A gold necklace with Jimmie “Jay” Lee’s name was found with human remains in Carroll County this weekend, but authorities have not publicly confirmed that the remains belong to the missing University of Mississippi student and prominent member of Oxford’s LGBTQ+ community.
Local authorities confirmed that they recovered the necklace along with human remains that are still awaiting DNA identification. Carroll County Sheriff Clint Walker admitted receiving a picture of the jewelry via text but declined to comment. The Oxford Police Department could not be reached by press time.
Mississippi Today received an image of the cursive nameplate, which matches a necklace seen in pictures and videos on Lee’s Instagram account as recently as two days before he went missing.
Lee’s body had been missing since July 2022, when his mother informed local authorities that she hadn’t heard from him. A few weeks later, Sheldon Timothy Herrington Jr., a fellow Ole Miss student and recent graduate, was arrested and accused of murdering Lee to protect their secret sexual relationship.
Herrington’s counsel, state Rep. Kevin Horan (R-Grenada), declined to comment. We couldn’t reach Lee’s parents.
We discovered the human remains approximately an hour and a half south of Oxford. According to evidence presented in the case, on the day Lee went missing, Herrington was seen on film removing a long-handled shovel and wheelbarrow from his parents’ residence in Grenada County and loading them into the back of a box truck belonging to his moving company.
The Lafayette County District Attorney’s Office tried Herrington on capital murder charges in December. A judge declared a mistrial when the jury, picked in Forrest County, hung 11-1, with the opposing juror reportedly unable to convict owing to a lack of a body.
