By Brian Anderson
Valley Times

Aug. 2, 2001

OAKLAND — Nearly a week after returning from a drunken pleasure cruise through the Caribbean, Thomas Franklin Wheelock sat across from an Alameda County prosecutor in a Utah jail explaining the moments that had forever changed his life.

With a tape recorder rolling, Wheelock calmly uncovered his previous two weeks of living that embraced a bloody killing in Oakland, two brushes with suicide and a four-state exodus that ended in his Thanksgiving day arrest on a Utah interstate.

" ... I knew that he was going to die, so I shot him again in the head, I think, and then pushed (unintelligible) over and I got in the driver's seat," Wheelock said during a three-hour interview replayed for jurors in the second week of his trial.

Wheelock detailed for deputy district attorney Eric von Gelder and county inspector Steve Matsumoto a hand-crafted blueprint spelling out plans to rob the armored car he was charged with guarding. He explained to the pair his poorly written "manifesto" that made mention of an escape to Canada and his plans to live out life as a multilingual international sniper for hire.

"That's what I was going to do, I was going to become a sniper," Wheelock said, according to the prosecution's transcription passed out to jurors.

Wheelock's words spilled off the tape Wednesday, resurrecting for the five-man, seven-woman jury the shooting of 30-year-old Rodrigo Cortez of Pittsburg on Nov. 24, 1997. In his own voice, Wheelock told them of the horrific killing that he said did not truly hit him until a day later.

"When I got out of the truck the first time I was covered in blood," Wheelock said.

Wheelock, 24, is charged with making off with nearly $300,000 and killing Cortez, whose body was left behind in the armored car ditched behind a San Ramon auto parts store. He faces the death penalty if convicted of the shooting, with special circumstances of lying in wait and killing someone during a robbery.

The San Ramon man told investigators he first thought of robbing the Armored Transport van he guarded with Cortez a day before leaving on a weeklong cruise with his friend, Peter York. His application for a guard card, or state license, that he needed to work in the industry had been turned down, and Wheelock feared he was about to lose yet another job.

During breaks between heavy drinking, Wheelock penned his plan, jotting down details that included budgets for supplies as well as timelines and killing methods.

"I will kill everyone who gets in my way except Pete," Wheelock wrote in the 10-page document later discovered in York's car.