How A Neighbor Discovered A Missing 2007 Case Under Their Mountain Floor
A cold case gets solved when a homeowner finds human remains under the house.
It is a spooky thought to realize that the crawlspace of the home you live in might hide the remains of a previous tenant without you ever knowing it. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department announced a major breakthrough in a decades-old mystery this week. A missing person case from 2007 has finally been solved. The remains of Jill Maiorca were found in the crawlspace of a Big Bear Lake home. This discovery happened back in October 2020 but it is just now closing the book on the case. The homeowner found the remains and called the police. This led to the arrest of Jeff Maiorca. He is the ex-husband of Jill. The discovery of human remains not only solved the missing person case but also confirmed that the death was a homicide. We have the details on who was arrested and what happened next.
Jill Maiorca was 29 years old when she was reported missing from Big Bear Lake in 2007. Her disappearance was a mystery that consumed a lot of time for her family and the local authorities. For years, officials tried to find her. They ran DNA tests and other methods to identify the remains found in 2020. It took a long time for the results to come back. Finally, the DNA confirmed that the body was indeed Jill Maiorca. She was a resident of Big Bear Lake and the search for her seemed endless until the bones were dug up from under the floorboards. This case is now a homicide investigation.
The man in custody is Jeff Maiorca. He is 53 years old. He is the former husband of Jill Maiorca. Court records show that Jeff filed for divorce in Los Angeles County in 2004. That was three years before Jill went missing. Jeff Maiorca was arrested on suspicion of murder this week. He is currently being held in a San Bernardino County jail without bail. The sheriff’s release did not go into detail about what specific evidence led to his arrest. However, the connection between the remains found under the floor and the ex-husband is clear.
The timeline of this story is complex. The body was buried under the unsuspecting resident’s home without the homeowner’s knowledge. The discovery provided the key evidence needed to move this from a missing person file to a murder file. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department asked for the public’s help. They asked anyone with information regarding Jill Maiorca to reach out to the agency. This story highlights the importance of modern forensics in solving old crimes that were once thought to be unsolvable.
First reported by LA Times: California.
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