When Sheila’s husband died, suddenly, from a massive heart attack at an Arizona truckstop en route to a sunken ship and the promise of gold, she knew she had only one choice: after more than 40 years in the US she must hand herself in for deportation. A decade later, in Belfast, Sheila is ready to tell her story.  

Sheila’s husband, Roger Miklos, was a former Nevada police officer and head of security at Caesar’s Palace. To the public, however, he was better known as one of the world’s most successful treasure hunters, credited with recovering over $200 million worth of gold from the Caribbean seabed. A gambler by nature, Roger reinvested each fortune into ever higher-stakes expeditions, chasing increasingly grand legends. 

In 1978, Sheila, a Belfast nurse, went on a two week holiday to the Bahamas. Before the end of the trip, she had met, fallen in love with and married her husband Roger. He smuggled her into the US and she wouldn’t leave for another 40 years. 

In the early 1980s, Roger made the claim that would define, and haunt, the rest of his and Sheila’s life: that he had discovered the wreck of a highly modified German U-boat from 1943, one that had fled the Reich laden not with torpedoes, but filled to the brim with stolen Nazi treasure. It was lying there undisturbed just off the coast of the Turks and Caicos. There was a catch… the local government wouldn’t let Roger in to dive the site and he refused to tell anyone where this wreck was. What followed was a thirty year attempt to prove the wreck’s existence and raise the funds to recover it.

Roger travelled across Europe pursuing fragments of testimony and coincidence. Meetings, encounters, and archival traces that he interpreted as confirmation of his belief. Throughout this period, Sheila remained largely confined to domestic life in Florida, unable to leave the country and increasingly living in the shadow of an obsession she could only imagine.

Roger’s obsession with the Nazi U-boat was beginning to dominate Sheila’s life. She was stuck in the US and she couldn’t leave. She could only fantasise about the grand adventures that Roger was going on. Sheila began to write. Was Roger on the verge of finding the holy grail or beginning a lifelong quixotic fool’s errand?

This mythology did not end with Roger. His son from a previous relationship, Darrell Miklos, has continued to pursue the story publicly, building a television career around searches for the wreck that diverge from Roger’s own claims. In the final year of his life, Roger disowned his son and urged Sheila to protect his documents, further fracturing an already strained family dynamic.

For Sheila the only way to make sense of Roger’s life was through fiction. The horrendous childhood in a boys home. The riches he found on Christopher Columbus’ ships. The tales of working for the mob in Vegas. The criminal president of the Turks and Caicos who robbed him of his treasure. Some of these events were verifiably true, but others had to be embellished. For Sheila writing became a way to process the bizarre events of Roger’s life. She was the person who knew him best but yet the truth remained illusive, even to her. 

For the first time, Sheila is sharing her story. Rather than solving the mystery of the wreck, the film interrogates why such myths endure and what they cost the people who live in their shadow. Drawing on her fiction, contemporary interviews, archive, Roger’s final recorded interview before his death, and testimony from those who worked alongside him, Roger and the Wreck constructs a layered portrait of a marriage lived inside a myth.