A Vow Of Silence

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She was a male-order bride, lured to the United States with the promise of a better life.

Just a few years after she was married, she disappeared.

The clue to this mystery came from an unlikely source:

a second forensic look at the suspicious death of another woman 16 years earlier.

Emelita Reeves was 26 years old.

Her husband, Jack, was a 52-year-old former Army sergeant, now working as a painter.

Together, the couple had a three-year-old son, whom we'll call Theo.

Emelita had an interesting past.

When Emelita was 18, she had been her family's passport out of poverty.

Eleven of her family members lived in a two-room hut in Cebu City in the Philippines.

She was a beauty queen in her community, and she was a lovely girl.

She wanted to go to school, but her family had convinced her that that's how they could have a better life if she married a rich American.

At her family's request, Emilita put her picture in Cherry Blossoms, a subscription service for mail-order brides.

In 1987, Jack Reeves flew to the Philippines to meet her.

There were two other American men that were there to meet her, and he pretty well bulldozed his way into the house, offered her father more money than the other men had offered, and her father chose Jack to be Emeliti's husband.

Once Emelita arrived in Texas, Jack Reeves kept his promise and started sending Emelita's family $250 a month, a small fortune compared to the $3 a month Emelita's father was earning.

On October 11, 1994, Emelita Reeves went to lunch with some friends at the Lotus Restaurant in Arlington, Texas.

During lunch, Emelita confided to her friends that she was no longer in love with her husband.

Instead, she was in love with someone else, another woman.

and was anxious to start a new life.

After lunch, Emelita went shopping, but never returned home.

Later, when her friends couldn't get in touch with her, either on her cell phone or her pager, they called police.

When questioned, Jack Reeves told police he wasn't particularly concerned about his wife's disappearance.

He said his wife may have run off with her female lover.

Jack was into all this pornography and he was into watching videos of women together, men and women in the act, sexual acts.

But he drew the line at Emelita going out with any other men.

And if he ever found out that she had close male friends that she went out with, then he became very angry.

And Reeves was convinced his wife would return.

Matter of fact, he was very nonchalant, telling the officers that she would return as she always does.

Police located Emilita's lover, Mona Lisa Pate.

Mona Lisa Pate admitted to us

that she and

Emilita were in fact engaged in a relationship.

She also admitted she was with Emelita until 8 p.m.

on the night of her disappearance, but she didn't know where Emelita went afterwards.

Two days later, Emelita's abandoned car was found in a supermarket parking lot just a few miles from her home.

Police interviewed her husband once again.

Initially, he said she had just run off, but then he decided he was going to start helping.

So he brings in to Tom Lenore's office something that he believes will help track Emelita.

Even with Emelita's scent, search dogs were unsuccessful.

In another attempt to help the investigation, Jack Reeves offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to his wife's safe return.

But police got their first break in the case when a detailed search of Emelita's abandoned vehicle gave investigators some important insight into her last ride.

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Police in Texas were starting to believe that there was foul play involved in Amelita Reeves' disappearance.

When police inspected Emelita's abandoned car, they noticed something suspicious.

When the vehicle was found,

the seat was consistent with someone much taller than Emelita, who was a very short person.

The steering wheel was not locked, as Emelita always locked it.

And the alarm was not set on the vehicle, which Emilita always did.

And suspicions mounted when police learned that none of Emelita's clothing was missing from her home.

They also learned that Emelita was not in love with her husband.

Emelita also told friends Jack once asked her to have sex with one of his sons from an earlier marriage.

Emelita refused.

Police asked Jack Reeves to come to police headquarters to retrieve Emelita's car.

Jack had apparently left town.

He had taken his young son and left for nearby Lake Whitney, where he frequently camped.

And police also learned that Jack Reeves had recently offered Emelita a substantial sum of money, $30,000, if she agreed not to leave him.

In speaking with Emelita's friends, they reflected several conversations that Emelita had had with them where she expressed

a tremendous fear that Jack would, in fact, kill her, in her words, as he had killed his other wives.

Jack Reeves had been married three other times, and his second and third wives both died under mysterious circumstances.

Jack married his first wife, Amaryllis, when she was only 15 years old.

Her mother later had the marriage annulled.

In 1961, Jack married his second wife, Sharon.

Together, the couple had two sons.

While Jack was in South Korea with the U.S.

Army, Sharon filed for divorce.

Reeves immediately flew home to try to save the marriage.

A few days later,

Sharon died from a shotgun wound to her chest.

Her death had been ruled a suicide.

After Sharon's death, Jack returned to Korea, where he met wife number three, Myung-hoi-chang.

Six years later, while vacationing at Lake Whitney, Myung was on a raft in the lake while Jack was away gathering fish bait.

And when he came back, he claims that that's when he found My Young had fallen off of the raft and had drowned.

Her sister attended the funeral and found bruises on her arms and scrapes.

She contended from the very beginning when she learned of Miyang's death that Jack had killed her.

I talked to the sister and I said, What is this about Myeong?

You know, we're all kind of wondering about it.

And she said, Well, I wondered not only because of the nails, but because of the scratches on Jack's hands.

And I thought, well, like he was scratched up by brush when he pulled her out of the water.

And she said, no, no, no, long parallel scratches on his hands.

And it made me think, you know, were those from her fingernails?

After the funeral, Jack had Myung's Myung's body cremated.

Despite her family's concerns, there was no investigation.

After learning of Jack's past, Detective Lenore was convinced Emelita Reeves had been the victim of foul play and set a trap to test his hypothesis.

He spoke once again to Jack Reeves and this time bragged about the latest advances in DNA testing.

I went into this dissertation, which was completely fictitious and made up on the spot.

About

when an individual dies,

cells on the body immediately die.

DNA falls from the body, and in fact, would fall and embed itself into his carpet to where you can shampoo it, vacuum it, do whatever you want.

You're not going to get rid of it.

The only thing you have to do is get rid of the carpet.

The next day,

as undercover police watched from across the street, Jack Reeves did just that.

He replaced the carpet in his home.

He had taken the bait.

There was absolutely no reason for him to take that particular activity at that particular time.

But police still had no forensic evidence against Jack Reeves, and they still could not find Emelita.

Arlington Police Detective Tom Lenore believed his best chance of solving the disappearance of Emelita Reeves was to investigate the sudden and unusual circumstances surrounding the deaths of Jack's other wives.

Jack's third wife, Myung Reeves, had drowned in 10 feet of water in Lake Whitney after falling off a raft.

At the time of the accident, the local game warden reported that Myung's raft was undamaged and had a full air supply.

He thought it was unlikely that an adult could fall off and not be able to retrieve it.

And the drowning occurred in 10 feet of water.

If Myung indeed slipped off her raft, investigators couldn't understand why she was unable to swim just a short distance to where she could have stood in the lake.

Unfortunately, there had been no criminal investigation and no autopsy was performed.

Young Reeves had been cremated.

Jack's second wife, Sharon Reeves, was found dead in her bedroom from what was believed to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to her chest.

Since it was presumed to be suicide, there had been no autopsy performed.

And only one photograph of the accident scene remained.

Arlington police sent the photograph to the internationally known blood spatter expert Tom Bevel.

At the time of the accident, Jack told police that he believed Sharon was sitting on the bed and pushed the trigger with her toe.

But an analysis of the blood spatter evidence revealed that Sharon had been standing at the time the gun went off.

Blood on Sharon's thigh was in an L-shaped pattern, indicating that Sharon was standing when blood first dripped down her thigh from the wound.

Then, after she fell backwards, the blood changed direction.

Had Deshin Reeves been sitting, the blood spatter as well as the blood flows would have looked entirely different.

In fact, it would have been a reverse.

And with Sharon in a standing position, she would have been physically unable to discharge the gun.

I would say that it's not absolutely impossible,

but highly improbable that that would be the case.

Detective Lenore now had probable cause to exhume the body of Sharon Reeves

16 years after her death.

The autopsy was conducted by Dallas County medical Examiner Dr.

Jeffrey Barnard.

She had a shotgun wound of the chest, and the entrance wound was in the front of the chest, and had a very sharp right-to-left trajectory.

So the shotgun entrance was really in the front, but very sharply went to the left lateral chest.

And the angle of the shot was slightly downward.

With that very acute trajectory, with her being in an upright position, how she would have to hold the weapon would prevent her from the ability to reach the trigger and to discharge it herself, which makes it not possible for her to have done.

With a trajectory that was a very sharp trajectory,

ending up with her shot dead on the bed and then the shotgun standing perfectly vertical between her legs just made that a very unlikely scenario.

I had no doubt whatsoever that this was not the case of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Sharon Reeves' death was officially ruled undetermined, suggestive of a homicide.

Jack Reeves was in the house when the shooting occurred.

There was nobody else in the house at the time, so that made it by process of elimination if Sharon didn't pull the trigger, Jack had to it.

According to Patricia Springer's book, Male Order Murder, After Emelita's disappearance, Jack Reeves was desperate for female companionship.

So desperate, he called Emelita's 21-year-old sister, asking her to come live with him.

When that failed, Jack renewed his subscription to Cherry Blossoms magazine, and through the personal ads found wife number five, Emalia,

who was also in the Philippines.

But before the two could meet, Jack Reeves was arrested.

We picked him up, put him in the car, handcuffed, and all.

Jack looks at Ranger Cummings and said, You know, what's the deal?

What's going on here?

And Fred said, You're under arrest for murdering your wife.

And Jack said, Which one?

And we all just kind of looked at each other and said, Well, that's probably a fair question.

Five months after the disappearance of Emelita Reeves, her husband Jack was arrested for murder.

When he was arrested, he repeatedly told me he had not killed Emelita.

And that's when I explained to him that he was being arrested for the murder of Sharon Reeves.

Sharon was Jack's second wife, who died of a gunshot wound 16 years earlier.

In the trial of Sharon Reeves' death, the case hinged on blood spatter evidence and a shooting reenactment.

The reconstruction of the shotgun blast challenged Jack's story that Sharon was sitting on the bed and pushed the trigger with her toe.

The female police officer assisting in the recreation could not maneuver her toe into the trigger guard of the gun.

The jury was really entranced by that.

They were into it.

And they had to be because this was a case where, first of all, we had to show she couldn't have pulled the trigger.

Second of all, we had to show that there was nobody else available to pull the trigger except for Jack, and that by process of elimination, he had to have been the one that committed the murder.

Jack Reeves was found guilty of Sharon's murder and was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

On October 1st, 1995, deer hunters at Lake Whitney stumbled upon a shallow grave.

The remains were sent to the medical examiner's office in Fort Worth, Texas.

Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Mark Krause was able to identify the remains by comparing dental records to the recovered jaw.

It was Emelita Reeves.

Emelita was found without clothing, jewelry, or personal items, which was not consistent with someone who ran away.

Dr.

Krauss hoped that the bones would tell how Emalita was killed.

But there was no bone trauma, no bullet holes, no knife wounds, and unfortunately, the hyoid bone was missing.

If it's fractured, and if it's fractured in a certain way,

we can assume that a strangulation has occurred, that the person has been strangled to the point that that bone was damaged and it was likely to be fatal.

But But Dr.

Krause made an important discovery.

In the soil around Emelita's lungs were tiny single-celled organisms called diatoms.

This was an important finding.

Why?

Diatoms live in water.

By finding a relatively high density of these little microscopic creatures, skeletons,

in the area where the lungs had once resided when the body was placed in the grave.

And by finding very low

concentrations or low numbers of diatoms elsewhere, the inference could be made that she was drowned.

The manner of death was ruled a homicide.

Later, police visited Lake Whitney with the Reeves' young son, Theo,

who told police to watch out for the big hole as he pointed in the direction of his mother's grave.

He also said his mother was hurt in the bathtub by his father.

There was a likelihood, quite frankly, a probability, that he actually watched and saw his mother get buried.

Jack Reeves stood trial again, this time for Emilita's murder.

He didn't kill Emilita?

No, I did not.

He was convicted of her murder as well.

When he heard the D word, meaning divorce from any of his wives, he considered it to be death and he killed them.

Jack Reeves was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Jack Reeves probably has absolutely no redeeming quality about him.

I've interviewed several killers in my life and Jack is probably the most cold-blooded I've ever met.

Jack Reeves is definitely where he deserves to be.

And that's in prison for the remainder of his life.

The forensics made the case.

Without them, nothing would have happened in either case.

There would have been no identification, there would have been no means of death, there would have been no conviction.