Reconstructing Jerry

Jerry lived in the woods on the edge of the Ventura Freeway in Encino with his pots and pans, Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup and applesauce, gospel tapes and muscle magazines--essentials and comforts for a man who carried his home on his back. With tree-filtered sunlight and singing birds, the camp might have been pleasant if not for the steady roar of traffic.

Maybe it was a good life. It’s unclear how it ended.

To solve that mystery--to determine how a man lived and died unnoticed until there was nothing left but a broken skeleton--five experts in the death business have gathered around Jerry’s skull in his tattered camp on an April afternoon.

Forensic anthropologist Deborah Gray picks up Jerry’s skull, squints through the hole in its base and shakes the sun-bleached bone vigorously.

“I was looking to see if he had any brains left,” she says. No brains means Jerry has been dead for a while--long enough for the elements to disintegrate his flesh and clothes and reduce to pulp the papers that linked him to the official world.

*

If someone hadn’t strayed into those woods on April 15 and called authorities, Jerry might have vanished entirely. A heavy storm might have washed his skull--the only bone not covered by leaves and grass--into a nearby stream. Or a wood rat could have dragged it off to use in a nest.

“You’d be surprised at what rats can haul,” said Erik Arbuthnot, a county coroner’s investigator.

The responsibility for reconstructing Jerry falls to this small group of detectives, coroner’s investigators and medical experts. They work backward, collecting bones that may lead to a complete name and, hopefully, an explanation.

*

When Arbuthnot arrives at 12:20 p.m. on April 15, he and three Van Nuys homicide detectives begin picking through Jerry’s belongings. They collect everything because anything could be a clue.

A fat lizard flees Jerry’s jacket, hanging crusty and stiff from a tree branch.

“He smokes Camels,” LAPD Det. Roberta Moore says, pulling a tattered fragment of a pack out of a pocket.

“That’s what killed him,” quips another detective.

Through the warm afternoon, humor and theories pass the hours.

“He was sitting there darning his socks when that tree fell on him,” LAPD Det. Dave Escoto offers.

Someone finds a wallet. “Oh please, oh please,” Moore begs the god of dumb luck for a name and next of kin. There is no identification, only a fragile mass of pulp with a few blurry digits--maybe part of a driver’s license number--and half a name.

But that credit card-size scrap is a major find. It gives them the dead man’s first name.

“I can see a ‘Jerry.’ I can see a D, and E. It just goes from there. I think there’s an A there,” Arbuthnot says. “At this point, even shoe size is critical. I don’t have a driver’s license. I don’t have a face. Obviously, I don’t have fingerprints. I do have great dental, but the problem is [without a name] I can’t just search dental X-rays.”

Gray arrives at 3 p.m. A freelance anthropologist paid to help police recover remains, she lugs a doctor’s bag full of gardening rakes and other tools of her trade to the camp.

She dazzles the group immediately.

“He did a lot of this,” she says, examining an arm bone and flexing her arms to indicate physical conditioning. The detectives, who had found a muscle magazine and cheap exercise equipment in Jerry’s gear, are impressed.

“She’s good,” Arbuthnot says.

“He’s got something going on in his lower back,” Gray says, turning to part of Jerry’s spine worn with age. “His bones are not happy.”

Any bone could be the key. The detectives comb the leaves and soil. Gray inspects the yellowed bones and lays them on a sheet. The scattered bones begin to resemble a man--long leg bones touching the pelvis, spinal column touching the skull. Some wag begins to sing, “The leg bone’s connected to the . . . “

“How many pieces do we have to find?” a detective asks.

“Two-hundred and six,” Gray says.

“They pay us to do this--fascinating ain’t it?” says Det. Steve Fiske.

Seven hours after Jerry’s bones are discovered, his remains are tied in a bundle that weighs less than a child. Without proper identification, Jerry is put in a cooled crypt under the official name for the nameless: Unidentified Doe, Case No. 98-02766.

Spring passes. Jerry’s bones are a constant in a coroner’s cooler that functions like a revolving door for Los Angeles’s most unfortunate souls.

Finally, on an afternoon earlier this month, Jerry gets his identity back.

Although Jerry’s teeth--complete with fillings--seemed the best hope for identification, a 6-year-old chest X-ray provides the final proof.

*

Using those wet, ragged scraps of paper taken from Jerry’s wallet, Gilda Tolbert, a coroner’s investigator who handles an average of one unidentified body a day, had been able to get a possible ID by playing with combinations of names and numbers in the Department of Motor Vehicle’s computer.

No one had reported Jerry missing. But now a query of local hospitals turns up an old chest X-ray at Valley Presbyterian Hospital with the same ID.

A forensic expert matched the X-ray to Jerry’s bones.

He is Jerry Dale Degraw.

He was born in Cushing, Okla. Reasons that may never be known brought him to Los Angeles and his death at age 56 or 57. Careful study of his bones puts his death sometime between April 1997 and January 1998.

“It’s an undetermined death and will forever remain that unless someone comes forward with more information,” Arbuthnot says. “Most likely it was a natural death. If it was a homicide, there was no trauma to the bones. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t strangled. Everything that would determine that was gone.”

The mystery is solved, but the case remains open.

“These cases aren’t closed until we can find a family member and say, ‘Hey, so-and-so died,’ ” says coroner’s Investigator Doyle Tolbert--Gilda Tolbert’s husband. “Somewhere out there is a sister who apparently does not know her brother is dead.”

*

She is Johanna Gayle Samuel, also known as Joanne, a 41-year-old former Santa Monica resident who is proving as tough to track down as her brother was to identify. She worked at a San Fernando Valley newspaper in the mid-1980s, but subsequently surrendered her California driver’s license when she obtained one in Canada.

Doyle Tolbert tracked Samuel through passport records from Toronto to Cannes, France. She has not responded to Tolbert’s letters--he hopes because they are waiting for her at a mail drop.

Jerry’s mother died years ago at a nursing home in Cushing, Okla. The paper trail on his father ends abruptly in San Diego.

Tolbert hopes someone might know how to find Johanna Samuel or someone else in Jerry Degraw’s family and call (213) 343-0714.

If not, the bones will be cremated at taxpayer expense and Jerry Dale Degraw--nobody once again--will vanish from this world once and for all.