Piece Of Marine's Jawbone Found 73 Years After Tragic RivCo Death

RIVERSIDE COUNTY, CA — Forensics sleuths in multiple states have helped solve a 73-year mystery that originally wasn’t thought to be a mystery at all, but the tragic accidental death of a 30-year-old Marine with a wife and two young children.

Marine Capt. Everett Leland Yager crashed his plane during a training exercise on July 31, 1951, in Riverside County, California. The Marine’s remains were gathered, and he was buried with military honors in a family plot in Glendale Cemetery in Palmyra, Missouri.

But 20 years later, a mom in northern Arizona saw something peculiar in the rock collection her son had inherited from his grandfather, who was known to scavenge vast areas to curate his collection of stones.

She plucked from the rocks what was later identified as a human jawbone with teeth. The family turned it over to the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office. Traditional DNA testing was performed, but government databases turned up no leads.

The case information was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System to compare it to details entered in missing persons cases. The search produced a possible result for Everett Leland Yager, who had died in California and had long been buried in Palmyra.

The mystery might have ended there, unsolved.

But last year, the pro bono Ramapo College Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center in Mawhah, New Jersey, approached the Arizona sheriff’s department, asking if had any cold cases that might be appropriated for the new investigative genetic genealogy certificate program

An extract from Rock Collection John Doe was sent from the Center for Human Identification in north Texas to Intermountain Forensics in Salt Lake City, where it went underwent a months long advanced DNA genotyping process. A profile was developed and uploaded to GEDmatchPro and Family Tree DNA, according to the news release.

DNA samples from Capt. Yager’s family members allowed Bode Technology of Lorton, Virginia, to positively identified the bone fragment as a match to the fallen Marine.

From there, the college’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy Bootcamp participants used the profile to identify Capt. Yager.

One mystery remains. Capt. Yager’s plane disappeared in California, but the jawbone was most likely found in Arizona. One theory is that a scavenger bird may have picked up the carrion and dropped it over Arizona.

The case resolution, the first by IGG’s summer bootcamp student cohort, “was a lesson in expecting the unexpected,” Cairenn Binder, assistant director of the IGG center, said in the news. “The team that worked on this case at our IGG bootcamp included some truly outstanding researchers, and we are so proud of them for helping to repatriate Captain Yager’s remains and return them to his family.”

The fallen Marine was born on Oct. 2, 1920, in Marion County, Missouri, the son of Thomas Everett and Vera Lucille Stout Yager. He was married to Betty Ruth DeBary Yager. They had two children, Richard Leland Yager, who had just turned 6 when his father died, and Denise Yager Hughes, who was barely 6 months old at the time.

Capt. Yager’s immediate family are all deceased now and buried at Greenwood Cemetery. The Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office said the extended is grateful to have “final closure to this almost 73-year-old unexpected and mysterious disappearance of Everett Leland Yager.”