A woman whose decapitated body was found at one of the grisliest crime scenes police had ever seen has been identified a decade later.
The naked body was drained of blood and posed as a mannequin in a “sexually degrading position” in a vineyard near Arvin, California on March 29, 2011.
In addition to the macabre placement of the body, lying flat on her back on a dirt road surrounded by vines, the killer was also meticulous in concealing her identity: she cut off not only her head, but both thumbs as well.
The case confused the detectives and quickly went cold, as without identifying the body they had no leads to proceed.
But 13 years later, the woman has finally been identified as Ada Beth Kaplan, 64, of Canyon Country, California, near Santa Clara. Her killer was never caught.
Ada Beth Kaplan, 64, (pictured in a much older photo) was identified as the woman whose decapitated body was found in a vineyard on March 29, 2011.
The naked body was drained of blood and posed as a mannequin in a 'sexually degrading position' in a vineyard on March 29, 2011
The only things going on at the time were a C-section scar, indicating the victim had at least one child, and a scar on her left breast from a mastectomy.
So for nearly a decade, the files sat in storage until the Kern County Medical Examiner's Office asked the DNA Doe Project to take another look at the case.
After two and a half years of painstaking investigation, the body was identified as Kaplan.
“Our team worked long and hard for this identification… but they never gave up and their perseverance finally paid off,” said team leader Missy Koski.
DNA determined Kaplan was Ashkenazi Jewish, which made the identification process even more difficult.
'Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry is often complicated to unravel. When we brought in an expert in Jewish archives and genealogy, it made a huge difference, Koski said.
The researchers initially found only distant cousins with common surnames, and had to work through a web of ancestors spanning eight generations.
'Three of her four grandparents were immigrants, so the researchers had to sift through Eastern European data to connect her matches.
Finally, last July they found two potential relatives living on the East Coast, including in Forest Hills in Queens, New York, who provided DNA samples.
Interviews with Kaplan's family revealed another reason why she was difficult to identify: No one ever reported her missing.
Kaplan's body was found in Arvin, California, near Bakersfield and has only now been identified
Police arrived on the scene in March 2011, looking for clues, but without ID the case quickly came to a standstill
Kaplan was buried at Union Cemetery in Bakersfield after she could not be identified. It is unknown whether her remains will now be moved.
Detectives working the cases at the time said the gruesome scene stayed with them and even gave them nightmares after seeing it.
'I've never seen anything like that in my life. “I've seen some pretty gruesome crime scenes and this was just… it was creepy,” retired Detective Ray Pruitt said. KGET in 2018.
'Why did they take the time to drain the blood from the body? The crime scene itself was very clean. Honestly, it looked like someone had taken a mannequin, removed the mannequin's head and placed it on the dirt road.
“This individual took the time to drive onto this dirt access road, remove the body, place it on the ground and pose it in a way that I would consider sexual, and he wanted the body to be found that way. '
Homicide Sergeant David Hubbard said in 2018 that without identification, detectives had no chance of solving the case, and that they were nervous the killer was still at large after such a heinous crime.
“If someone doesn't come here and tell us why he did it, I don't know if we'll ever really have an answer to it,” he said.
Now they have a place to start.