Search for Jerry’s Family Ends With a Long-Lost Uncle

For months, county coroner’s investigators had worked to reunite Jerry Dale DeGraw’s broken skeleton--excavated in April from a homeless camp in Encino--with his past.

It took three months to track down a chest X-ray that matched the bones of the middle-age man and confirmed DeGraw’s identity. But even with a name, investigators hit a dead end while searching for relatives to inform of DeGraw’s demise.

That changed when a distant family friend read an article in Tuesday’s editions of The Times about the mystery and called DeGraw’s uncle, Wayne DeGraw of Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County.

“She asked me if I knew the person and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s my nephew,’ ” DeGraw said Wednesday. “I often wondered what happened to him. I knew eventually something like this would happen with the way he was living in those hobo camps.”

Wayne DeGraw barely knew his nephew. Tormented by mental illness, Jerry fled Cushing, Okla., for Los Angeles when he was a teenager. Jerry served a little time in prison for aggravated assault, and mostly kept to himself over the years, Wayne DeGraw recalled.

The drifter’s only family contact was his sister, Joanne Samuel. He emerged from the streets occasionally to pick up his government relief checks at Samuel’s Santa Monica home.

Money in hand, he would vanish again.

“Nobody could help him,” Wayne DeGraw said. “He was sort of antisocial. Nobody really knew what he did. He didn’t even reveal too much to Joanne.”

Samuel died more than a decade ago, and Jerry DeGraw’s last real link with his family was broken. His father--Wayne DeGraw’s older brother--died a few years later in San Diego. Jerry DeGraw wandered the streets until he died sometime last year at age 56 or 57. A man found his sun-bleached skull in a neat little camp just off the Ventura Freeway on April 15.

Wayne DeGraw, 76 and living on Social Security, can’t afford to bury his nephew.

“There is nobody left it would make a difference to anyway. I’m the last of my family,” DeGraw said. “At least we know what happened.”

The coroner’s office is arranging for a county cremation. Now that they’ve found Wayne DeGraw, investigators can finally close the file on Jerry Dale DeGraw.

But little questions linger.

What killed him? And how did his sister’s official identity outlive her body? Coroner’s investigator Doyle Tolbert was still chasing Samuel, since passport records put her in Canada and France last year. Only Tuesday did he find out that he’d been chasing a ghost.

“It’s kind of an unusual situation,” he said.

Chalk up another mystery to the bones of Jerry Dale DeGraw.