EMERYVILLE — Dexter Appleby had been shot and killed on a city sidewalk late one night, and police had almost nothing to go by — just a grainy video showing the suspect in a particular jacket, and local gossip that the lead investigator didn’t believe.
That all changed in 2025, when a woman contacted Emeryville police to complete a task no mother would envy: she wanted to turn in her own son, James Wheeler, in the May 26, 2023 killing of Appleby, according to court records. Now Wheeler, 45, has been convicted of first degree murder and an enhancement for personal use of a firearm, prosecutors announced Thursday.
By the time Wheeler was identified as a suspect in Appleby’s killing, he was already well on his way to being convicted in another homicide. Both occurred in 2023. Nearly six months to the day after he killed Appleby, while working as a UPS driver, Wheeler shot and killed Johnny James Johnson Jr. during a dispute in an Oakland parking lot. Wheeler told a friend from a Santa Rita Jail phone that Johnson was trying to “vehicular manslaughter me” and jurors appeared to take those crimes seriously, convicting Wheeler only of voluntary manslaughter, a crime that involves “imperfect” self-defense, according to court records.
But while Wheeler was on trial for Johnson’s killing, his mother was working with Emeryville police to build a second murder case against him. She came forward in June 2025, just as the Johnson trial was set to start. In September 2025, prosecutors charged Wheeler in Appleby’s killing, ending a nearly two-year investigation that initially seemed hopeless, according to court records.
Appleby, 34, was shot and killed a little before midnight, on a dimly lit section of road near 41st Street and San Pablo Avenue in Emeryville. Tipsters came forward telling police it must have had to do with an archaic gang feud between near-defunct groups in North Oakland, but the leads went nowhere, prosecutors say. Desperate for leads, police in late 2023 released video from a surveillance camera showing an unidentified suspect walking from the scene. He was wearing a “Lanesplitters” jacket but his face wasn’t recognizable to Emeryville police.
Wheeler’s mom would later tell authorities she recognized her son immediately but kept silent for years. Then in 2025, an intensely personal accusation was made against Wheeler by another family member, causing her to come forward.
“That is my son, James Wheeler, 100 percent,” she allegedly said. “I raised that boy since he was 5 years old.”
Defense attorneys argued the woman’s “bias” should give anyone pause about whether she was telling the truth.
But Wheeler’s mom told police she recognized the suspected killer’s jacket as a present she bought Wheeler years earlier. She also told police he “had the same walk as his grandfather and her husband,” prosecutors said in court filings, and that she recognized the manner in which he was walking in a way that a mother would. He appeared to be up to “no good,” she told police, according to court records.
“This video shows me that he did something and he’s just trying not to be noticed or he’s on his way to do something,” she reportedly told police.
When Emeryville police began looking into Wheeler, they came across a second revelation: The suspected murder weapon had been sitting in an Oakland police locker for nearly two years, ever since a raid on a Ney Avenue home by cops who were investigating Johnson’s death. A ballistics test proved the connection. But Wheeler’s attorney argued in court records there was no evidence Wheeler knew the gun was inside the home, which was frequented by lots of other people, and by the time police found in Appleby’s homicide was months old.
“These facts indicate that Mr. Wheeler was not in possession of this firearm that was linked to the homicide,” Deputy Public Defender Erin Herrera wrote in court papers. “In fact, these issues point to other people having the firearm instead.”
Wheeler is scheduled to be sentenced in Johnson’s killing on June 10, and in Appleby’s on June 17, court records show.