The Wrong Victim

Alecia Wheeler Was the Victim the System Was Built For

On September 13, 2011, Alecia Paulette Wheeler was stabbed to death in the 1200 block of Neal Street NE in Washington, D.C. The Metropolitan Police Department recorded her death as a homicide.

Wheeler's death did not begin in that alley. She had been telling the District that she was in danger. Her estranged husband, Claude Kinney, had beaten her, threatened her with a knife and threatened to cut her throat. Wheeler did what endangered women are told to do: she sought help, entered the domestic-violence system and went to court.

She did not receive an Assistant Attorney General standing beside her when she sought long-term protection. She returned again for protection. The next day, Kinney attacked her in front of her four children and killed her.

The central question is not whether Gregory Slate wielded the knife that killed Alecia Wheeler. He did not. The question is why D.C.'s domestic-violence resources were being spent on Slate while Wheeler was trying to stay alive. Editorial thesis of this investigation

They Were Warned

The prosecutors were not operating in an information vacuum. Warnings about Slate reached D.C. officials repeatedly. In early 2011, OAG investigative leadership was told that Slate had a history involving fraud allegations, restraining orders and stalking complaints.

On August 30, 2011, a detailed complaint addressed to Attorney General Irvin Nathan challenged the Domestic Violence Section's reliance on Slate and warned that government resources were being used on a fraudulent case while genuine domestic-violence victims needed help.

The complaint circulated inside the Attorney General's office. Gail Stern routed it to prosecutors including Connell and Bechtol. The warning also reached the Metropolitan Police Department's domestic-violence coordinator.

The Man Prosecutors Chose to Believe

I describe Gregory Slate as a serial stalker because the record does not describe one isolated dispute. It describes repeated complaints from unrelated people, protective-order proceedings, police involvement and recurring allegations of unwanted contact, surveillance, intimidation and harassment.

Slate was also accumulating arrests, probation problems and allegations of evidence fabrication and fraud. His arrest, probation and litigation history belongs in the same public record as the cases in which government officials chose to rely upon him.

Gregory Slate and the Police Complaint Center

The record of Slate's relationship with the Police Complaint Center matters because he later tried to distance himself from it. The contemporaneous documents say something very different.

The Employment Record Slate Tried to Erase

The strongest evidence that Gregory Slate worked for the Police Complaint Center does not come from me. It comes from Slate's own words, Slate's own email signatures, Slate's own resignation language, recordings of Slate introducing himself, television reports made while he was doing PCC investigations, ABC's business records, travel records, expense records, mail records and the documents Slate himself produced in litigation.

The People Warning About Gregory Slate

This section documents independent people describing similar conduct and helps explain why Slate's credibility should have been examined before the government used its authority against others.

When the Target Was His Own Father

Gregory Slate's disputes were not limited to former employers, investigators, lawyers or strangers. He was also locked in repeated litigation with his father, Clinton Slate, over money and obligations Slate believed were owed to him after he reached adulthood.

My investigation led me to conclude that the court fight was accompanied by a campaign of harassment directed at his father. One of the most revealing pieces of evidence was a television recording Slate himself obtained.

A Litigation Machine

Gregory Slate did not merely appear in an unusual number of court cases. By his own reporting to Maryland bar authorities, he identified 43 personal civil cases and 33 criminal matters—76 matters before even counting the litigation that followed.

The number matters because litigation became part of the pattern itself. In my view, many of Slate's civil cases were not ordinary attempts to resolve disputes. The record includes cases that courts or opposing parties described as legally deficient, retaliatory, bad-faith, or built around extraordinary allegations. Judge Beryl Howell's findings in the ABC litigation are the clearest example, but they were not the only one.

The Public Defender Service Took Slate's Hit-and-Run Seriously

On or about May 30, 2009, while employed as a staff investigator for the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, Slate crashed a vehicle in Arlington, Virginia. PDS later told the federal court that Slate left the scene without making the report required by Virginia law.

PDS placed Slate on administrative leave and required him to present himself to Fairfax City, Fairfax County and Virginia State Police in the presence of a supervising investigator to demonstrate whether an outstanding warrant existed. PDS also required him to surrender his identification, stop using PDS databases and email accounts, and refrain from working PDS cases without authorization.

A felony hit-and-run warrant was executed on June 25, 2009. PDS reported that Slate was charged with DUI and felony hit-and-run. On January 26, 2010, Slate pleaded guilty to misdemeanor hit-and-run and misdemeanor DUI. PDS later terminated his employment.

Meanwhile, Judge Beryl Howell Was Building a Very Different Record

Slate in CourtA courtroom image used in the site's litigation coverage.

Slate in Police CustodyA 2004 image preserved in the evidence archive.

While D.C. prosecutors continued relying on Slate, the federal litigation against ABC was generating a radically different record of his credibility. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ultimately found serious bad-faith litigation conduct, including a fabricated letter and testimony the court described as likely perjurious or intentionally misleading.

One of the most striking episodes involved discovery materials delivered to ABC's lawyers. ABC attorney Nathan Siegel stated under oath that Slate personally delivered a box containing court and discovery materials with a powerful odor of excrement and documents stained by a brown substance. Judge Howell later personally observed a visibly soiled envelope with a strong odor of excrement. The court did not determine who caused the contamination.

The importance of that episode is not shock value. It is what the larger federal record said about Slate's methods at the same time another government office was treating his accusations as worthy of extraordinary attention.

ABC Bad-Faith Record

Using Jonathan Johnson’s Identity to Manufacture Evidence

ABC’s September 2011 bad-faith filing describes a much more specific episode than a suspicious IP address. On April 21, 2011, Slate first registered an account with ABC News Video Source in his own name. At 10:14 a.m., ABC employee Celina DeNicola sent him the routine welcome email. A few hours later, an inquiry arrived from “JKJ” using jonathanjohnson@umd.edu — the name and university email of Slate’s younger brother.

The message did not read like a family communication. It posed as an independent customer seeking to license “all the hidden camera footage” in the 20/20 segment for classroom, local-broadcast or national use and asked ABC how the footage would be priced. ABC’s filing says the university address and wording made the inquiry appear to come from a professor or student. DeNicola responded that ABC did not own all of the hidden-camera material in the entire segment — a statement ABC later explained was accurate because much of the program used surveillance and public-record footage from other sources.

The critical point is what happened next. Slate produced only a photograph of part of DeNicola’s response, stripped of the header, date, recipient and the email that prompted it. ABC then recovered the complete chain. Header evidence showed that the outgoing “Jonathan Johnson” message originated from an IP address assigned to the University of the District of Columbia, where Slate was attending law school. The header also showed a read receipt going to the University of Maryland.

ABC argued that Slate had manufactured apparently independent licensing evidence: register with ABC himself, use his brother’s identity/account to pose as an outside customer, obtain an ABC response, and then seek to use the response without disclosing the surrounding context. Slate simultaneously maintained that the native emails were not sent or received by him and were not in his possession or control. The federal court later ordered production of the emails.

The brother-identity evidence did not stand alone. ABC’s filing also cites a September 2007 email in which Slate wrote that he had researched hidden-camera equipment and “ordered both on my brother’s American Express.” ABC identified a $941 Spy Source purchase for a digital recorder and pen camera charged to Jonathan Johnson’s American Express and shipped for Slate’s pickup in Florida.

That history matters because Slate was asked directly about Jonathan Johnson in his January 16, 2023 deposition. He acknowledged Jonathan was his brother, denied ever using Jonathan’s identification, and said he did not recall using a credit card in Jonathan Johnson’s name. Those sworn denials can be compared directly with the earlier ABC record, the equipment-purchase records and the licensing-email evidence.

Read the Full Jonathan Johnson / ABC Evidence

Creating Evidence: The GEICO Investigation

GEICO investigator Theresa Onnen separately described Slate as manufacturing evidence in an insurance claim. The materials in this archive include recordings concerning a prefilled statement, altered evidence, fax and email transmission, and the identification of Geoffrey Johnson as a participant in presenting a statement to another driver.

The Greg Miller Assault Story Was Also Turned Into an Insurance Claim

The archive contains a November 9, 2010 claim email sent in the name of Theresa Johnson concerning private investigator Greg Miller and Citizens Investigative Service. The email copied legal@gregslate.com and sought damages arising from the same October 1, 2010 episode, listing assault, battery, trespass, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, false imprisonment, defamation, invasion of privacy, tortious interference, conspiracy and other alleged acts.

The insurer’s November 22 response identifies Claim No. AD12503, acknowledges receipt of the November 9 email, and denies coverage under the policy issued to Citizens Investigative Service. This is significant because the alleged Miller confrontation was not used only as a police or litigation narrative; a monetary insurance claim was also pursued from it.

The page should present the document itself so readers can distinguish the underlying record from my conclusions about who authored or directed the claim.

The Prosecutors Had a Choice

Sarah Connell and Janese Bechtol were not merely passive recipients of Slate's claims. They exercised government authority in a case built around those claims. The record shows that warnings about Slate continued to reach the office, including allegations of stalking, fraud, perjury, criminal conduct and later hacking.

My conclusion is that the Domestic Violence Section made a catastrophic allocation of attention: it pursued a dramatic case involving a celebrity while a woman facing an immediate lethal threat struggled without comparable government advocacy.

No internal memorandum needed to say, "Gregory Slate matters more than Alecia Wheeler." Institutions rarely confess priorities in that language. Priorities are visible in what they do.

They Had the ABC Record Before Slate Testified

The October 14, 2011 hearing did not occur in a vacuum. The prosecutors had already been receiving material challenging Slate’s credibility and describing the ABC litigation. On October 7, 2011, one week before the hearing, I sent Janese Bechtol, the Office of the Attorney General, and OAG attorney Emma Clark a YouSendIt delivery for the ABC motion for bad faith. My accompanying message told Bechtol that the pleading was being supplied because we were preparing a motion based on it and specifically asked that the materials be preserved in connection with Sarah Connell.

That matters because at the October 14 hearing Tyra Ferrell confronted Slate about his PCC employment. Slate denied that he had ever worked for the Police Complaint Center. The record therefore presents a direct question about prosecutorial knowledge: the office had been supplied the federal pleading attacking Slate’s credibility before he gave the denial in open court.

Then Came the March 2012 Filing

By January 5, 2012, Gregory Slate had been arrested and was being held in the D.C. Metropolitan Jail in connection with a stalking warrant. Yet the prosecution involving Tyra Ferrell did not simply stop.

In the litigation we have filed against the District officials, we allege that on March 20, 2012, shortly after Bechtol was told that her conduct would be publicly exposed, she threatened further action and initiated a new proceeding against Ferrell while Slate remained incarcerated. We allege that the filing was retaliatory and was not prompted by a new incident.

The later OAG email trail is important context. On March 29 Bechtol wrote Ferrell that OAG was seeking a continuance because “Mr. Slate is not available”; later that same day she told Ferrell to disregard the request because OAG would withdraw the motion to extend instead.

Those documents do not, by themselves, adjudicate retaliatory intent. They do establish a chronology that readers can evaluate: Slate was in custody, OAG was still attempting to extend proceedings connected to him, and the motion was then withdrawn when his availability became a problem.

They Are Still at the D.C. Office of the Attorney General

This is not merely a dispute about officials who left government years ago. The District of Columbia's 2026 OAG personnel roster still lists Sarah Cynthia Connell and Janese M. Bechtol in the Domestic Violence & Special Victims Section.

The 2026 roster lists Sarah Cynthia Connell as a Trial Attorney in that section and Janese M. Bechtol as a Supervisory Trial Attorney. Both are regular OAG employees in the same public-safety function implicated by the events described on this page.

In my view, that continuity is part of the accountability story. The concern is not simply that poor judgment was exercised in 2011 and 2012; it is that the same public institution retained both attorneys in work affecting domestic-violence victims and other vulnerable people. The records presented here allow readers to decide whether that history should have produced internal correction, discipline, reassignment or public explanation.

Evidence Archive

This page is designed as a living public archive. Additional court orders, protective-order filings, probation records, arrest records, government emails, photographs and document exhibits can be added as public Blob URLs are confirmed and privacy-sensitive identifiers are redacted.

• Washington Post — Alecia Wheeler Contemporary reporting documenting that Wheeler repeatedly sought protection, filed again the day before her death, and was fatally attacked while walking with her four children.
• OAG warning chronologyDated notice history involving Connell, Bechtol, Irvin Nathan, Gail Stern, Brenda Riddick and MPD personnel.
• Prince George's County / PCC letterSlate's own 2007 statement identifying himself as PCC executive director and director of investigators.
• Slate ABC deposition2011 sworn testimony in which Slate said he did not know what the Police Complaint Center was and did not recall identifying himself as working with PCC.
• PDS hit-and-run filingPublic Defender Service filing describing the Arlington crash, leave requirements, warrant, charges and guilty plea.
• Slate probation reportTo be published in redacted form with Social Security number and unnecessary personal identifiers removed.
• Kamau letter to Slate's fatherContemporaneous 2008 account of Slate's termination from PCC and the breakdown in the relationship.
• Courthouse News / McClatchy coverageIndependent legal-news reporting on Judge Howell’s dismissal, fabricated evidence findings, and excrement-soiled discovery materials.
• OAG YouSendIt receipt — October 7, 2011Documentary proof that Janese Bechtol and OAG were sent the ABC bad-faith filing before the October 14 testimony.
• March 2012 OAG chronologyRecords concerning the proceeding initiated while Slate was incarcerated and Bechtol’s later withdrawal of the extension request.
• Beryl Howell / ABC rulingFederal litigation record concerning fabrication, misleading testimony and bad-faith litigation conduct.
• Hargrove recordingAudio concerning Slate's conduct at property rented by LaDonja Hargrove.
• Mike McCormick recordingsVideo evidence concerning stalking allegations and evidence fabrication.
• GEICO investigationVideo and audio concerning alleged manufacturing and alteration of evidence.
• 911 / police recordingsPrimary-source audio preserved in the public media archive.

History Eventually Caught Up With Gregory Slate

On March 2, 2018, Maryland's highest court disbarred Gregory Allen Slate. The disciplinary case ran directly through the dishonesty exposed in the ABC litigation and his later failure to disclose the substance of those findings during the Maryland bar-admission process.