Wheeler was convicted of assault and robbery at age 17. He was serving a one-year-to-life sentence. In prison, he began studying politics. A convict organizer, he was known as a "jailhouse lawyer." He read Engels, Marx and Lenin. He had joined and then, with critiques, resigned from the Black Panthers and a Maoist group. Wheeler met some activists from University of California, Berkeley while he was in Vacaville prison. Through this group, he met his girlfriend at that time, a young heiress who went by the name of Mary Alice Siem.
Escape
In August 1973, the early SLA clique apparently engineered the escape of Thero Wheeler, providing transportation and a change of clothes after Wheeler walked away from Vacaville prison. Wheeler later said his friends who aided his escape were "well-connected". He joined DeFreeze and "a curious group of upper middle-class whites, most college-educated but menially employed" at a small house in Oakland. Close friends say he split with the SLA over the Foster murder, under death threat after he called DeFreeze a "drunken fool." On 4 May 1974, an article appeared in The Pittsburgh Courier quoting Mary Alice Siem. She had originally spoken to The San Francisco Examiner. She said that she had left the SLA due to death threats from DeFreeze: After Patty Hearst was kidnapped, a number of eyewitnesses contributed to identikit composite sketches of the men they had seen. The drawings both appeared to resemble DeFreeze and Wheeler so closely that police were soon able to attach names to these sketches.
Later life
Wheeler moved to Texas and changed his name to Bradley Bruce. He relied on electronics skills learned in prison to gain employment. He formed a relationship with a woman and they had a daughter. His cover was blown while interceding in a dispute. When he sought hospital treatment, his alias was fed into a computer and the FBI arrested him. He was returned to California to face escape charges and continue serving his previous term. In 1976, he married Cynthia Spencer. In 2005, Wheeler appeared in a local San Francisco newspaper as a recipient of free eyeglasses through a program known as Project Connect. In those articles, Wheeler was described as a Vietnam War veteran. Wheeler died on March 2, 2009, in San Francisco.
