Margaret Sheeler, a 20-year-old White/Caucasian woman, was living with her husband, Philip Sheeler, at 21 Bridle Path in London, Ontario, when she disappeared during the final days of 1963. London Police Service records list her date of death as December 28, 1963, rather than December 27. On the evening of Friday, December 27, Margaret and Philip were at their home when an argument developed between them. Margaret left the residence afterward, reportedly intending to go for a walk.
She was five to six months pregnant at the time.
Margaret did not return home. At approximately 11:40 p.m. on December 28, Philip went to the London Police Force and reported his wife missing. Nearly a month passed without any confirmed sign of her. Then, on January 23, 1964, two boys walking in a field near Kipps Lane, just west of Bridle Path and only a short distance from the Sheeler home, discovered Margaret's body. An early winter thaw had exposed the remains after they had apparently been concealed by snow. Her clothing had been removed and scattered around the field, and historical reporting later stated that she showed signs of having been sexually assaulted.
Investigators determined that Margaret had been murdered. The fatal injury was a fractured skull caused by severe trauma to the head. The circumstances surrounding the body, including the removal and scattering of her clothing, became an important part of the homicide investigation. Police established that she had left her home following the disagreement with her husband, but the publicly available London Police cold-case summary does not identify a named suspect or state that any individual was formally charged in connection with the killing. Philip was the last publicly documented person known to have been with Margaret before she disappeared and was the person who subsequently reported her missing, but the current official police account does not accuse him of committing the crime.
Decades later, Margaret's murder became one of the old London-area homicides reexamined through Project Angel, a joint investigation involving London police and the Ontario Provincial Police. The project reviewed numerous unsolved killings dating from the 1950s through the early 1980s, reinterviewed witnesses and examined surviving forensic evidence in an effort to determine whether some of the murders were connected. Contemporary reporting about Project Angel specifically included Margaret's case among those under renewed investigation and described investigators as examining DNA and other physical evidence from the wider group of cold cases. Although Project Angel produced developments in some investigations, no arrest, criminal charge, trial or conviction has been publicly reported in Margaret Sheeler's homicide.
More than six decades after Margaret vanished from her home, her killing remains listed by the London Police Service among the city's unsolved murders. Police continue to treat her death as a homicide and continue to seek information that could identify the person responsible for killing the young pregnant woman and leaving her body in the field near her home.
