My father-in-law came home shaking. He’d gone fishing early that cold February morning on Loftton Creek, north of Jacksonville, and when he was loading his boat, the wake pushed something out from under the dock. It was a body, wrapped in something. He tied it to a cleat so it wouldn’t float away, then called the authorities.
I was a detective assigned to the area, and when the radio call came in around lunchtime, I knew this wasn’t going to be a typical drowning. The water there is dark, stained by tannic acid from the swamps. Locals call it coffee water. You can’t see anything in it.
And when I got to the dock, I saw why my father-in-law was so shaken. The body was partially wrapped in a shower curtain. There were tattoos on the skin. And when we got closer, we saw the gunshot wound to the head.
The victim was a Black male in his early thirties. The body had been in the water for only a few days, so the fingerprints were still usable. He was identified as Paul Sheileely, a 31-year-old father from Jacksonville, only 24 miles away. Paul had eight children by several different women.
He adored them. He had their names tattooed on his body. He was flashy, always wore expensive jewelry, drove cars painted in Jacksonville Jaguars colors, and was the first to buy the newest Air Jordans when they came out. He carried cash and twin .
380 pistols. But the autopsy changed everything. The entrance wound was to the forehead, from a . 38 caliber firearm that Paul himself owned.
He couldn’t have wrapped himself in a shower curtain after shooting himself. There were no defensive injuries, no signs of a struggle. And there was no water in his lungs, which meant he was killed somewhere else and dumped in the creek. This was a homicide, and the creek was just a dump site.
Detectives looked at robbery first. Paul wasn’t wearing his jewelry or his flashy clothes, and the Air Jordans were missing. But the more we learned about him, the less that theory held. Paul was streetwise, careful, always aware of trouble.
He didn’t seem like an easy target. Then we looked at his personal life. Paul had a long-term girlfriend, Alicia Lee, a single mother of three who had lived with him for more than a decade. She was a daycare worker, quiet, responsible, went to church with her kids.
But while she was with Paul, he was also seeing other women. One of them, Aisha James, got pregnant and called the house one day. Alicia answered. Aisha told her, “I’m not sure if he told you or not, but I’m pregnant with his son.
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Alicia was devastated. She was furious. A few days later, Paul went missing. Alicia told police that on that Sunday, Paul came home, went to sleep, and when she got back from dropping her kids at church, he was gone.
The car was gone. She also said she decided to replace the mattress on the bed she shared with Paul. That seemed odd to us. We searched the house.
We found a small amount of blood in a sink, but not enough to match a gunshot wound. No shell casings. Nothing. And the case went cold for months.
Then we got a break. A man named Daniel Reic, who was in jail for attempted burglary, confessed. He said he and three others helped dump Paul’s body in Loftton Creek. He claimed Alicia Lee had asked him to kill Paul.
He said he refused. But then she called him out of the blue and told him it was done. Reic and his friends helped dispose of the body and the mattress. In exchange, Alicia paid them with Paul’s jewelry and his expensive sneakers.
We went back to the house, this time to the master bedroom. A luminol test lit up the scene. The crime had happened right there, on that bed. When we brought Alicia in for questioning, she denied everything.
But then something happened. A detective handed her something to read, and she pulled out a pair of reading glasses. That same detective remembered seeing an identical pair of glasses in the evidence collected from the bottom of Loftton Creek. She had lost that pair in the shower curtain she used to wrap Paul’s body.
She finally confessed. She waited until Paul was asleep. She made sure her children were busy in the other room. She got his gun from the closet and used a potato as a silencer, something Reic had told her about.
Then she shot him in the head while he slept. Then she got her kids ready for church, took them there, dropped them off, and spent the rest of the day arranging to get rid of the body, the mattress, and the evidence. She even came to Paul’s funeral. She stood on the porch, crying, consoling his grandmother.
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 30 years in prison. Her four accomplices got between three and five years for helping dispose of the body. Paul’s eldest son, who was only ten when his father was killed, grew up without him.
Aisha, who was pregnant with Paul’s child, gave birth to a boy, the ninth child Paul never got to meet. The man who found the body, my father-in-law, lived in fear for the rest of his life that the killers would come after him. Even now, there’s no real closure. Just anger.
And the memory of a father of nine whose life ended in a dark, swampy creek because the woman who was supposed to love him decided he had to die.
