The old dock still stands at Lofton Creek, the dark water lapping against the wooden posts like it did the morning my father-in-law found the body. It was a cold February morning in 2001 when he went out fishing like he always did, and when he came back to load his boat, the wake from a passing vessel pushed something out from underneath the dock. At first he couldn’t make out what it was. Then he saw it was a body, wrapped in something, wedged into the shadows.
He was pretty shook up, but he knew enough to tie the body to one of the cleats so it wouldn’t float away while he went to call the authorities. I heard it over the police radio right around lunchtime. Partly cloudy day, high humidity, typical for that time of year. A body in Loftton Creek, partially wrapped in a shower curtain.
That wasn’t a drowning. That wasn’t suicide. That was a dump job. The woods, the creeks, the rivers, them remote spots—that’s where people leave bodies when they’ve murdered somebody.
Most of the time, if you’re looking at a dump job, you’re looking at something criminal. When I got there and saw him, I knew we had our work cut out for us. He was down in the water, and even from a distance you could see tattoos up and down his body. On closer inspection, there was a gunshot wound to the head.
The water was dark, almost black, the tannic acid from the swamps staining it like tea. The locals call it coffee water. You couldn’t see six inches down. Crime scene investigators had to work blind.
Specialist divers from the FDLE were called into assess the body before moving it. The wildlife alone was a problem. I remember the fish had already been at him. The wounds, contested, contaminated by the water, the insects, the creatures feeding on the area.
It was gruesome. It was a challenge. But we had to start somewhere. Fingerprints identified him fast.
Body hadn’t been in the water long, three to five days, so the skin was still usable. His name was Paul Sheiley. Thirty-one years old. Father of eight.
His kids’ names were tattooed on his body. He lived just twenty-four miles away, in Jacksonville, in a northwest side neighborhood that was no stranger to violence. I remember the question that came first: suicide or homicide? We treat every gunshot death with that question.
But the entrance wound was on his forehead, and a . 38 caliber gun was matched back to Paul himself. He wouldn’t have been able to shoot himself in the forehead and then wrap himself in a shower curtain after. There was no fluid in his lungs, either, which told me the primary scene wasn’t the creek.
He was shot somewhere else and then dumped here. And somewhere along the way, somebody had planned this out well enough to use the tide. I believe the body was dumped off the bridge at low tide, washed under the dock, left to rot famous maybe the gators would take care of the rest. But alligators don’t scavenge.
They’re predators, not scavengers. So the body sat there, untouched by them, waiting for someone to find it. Then came the hard part: who would want Paul Sheiley dead? And why?.
Paul was a flashy man. He wore jewelry worth twenty to twenty-five thousand dollars. He carried wads of cash, at least a thousand on him in any given time. He drove cars painted in Jacksonville Jaguars colors, teal and gold, rolling loud enough for the whole neighborhood to notice.
When the newest Air Jordans dropped, he was first in line, buying pairs for himself and his kids. He loved his children more than anything. He spoiled them. He was always there for them, taking them shopping, buying them clothes, shoes, whatever they wanted.
His eldest son, Paul III, was only ten when his father’s body was found. My dad, when it came to his children, he went above and beyond. He was a hell of a guy. I carry his name.
I look like him, walk like him, talk like him, dress like him, act like him. He also had eight children by several different women. He was a ladies’ man, a free spirit, spontaneous, loved to travel, loved to be around family. He never seemed interested in settling down with any one woman.
But he adored his kids. He had their names tattooed on him. People who knew him said he talked about them all the time. At autopsy, they found no defensive injuries.
No blunt force trauma. No marks from restraints. Nothing indicating a struggle. Paul was street-wise.
He always paid attention. He knew when trouble was brewing and avoided it. So if he didn’t fight back, that meant whoever did this caught him completely by surprise. Or he trusted them completely.
So robbery started to feel wrong. Gang violence felt wrong, too. He wasn’t in a gang. He wasn’t involved in the drug trade, not that anybody could prove.
What was left?. A crime of passion. We started looking hard at his love life. Paul had several children by several different women, and we learned that at the time of his death, one of those women was pregnant with his child.
And the woman he was currently living with, a single mother of three named Alicia Lee, had been with him for more than a decade. She was a daycare worker. Quiet. Layed-back.
Took her kids to church every Sunday. She was the last person you’d suspect of something like this. But the more we looked, the more the timeline started to bother us. Paul had come home early on a Sunday morning, either from out of town or from one of his other girlfriends.
He’d gone to bed. She got her kids up, got them dressed, got them breakfast, took them to church. When she came back, Paul was gone. And the car was gone.
And she told us she decided, at that moment, that she was going to replace the mattress on their bed. Why would you replace the mattress, all of the sudden, right after your boyfriend disappears?. We got a search warrant for the house. We processed the main part.
We found a small amount of blood in one of the sinks. But not enough to match a gunshot wound. No shell casings. No other physical evidence.
The case started to go cold. For months, we had nothing. We knew somebody killed him. We had potential suspects.
But nobody was talking. Nobody would give us anything to blow this thing open. It was frustrating. It was the kind of case that eats at you, because you knew the truth was out there somewhere, but you couldn’t reach it.
The family is left with no answers. No justice. Just a body in a creek and a thousand questions that nobody would answer. Then, almost a year later, we got a breakthrough.
A man named Daniel Reic, serving time for attempted burglary, started talking. He was an acquaintance of both Alicia and Paul. He told us that Alicia Lee had asked him, weeks before she did it, if he would be willing to kill Paul. He said no.
He thought that was the end of it. Then, out of the blue, she called him and said, “I’ve done it. Remember what I told you about? ” He said he and three friends helped her dispose of the body.
They wrapped Paul in a shower curtain, put him in the creek, and she paid them by letting them divvy up his jewelry and his expensive sneakers. That was it. That was all it took to get four people to help get rid of a man’s body: his flashy things. It was mind-boggling.
It was cold. It was almost worse than the murder itself. We went back to the house on Jacksonville’s northwest side, focusing on the master bedroom. We luminolled the room and found plenty of evidence, that time, showing the crime had occurred right there.
And then we brought Alicia Lee in for questioning. She denied everything at first. But during the interview, they handed her something to read, and she pulled out a pair of reading glasses. A detective recognized them.
The same glasses, the identical pair, had been pulled out of the water at Loftton Creek, right near the shower curtain Paul’s body was wrapped in. She’d lost them in the curtain when she was disposing of his body. That was what took the wind out of her sails. That, along with everything else, finally made her confess.
She told them she waited until he was good asleep. She made sure her children were busy in the other room, eating breakfast, getting ready for church. She went into the closet, got his gun, and got a potato. She put the potato on the barrel as a silencer, like Reic had advised her to do.
Then she went into the bedroomand shot him in the head as he slept. He died instantly. He never knew what hit him. He never had a chance to defend himself, to explain himself, to do anything but die in his sleep at the hands of the woman he’d lived with for over a decade.
Then she went about her business. She took her kids to church. She dropped them off at her aunt’s house. Then she called Reic and his friends to help get rid of the body.
She replaced the mattress. She cleaned up. She even came to Paul’s funeral. She sat on the porch with his family, crying, consoling his grandmother.
His grandmother, who had been told she couldn’t have children, who had only ever had Paul, was sitting there being comforted by the woman who’d shot her son in the head. That is wild to me. That is something I will never understand. Alicia Lee was charged with first-degree murder.
In March 2006, she accepted a plea bargain, admitted to second-degree murder, and was sentenced to thirty years in prison. Her four accomplices got three to five years each for helping dispose of the body. Paul’s eldest son was ten when his father died. He grew up without him.
He told us, “I still to this day am angry, because the hurt never goes away. People speak of closure, but there’s no real closure. ” Paul had eight kids, and one more on the way when he died. Nine children total.
My son was number nine. I think he would have been a proud dad. If he was still around, he would be there at everything that happened in my son’s life. My father-in-law, the man who found the body, was afraid for the rest of his life that his name would get out and the people who murdered Paul would come after him.
It disturbed him till the day he died. The case affected everyone in different ways. Justice was done, but it didn’t bring Paul back. It didn’t give his children their father back.
It didn’t give his mother her only child back. It just left us all standing at the edge of a dark creek, looking down into water the color of coffee, wondering how a man so full of life ended up wrapped in a shower curtain at low tide, and how the woman who loved him enough to live with him for ten years became the one to end his life.
