Headless Woman Finally ID'd 13 Years After Being Found In CA Vineyard

ARVIN, CA — Nearly 13 years after authorities discovered a woman's partially decomposed body with her head and thumbs missing in an Arvin grape vineyard, she has been identified, authorities announced last week.

The woman, 64-year-old Ada Beth Kaplan, was a resident of Canyon Country at the time of her death, according to the Kern County Sheriff's Office.

On March 29, 2011, Kaplan's corpse was found drained of blood at a grape vineyard on Sebastian Road, just east of Wheeler Ridge Road.

The case "haunted investigators" as they "worked diligently to identify the remains but ran out of leads," according to the DNA Doe Project.

Officials were unable to determine her cause of death. Efforts to identify her from missing persons records and fingerprints were unsuccessful and there were no hits on her DNA as a missing person or from CODIS, authorities said.

She was laid to rest as a Jane Doe at Union Cemetery and the case went cold until 2020, when the Kern County Medical Examiner’s Office reached out to the DNA Doe Project for help.

A group of volunteer investigative genetic genealogists got to work, finding that DNA matches to the then-Jane Doe's genetic profile were distant cousins with common surnames, making building her family tree difficult, the Jane Doe Project said.

Three of her four grandparents were immigrants, meaning researchers were searching Eastern European records to connect her matches to each other.

"Our team worked long and hard for this identification," Team Leader Missy Koski said in a news release that announced Kaplan's identification. "Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry is often complicated to unravel. When we brought in an expert in Jewish records and genealogy, that made a huge difference."

To this day, the location where the crime occurred and suspect involved in her death remains unknown, officials said.

Investigative genetic genealogy technoques combine traditional genealogical research with analysis of DNA relatives, the Jane Doe Project said. It has been used successfully in cold cases of unidentified human remains since 2018, when the DNA Doe Project announced its first successful identification — Buckskin Girl.