The medical examiner could not determine a cause or manner of death for Jimmie “Jay” Lee, the University of Mississippi student whose disappearance and death sparked a movement in Oxford’s LGBTQ+ community. 

Missing for more than two years, Lee’s remains were found earlier this year in a wooded gully in rural Carroll County – about an hour and a half south of Oxford – where people have been known to illegally dump trash. 

But the cause of death could not be determined in part because of the decomposition of Lee’s body, said Carroll County Coroner Mark Stiles who responded to the scene. The remains were skeletal, with no soft tissue. 

“It’s kind of hard for us as coroners when we go to a scene like a homicide or a suicide or a natural death,” he said. “We’ve got the body there, and we’ve got first-hand accounts of usually witnesses. But in this case, we didn’t have anything. It was just the remains that were found.” 

Cause of death refers to how someone died, such as a gunshot, stabbing or strangulation, while manner of death is how medical examiners classify whether a person died from a suicide, homicide or natural death. 

An “undetermined” finding does not mean the autopsy has ruled out homicide as a potential manner of Lee’s death, Stiles noted. 

“The autopsy is going to be kind of vague just from what they had to work with,” he said. “It was just some bones.” 

The discovery of Lee’s remains, aided in part by a necklace with Lee’s name on it, came after a deadlocked jury led a Lafayette County Circuit Court judge to declare a mistrial in the state’s case against Shelton Timothy Herrington Jr., a fellow Ole Miss student who was arrested and charged with capital murder a few weeks after Lee went missing in the summer of 2022. 

One of the 12 jurors refused to convict Herrington due to the lack of Lee’s body during the first trial. The prosecution had built a circumstantial case against Herrington, arguing he was the last person to see Lee alive based on cellphone data. 

Herrington is set for trial again in early December in Lafayette County, with jurors to be drawn from Madison County – a similar setup to last year when jurors were drawn from Forest County. 

The judge, Kelly Luther, has taken several steps to insulate the case from intense media attention. Earlier this week, he granted an oral motion from Herrington’s defense attorney, Aafram Sellers, to file pre-trial motions under seal. Sellers did not respond to an inquiry from Mississippi Today.

“The Court has conducted a balancing test to weigh the competing interests of the public’s right of access and the Defendant’s request to seal certain pre-trial motions,” Luther wrote in the Oct. 27 order. “The circumstances do not warrant sealing the entire file; however, the Court finds no less restrictive alternative to protect the integrity of this matter.”

Last year, Luther denied a joint motion from the prosecution and Herrington’s defense to seal the entirety of the filings in the case. Legal experts had called the joint motion “highly unusual.” Instead, Luther said he would consider sealing some filings containing evidence that could prejudice a jury if requested to do so by the defense. 

In other filings this week, Sellers asked Luther to exclude the photographs of the crime scene and Lee’s autopsy as well as expert testimony the state plans to submit from a clinical social worker who has researched behavior in the LGBTQ+ community.

The prosecution’s theory of the case last year was that Herrington killed Lee to preserve the secret of their sexual relationship. 

“Relevance requires more than tangential connection to broad social categories,” Sellers wrote in an Oct. 28 motion. “It demands a meaningful relationship between the expert’s opinion and the specific facts in dispute.”

Herrington’s case is still considered an open investigation, Stiles said. But he noted the autopsy report from the state medical examiner’s office could be changed pending the outcome of Herrington’s trial. 

“If the boy was found guilty or if he has a change of heart and admits to everything, then they could change it,” Stiles said. 

When Stiles responded to the scene the night that Lee’s remains were found off a dirt road, he said investigators laid the skeleton on a tarp, the bones arranged anatomically. Several were missing, likely due to animals. 

“You could see that some of the hands, the appendages were missing, the phalanges and the toes were missing, the smaller bones like that,” he said. 

Stiles then photographed the remains and collected them to be sent to the state Crime Lab in Jackson for analysis. He was not involved in the autopsy, but Stiles said medical examiners can take certain steps to form a conclusion in the absence of soft tissue. 

The skeletal remains can be X-rayed, which could help determine if broken bones were due to gunshot wounds. Stiles said the autopsy report ruled out blunt or sharp force trauma or firearm injuries as the cause of death. 

Other DNA that can point to a perpetrator can be collected, but Stiles said the only DNA on the autopsy report was for the identification of Lee’s body. 

In the case of strangulations – a theory the prosecution had offered for Lee’s death – sometimes a neck bone can be broken. Stiles said that was not the case with Lee’s remains. 

“You can strangle someone, and it still not be broken,” he said. 

The heat, humidity and water in Mississippi means bodies can decompose faster here than in other places. In Carroll County, Stiles said water running down the hills causes erosion to the point that people have for decades been known to throw objects like washing machines into ditches and gullies to form a blockade.

“In the desert, (a body) would dehydrate and be mummified,” Stiles said. 

Because the county is so rural, Stiles said it’s common for bodies to be found years after a death, in advanced stages of decomposition. He began serving as the county coroner in 2016, and his first case was that of a missing person who was found as skeletal remains. There was no foul play, he said. 

“Ever since I became coroner, I’ve always said, you can get away with murder but you’ve got to do it yourself and not tell anybody.”