Local authorities were investigating how Wheeler, who most recently was a special assistant to the Air Force Secretary and was a major force behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, ended up finding such a grisly end.

Police combed a Delaware landfill for clues in the mysterious killing of former Army officer and government military consultant John P. Wheeler III, and believe his body was dumped in one of 10 dumpsters in or around the Newark area several miles from Wheelers home over the holidays.  Investigators have yet to begin to pinpoint where the crime happened.

Wheeler, 66, had a reservation on an Amtrak train from Washington to Wilmington on Dec. 28, according to the Washington Post. But what happened between then and the discovery of his body after it fell out of a trash truck at the Cherry Island Landfill remains a puzzle.

Police wouldn't say how Wheeler died and it's not even clear where his body was first dumped, although a worker reportedly saw it slide out of a garbage truck at the landfill and alerted police.

Wheeler seemed an unlikely person to meet such a horrific end. He was a graduate of West Point, Harvard Business School and Yale Law School, and most recently worked as a special assistant to the secretary of the Air Force in the administration of President George W. Bush.

The garbage truck that was carrying Wheeler’s body made multiple stops Friday, all within Newark, a local police lieutenant told reporters, adding that the police have determined that the body came from a trash bin early in the route. The body had not been in the bin for very long, the police said. The truck’s first stop was 4:20 a.m.

Wheeler had been involved in a dispute over the construction of a home in his neighborhood, said his lawyer, Bayard Marin, but it was not clear whether that was part of the homicide investigation.

Since 2008, Wheeler and his wife, Katherine Klyce, had been involved in civil litigation to stop the construction of a home near the parking lot of Battery Park in Old New Castle, which the Wheelers claimed was too big. The case remains unresolved in Delaware courts.

“This case has all the intrigue of a murder mystery,” Marin said. “There’s ongoing litigation, but I would put that pretty far down the list.”

Wheeler became a well-known figure in the Washington area after he became chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which raised $11 million to build the famed “Wall” on the National Mall. In recent years, he worked as a consultant for the nonprofit Mitre Corp. in McLean, Virginia, and became deeply concerned with the threat of cyber-attacks on US security systems.

"The more you think about it, the more implausible it becomes," Robert Meadus, a neighbor near Wheeler's New Castle, Del., home told the Associated Press. ". . . It's a Perry Mason thing for sure."

A next-door neighbor, Ron Roark, told the Wilmington paper that police were inside Wheeler's home over the weekend. Roark said that for several days around the Christmas holiday, his family heard a television constantly blaring away in Wheeler's home, even thought it was apparent no one was there. The AP said Wheeler and his wife also had a condominium in upper Manhattan but hadn't been seen there in a couple of weeks.