Casey Jordan

On CBS NEWS "The Early Show on Saturday Morning," criminologist Casey Jordan. of Western Connecticut State University, in Danbury, pointed out that authorities called Wheeler's death a homicide within 24 hours of his body being found. "That's a logical thing to assume," she told co-anchor Rebecca Jarvis, "based on the fact that his body was n a dump and had been placed in a dumpster. But, we still don't know the actual cause of death. To be honest, that's a little bit of a jump. Usually, you know the cause of death before you decide the manner of death is a homicide. That was, of course, before we had seen the (surveillance) footage (and) we understood about this disoriented state that happened in the two days before he was found.

"And I wouldn't be surprised if they end up changing that after they get the toxicology reports come back. I think the autopsy isn't complete and we need more details before we decide whether or not he was murdered.

"What's confusing to me is that, usually, you know that (someone was killed) because you have something like a gunshot wound, stabbing wounds, bludgeoning -- something that clearly could not have been self-induced. But no details like that have been released.

"And the fact of the matter is that, when we see this footage, we see perhaps he was suffering from an organic brain problem? Even his neighbors say they'd never seen him like this. Was he poisoned? Did he have a brain tumor? Did he suffer from brain cancer and nobody even knew it? Something -- there's a disconnect between him being in the dumpster and that behavior we see in the hours before he disappeared.

" … There are possibly 10 dumpsters he came from that ended up in that dump truck, so we don't even have a crime scene. It is entirely possible he crawled into the dumpster himself in his demented state.

"We may never know the truth about what happened to John Wheeler."