A skull discovered by two teenagers along a Humboldt County road has been identified as that of a war veteran whose daughter had not seen him since she was a child.
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Though the man is now known to have been William Toller, investigators are still trying to determine how he died, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office said in a report Monday.
The long mystery began in May 1968, when the sheriff’s office received a letter saying teenagers had discovered a human skull on April 28 near Berry Summit, along the Trinity Highway about 10 miles west of the town of Willow Creek.
Sheriff’s detectives found additional remains there, and they learned the area had been a collection site for debris from the Christmas flood of 1964, when rivers throughout northwest California had overflowed.
The remains were buried in Ocean View Cemetery in Eureka. More than 40 years later, in 2010, the grave was exhumed and DNA samples were taken in accordance with a recently enacted California procedure concerning unidentified remains.
No matches were discovered until last year, when the case was given to the forensic genealogy laboratory Othram, based in Texas. Investigators there found genetic information indicating the unknown man may have been the father of a woman now living in Louisiana, the sheriff’s report said. When contacted, she said that last saw her father, William Toller, when she was 8 years old.
Her DNA confirmed the identification: The mystery man was William Melvin Toller, born in 1927.
The daughter helped fill in details of his life. He had grown up in Idaho and lied about his age to join the Marines in 1942, when he was 15. A Navy document listing World War II casualties said Toller, then a corporal in the Marine Corps Reserve, had been wounded in action; his daughter said he fought in the South Pacific.
Returning home, he received a degree in psychology from the University of Idaho, then re-enlisted in the military and saw combat in Korea. When he came back after that, his wife found him “a different man,” the daughter said. “It is probable that William was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder,” the Humboldt County sheriff’s account said.
Toller and his wife divorced in the 1950s, and his daughter lost contact with him. He is believed to have been in his 30s when he died.
The sheriff’s office asks that anyone with information about his whereabouts prior to his death contact Investigator Mike Fridley at 707-441-3024
