Mel Wiley, the Ohio Police Chief Who May Have Authored His Own Demise

Jim Bigam wasn’t buying it.

The Medina, Ohio, detective had been called in to investigate the disappearance of his friend and colleague, Mel Wiley. Just three years earlier, in 1982, Wiley had been named chief of police in nearby Hinckley Township. Now, in July 1985, Wiley had vanished without explanation, save for telling a friend the day before that he planned to go swimming at Edgewater Park near Lake Erie, some 20 miles away.

The problem as Bigam saw it was that Wiley wasn’t one for the outdoors, or even for swimming trunks. He favored long-sleeved shirts even in the blazing heat, the result of a skin condition that left his arms dotted with white patches. Though his car was found in the park with his street clothes folded inside, it seemed impossible he just waded into the water to potentially drown. In the heat of summer, his body would have risen to the surface like a kitchen sponge.

No, Bigam thought. This didn’t make any sense at all. There’s something else going on with Chief Wiley. A reason he wanted to get out of town. But why would a cop of all people just vanish without explanation? What could have driven a well-respected man to leave so abruptly, with cash in his bank account and most of his possessions still in his apartment?

As Bigam would soon learn, a possible answer was sitting at the bottom of Wiley’s office wastebasket—a secret so shocking the people of Hinckley Township wouldn’t learn about it for years.

The Two Mels

Bigam had gotten to know Wiley when both were working for the Medina sheriff’s office in the 1970s. When a position opened up in Hinckley Township (population 5000) in 1978, Wiley took it, first as a sergeant and later filling the chief of police role at a salary of $23,500 annually. Previously, he had been a fingerprint analyst for the FBI and a member of the U.S. Army.

Despite these roles, Wiley was not much of an authoritarian. The 5-foot, 11-inch chief had a bit of a paunch and was considered easygoing and congenial by friends, if not much of an extrovert. He was divorced and childless, so there were few opportunities to gather with families; instead, he did most of his socializing at K&K Donuts, a coffee shop in town, where he’d joke with owner Mary Kirby and customers about her inedible donuts, which he still managed to scarf down a few times a week.

If you knew Wiley well enough, you’d eventually learn he was a bit of a frustrated author. He had published a book of poetry several years earlier, and wrote a column with a nostalgic bent that appeared in the local press. He also toiled on a mystery novel with the working title Harvest of Madness; depending on who you asked, he got three or five chapters in before progress stalled. Increasingly, Wiley seemed less interested in policing and more in finding himself in a more artistically nurturing environment. He left the office early and spoke often of San Francisco, which he had visited and where he one day hoped to return, possibly when he retired when he turned 50 in three years.

“Mel Wiley always wrote,” Bigham would later say. “He was a poet as well. When we were in the sheriff’s department, he would rewrite a report constantly until it was grammatically correct.”

At work, colleagues noticed he didn’t seem as involved in his job. He spent a good portion of his day writing at his desk. When dispatcher Virginia Yates walked in, he would often bend over the typewriter, obscuring his prose from her view. Co-workers would later realize that Wiley had been removing more and more books from his office shelves, as though he were preparing for something.

Aside from these mild aberrations, Wiley gave no indications anything was seriously wrong. When he spoke to his mother, Doris, on the phone on July 24, 1985, she thought he sounded normal. So did his girlfriend, who spoke with Wiley and was informed he planned to go swimming at Edgewater Park right after he purchased some swim trunks he had seen on sale at Kmart.

That was on a Thursday. On Friday, Wiley made his usual stop at K&K, finished up his shift at work, and then left.

On Sunday, Edgewater Park rangers noticed an abandoned car: a 1980 Toyota station wagon that had once belonged to Wiley’s brother, who had passed from cancer a few years prior. When no one came for the car after a couple of days, rangers rangers phoned police. They broke into the vehicle and found Wiley’s clothes—pants, shirt, shoes, socks—along with his police badge, a wallet with $15 in cash, suntan lotion, beach towel, and driver’s license.

Because Wiley’s apartment was in Medina, Jim Bigam was assigned to the case, though what type of case it could be was open to interpretation. Nothing in Wiley’s police work hinted at any kind of physical threat. There were no signs of any lakeside struggle. Wiley’s personal items had been carefully left behind in the car. Maybe it was a drowning? Coast Guard officials searched the water but found nothing. No one could recall Wiley ever going swimming. The patches on his skin, said to be from radiation exposure during his time stationed in Nevada while in the military, meant that he kept covered up most of the time. It was as though Wiley wanted people to believe he had gone under and hoped the absence of a body would keep the theory in play.

Wiley’s apartment yielded more interesting information. Inside was enough water and food to care for his cats; a window had been left open so they could come and go. Most of Wiley’s possessions remained, save for some long-sleeved shirts. A cursory check of his bank accounts revealed no major withdrawals.

Bigam did find one substantial clue: a receipt for a dry cleaner. When he returned the ticket to claim the clothes, he found bus and taxi schedules inside a pocket. Further searching revealed a train brochure. One train station was only 100 yards from Edgewater Park.

Bigam believed this was a disappearance, not a crime. “We investigated it like a homicide, but homicide doesn’t add up,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Suicide doesn’t add up. Gangland slaying doesn’t add up. Kidnap doesn’t add up.”

But the question of why Wiley had left town was murky. Then dispatcher Virginia Yates had an idea.

Bold Type

Wiley had constantly hovered over his electric typewriter, so Yates decided to take a look at the ribbon—would retained the impression of whatever he may have drafted—to see if he had left any clues.

Yates’s hunch was right. Examining the ribbon revealed that Wiley had written to a married woman he had seemingly been carrying on an affair with. The courtship seemed to be one-sided—Wiley admonishing her for not leaving her husband, then went on to explain that little was left for him in town and that, by the time she got the letter, he would be hundreds of miles away.

“Where I’ve gone is of no critical importance and it’s very doubtful I’ll ever return,” he wrote. And in another passage: “By the time you receive this, I will, in a sense have gone away … Fortunately or unfortunately, it’s a one-way trip, so I’m told, with no possibility of ever returning.”

When Bigam spoke to the woman—whose identity was never publicly disclosed—she claimed to never have received the letter. But Bigam soon discovered that she had closed a post office box where the two exchanged correspondence just days after Wiley’s disappearance, a rather suspicious coincidence. If she had indeed never received the letter, then Bigam believed Wiley had second thoughts about revealing that he planned to leave town and scrapped it.

This was the theory distributed to a curious local media. Wiley, burdened with a doomed love affair and a tedious job, decided to reinvent himself. He might go finish his novel, or simply look for a change in scenery. As a police officer, Bigam believed, Wiley had the skills to essentially make himself scarce.

“You have to work on the assumption he took himself out of the picture,” Bigam said. “He was divorced with no children. There was no real reason to keep him here. He had the background and ability to get lost if he wanted to.”

Some of the writing Wiley left behind featured a fictitious protagonist who seemed equally lovelorn. There were “times when he could actually feel that loneliness move in upon him and begin to crush him,” he wrote.

Wiley’s mother, Doris, wasn’t so sure. “A marriage that endured for 17 years would reflect a personality not easily tumbled by adversity,” she said, referring to Wiley’s first marriage. “Mel did not leave because of a married woman. Whatever impelled him to leave has not been told to his family.”

But that still didn’t answer the question of why Wiley left so abruptly. In addition to his colleagues at work, he had a mother as well as two sisters, none of whom had heard from him in the weeks and months following his disappearance. One sibling, Myra, even went to the trouble of hiring a private detective to see if her brother could be found. He turned nothing up.

Hinckley Township was left to believe Mel Wiley had simply grown tired of his old life and sought a new one. They soon solicited a replacement police chief.

“I thought we knew Mel,” one resident told Time. “Guess we didn’t.”

But Bigam and Virginia Yates knew something that most of the townspeople didn’t. And while it was not a conclusive motive for Wiley’s vanishing act, it might explain why he was so eager to leave without saying anything.

Mel Wiley wasn’t just an author of mysteries or poetry. He also enjoyed composing explicit pornography.

A Shocking Discovery

It was Virginia Yates who first discovered Wiley’s hobby. His odd behavior in the office prompted her to begin checking his wastebasket, where she found crumpled and discarded typewriter pages. They were lurid and salacious sexual fantasies featuring Wiley and numerous real-life members of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Medina that he and his ex-wife used to attend—page after page of erotic and often shocking passages that even included incestuous and scatological scenarios. On some he had drawn lewd pictures. One paper appeared to be an order form so Wiley could obtain incest material from a publisher.

Yates didn’t breathe a word of it to Wiley. But she kept taking the pages from the trash, later estimating it amounted to roughly 200 pages written and discarded over the course of a year. She shared them with her husband, David, who was a sergeant under Wiley. He, too, didn’t say anything—but they brought the erotica to Bigam’s attention after Wiley went missing.

Bigam made note of it in police reports related to Wiley’s disappearance, but the detail wasn’t offered up to local media and remained largely under wraps until a July 1991 Plain Dealer story uncovered the contents of the wastebasket.

Though it hasn’t been proven, it’s possible Wiley realized his erotica had been discovered and opted to leave town rather than face public embarrassment. Equally possible is that Wiley was morose over his expiring love affair and saw little reason to remain in Hinckley Township. One patrolman admitted to telling Wiley he might expose his affair, which could have expedited his plans.

Still, the idea he could just leave with only minimal traces of his old life worried his friends. “The fact that his car was where it was and that he cared so much about that car,” Mary Kirby, his friend at the donut shop, said. “Would you leave your precious train collection? Would you leave your mom, who already lost a son? Would you leave her—when you cared? You have a pension fund that has, I don’t know how much in it. Would you leave that behind? Would you not have done things just a little more to secure yourself? I mean, would you just walk off and leave whatever you possessed behind?”

It would appear that he did. Wiley was declared legally dead in 1993 so his estate could be handled. Bigam never wavered from the belief his friend made his exit voluntarily and likely went to San Francisco to pursue his writing. Among the few things missing from Wiley’s apartment was his work-in-progress novel, Harvest of Madness.

The sentiment is shared by Hinckley Township’s current police chief, David Centner, who told Penn Live in 2020 that Wiley just needed to go. “I am about as reasonably sure as I can be that Mel did not perish in Lake Erie,” he said. “Mel staged his own disappearance and left the area. I believe he went to California and could very well, to this day, still be alive. We don’t know ... We all have moments in our lives, I think, where we’d like to take off and disappear, go somewhere and start over.”

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