2024-01-15 18:28:34
(Datilin) – On March 29, 2011, the body of a dismembered woman was discovered in a vineyard in Erwin, a town just across the Los Angeles county line.
At the beginning of this month, almost 13 years later, the victim was identified as witness Beth Kaplan, a 64-year-old Jewish woman who died.
The tortuous journey to crack the mystery of Kaplan’s name included a “long and difficult” multi-year effort by a DNA-focused nonprofit, eight generations of family documentation and the work of two Jewish genealogists who understood how thorny it can sometimes be to find out the identity of an unknown Ashkenazi Jew.
“It’s kind of a miracle that it was understood, in a lot of ways,” said Adina Newman, co-founder of the DNA Reunion Project at the Center for Jewish History in New York. “Returning her name to Ada Kaplan when people didn’t even realize she was missing is just a big deal for me.”
Kaplan’s decomposing body was found naked, stripped and mutilated in 2011, with few clues as to who she was or how she met her end. Her case remains unsolved, and in 2020, the Kern County Coroner enlisted the help of the DNA Doe Project, an organization that uses genetic genealogical analysis to build the family trees of unidentified victims in an effort to find their identities.
Kaplan’s DNA indicated that she was Ashkenazi Jewish, an ethnic heritage that was as much a challenge as a step forward. The research team initially found only Kaplan’s distant cousins, who had common Eastern European Jewish surnames and spanned eight generations.
This made it difficult to locate her specific ancestors, among all the people with these surnames, and place them in a family tree. Researchers are prohibited from using certain large DNA databases such as Ancestry.com and 23andMe, whose terms of service bar work with police.
“The truth is that it scared me, because I didn’t know I could solve her case,” Missy Kosky, head of the investigative team, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency regarding Kaplan’s Ashkenazi heritage.
Koski recalled the recent case of John Ayala who was a quarter Ashkenazi Jew, which was not solved for a long time due to difficulties the team encountered in identifying Jewish grandparents. This case is ultimately solved through the non-Jewish side of his family tree.
“We’ve been working very hard on this for a long time, so I already knew how difficult it could be in terms of trying to bring these family members together,” Koski explained.
To further complicate matters, researchers eventually discovered that three of Kaplan’s four grandparents were immigrants—meaning they had to search through records in Eastern Europe to connect them together.
Many Ashkenazi families changed their surnames or spelled the same names differently. And Ashkenazi Jews are historically an endogamous group. They are descended from a small population and breed from the same small tribe for generations. This means that an Ashkenazi Jew may have a strong DNA match with someone he is not really related to.
For help, the team turned to an expert in Jewish genealogy: Susan King, the founder of JewishGen, an online database for Jewish genealogy research. King’s extensive knowledge of Jewish genealogy led the Ayala DNA team to Kaplan’s grandparents, including an ancestor born in Lithuania in the 1980s. But King died in December 2022 before Kaplan was identified on the family tree.
The Ayelet DNA Project then approached Newman, whose DNA Reunification Project helps connect Holocaust survivors with their long-lost relatives. Newman previously volunteered on another John Doe case, involving a man of Ashkenazi heritage whose body was found in Maine in 2000. This John Doe was eventually identified by the local medical examiner and the FBI as Philip Kahn, a Las Vegas cab driver. who appeared as an extra in the 1988 film “The Rain Man” with his wife Jean.
“My other work is in … helping survivors find families and reconnect,” she said. “So it’s kind of the same ballpark, in a way, and I have the skills. I’d like to use it for the biggest mitzvos possible, that’s how I see it.”
DNA testing has recently come under scrutiny in the Jewish world due to privacy concerns that arose when hackers stole the data of Ashkenazi users on 23AndMe in a targeted attack, and put the information up for sale. The genetic testing company is now facing a class action lawsuit in federal court for negligence, invasion of privacy, unjust enrichment and breach of implied contract.
But for genealogists like Koski and Newman, the benefits of these databases outweigh the risks. Newman said the privacy issues go far beyond the potential problems associated with DNA databases — and that to definitively identify someone, one examines more than genetic records.
“People think DNA does all these things, but people don’t realize the digital footprints they leave behind. We shed DNA every day of our lives,” Newman said. “So I think people get a lot of DNA stuff wrong when really… you might be a match for me, but I can’t find you because the DNA told me something. I find you because of your digital footprint. I find you through public records, find you through Your Facebook profile”.
She added, “The DNA is kind of the starting point.”
In July 2023, the team of investigators working on Kaplan’s case found two potential family members who agreed to provide DNA samples for comparison. One of her relatives lives in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Forest Hills in Queens, New York. This, in turn, eventually led to Kaplan’s identity.
The cause or place of death has not been determined in Kaplan’s case, and Kern County sheriff’s detectives learned from interviews with family members that she had never been reported missing. She is not known to have any children. Also, no suspect has been identified in connection with her death.
But researchers did learn some details about her life: Online yearbook records show Kaplan attended Forest Hills High School, where, as a senior, she was an office assistant and one of the recipients of the New York State Scholarship Award in 1963. She wrote that she had aspirations of becoming a prima ballerina.
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