Murder Victim Identified
by Jeannine Gutman

With the FBI’s help, the sheriff’s department Wednesday identified a murder victim whose decapitated and mutilated body was found last week in the Running Springs area. Gregory Wallace Jolley, 19, of Jacksonville, Florida, is believed to have been killed two to five days before his headless body was found last Friday stuffed in a plastic trash bag off Highway 330, sheriff’s homicide investigators said. The next day officers found the young man’s severed head and “other body parts” also wrapped in plastic trash bags in a garbage bin here, about 20 to 25 miles from where the body was located, deputies said. “Contact was made with his parents today (Wednesday),” said Sgt. Dean Knadler of the sheriff’s homicide division. “They said that for the past two months they had been unaware of his whereabouts. “We don’t know what he was doing out here or who he was with. It’s going to take some time to piece all of that together,” he said. Not much is known about Jolley but officers said that while in Florida he worked in his father’s diving equipment store. The FBI was asked Wednesday to help identify the victim after the sheriff’s department exhausted all state resources, Knadler said. “We ran the (finger) prints (of the victim) through all the state systems and we came up with nothing. So we asked the FBI to run the fingerprints through their national system and they came up with a match about 12:30 p.m.,” Knadler said. Through the FBI bureau in Riverside, Jolley’s fingerprints were sent by electronic transmission to the Washington, D.C., headquarters where a match was made, Knadler said. No arrests have been made in connection with the slaying, officers said. A county pathologist compared the vertebrae in the body to that in the head and said that “they matched, that they were identical,” deputies said.