Wicked and Grim: A True Crime Podcast · Ben Gibson

Jack Reeves - Serial Killer

·1 hr 5 min·4 clips

A single crime-scene photo led investigators to reject Sharon Reeves’s suicide ruling.

1. Wicked and Grim: A True Crime Podcast covers the Jack Reeves case, beginning with Emelita Reeves’s 1994 disappearance in Arlington, Texas. 2. Ben and Nicole host the episode, and Nicole says she recommended the case because she is drawn to spousal-dispute stories. 3. The episode asks how multiple deaths around one man were treated as separate incidents until detectives laid them side by side. 4. Police first encountered Jack Reeves in October 1994 after a worried friend reported that Emelita had not answered her pager or phone. 5. Jack told officers that Emelita was not home and suggested she had gone off with another lover. 6. Investigators later learned that Emelita was a 26-year-old immigrant from the Philippines who had married Jack through a mail-order bride service. 7. The narration says Jack was a 54-year-old retired U.S. Army master sergeant, which gave him credibility during the welfare check. 8. The case changed when detectives traced Jack’s earlier marriages and found that Sharon Reeves had died in 1978 and Myung-Hye Chung had drowned in 1986. 9. The 1978 death was originally ruled a suicide after Sharon was found shot in the chest with a shotgun between her legs. 10. The 1986 death at Lake Whitney was originally ruled an accidental drowning after Myung-Hye was found floating face down in the water. 11. Detective Tom Lenore reexamined the old files and saw that each woman had been preparing to leave Jack before the deaths or disappearance. 12. Jack repeatedly offered the only account of what happened, and police had relied on his version in each earlier case. 13. The most striking old clue was a single surviving photo from Sharon’s bedroom that showed the shotgun position and Sharon lying nude on the bed. 14. Bloodstain pattern experts concluded from that photo that Sharon would have been standing when she was shot. 15. An exhumation of Sharon’s remains found no evidence of close-range firing such as stippling or powder burns. 16. Dr. Jeffrey Bernard concluded that the wound trajectory was inconsistent with a suicide and suggested the gun was fired from in front of Sharon while she was upright. 17. The hosts describe the episode in a conversational true-crime style, with repeated back-and-forth commentary and short explanatory detours. 18. The pacing mixes summary narration, police procedure, and host reactions to the repeated red flags in Jack Reeves’s history. 19. Listeners interested in marriage-linked true crime and forensic reexamination will follow this case. 20. Listeners wanting a light, non-investigative episode will probably skip this one.

As heard by us

A steady missing-persons case that turns on persistence, not theatrics.

Wicked and Grim follows Emelita Reeves' disappearance as a careful missing-persons account, then gradually opens into a darker view of Jack Reeves' marriage and prior history.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a marriage case that keeps turning darker as the disappearance opens into a longer pattern of violence.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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