$30K Reward Offered For Leads To Cold-Case Murder In Paulding

DALLAS, GA — Backed by $30,000 in reward money, the Paulding County Sheriff’s Office announced Tuesday that it’s still seeking leads to solve a cold-case murder that happened 15 years ago.

On Oct. 13, 2005, Regan Wheeler, an inspector with Lockheed Martin and a volunteer prison chaplain, was found shot to death in the driveway of his Paulding County home. His house had been burglarized, and detectives at the time believe he’d caught the burglars in the act. Wheeler was 54.

Since then, according to Tuesday’s statement, the Paulding sheriff and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation “have been working this case continuously since its occurrence 15 years ago.” Recently, the FBI has chipped in as well, pledging both manpower and money to increase the reward.

Between $14,000 from Crime Stoppers Atlanta and $16,000 from the FBI, the total reward for information leading to arrest and conviction of those responsible for Wheeler’s murder now stands at $30,000.

Wheeler’s family is also pitching in with a GoFundMe page to raise more reward money.

“We just want it solved,” said Wheeler’s son, Matthew Brooks, in a 2018 interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “My mom, my sister and I just want it solved.”

Wheeler was a volunteer chaplain with the Georgia Department of Corrections who also taught Sunday-school classes, according to the Atlanta newspaper.

Brooks said in 2018 that his father would “try to lead young men to God and help them out after they had been involved in drug arrests.” And his daughter Rachael Wheeler said that her father “would give them a ride home when they got released.”

“Detectives and agents believe that someone out there has a key piece of information that they have kept to themselves for the past 15 years,” said Tuesday’s statement from the Paulding County Sheriff’s Office. “They further believe that this piece of information, no matter how small, could lead to an arrest in this case.”

Anyone with information in this case is asked to call Crime Stoppers Atlanta at 404-577-8477 (TIPS), the Paulding County Sheriff’s Office criminal investigations division at 770-443-3015, or the GBI Region 1 office at 706-624-1424.