Vanishing Act

The outside world has tended to notice Hinckley Township, Ohio, only during the annual celebration of Buzzard Day on March 15, when the homely scavengers flap back to town just as swallows home in on Capistrano. But this summer the northeast Ohio community of 5,000 has a more urgent claim on public curiosity: the case of the missing police chief.

It began in late July when the tan 1980 Toyota station wagon owned by Hinckley Police Chief Mel L. Wiley, 47, turned up at Cleveland's Lakefront State Park on Lake Erie. Park rangers noticed it around 4 a.m. one Tuesday. The locked car contained Wiley's neatly stashed clothing, a towel, his wallet, police identification, a badge. Then Wiley's girlfriend Judy Easter reported that the chief told her the day before his disappearance he intended to buy a bathing suit at K mart and go swimming with an unnamed out-of-town visitor. The possibilities seemed ugly. Drowning? Foul play?

Searches of the park and adjacent waters produced not a hint of Wiley's fate. Further, he had not bought a swimsuit. That was no surprise to some. "Mel didn't like to swim," said Medina County Police Detective James Bigam, who came to know Wiley when they worked in the Medina sheriff's office in the 1970s. He suspected the answer to the disappearance lay in Wiley's ways.

Mel Wiley was not a run-of-the-beat lawman. He aspired to be a poet (writing lines like "my love is a silver shadow") and had long worked on a mystery novel called Harvest Madness. Bigam knew that the chief had been moody lately, and a bit bored with the department he joined in 1978 and had run since 1982. Still, Bigam did not suspect suicide. Wiley's normally disheveled uniforms had been left at the dry cleaner. His apartment was spotless, and his manuscript for Harvest Madness was missing.

It was the chief's literary ambition that prompted Bigam to examine the ribbon in Wiley's electric typewriter. And thereon lay a tale. Wiley had written someone a most revealing letter. "Where I've gone," he typed, "is of no critical importance and it's very doubtful that I'll ever return . . ." Just 16 days after the disappearance, Bigam issued the sort of announcement that might have been found in a whodunit by Agatha Christie (herself famous for a never explained ten-day absence in 1926). Wiley, said Bigam, had apparently "acted out the last chapter of his book . . . and rode off into the sunset."

Theories: he had vanished to devote himself more fully to writing; he was fed up with police work; he was fleeing financial pressures (he owed $2,000 to a woman friend and was behind on alimony payments to his ex-wife). Where might the hefty, 5-ft. 11-in. chief have gone? He had a soft spot for San Francisco. He had spoken of Florida. And he had long been obsessed with Burnt Cabins, Pa., a hamlet about 60 miles southwest of Harrisburg that according to Wiley had been the scene of a bizarre crime in 1965 and was the setting of his novel in progress.

Nobody knew where or when Wiley would surface, and many Hinckley folk now sense he is beyond their guesswork. Said Mary Placke, who saw him daily when he picked up Kent regulars and a newspaper at the Open Pantry Food Mart: "I thought we knew Mel. Guess we didn't." Detective Bigam feels sure of one thing: "He knew I'd be working on the case. He's got to be gloating."