Police identified a woman found dead on March 29, 2011, in this Arvin, California vineyard with her head and thumbs chopped off and her body drained of her blood as Ada Kaplan, 64. The Kern County Sheriff’s Office is still trying to identify her killer. (Google Maps)
Nearly 13 years after cops found a woman without her head or thumbs and with her blood drained from her body, they now know her name.
The Kern County Sheriff’s Office last week said it identified the woman found dead in a grape vineyard in Arvin, California, on March 29, 2011, as 64-year-old Ada Beth Kaplan. The scene that day in Arvin, which is about 30 miles south of Bakersfield, was brutal. In addition to having her head and thumbs chopped off, the woman now known as Kaplan also was nude and placed in a prone position that investigators considered sexual.
Detectives believe she was killed elsewhere and carefully placed in the vineyard. Coroners categorized the death as a homicide but could not determine the cause of death.
Ray Pruitt, then an investigator with Kern County Sheriff’s Department, described the scene as “surreal” in a 2018 interview with NBC affiliate KGET.
“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,” Pruitt said. “We were all just looking at each other trying to get our minds around what we were looking at.”
Pruitt said the murder was one “that you come across maybe once in an entire career, maybe never.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” Pruitt told KGET. “I’ve seen some pretty gruesome crime scenes and this was just … it was creepy.”
The sheriff’s office had little success for years. Missing persons’ records and fingerprints turned up empty. Two out-of-county cases generated interest but were ruled out by DNA. Investigators submitted specimens to the U.S. Department of Justice so they could create a DNA profile but there were no hits.
After the DNA Doe Project worked with the sheriff’s office in 2020 to successfully identify a woman found dead in 1980, investigators then asked the organization to create a genealogy profile in the 2011 case. Volunteer genealogists were able to find DNA matches of cousins of the then-identified woman and built out an extensive family tree spanning eight generations, the organization said in a press release.
The genealogists learned three of her four grandparents were from Eastern Europe and were of Jewish descent.
“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.”
Last July, the group identified two potential family members who lived on the East Coast. The family members agreed to provide their DNA and investigators were able to positively identify Kaplan. Investigators learned that Kaplan’s family never reported her missing.
Her killer and the location of her death remain unknown.
From the sheriff’s office:
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