Chief Deputy
Jay Oberholtzer

Chief Deputy Jay A. Oberholtzer joined the DeKalb County Sheriffs Department in August of 1977 as a reserve deputy sheriff under Sheriff John Graham. In January of 1978 he accepted a position as a Sheriffs Department police dispatcher and in 1979 attended the basic training course at the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy in Plainfield, Indiana. In October of 1979 Oberholtzer was promoted to merit deputy sheriff by the Sheriffs merit board and assigned as a road patrol officer. During the past 24 years Oberholtzer has patrolled over 600,000 miles of Dekalb County's state and county roadways, performed hundreds of misdemeanor and felony criminal investigations and became the departments firearms and moving radar instructor. In 1989 Oberholtzer graduated from the Argenbright International Institute of polygraph and for the following five years assisted numerous county and city police departments, state police, FBI and secret service in their criminal investigations as a polygraph examiner, having performed over 400 examinations. During 1992 and 1993 Oberholtzer worked with the United States National Security Agency in polygraph research. Chief Deputy Oberholtzer is also a graduate of the Department of Justice's National Sheriffs Institute.  Oberholtzer was elected Sheriff of Dekalb County in 1994 and served in that position until December of 2002.  In January 2003 Oberholtzer was appointed as Chief Deputy by Sheriff John W. Dennis.  Oberholtzer and Dennis have worked together as a team in law enforcement since 1977 and were friends prior to that time.  The citizens of Dekalb County have a experienced, involved and hard working team leading their Dekalb County Sheriff’s Department.