Deaths of Three Wives Casting Suspicion on ‘Luckless’ Widower

When wife No. 2 died of a gunshot wound to the chest in 1978, her husband said it was suicide.

When wife No. 3 was found floating face down in Lake Whitney eight years later, Jack Reeves said it was an accident--she had fallen off her air mattress and drowned.

Then, a year ago, wife No. 4 disappeared. Reeves said it was perfidy--she had probably left him for a lover.

But when police began the search for Emilita Reeves--a 26-year-old mail-order bride from the Philippines--they also dusted off the case files of Reeves’ dead wives. What they found raised their suspicions.

At the time of their deaths or disappearance, each wife was planning to leave Reeves, telling friends they could no longer stand his peculiar sexual habits and physical abuse. And when police arrived to investigate each case, Reeves had a habit of appearing unconcerned or bragging about his sexual prowess with other women.

Is Jack Reeves a luckless widower? Or is he something more sinister?

“Some people say nobody’s that unlucky. I will concede it is an unusual and bizarre set of circumstances, but if you look at each one on its own, they’re not that suspicious,” says Reeves’ lawyer, Wes Ball.

*

The year is 1978. Jack Reeves stands in the doorway to the master bedroom. His 10-year-old son, Randall, leans against him, looking at his mother’s naked, bloody body on the bed, a gaping hole in her chest.

A shotgun is propped between her legs. To all appearances she is dead, but as Copperas Cove Police Officer Johnny Smith approaches the bed, it seems Sharon Reeves’ eyes are following him.

What happened next haunts him to this day.

“I reached down and checked her pulse by her wrist and she grabbed me. She reached up and took hold of my wrist with her last bit of air. It startled me,” he says.

“It was a tight grip. I had to pry her fingers from around my wrist.”

Now, 17 years later, he wonders if this was just a muscle reflex. Or was Sharon trying to tell him something--that her tumultuous marriage had culminated in her murder?

Reeves told police he had received divorce papers from Sharon while he was stationed with the Army in South Korea. Instead of signing them, he said, he came home immediately to try to salvage the marriage.

It was the second marriage for Reeves. The first, to a 15-year-old girl when he was 18, lasted only a few months and was annulled in 1960.

He married Sharon the next year. In 1967, while stationed in Verona, Italy, Reeves shot and killed an Italian he said was peeking in the couple’s bedroom window.

He was convicted of manslaughter and spent four months in prison before a petition drive from his home town of Wichita Falls, Texas--and intervention by then-President Lyndon Johnson--persuaded Italian authorities to drop the charges.

The couple ultimately moved to Copperas Cove where they reared their two sons. To friends, they seemed to be a happy couple--Jack, a handsome young sergeant, and Sharon, a sweet, churchgoing homemaker.

It was Jack who called police to report that his wife had committed suicide. He told them he had been in the kitchen when he heard the shot. His younger son was playing in the driveway. The older one wasn’t home.

As Reeves’ wife of 18 years lay dead in the bedroom, he boasted to police outside about his sexual conquests in South Korea.

A will was found on the dresser, signed by Reeves and his wife the night before Sharon died.

Reeves handed police a suicide note he said he found in the china cabinet. It said she was in love with Reeves and another man and, because she couldn’t decide between them, she wanted to “end it,” according to a police affidavit. The note was illustrated with a sketch of a sex toy.

The note never underwent a handwriting analysis and an autopsy was never done. Police ruled her death a suicide.

And the case remained closed, until Emilita disappeared and Arlington Police Detective Tom LeNoir was assigned to the Reeves case.

Looking at old photos of the crime scene, LeNoir thought the gun’s position looked staged. A blood-spatter expert, looking at the same photos, determined that Sharon had been wearing a bra and underwear when the gun was fired. But she had been found naked.

Seventeen years after she was laid to rest--just two months after Emilita disappeared--LeNoir had Sharon’s body exhumed.

An autopsy analyzing the angle of the gunshot wound determined the “high improbability” that Sharon had killed herself or had the physical ability to pull the trigger with her toe, as originally believed.

In March, while the search for Emilita continued, Reeves was charged with murdering Sharon. Randall, who had seen his mother dead as a child, accompanied his father to the arraignment.

*

Eight years later, Myong Reeves’ body lay in an open casket.

Her sister noticed something strange. Myong had bruises on her face. Drowning wouldn’t cause that, she thought.

She looked at Jack Reeves, who moments earlier had been taking pictures of Myong in her casket. This was the man who beat Myong and forced her to engage in humiliating sexual acts. Myong said so in a letter she wrote days before her death.

But something else bothered her. She knew Myong couldn’t swim, was afraid of the water and would never float on an air mattress for fun.

She confronted Reeves, demanding that an autopsy be performed. Instead, he canceled burial plans and had Myong immediately cremated.

The drowning had appeared suspicious, a park ranger who investigated the case said. Reeves, who had met Myong while stationed in South Korea, showed no emotion and was “very nonchalant” as his wife’s body was retrieved.

Nonetheless, the local justice of the peace ruled it an accident simply by observing the body as it was removed from the water.

Because Myong was cremated and an autopsy was never done, police say they have no evidence to further investigate the case.

But a disturbing pattern exists nonetheless, says Arlington Police Officer Dee Anderson: “Whenever someone gets ready to end the relationship, something drastic happens.”

*

Within a year after Myong died, Reeves went to the Philippines to pick up his next wife, selected from a mail-order bride catalog.

Emilita was just 18--vivacious, petite and pretty with long black hair and a big smile. She lived in the Philippines with her parents and siblings in a rundown hut with one mattress. Open sewers lined the streets. America would be her salvation.

Jack was not what she hoped. He was 46 years old, with thinning hair.

“When Jack went there, she cried because she didn’t know Jack was that old,” says Lynn Combs, one of her best friends. “But her family wanted her to [marry him] because of the money.”

A tall, lean man, Reeves lived on a military pension and income from a paint-contracting business. To Emilita’s family, he seemed to have a lot of money. Every month, he sent her family several hundred dollars and paid for the medical care of her ailing mother.

He owned a brick home in the Dallas suburb of Arlington, a fishing boat, a Harley Davidson motorcycle and a camper parked in the driveway. He bought Emilita a new Nissan Pathfinder, cell phone and pager and seemed to give her an endless clothing budget.

He kept to himself mostly and didn’t have many friends.

Home life was tense. When Emilita got pregnant, Reeves didn’t believe the baby was his and sent her back to the Philippines when she refused to have an abortion, says one of her friends, April Browning. He sent for her later, when he examined a picture of the child and decided this was his son.

But during the two years Emilita was gone, another woman entered the picture. Police say Reeves had a live-in Ukrainian mistress. They are searching for her now, hoping she’s alive, hoping she can shed some light on Reeves’ past.

When Emilita returned and found out about the mistress, she did not remain the dutiful wife, Browning says: “That’s when she had her revenge. She went to discos, had a boyfriend.”

Before she came home, she would shower at a girlfriend’s house so she wouldn’t smell like a smoky bar. Sometimes she would meet with her boyfriend, who worked at a local Asian restaurant. Reeves knew about the boyfriend and also says she had a lesbian lover, which her friends don’t deny.

“I want to forget my problems,” Emilita told Combs. “I’m trapped. I don’t know how to get out of this situation.”

Emilita told her friends that Reeves had beaten her and would make her perform humiliating sexual acts while photographing her.

Knowing the fate of Reeves’ last two wives, they feared for Emilita.

“We said, ‘You have to be careful, you may be the next one,’ ” Combs recalls. “She said, ‘Oh, no, he wouldn’t do that. He loves me.’ ”

In the weeks before she disappeared, Emilita told her husband she wanted a divorce. He asked her to stay until December. After that, he would give her $30,000 and set her up in an apartment, Combs said.

“We tried to encourage her that whatever happened, we were here for her,” Combs says. “She said, ‘OK, maybe I can make it a few months,’ and then she was gone.”

The day before she disappeared, Emilita told her friends that she and Reeves had argued the night before about going camping for a few days at Lake Whitney--the same place Myong drowned.

When she protested, Reeves pulled her long, black hair.

“Don’t go to Lake Whitney with Jack,” Combs told Emilita. “Don’t drink. Don’t get drunk. Just watch your husband.”

The next day, Emilita didn’t return messages left on her pager. Combs panicked, remembering Emilita’s warning.

“If I don’t return your page,” Emilita had said, “call the police because something has happened to me.”

*

There was no answer when two police officers knocked on Reeves’ door Oct. 12, 1994. When they peered into his garage window with a flashlight, they saw Reeves in the darkness behind Emilita’s Nissan Pathfinder.

When Reeves opened the front door, he squeezed through, closing the door behind him. Sweat coursed down his face, and he appeared nervous. Reeves said he was moving furniture.

Emilita wasn’t home, he said. No, the police couldn’t come inside to look for her.

The next day, the Pathfinder was found at a shopping center she frequented. The same day, Reeves went camping at Lake Whitney. When he returned a few days later, he told police he wasn’t concerned about Emilita because she often left for a couple of days at a time and had probably run off with her boyfriend or girlfriend.

Ron Barr, who is married to Emilita’s cousin, heard about her disappearance five days later and called Reeves immediately.

“The first thing that came out of that man’s mouth wasn’t, ‘Hey, Ron, my wife’s missing.’ The first thing that came out was, ‘Well, I didn’t kill her. I didn’t have anything to gain because I didn’t have any insurance on her,’ ” Barr remembers.

And then, “He wanted me to find him a new girlfriend, preferably someone in our family, and this wasn’t a week after she so-called disappeared. Let’s put it this way: It stunned me.”

Reeves ultimately distributed flyers and offered a $25,000 reward for Emilita’s return. He also filed for divorce, claiming she had abandoned him and their 3-year-old son.

Reeves refused a polygraph test and shocked detectives when he plopped a box of sex toys on their desk and said they were Emilita’s.

Months went by with no trace of Emilita. By late summer, Arlington police had just about given up hope of finding her.

Then, in October, one year after she disappeared, a hunter trudging through the woods around Lake Whitney stumbled upon a body. It had been partially unearthed from a shallow grave and ravaged by wild animals.

It was a young, petite woman with long black hair. It was Emilita.

Police don’t know exactly where or how she was murdered. There were no signs of bullet wounds or stabbing. But experts could tell she had been buried in the woods about a year, the same woods where Reeves camped after her disappearance.

“You take isolated pieces out, even take two or three pieces out, they don’t look incriminating,” says Arlington Police Sgt. Mike Simonds. “But when you look at the case in totality, it becomes clear. It leads back to Jack Reeves.”

Reeves was charged with Emilita’s murder. He posted bail and is under house arrest pending a Jan. 22 trial date in Sharon’s murder. No date has been set yet for Emilita’s case. His lawyer says Reeves will not speak with reporters.

The lawyer, Ball, says police were too quick to accuse his client and failed to investigate her lovers. Besides, he says, police had closed the cases of Sharon and Myong years ago for good reason.

No matter how bad it looks, Ball insists, Reeves is innocent.

“If you combine them, it’s the stuff of soap operas or something. But if our point of view is correct, then he’s an unlucky person in the worst sort of way.”