‘It was creepy’: Woman found in prone position with no head or thumbs and blood drained from entire body is identified

Ada Kaplan identified

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.”

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