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SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah forensic lab on the forefront of a new type of genetic technology has identified a piece of jawbone found in the Arizona desert as a Marine who died more than 70 years ago.
In July 1951, a single-engine plane took off on a routine military training flight in Riverside County, California, with two men aboard — U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Everett Leland Yager and 2nd Lt. Robert Phillips. They were reported missing at 1:25 p.m., and according to an article in the Palmyra Spectator, "two reconnaissance planes found the wreckage in rugged hills 6 miles southwest of Elsinore."
The 30-year-old Yager had crash-landed a bullet-damaged plane before when stationed in Okinawa during World War II, though it was missing wheels and landing flaps. But he did not survive this crash.
A helicopter landed close to the site of the crash, and rescuers retrieved the bodies, according to the article. Yager's body was transported to his hometown of Palmyra, Missouri, where it was met at the no-longer-existing Burlington Train Depot by an honor guard, the Palmyra Spectator reported in August 1951. Yager's remains were buried at the Greenwood Cemetery next to his family members, gravesite records show.
In tribute to the fallen soldier, a neighbor wrote, "We have often heard some such expression as 'death likes a shining mark' and so it was in the passing of Leland Yager, who was a general favorite with both young and older people in this community."
Finding a match
Decades later, a child in Yavapai County, Arizona, inherited a rock collection from his grandfather and began gathering rocks himself. Kristin Greene, a spokeswoman for the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office, told KSL.com that the child grew up and his mother began clearing his things from her house when she noticed a strange object in that collection — what turned out to be a human jawbone.
She called the sheriff's office, and the bone was turned over to the county for safekeeping. It was stored as "Rock Collection John Doe."
In January 2023, the Yavapai medical examiner sent a DNA sample over to Ramapo College Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center, which sent it to Salt Lake City's Intermountain Forensics lab.
The Utah lab took on the daunting task of building a genetic profile from this weathered, sun-beaten bone fragment, and sent it back to the genetic center in New Jersey. Within two days, the center identified "a candidate lead" by comparing the DNA in the bone to family members in genetic databases. Yavapai County was able to take a sample from Yager's surviving child, and in March it was confirmed a match.
No one knows for sure how the bone traveled over 200 miles from the crash site. Greene believed that child's grandfather, a prolific rock collector, had ventured through that crash site at some point, and it was in the rock collection when it was passed down to his grandson. Investigators in New Jersey theorized in their press release that a scavenger, maybe a bird, picked it up and deposited it in Arizona, where the child found it.
A paradigm shift
Danny Hellwig is director of laboratory development at Intermountain Forensics, a small but mighty force of seven that uses what he calls "ancient" DNA techniques, investigative genetic genealogy, which is closer to paleontology or anthropology than modern-day DNA methods.
Until recently, his lab was the "only accredited lab in the world doing this work," which it began a little over a year ago. That's how new the field is. Hellwig called its process, which sequences the entire genome of a sample and turns it into a profile that can be compared across databases, "a paradigm shift in our universe."
"I'm trying to be humble here, but we're on the forefront of this," said Hellwig, who has working in the industry for over 20 years. "It's a huge deal." The group is one of two labs in the U.S. that can do this, and the only nonprofit.
Normally, a genetic sample requires an exact match to entries in the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS. Law enforcement uses this database to find matches to remains, or in investigations requiring forensic analysis. But if someone has never been entered into the system, there won't be a match.
Two growing databases, GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA, can take a genetic profile from willing participants, similar to that of Ancestry and others, and compare. They link genetic information, whose "fundamental chunks," as Hellwig explains, become more similar the closer one is related to another.
"It's game-changing technology in the forensic space," Hellwig said. The company is currently sorting through samples from the Tulsa Race Massacre and is making previously impossible connections in many others.
"We're IDing people left and right. It's amazing," he said, though he doubts the case of the mysterious jawbone will be topped anytime soon.
Greene said in Yavapai County, investigative genetic genealogy was used recently to solve the 36-year-old cold case of Cathy Sposito, a college student who was murdered while hiking in central Arizona, and linking it with other unsolved sexual assaults in the area.
In 2023, $300,000 in funding was awarded to the Utah Department of Public Safety for the Utah Forensic Genetic Genealogy DNA Testing Initiative, which allows agencies across the state to use these new advanced techniques on unsolved cases. As of last year, the department's cold case database consisted of "at least 290 unsolved homicides, and 76 sets of unidentified human remains" that they say could benefit from advanced DNA testing.
