The claim
In the spring of 2011 the American Free Press, a weekly with a long record of conspiracy content, ran a piece by Pat Shannan under the headline “Short Life Expectancy for BP Whistleblowers?” It listed people who had died, been jailed or vanished in the months after the Deepwater Horizon blowout of April 2010 and suggested that BP, or interests behind it, were removing anyone who knew too much about the true size of the spill. The list was reposted across conspiracy sites, grew from nine victims to “over ten”, and was folded into that winter’s theories about chemtrails and mass bird deaths. The original text of this case file was a copy of it.
The names
John P. Wheeler III was the anchor. A West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran who had chaired the fund that built the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and served in three Republican administrations, Wheeler, 66, was last seen on the evening of December 30, 2010, on security cameras in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, disoriented and declining offers of help. The next morning his body fell out of a garbage truck at the Cherry Island landfill; it had been collected from a dumpster in Newark, Delaware. The state medical examiner ruled the death a homicide by blunt-force trauma. Shannan’s article made him a chemical-weapons expert about to expose the Arkansas bird kills. Wheeler’s actual consulting work at the time was for a Pentagon office, and nothing in the record connects him to BP or to birds.
Matthew Simmons, 67, an energy investment banker and peak-oil author who had spent the summer of 2010 on television insisting the leak was far larger than BP admitted, died on August 8, 2010, at his vacation home on North Haven island, Maine. He was found in his hot tub. Early reports said heart attack; the Maine medical examiner’s office later ruled the death an accidental drowning with heart disease as a contributing factor.
Ted Stevens, 86, the former senator from Alaska, died the next day when a turbine Otter flew into a hillside near Aleknagik, Alaska, killing five people. The National Transportation Safety Board spent nine months on the crash and in May 2011 attributed it to the pilot’s temporary unresponsiveness, for reasons it could not establish; no mechanical fault was found and the weather was flyable. The pilot, who had returned to flying two years after a stroke, was among the dead.
Roger Grooters, 66, a retired university athletics administrator from Gulf Breeze, Florida, was riding across the country to raise money for spill victims when a pickup truck hit him from behind on State Road 20 outside Panama City on October 6, 2010. His wife, following in a support vehicle, was with him. Chitra Chauhan, 33, a postdoctoral researcher in tropical disease at the University of South Florida, was found dying in an extended-stay hotel in Temple Terrace on November 15, 2010; police found cyanide and a suicide note. Her laboratory worked on malaria and filariasis, not on oil or birds.
The remaining names could not be verified for this file. Thomas Manton, described as an oil-spill consultant jailed on fabricated child-pornography charges and murdered in prison, appears only in conspiracy sources; the claim that the charges were planted rests on one conference organizer’s say-so. The same is true of the Mississippi marine officer Anthony Tremonte, the “disappeared” Florida doctor Geoffrey Gardner and the BP restoration manager James Patrick Black, for whom no independent record of the events described could be found.
The evidence
What the list has in common is timing and a loose association with the Gulf. What it lacks is any mechanism. Nobody has identified a person, an order or a motive. BP’s exposure was being settled in court and in Congress, and the true flow rate of the well had been established by government scientists within weeks of the blowout, so there was nothing left to protect by killing a banker or a cyclist. The deaths with autopsies have causes. The deaths with investigations have findings. The one genuine mystery, Wheeler’s, has no BP connection beyond the fact that he died in the same year.
Where it stands
Wheeler’s murder remains open with the Newark, Delaware, police. Three years on, in 2013, the department said it had nothing new to release; a decade on, the case was featured on Netflix’s Unsolved Mysteries with no suspect named. Everything else on the list has been explained, or was never documented to begin with. The verdict is mostly false: the people are real and most of them really did die in the second half of 2010, but the pattern exists only in the telling.