Be honest: If you found a wallet with $5,784 in cash inside and there were no witnesses, what would you do?
Mount Prospect resident Bill Winquist’s decision to do the right thing is considered rare enough for the Prospect Heights City Council to honor him for it with a plaque at its Sept. 9 meeting.
“So many people wouldn’t have turned it in, especially with that amount of money,” Prospect Heights Director of Police Administration Rachelle Gentry said.
The Wheeling man who lost the wallet, and asked to remain anonymous, said he’d resigned himself to his fate.
“I personally didn’t think I would ever see it again, but my girlfriend reported it immediately,” he said. “I was just amazed.”
A Prospect Heights police officer shows the lost wallet containing $5,784 found by Mount Prospect resident Bill Winquist at the Chicago Executive Airport viewing area and returned to its Wheeling owner the same day.
Courtesy of Prospect Heights Police Department
Winquist, who works for Ashland Millwork Inc. just west of Chicago Executive Airport in Wheeling, was running early for an appointment when he stopped to kill some time at the viewing area along the frontage road at the south end of the airport in Prospect Heights at about 7:10 a.m. Aug. 13.
“I just walked around the back of the truck, looked down and there it was,” he said.
The wallet didn’t even need to be opened to see it contained an extraordinary amount of money, reminding Winquist of a specific episode of the sitcom “Seinfeld.”
“It was huge,” he said. “It was doubled over. It was kind of like George Costanza’s that made him sit at an angle.”
Winquist brought the wallet to his workplace, where he spent a few hours trying to contact the owner himself. The driver’s license provided an address, but he couldn’t find a phone number for the owner.
Giving up in the afternoon, he called police so they could track down the owner.
The owner of the wallet operates a paver company and had just finished a job the day before that paid in cash. He kept the cash on hand because he was planning to buy a vehicle with it.
He didn’t find what he was looking for at the car dealership, so he still had the overstuffed wallet when he and his girlfriend got something to eat close to midnight at a Prospect Heights McDonald’s.
The couple went to the airport viewing area just west along the frontage road to eat, where he now knows he accidentally dropped the wallet.
It wasn’t as immediately obvious when he woke up at 7:30 a.m. and discovered it missing. But he reasoned that it must have been within a short time frame after he’d bought the food at McDonald’s.
“I thought I must have dropped it outside of my house,” he said.
When it wasn’t there, the airport viewing area was his next thought. He believed there was a good chance no one had stopped there since he and his girlfriend had left. But he now understands Winquist must have been there about 45 minutes before his own return.
The wallet’s owner had no idea his billfold had been found until a Wheeling police officer showed up at his door the next afternoon. Not a dollar missing.
The owner expressed gratitude to his money’s savior, but said he knew nothing of the Prospect Heights City Council’s plans to honor Winquist.
Winquist said he hasn’t connected with the wallet’s owner, but the recognition he’s getting from Prospect Heights is itself more than he ever expected.
“I never have and that’s fine,” Winquist said. “Prospect Heights called and asked if I would be thanked.”
Bill Winquist of Mount Prospect found the wallet of a Wheeling man containing more than $5,700 at the Chicago Executive Airport Viewing Area while he was killing time before an early morning appointment earlier this month.
Courtesy of Bill Winquist