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Read 3:04 pm https://www.reddit.com/r/SolveIt/comments/sf3krv/it’s_been_5_years_since_jason_todd’s_death
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r/SolveIt • Posted by u/Phalangefier 3 days ago
It’s been 5 years since Jason Todd’s death
Today is the fifth anniversary of the day that Jason Todd and Sheila Haywood were murdered, so I thought I would post a write-up unifying all of the information that we have on the case. There have been a lot of posts about Jason over the years, but this case is so weird and has so many branches to it, I don’t think that anyone’s ever compiled all of them in one place.
Background
Jason Todd was born in Gotham, NJ on August 16, 2001 to Willis Todd and an unknown woman. (More on this later.) He was raised by Willis and Catherine Todd. (Catherine was almost certainly not his biological mother—again, more on that later.) In 2011, when Jason was 10, Willis went to jail for car theft. A year later, he was murdered in prison—his killer was never identified. Catherine died of a drug overdose in June of 2012.
Jason was initially placed in a group home, but ran away and lived on the streets until February of 2013, when he was taken in and then adopted by Bruce Wayne. According to an interview he gave at the time with the Gotham Journal, Wayne met Jason when he tried to spend the night at one of the shelters run by the Martha Wayne Foundation. Wayne happened to be there for an inspection, and helped get Jason transferred to a youth shelter.
For the three years that he lived with Bruce Wayne, Jason’s life was reportedly good, if hectic. He attended Gotham Heights High School and got good grades, but his attendance was spotty. He and Wayne traveled frequently, both domestically and abroad.
Jason’s friends, teachers, and family describe him as a bright, energetic kid with a generous spirit. A few months prior to his death, sources agree that he became moody and more volatile. Wayne says that he attributed this to normal teenage ups and downs, but that it may have been connected to grief over his parents.
The Days Before the Murder
On April 24, 2017, Jason skipped school. According to Wayne and the family’s butler, he claimed to be sick. Both Wayne and the butler say that Wayne left the house at 10 a.m. to spend the day golfing, and didn’t return until 6 p.m., the family’s usual dinner time. The butler spent the day cleaning and taking care of household affairs. He knocked on Jason’s bedroom door once at around 1 p.m., but got no response; according to him, it wasn’t unusual for Jason to skip lunch if he was upset or not feeling well, so he left him alone and didn’t check on him again until 5:30 p.m. When he still didn’t get an answer, the butler went into Jason’s room and found it empty. A note had been left on the bed saying that Jason was running away. (The exact wording of this note has never been released, but the FBI has confirmed that they have it in evidence.)
Jason’s activities throughout the day are largely unknown, but we do have two solid pieces of information. First, Melanie Walker, a former neighbor of Jason’s, saw him in the apartment building that he used to live in with his parents at around noon. According to Walker, she saw Jason on the street and called him in to see her, because she had a box of photographs and personal papers that had belonged to his parents. Jason stayed for about ten minutes, he and Walker caught up briefly on each other’s lives, and then he left with the box.
Sometime around 3:40 p.m., Jason boarded a commercial flight to Tel Aviv that he'd booked using a credit card that had been given to him by Bruce Wayne. The airline records show that he boarded, and a flight attendant remembers speaking to him on the plane. The flight landed at 1 p.m. Tel Aviv time, April 25.
Between realizing that Jason was gone at 5:30 and Bruce Wayne's arrival home at 6 p.m., the butler called Jason several times, with no answer (which makes sense, as Jason would have been on the plane). He then checked Jason's credit card activity and discovered the flight. After Wayne arrived home, the butler explained the situation to him. Wayne chartered a private flight to Tel Aviv, hoping to find Jason. The plane took off at 7 p.m. EST and landed 12 hours later at 2 p.m. Tel Aviv time, April 25.
For the next day, Wayne searched for Jason across Israel and Lebanon. His credit card was charged at multiple hotels and taxis in those two countries, and although he was traveling under an assumed name, various clerks, drivers, and shop employees have confirmed that they encountered a man of his description.
According to Wayne, he found Jason in Beirut on the afternoon of April 26th. Jason informed him that he had traveled to the Middle East in order to find his birth mother, who he believed to be in the area. Wayne agreed to help Jason with his search.
The Day of the Murder
On the morning of April 27, Jason and Wayne traveled to a medical mission in the Ethiopian countryside, where 34-year-old American Sheila Haywood, one of the women Jason believed might be his mother, worked. There they spoke with Sheila, and according to Wayne, she confirmed that she was Jason’s mother. A volunteer at the camp, Howard Wool, confirmed with Ethiopian investigators that he saw Wayne and Jason speaking to Sheila.
At around noon local time, Wayne, wanting to give mother and son some time alone, left the tent where Jason and Haywood were speaking and went to help volunteers with food dispersal on the other side of the camp. At approximately 12:30, according to Wool, Jason left the tent, borrowed his motorcycle, and drove away from the camp. About fifteen minutes later, he returned, visibly upset, and he and Wayne drove off again in the truck that Wayne had rented to drive in Ethiopia.
After this, we have only Wayne’s account to go on. (And since he is considered by many to be a suspect, that account is only as reliable as your faith in Wayne.) According to Wayne, Jason told him that he and Sheila had argued, and Sheila had left for a walk to clear her head. After a while, Jason began to regret what he’d said, and borrowed the motorcycle to go after her to apologize. He found Sheila several miles from the camp, having fallen in a ditch by the side of the road and injured herself. Jason helped Sheila find shelter in the medical supplies warehouse nearby, then returned to the camp to get help for her.
Wayne says that when they returned to the warehouse, he became concerned that Sheila might have a spinal injury. Not wanting to risk paralyzing her, he decided to seek qualified medical help in Addis Ababa, the closest city. Jason insisted on staying with Sheila.
Halfway to Addis Ababa, Wayne says that he second-guessed his decision to leave Jason with Sheila, and turned back to try to convince him to come with him. When he returned to the warehouse, it had been destroyed, apparently by a bomb.
According to Wayne, Sheila was dead when he arrived. He pulled Jason out of the wreckage and attempted resuscitation unsuccessfully. At approximately 5 p.m. local time, he notified the US consulate in Addis Ababa of Jason's and Sheila’s deaths, and official investigations began.
The Investigation
As a US national killed on foreign soil, Jason’s death was investigated by the FBI in coordination with the Bureau of Consular Affairs and local authorities in Ethiopia, Israel, and Lebanon. As you might imagine, that meant that the investigation was a total clusterfuck of conflicting jurisdictions, and as such we’ve heard different versions of events from pretty much everybody involved with the investigation.
The timeline of Jason’s movements in the US on the day prior to his flight is relatively clear because that investigation was performed by a single agency (the FBI) and because multiple witnesses in the US (notably Melanie Walker) have spoken to the media. From official FBI statements, we also know that Jason, who had a small personal bank account in addition to the credit cards provided by Wayne, withdrew $400 from an ATM at the airport before he left the country, but did not use any of his credit cards.
The investigation abroad is less well documented, or at least less transparent. Officials in Israel attempted to trace Jason’s movements from the airport, but there are no reports that they ever found anything. Wayne claimed that he heard that Jason was heading to Lebanon from a cab driver near the airport, but the cab driver was never located. To my knowledge, there has never been any official statement from Lebanese officials on the case, but an FBI statement claimed that they were searching for any evidence of Jason’s presence in the country. There is one article from a Lebanese newspaper on the search, but it’s in Arabic, so I don’t know what it says.
The Ethiopian investigation is the only one that we have any real information about, possibly because it was the only one to turn up any. Ethiopian authorities verified that the warehouse was destroyed by a bomb. It was also Ethiopian authorities who spoke to volunteers at the medical mission and confirmed that Wayne and Jason had been there and met with Sheila.
Because of the complicated nature of the investigation, the lack of local infrastructure, and the seemingly obvious cause of death, no official autopsy was performed. Wayne hired a private medical examiner to perform an autopsy after Jason’s body was returned to the US, but the results of that autopsy have never been shared.
Sheila Haywood
Sheila is obviously a central figure in this case, but a lot less is known about her than about Jason. The FBI put out a call for information about her during the initial investigation, but what if anything they found out has never been released. She did not have any living family when she died, and her co-workers have never spoken to the press.
We know a few things from public record. Sheila was born in Gotham, NJ and lived there at the time of Jason’s birth. She attended Hudson University for undergraduate, and Metropolis U for medical school. In 2003, she was the subject of a medical malpractice suit which was settled out of court, after which she quit her job at Gotham General and began working with various international medical charities.
No details have ever been released about why Jason supposedly believed Sheila might be his birth mother. But there are some suggestive clues. Melanie Walker has spoken extensively to the media about her interactions with Jason both on the day he ran away and as a child. She is adamant that the box that she gave him contained a birth certificate: “I remember because I kept it thinking he might need it. I was careful to put it in an envelope in a folder, to keep it safe.”
However, the FBI recovered the box of personal belongings in Jason’s bedroom. They have released a list of contents, and Jason’s birth certificate is not among them. As an adoptee, Jason’s original birth certificate has been sealed, so we don’t know what it said. But possibly, Jason saw something on his birth certificate that led him to believe that Sheila was his mother. If so, the FBI may know about it, since they could have access to a sealed record, but they’ve never released any information on the subject.
Supervillain Angle
Neither Wayne nor the FBI has ever expressed any suspicion that Jason and Sheila’s deaths were the result of any kind of vigilante or supervillainous violence. However, it’s worth noting that two camp volunteers claimed to have encountered Batman while on a supply run that day, and Batman told them that the Joker was using their convoy to smuggle explosives. They abandoned their supplies on the road for authorities to confiscate. The volunteers never saw any explosives themselves, nor did they see the Joker. Ethiopian authorities have never confirmed that any contraband was confiscated or that the Joker or Batman was in the area. This was around the time that the Joker briefly became the Iranian UN Ambassador, and sightings of him popped up all over the Middle East and North Africa, mostly uncorroborated or debunked. (It's worth mentioning that there are also apparently an average of 20 false Batman sightings reported to authorities outside Gotham every day . This isn't even the only famous death/disappearance to have a Batman angle—see the write-ups on Darla Aquista and the disappearance of Shondra Kinsolving.) If the Joker was in Ethiopia that day, though, it doesn't seem impossible that Jason and Sheila could have been collateral damage.
Richard Grayson
One of the odd tangents of this case that I've only ever seen a couple of people mention is Bruce Wayne's elder son, Richard Grayson. Richard was adopted seven years before Jason. [Edit: apparently he was taken in by Wayne as a child, but wasn't officially adopted until three years ago.] Despite the large age difference and the fact that Richard moved out before Jason was adopted, the two reportedly had a brotherly relationship.
When the FBI began investigating Jason's death, they wanted to speak to Richard, but couldn't find him for several weeks. When they asked Wayne for his whereabouts, Wayne claimed that he and Richard had a falling out, and that he didn't know where to find him.
Eventually, in late May, Richard spoke to the FBI. He claimed to have been on a yacht trip and off the grid for the past month. The FBI seems to have believed his story, but has never released any corroborating details.
Jason Todd sightings
One of the weirder aspects of this case is the number of people who claim to have seen Jason since his death. Jason's murder received a lot of attention both in the US and abroad, and his picture was widely circulated, both in media and by investigators trying to lock down his timeline.
In the years since Jason's death, five separate people have claimed to have seen him: a woman in Prague, a couple in London, a man in Germany, and most recently, a bank teller in Gotham last year. None of these sightings have ever been corroborated.
Theories
There are three main theories as to who killed Jason and Sheila.
- Bruce Wayne did it. He was the last person to see them alive, and his actions on the days leading up to and of their deaths were strange, to say the least: he never reported Jason missing, he left Jason alone in a foreign country multiple times, he traveled under an assumed name. (To my knowledge, no one has ever explained why Wayne was traveling under a different name.)
There's also the fact that only two years later, Wayne was arrested for the murder of radio host Vesper Fairchild. Wayne was eventually cleared of the charges, but not until after he'd escaped from jail. (Also, though I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm one of these people, a lot of people aren't incredibly convinced of Wayne's innocence.)
But the FBI says that Wayne is not a suspect, and it's pretty much undeniable that he and Jason arrived at the medical mission alive together. If he was going to kill Jason, why do it in a foreign country? And why do it in a place where multiple witnesses could place them together, and he had no good alibi?
For what it's worth, on the two occasions that Richard Grayson has spoken to the press about Jason's death, he was adamant that he did not believe Wayne could have killed him.
- They got caught up in a plot by the Joker/some other third party. An explosion does seem more like something the Joker would do than a personal murderer would. But it's hard to figure out what that plot would've been, or how Jason and Sheila could possibly have gotten involved in it during the approximately half an hour that Wayne was gone, when Sheila was too injured to move.
- An enemy of Sheila's killed them. Sheila was the person who lived in Ethiopia, and was the person who was expected to be around that day. She had a potentially checkered past. It's possible that whoever killed Jason and Sheila was aiming for Sheila, and Jason just happened to be in the way. Unfortunately, we have so little information on Sheila that it's hard to guess who might have wanted to kill her.
There's also a fourth theory—that Jason never died, thus accounting for all the sightings—but I don't think that one is very likely.
Whatever happened, it’s been five years to the day since Jason and Sheila died, and we don’t seem to be any closer to finding the person who killed them.
263 Comments sorted by Best
maybemaple 3 days ago
I've always thought it's veeeeeery interesting that the only source we have for the claim that Jason was looking for his birth mother is Bruce Wayne. They never even tested Sheila's DNA. Jason could've been in the area for any reason at all.
One_Unicorn_Town 3 days ago
Especially since he's ALSO the only source we have for anything that happened once Jason left the camp!
jdf1991 3 days ago
The FBI will have checked his original birth certificate, though.
One_Unicorn_Town 3 days ago
That doesn't mean they found anything unusual about it.
25 more replies
StMaryMead 3 days ago
I've always been partial to the theory that Sheila was the target. I don't think that Batman ever showed up that day. But if he wasn't there, then you have to explain why the two volunteers said he did. My theory is that there was some kind of graft going on. Some of the volunteers were skimming supplies, either to use somewhere else or to sell. And they came up with the Batman story to cover for the missing supplies. Maybe they were inspired by their visitors from Gotham, even. So then Sheila was either in on the graft and died from some fallout there, or she found out about it and was killed to cover it up.
jdf1991 3 days ago>/span>
That's a really interesting theory! And definitely tallies with the fact that the Ethiopian investigation seems to have been cursory, if that's the right word.
first_in_first_out 3 days ago
Was the investigation cursory, or did we just not hear about most of it? Like they clearly found the bomb and did a lot of work corroborating timelines, they're just not releasing a bunch of statements to the American press like the FBI does.
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donasaturation 2 days ago
I think famous people sometimes travel under false names to avoid paparazzi. That might explain why Wayne didn't report Jason missing at first, too. He wanted to avoid a media circus if he could.
maybemaple 2 days ago
Wouldn't a media circus help? If my kid were missing, I'd want everyone in the world on the lookout.
robinseggred 2 days ago
Yeah like I mostly think being famous is a nightmare, but that’s the one time I’d be THRILLED to have cameras everywhere.
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donasaturation 2 days ago
Worried about kidnapping/worried about his son’s mental health/honestly worried about image? I’m not saying Wayne’s a great guy, just that I don’t think the no-media thing is 100% suspicious.
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robinseggred 2 days ago
So I’m also active in r/BatTrackers, and literally anyone over there can tell you that the Robin mantle changed hands between April and June of 2017. Suit style changed, fighting style changed, haircut and build changed.
We have reason to think Batman was there. Jason was from Gotham and the right general age. Plus, I just realized, the Robin mantle ALSO changed hands sometime between January and March 2013!
StMaryMead 2 days ago
Are you saying you think Jason Todd was Robin and Bruce Wayne is Batman?
robinseggred 2 days ago
I’m saying it’s a really interesting coincidence that we should think about.
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snarkmetodeath 2 days ago
OCCAM’S RAZOR, dude.
robinseggred 2 days ago
How is this NOT the simplest explanation? All of Wayne’s weird behavior makes sense if he’s protecting his identity. It explains Wayne’s actions, Jason’s actions, and the Batman sighting.
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One_Unicorn_Town 2 days ago
I’m from Gotham, and Bruce Wayne is an idiot, he’s not Batman. (He definitely killed that reporter, though.)
maybemaple 2 days ago
Can you explain more about the Vesper Fairchild thing? Why do people think Wayne did it? Is it possibly connected to this?
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first_in_first_out 2 days ago
Haven’t Batman and Bruce Wayne been seen together?
robinseggred 2 days ago
The BatTrackers subreddit doesn’t consider a person being seen together with a vigilante as hard evidence that that person ISN’T that vigilante. Those people get into weird shit. Magic and shapeshifters and cloning and stuff. You should read Jonathan Law’s memoirs, they’re fucking WEIRD.
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One_Unicorn_Town 3 days ago
JSYK, Dick Grayson wasn’t adopted until three years ago: Bruce Wayne adopts long-time ward - CNN
Phalangefier 3 days ago
Thanks, I’ll add a correction!
maybemaple 3 days ago
Oh my god that’s right, that was so weird. And I hadn’t seen the thing about Grayson being missing for a month in any other write-ups, that’s really weird too. I don’t really think Grayson had anything to do with it, but what’s going on there?
One_Unicorn_Town 3 days ago
Maybe he did have something to do with it. It wouldn’t be the weirdest theory I’ve heard about this case.
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redrovercomeover 1 day ago
Dude shut up Grayson wasn’t involved.
robinseggred 2 days ago
Not to beat a dead horse of a theory, but if Dick Grayson were Nightwing/Robin 1, it would at least explain where he was for that month. (Off doing superhero shit.)
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first_in_first_out 1 day ago
I know it’s a totally bizarre theory, but I feel like we should at least talk about the fact that a lot of different people have claimed to have seen Jason since he died. It’s not completely impossible that he’s alive. Bruce Wayne was the person who identified him *and* the person who paid for the autopsy, and with his resources, I feel like he could definitely fake a death.
snarkmetodeath 1 day ago
It’s a lot more likely that people were just primed to see him by his picture in the news.
first_in_first_out 1 day ago
Oh, I agree, and eyewitness accounts are always super sketchy. But it’s enough separate people that I feel like it’s at least worth talking about.
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One_Unicorn_Town 1 day ago
But why would Wayne want to fake his death?
first_in_first_out 1 day ago
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There was clearly something weird going on there, but I don’t know what it was.
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robinseggred 1 day ago
Okay, I know no one agrees with me on this, but do you even know how many superheroes have come back from the dead?
maybemaple 1 day ago
I’ve been thinking about this more, and what if Bruce Wayne was the one who the volunteers spoke to about the Joker? Not like Bruce Wayne is Batman, but what if he wanted to kill Jason and frame it on the Joker, so he pretended to be Batman to make people think the Joker was in the area?
One_Unicorn_Town 1 day ago
OOOH, I do like this theory, but I still don’t think Bruce Wayne is smart enough to pull that off.
maybemaple 1 day ago
He’s got the money to fake a really good Batman costume though, which I think is more important here.
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snarkmetodeath 1 day ago
Okay, I have to say it again: OCCAM’S RAZOR.
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Read 3:04 pm that u, redrovercomeover?
Read 3:04 pm :D
Don’t let it go to your head 7:02 pm