Editor’s Note: Details in this story may be gruesome; reader’s discretion is advised. Video above is from a 2018 update on the investigation.
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — In a stunning revelation, a decapitated body found nearly 13 years ago in a vineyard outside Arvin, California, has been identified.
In March 2011, a woman’s decapitated body was found in a Kern County vineyard.
“The body was completely nude and lying prone on its back on the dirt roadway and it appeared that the body had been posed by whoever left the body there,” Ray Pruitt, formerly of the Kern County Sheriff’s Department, told Nexstar’s KGET in 2018.
While it wasn’t uncommon for bodies to be found in the vineyards and orchards throughout the county, former Kern County Sheriff’s Lt. David Hubbard called the discovery “gruesome” and “very unusual.”
“Mutilated bodies in homicides are pretty rare,” Hubbard said in 2018. “We don’t get too many of them. Something to the point of full decapitation is pretty rare.”
According to Pruitt, the blood had apparently been drained from the woman’s body, and “the crime scene itself was very clean.”
“The body wasn’t just haphazardly dumped out of a moving car or dumped out of a car that pulled over on the side of the road,” Pruitt said. “This person took their time to pull into this dirt access road, remove the body, place it on the ground, and pose it in what I would consider a sexual manner and wanted the body found like that.”
The case quickly went cold, largely because police weren’t able to identify the victim. Investigators weren’t able to identify any distinctive features on the woman, and theorized the killer intentionally made her unidentifiable — the woman’s thumbs were also removed. The woman was not in any criminal systems, and thumb prints are the only prints collected for things like driver’s licenses and passports.
The woman’s head was also never found either.
There has, however, been a break in the case: the woman’s remains have been identified as Ada Beth Kaplan, 64, of Canyon Country, coroner’s officials said Thursday.
Kaplan was buried in Union Cemetery after all leads to identify her were exhausted. But in 2020 the coroner’s office worked with the nonprofit DNA Doe Project, which built a family tree based on a DNA profile.
In July, two potential family members were identified, officials said. They provided DNA samples for comparison, and Kaplan was identified.
“Kern County Sheriff detectives followed up on the investigation and interviewed family members and it was learned that a missing person report was not filed on her,” officials said.
The location where Kaplan was killed and who killed her remains unknown, according to coroner’s officials.
So far, authorities have not released any additional information. The Kern County Sheriff’s Office didn’t immediately respond to Nexstar’s request for comment.