His death remained a mystery on Monday, with the police in Newark, Del., trying to determine where exactly the crime scene might have been. On Friday, a worker at the Cherry Island landfill in the Wilmington area saw Mr. Wheeler’s body being dumped from a garbage truck.

Mr. Wheeler seemed an unlikely person to meet such a gruesome end. He was a graduate of West Point, Harvard Business School and Yale Law School, and most recently worked as a special assistant to the secretary of the Air Force in the administration of President George W. Bush. Some accounts had Mr. Wheeler, 66, a resident of New Castle, Del., scheduled to be on an Amtrak train from Washington to Wilmington shortly before his death.

“Certainly it’s unusual,” said Lt. Mark Farrall, a spokesman for the Newark Police Department. “We have no information that he has any ties to the city, so it’s unusual he would have been discovered here, especially if he was on a train to Wilmington.”

The garbage truck that was carrying Mr. Wheeler’s body made multiple stops Friday, all within Newark, Lieutenant Farrall said, and the police have determined that the body came from a trash bin early in the route. The body had not been in the bin for very long, the police said. The truck’s first stop was 4:20 a.m.

Mr. Wheeler had been involved in a dispute over the construction of a home in his neighborhood, said his lawyer, Bayard Marin, but it was not clear whether that was part of the homicide investigation. Since 2008, Mr. Wheeler and his wife, Katherine Klyce, had been involved in civil litigation to stop the construction of a home near the parking lot of Battery Park in Old New Castle, which the Wheelers claimed was too big. The case remains unresolved in Delaware courts.

“This case has all the intrigue of a murder mystery,” Mr. Marin said. “There’s ongoing litigation, but I would put that pretty far down the list.”

The death stunned Mr. Wheeler’s friends. James Fallows, a writer for The Atlantic and a longtime friend of Mr. Wheeler, said they had exchanged e-mails over Christmas. Mr. Wheeler, a Vietnam veteran who left active military service in 1971, had dedicated his life to “making sure war fighters received their proper due from the rest of the country,” Mr. Fallows said.

“It was simply incomprehensible,” Mr. Fallows said of the killing. “Having been in touch with Jack so recently, and associating him with worthy policy debates, it was almost impossible to register a news story that began ‘Body was found in a landfill.’ ”

Mr. Fallows described Mr. Wheeler as “a very passionate person, someone who threw himself fully into things he cared about,” and said his most significant accomplishment was pushing through the memorial wall.

As chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund from 1979 to 1989, Mr. Wheeler relentlessly sought financing and political support for the project, which is now acclaimed but was controversial when it was proposed.

“Jack played a crucial role in keeping the whole thing going,” Mr. Fallows said. “It was a long, fraught process with many people criticizing him, but he kept at it.”