Detectives learn name of Calif. woman found posed headless in field

A California woman found decapitated and posed in a vineyard in 2011 has finally been identified — and detectives say she was never reported missing.

On March 29, 2011, the woman was discovered in a vineyard off Sebastian and Wheeler Ridge roads in Arvin, a rural area off I-5 near the Grapevine. The body was headless, thumbless, drained of blood and posed in an intentionally degrading way. 

“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life,” a Kern County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson told KGET at the time of the discovery. “I’ve seen some pretty gruesome crime scenes and this was just … it was creepy.”

“Why did they take the time to drain the blood from the body?” he continued. “The crime scene itself was very clean. Honestly, it looked like somebody had taken a mannequin, removed the head of the mannequin and posed it on the dirt road.”

Although the woman’s DNA was submitted to national databases, and detectives scoured missing person reports, the case went cold. The woman’s identity remained a mystery.

In 2020, the Kern County Medical Examiner’s Office and the DNA Doe Project teamed up to give the case another try. The Jane Doe shared DNA with the known genetic profiles of several distant cousins, and genetic genealogists had to build a family tree of eight generations to begin to piece together closer blood relations. They discovered the woman was of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, and three of her four grandparents were immigrants.

“Our team worked long and hard for this identification,” DNA Doe Project team leader Missy Koski said in a statement. “Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry is often complicated to unravel. When we brought in an expert in Jewish records and genealogy, that made a huge difference.”

At last, in July 2023, Koski’s team believed they found two living family members on the East Coast. When their DNA samples were compared to the Arvin Jane Doe, it was a familial match. 

The woman is Ada Beth Kaplan, who was 64 and living in Canyon Country, Santa Clarita, when she was killed. Because of the state of her remains, a cause of death was not found, and detectives believe she was killed somewhere else and then taken to the Arvin site. When sheriff’s deputies from Kern County spoke with Kaplan’s family, they said she was never reported missing; the sheriff’s office did not explain why that was the case.

There is one Ada Beth Kaplan born in 1947 in U.S. census records. The 1950 census shows three-year-old Ada Beth living in the Bronx with her parents, Louis and Mary Kaplan. Louis Kaplan’s parents were born in Russia and Poland, and he was working as a shipping clerk.

The investigation is not yet over. With Kaplan’s name now public, detectives are seeking new leads. Anyone with information is asked to call the Kern County Sheriff’s Office at 661-487-4553.