Nine years ago, in March 2011, cops made a gruesome discovery in Arvin, California. The town is about 15 miles southeast of Bakersfield. What they found was the partially decomposed, unclothed, and headless body of a woman, and there were no leads.
The body was not only headless and unclothed, it had been drained of blood and was missing the two thumbs. Now, authorities have identified who she was via DNA analysis. Her name was Ada Beth Kaplan, and her case remains unsolved.
It took the officials almost 13 years to track down her identity because there were barely any clues. However, they determined the body belonged to a Caucasian woman 45 to 55 years old—the victim of a homicide.
In search of leads, they considered two missing persons cases in different counties that initially appeared promising. But both led to dead ends because DNA samples did not match. Investigators also submitted DNA samples to the Justice Department. However, the agency’s missing persons database didn’t turn up any matches.
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They eventually laid her body to rest when they ran out of leads. The case went cold for nine years until the start of the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit aiming to solve cases using DNA analysis.
A group of volunteer investigative genetic genealogists with the project poured time and effort over three years into piecing together Kaplan’s family tree after they hit on a DNA match to several of her distant cousins.
“Our team worked long and hard for this identification,” said Missy Koski, the team’s leader. When they discovered that three of Kaplan’s grandparents were immigrants with an Eastern European background, they reached out for help from an expert in Ashkenazi Jewish genealogy.
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According to Koski, this is because Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry is often challenging to unravel. “When we brought in an expert in Jewish records and genealogy, that made a huge difference,” Koski said.
In the end, the team found two possible relations of Kaplan’s far from where her body was. They were located on the other side of the country. After the relatives’ DNA samples returned a match, the team knew they had discovered the body’s identity.
Law enforcement officials later found out through interviews that nobody ever reported Kaplan missing. This makes one wonder why that is and how exactly she lost her life. While her identity is no more a mystery.
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The person who put her in that state, as well as where it happened, remains unknown. Unfortunately, it’s been 13 years since the homicide, and the trail is already very cold by now. So, it may remain one of the unsolved homicides recorded in the US.
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