Dateline: The Jacket - Who is Wesley Hadsell and where is he now? Disturbing details of a stepfather's crimes revealed 

The Dateline episode The Jacket is about a stepfather who abducted and then killed his stepdaughter. Wesley Hadsell was a devoted father. Or so everyone thought. When his stepdaughter, Anjelica "AJ" Hadsell, goes missing in March 2015, he looks just like any concerned father. Wesley wants the police to do everything they can to find AJ. He leads search parties for her. He gives interviews and helps the police in the investigation. But none of that hides what he really did.

According to Dateline, Wesley Hadsell was convicted of the first-degree murder of his stepdaughter Anjelica "AJ" Hadsell and the concealment of the body on 7th February 2022. Two months later, on 4th April 2022, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In addition to that, he was also sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

Dateline: The Jacket: What did Wesley Hadsell do?

Before committing the heinous crimes against AJ, Wesley Hadsell already had a criminal record. He had earlier been charged with burglary and breaking and entering. Dateline reports that he also had a drug use problem that was getting worse. This is also why his wife, AJ's mother, Jennifer Wright, had thrown him out of the house.

Wesley Hadsell was not AJ's first stepfather. Jennifer was earlier married to Zach Hoffer, who was a good influence in AJ's life and with whom she developed a good relationship. However, Zach and Jennifer got divorced when AJ was just eight years old. After a while, Jennifer married Wesley, who allegedly loved AJ like his own daughter and wanted to adopt her legally. AJ agreed, and when she was fifteen, Wesley officially adopted her.

However, what Wesley did is not something any father would do. AJ, the friendly girl studying in her freshman year at Longwood University, had returned home to Norfolk for spring break. She had just had a breakup but was trying to have fun on her break. According to Dateline, the case's investigation revealed that Wesley, who was no longer welcome at AJ's house, broke in and abducted AJ. Before doing that, he made her write an eerie note to her mother, which would make everyone think she left of her own volition.

He then sent out messages to her family to misguide them and then took her somewhere to kill her. The medical examiner who examined AJ's body said she had died of heroin poisoning and there were signs on her body of sexual assault. While there is no proof Wesley sexually assaulted her, it is alleged that he did, given the fact that AJ was found dead with her pants around her ankles.

Further investigation also revealed Wesley to have heroin in his possession, and his drug dealer agreed to have given him some soon after AJ went missing. Besides, when police searched his work van, they found a GPS tracker with a history of all the places he had driven to. That history led them to an abandoned house near the border of North Carolina, almost thirty minutes from Norfolk.

That is where they found AJ's body. As seen on Dateline, Investigators also concluded that Wesley Hadsell had tried to frame AJ's friend Corey French by placing AJ's jacket in his house. But Wesley Hadsell could no longer run. Detectives led by Detective David Benjamin finally found him guilty of murder and concealment of a body. However, Wesley denies all accusations. He said in an interview with 10 On Your Side,

"I would not have put my daughter out there like trash in someone's backyard and left her there like that.''

"I wasn't going to break down. I'm not going to accept that verdict."

He continued,

"I wasn't going to accept it because it's not true."

He also said,

"There are other things at play here that I can't speak on because I don't know."

He believed,

"Their minds were 100% made up before they deliberated.''

"It didn't make sense to come back that quick. This wasn't a clear-cut case... They're trying to make something out of something that isn't true. I mean people who know me know I have values."

As of now, Wesley Hadless is serving his life imprisonment plus fifteen years in prison. He will be in prison for the rest of his life, as is evident from his sentence.

The Dateline episode, The Jacket, can be streamed on NBC and Peacock.

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