To police, the fiery crash at Wayson's Restaurant in southern Anne Arundel County was grim and tragic, but straightforward.
On April 9, 1990, an unidentified male driver slammed a 1985 Ford Tempo at high speed into the restaurant's brick wall. He died from head injuries and the flames that engulfed the car. The body was burned beyond recognition.
Investigators soon learned that the car's owner had lent the vehicle to her brother, John David Wieck, 25, of Lochearn. They also established that Wieck had been unemployed and despondent after a breakup with his girlfriend. In his apartment they found a note, typed and signed, apologizing to his girlfriend and saying goodbye.
Dr. Mario Golle, an assistant state medical examiner, compared Wieck's dental records with X-rays taken of the corpse's jaws and declared a match. The body was positively identified as Wieck's. The death was ruled a suicide. The case was closed.
For Wieck's family, the case was not closed, however.
For them, the last 20 months have become a shadowy maze of unexplained mysteries, facts that don't add up, and questions that only yield more questions.
They have pored over charred evidence, dental records and grisly autopsy photos, and even had the body exhumed in search of answers.
Why did the autopsy report show the corpse in the car to be six inches taller and 10 pounds heavier than they remembered Wieck to be? Why did it have a size 12 foot, when John Wieck wore a 9? What about the kitchen knife found stuck in the body's stomach?
And who has been entering Wieck's girlfriend's apartment and taking articles of his clothing? Who has been dialing her answering machine and retrieving her messages with a code known only to a dead man?
There have been so many questions that John and Mei Wieck are convinced that whoever died in that car, whoever it was they buried and reburied, it was not their son.
"It tears us all up," said Wieck, 60, a retired postal worker. "Days will go by and you tend to forget. Then Gerry [Rice, their private investigator] will come to us with some report. It's constantly on our minds."
The Chesapeake Beach couple believe their son is still alive, perhaps in a government-witness protection program tied somehow to his involvement with drugs.
Police and forensic experts say the Wiecks are mistaken, victims of their own grief and hope. John David Wieck, they say, is quite dead.
Financially exhausted after spending $40,000 on their private investigation, the Wiecks have now gone public, hoping someone -- a law enforcement official, perhaps John himself -- will at least assure them quietly that he's alive.
"It would be easier," Wieck said. "We could live with not seeing him again."
*
Could John David Wieck have committed suicide?
John's young life had not been smooth, his father admitted. But he had plans. A graduate of Largo High School, he had talked about going to college, and "we had always told him that when he was ready, we would help him with his education."
But he dreamed of rock 'n' roll stardom and moved to New Jersey with his girlfriend for a year in a bid to make it as a bass player. There, he also got deeper into drugs and alcohol. The Wiecks found later that John and a friend had made frequent trips to the Bronx to buy cocaine.
Gerry Rice learned that Wieck had become a weekly cocaine user, and made at least two trips to Germany with a friend who was probably transporting drugs.
Then, last spring, John and his girlfriend moved back to Baltimore. He had left the band and he told his family he was ready to go back to school. But it was not to be.
Eleven hours before the crash, police learned, Wieck told his sister over lunch at the Friendly's restaurant in Crofton that he had just broken up with his girlfriend. He also was upset about not having a job.
Four hours before the crash he called his girlfriend's mother. He cried and told her his troubles, but the mother cut him off, telling him the couple would have to work out their problems together.
In his signed note, Wieck said, "I stand alone. I have never felt so bad in all my life. . . . I have hurt the most beautiful wonderful person I have ever known. I am so vile, I hate myself. . . . Forgive me. In the end it's my fault alone. . . . Goodbye."
Despite all this evidence, the Wiecks can't believe their son would kill himself.
"It wasn't that his future was bleak, like they [police] made it out to be," his father said.
Besides, the family doubts he would purposely destroy his sister's car. And what about the knife? Police suspect he stabbed himself (the wound was not fatal) or rigged the 8-inch knife to plunge into his abdomen when the car hit the wall.
No, said Wieck, "Not with a knife. He didn't like pain." And, perhaps the note was song lyrics, or just something he wrote.
At first, Wieck said, "we felt it was probably our son [in the car], but we just didn't think it was suicide." Maybe he picked up a hitchhiker, got stabbed in a fight or drug dispute, and somebody tried to cover it up.
But the questions multiplied and finally prompted their attorney, Martin C. Dennis of Dunkirk, to hire Gerald F. Rice to get some answers.
A captain in the Prince George's County Sheriff's Department with 34 years in law enforcement, Rice now also runs a private detective agency.
Rice's investigation quickly began to suggest that the man in the car was not John Wieck:
* The medical examiner said the charred body pulled from Wieck's car was 6 foot 1 and 172 pounds. Wieck's family says he was 5 foot 7 and 155 to 160 pounds. The body also appeared too well-developed to be John's. Hair on the body's unburned lower abdomen didn't square with the girlfriend's memory of John.
* When the family exhumed the body, a heel-to-toe measurement of a foot came to 11 inches -- a size 12. John Wieck wore a size 9.
* Ten of John's 13 keys, wallet photos and cards were not found in the wreck. Clothing and knives from the car were unfamiliar to the family.
* Three weeks after the crash, Rice said, an employment agency called the girlfriend's house asking for John. The caller said John had been in days before looking for a job.
* Three weeks after that, someone entered the girlfriend's home, using a key. Rice says it was the first of dozens of similar entries. Each time, something of John's was taken, or something of his was left behind. One night, Rice tried to catch a young man who appeared ready to enter. But Rice fell during a foot chase and the man escaped.
* Wieck's Lochearn apartment complex appeared to Rice to be rife with drug activity, and was raided several months after the car wreck. Had Wieck been an informant on that raid, or others? Rice tried and failed to get answers from Baltimore County police. He thinks police were concealing something.
Many more details of the case have troubled the Wiecks. But officials insist, as diplomatically as they can, that the family is wrong.
"It was as straightforward an ID as I've ever done," said Dr. Bernard Levy, an associate professor of pathology at the University of Maryland and the forensic dentist who verifies all dental identifications at the medical examiner's office.
"The X-rays matched," said Levy, who X-rayed the body himself. "There was no discrepancy at all; absolutely no doubt whatsoever."
The Wiecks acknowledge that the X-rays matched. But they harbor suspicions that somehow they've been tricked. They point out small discrepancies on paper charts marking the positions of fillings.
They also note that the corpse had space between the front teeth, where Wieck didn't, and the receding gums of a 40-year-old. But Levy dismissed that observation, noting that gum tissue "shrinks away" in a fire, making teeth appear longer and more widely spaced.
"Tissue looks different on a dead person than a live one, and unless you've looked at a lot of dead persons, you're not going to be familiar with what you're looking at," he said.
Levy added he was "astounded" that the Wiecks brought along a dental hygienist rather than a forensic dentist to review the records.
Dennis, the Wiecks' attorney, said no dentist he approached wanted to get involved. But he defended the hygienist, Judy Hampson, who he said once worked at the Bethesda Naval Hospital's morgue.
Asked why the corpse was so much taller than Wieck, Maryland's chief medical examiner, Dr. John Smialek, said the fire left the body fixed in crouch, making height measurements difficult.
"It ends up being an estimate," he said. "That's why we wouldn't rely on those physical features . . . as far as making a positive ID."
A person's weight can change in a fire, too. But, while Wieck's family said he weighed just 160 pounds, the weight he listed on his driver's license was 175 pounds, close to the autopsy finding of 172 pounds.
As for the foot size, Smialek said, the distance from toe bone to heel bone might well be extended if the ligaments that maintain a normal arch collapsed after death.
"I told them [the Wiecks] to bring in their own dental expert to look at these X-rays and convince themselves," Smialek said. The victim's jaws were removed in the autopsy and remain available for study.
"If the experts say [the ID] was not accurate, I'll be glad to listen," he said, but the dental records provided "clear and convincing" evidence that the body was that of Wieck.
"I understand that's difficult for the parents to accept . . . but that's the fact," Smialek said. "It's not unusual for the families to have great difficulty with a ruling of a suicide."
Dirk Rinehart, the Anne Arundel County detective who investigated Wieck's death, said that the circumstances were certainly unusual, but not unheard of.
"I have informed the family that if any evidence comes to light that tends to lead in another direction, that I would be open to hear it," he said.
"But my conclusion at this time is that Mr. Wieck committed suicide, and I have received no evidence to the contrary," he said. For now, he suspects that family members "just don't want to come to terms with fact that this person is gone."
FBI spokesman Andrew Manning said there is no chance that government agents would stage a death to help a witness disappear.
"I hate to take away the one last glimmer of hope they have, but that is totally beyond the realm of possibility," Manning said. "There is no need to go to those extremes."
Participants in witness-protection programs can and do maintain contact with anyone they choose by phone and letter, "but they have to do it through the U.S. Marshal's Service," he said.
*
Martin Dennis, the Wiecks' attorney, said their private investigation is over. The costs to go further would be "astronomical" and "the Wiecks don't have that kind of money."
"There have been so many odd things going on after his death that it raises a lot of questions," Dennis said. He is left with "no doubt" that government officials are acting together to protect a witness.
Rice, their private detective, also remains convinced that John David Wieck is alive, close enough to keep tabs on his girlfriend.
The suicide note, the accident, even the body in the car, he believes, were all arranged to get drug dealers off John's trail and give him a new start. No one believes Wieck was capable of engineering such a deception by himself.
"He's out there somewhere, and sooner or later I'm going to find him," Rice said.
Wieck's family, finally, is left haunted. Mr. and Mrs. Wieck declined to be photographed for this article because other family members fear drug dealers may try to harm them to get to John. John's girlfriend and two sisters asked for anonymity for the same reasons.
But they all keep hoping.
"Maybe John will turn himself in before someone else gets hurt," Mr. Wieck said.