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The original was posted on /r/unresolvedmysteries by /u/DNADoeProject on 2024-01-05 18:18:12+00:00.
I am happy to announce that the DNA Doe Project has been able to identify Kern County Jane Doe 2011 as Ada Beth Kaplan! Below is some additional information about our work on this case, in addition to some links to articles regarding this identification:
After nearly 13 years, the Kern County Medical Examiner’s Office and the DNA Doe Project have identified Kern County Jane Doe 2011 as Ada Beth Kaplan of Canyon Country, California, bringing closure to a case that has remained unresolved for more than a decade.
On March 29, 2011, Kaplan’s partially decomposed body was found in a vineyard in Arvin, California. The head and thumbs were missing from the corpse, and her body had been drained of blood. The gruesome scene haunted investigators, who worked diligently to identify the remains but ran out of leads. The case went cold until 2020, when the Kern County Medical Examiner’s Office reached out to the DNA Doe Project for assistance.
Team Leader Missy Koski’s group of volunteer investigative genetic genealogists worked tirelessly on the case, employing innovative techniques to restore the identity of Kern County Jane Doe 2011.
DNA matches to the Jane Doe’s genetic profile were distant cousins with common surnames, making building Kaplan’s family tree a time-intensive task to identify ancestors spanning 8 generations and place them in an extensive family tree. Three of her four grandparents were immigrants, meaning researchers were searching Eastern European records to connect her matches to each other.
“Our team worked long and hard for this identification,” said 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.”
Investigative genetic genealogy is a set of techniques combining traditional genealogical research with analysis of DNA relatives and has been used successfully in cold cases of unidentified human remains since 2018, when the DNA Doe Project announced its first successful identification - Buckskin Girl.
The DNA Doe Project is grateful to the groups and individuals who helped solve this case: the Kern County Medical Examiner’s Office, who entrusted the case to the DNA Doe Project; HudsonAlpha Discovery for DNA sequencing; Kevin Lord for bioinformatics; GEDmatch Pro and FTDNA for providing their databases; our generous donors who joined our mission; and DDP’s dedicated teams of volunteer investigative genetic genealogists who work tirelessly to bring all our Jane and John Does home.
But what was the story? Was she murdered?