.
Deep in debt, Wheeler was about to lose the two Vegas homes and a third in Snohomish County for failing to keep up mortgage payments. In Snohomish County, five of his baristas were facing charges of prostitution after their arrests in late 2008. Police said they allowed customers to photograph them nude and touch their breasts from the drive-up lane.
Wheeler's love life was also in typical disarray. He supported his wife, gave money to an ex-wife in California—who was under the impression she was still married to Bill—and was courting one of his baristas, whom he sometimes referred to as "my fiancee." Some of his wives and progeny were already feuding over who owned what, and his disappearance would spark a new round of property battles and dueling last-will-and-testaments.
But is Bill Wheeler alive to sit back and enjoy all this from afar? Is he, as some believe, ensconced in a sunny villa overlooking white Caribbean beaches, piña colada in hand, living a third life as a wealthy playboy? "Puerto Rico is where he was sending all his money," claims Tetzlaff, who is running Wheeler's Snohomish County businesses, taken over by Carol within days of Bill's disappearance. "I think he's got a stash there."
