A headless woman whose partially decomposed body was found drained of blood in a Kern County vineyard in 2011 has been identified in a mysterious cold case.
The body, discovered in the community of Arvin about 100 miles north of Los Angeles, was identified through DNA testing as that of 64-year-old Ada Beth Kaplan, of Canyon Country.
Kaplan's naked and decapitated body was found in March 2011 in a grape vineyard off Sebastian Road, just north of the Los Angeles County line. Her thumbs also were missing and the body, which appeared to have been posed, was drained of blood, investigators said.
"I remember looking at the detectives and the sergeant on scene and the coroner investigator who had arrived on the scene and we were all kind of speechless," Ray Pruitt, formerly of the Kern County Sheriff’s Department, told KGET-TV in an August 2018 interview. "We were all just looking at each other trying to get our minds around what we were looking at."
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Few clues were left at the gruesome crime scene. There were no hits in missing persons databases. Two missing persons cases from outside Kern County caught investigators' attention, but they were eventually ruled out by DNA.
It was later determined that no missing persons report was filed.
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The body, identified only as a Jane Doe at the time, was buried at Union Cemetery after all identification leads were unsuccessful, the sheriff's department said.
The case went cold until 2020, when the Kern County Medical Examiner's Office worked with the DNA Doe Project to track down the victim's identity.
Working to piece together a family tree, they discovered DNA matches to distant cousins.
"Our team worked long and hard for this identification," said team leader Missy Koski, "Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry is often complicated to unravel. When we brought in an expert in Jewish records and genealogy, that made a huge difference."
In July 2023, two potential family members who lived on the East Coast were identified. They provided a DNA sample, allowing for the identification of Kaplan, announced this month by the Kern County Sheriff's Department.
What led to her death remains a mystery. No suspect has been identified.
