A set of human remains found at Berry Summit in California in 1968 have now been identified using newer DNA technology, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office announced.
The remains belong to William Toller, born in 1927. Modern DNA matching by forensic laboratory Othram uncovered a child of Toller still alive in Louisiana. Her sample confirmed the identity of the bones.
The daughter, identified only as Anona by the sheriff’s office, told deputies that Toller, who served in the Marines in World War II and the Korean War, divorced her mother in the 1950s and lost contact with the family when she was eight.
On April 28, 1968, a pair of teenagers playing at Berry Summit found a skull, and further investigation of the scene uncovered more remains. The area where the bones were found had been used as a dump site for debris from a 1964 flood, the sheriff’s office said in a press release.
The bones were sent at the time to the FBI and D.C.’s Smithsonian Institution in an attempt to identify the remains, but after those attempts failed the remains were buried later in 1968. The only clues detectives had at the time were that the bones belonged to a man, with an estimated age between 45 and 60 years old.
The still-unidentified body was exhumed in 2010 and his DNA was run against state and national databases of missing persons, with no matches. In December 2022, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office and the California Department of Justice contacted Othram for assistance, receiving confirmation of Toller’s identity in August 2023.
The sheriff’s office did not specify how Toller died or the condition of his remains at the time they were found.
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