Frank Wills (4 February 1948 – 27 September 2000) was an American security guard who alerted police to a break-in at the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC on 17 June 1972, leading to the Watergate scandal.
Biography[]
Frank Wills was born in Savannah, Georgia on 4 February 1948, and he studied heavy machine operations in Battle Creek, Michigan. He worked for Ford as an assembly-line worker in Detroit, but his asthma forced him to give up the job. Wills travelled to Washington DC and worked at hotels, becoming a security guard at the Watergate Hotel. On the night of 17 June 1972, he noticed duct tape on one of the door locks in the hotel while making his first round, and he removed the tape; thirty minutes later, he found more tape on the same door. He called the Second Precinct police, and five men were arrested in the Democratic National Committee offices. The five "White House Plumbers" would be tried, and the Watergate scandal would bring down Richard Nixon's administration. Wills received a $2.50 raise, but he was fired from the job some time after the botched burglary. He struggled with finding a job over the course of the next several years, and he spent a year in prison in Georgia for stealing shoes from a store. He died in Augusta, Georgia in 2000 from a brain tumor.