Sierra Nevada skull found by loggers over 30 years ago is ID’d as George Krusely

A mystery that began with a grisly find in the California wilderness has finally been cracked — more than three decades later.

George Krusely had been a name lost to investigators until DNA technology and genetic genealogy finally connected him to a partial skull discovered by loggers near Putt Lake in Nyack in 1994.

Krusely, born April 30, 1929, was last known to be in California in 1963, according to the Placer County Sheriff’s Office.

Then a skull was discovered on July 7, 1994, at a remote campsite in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Detectives believed it had been there for at least a year, estimating it had been “quite some time, upwards of a year.”

Deputies collected the remains and other evidence, but the case quickly ran into a dead end. There was not enough information to establish how the man died.

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Investigators eventually listed the unidentified man in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, with his age estimated at between 50 and 60.

The case finally got a jolt in December 2024, when Placer County investigators teamed with the California Department of Justice and Othram Inc., which conducts advanced DNA testing.

Othram scientists were able to build a “comprehensive DNA profile for the man.”

That genetic profile was sent the following month to Ramapo College’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center.

Instead of simply looking for a name, the team used genetic information to work backward through family connections.

It was a particularly difficult hunt because of the unidentified man’s Croatian and Yugoslavian ancestry.

“The case was very challenging due to the Croatian and Yugoslavian ancestry of the unidentified,” Cairenn Binder, director of Ramapo’s IGG Center, said in a statement.

“Low representation in accessible DNA databases and limited availability of genealogy records in some populations can make our research more complex.”

In December 2025, the Ramapo team identified Krusely as a potential match. Investigators then located a living descendant and, with help from the Lordstown Police Department in Ohio, obtained a DNA sample.

It matched. The decades-old remains were finally confirmed as Krusely’s.

Authorities still don’t know how long Krusely had been dead when the loggers stumbled across his remains in 1994.