For more than half a century, homicide investigators have gathered annually at the California Homicide Investigators Association (CHIA) Conference.
“They have a conference and talk about -- kind of case studies on how they were able to solve a homicide investigation,” Detective Ashley Thompson of the Kern County Sheriff’s Office told Dateline.
At this year’s conference, Thompson met some of the Dateline team and told them about a cold case she’s working on: the unsolved homicide of Ada Kaplan Moore.
On the morning of March 29, 2011, the body of an unidentified woman was found by employees on the grounds of an Arvin, California, orchard. The Kern County Sheriff’s Office responded to the scene that day. “Kern County is -- is pretty rural,” Thompson said. “And in 2011 in that area, it was one hundred percent rural.”
The woman had been decapitated. “That definitely took me aback,” Thompson said. The death was ruled a homicide. Nothing else of note was found nearby, which led investigators to believe the orchard was not the crime scene. “We were able to pretty much determine that she was probably just placed there,” she said.
Authorities were unable to identify the woman. “She just wasn’t in the system,” Thompson said. She was a Jane Doe for more than a decade.
That changed in 2023. “Forensic investigative genetic genealogy was something that helped us identify her,” Thompson said. The victim was identified as 64-year-old Ada Kaplan Moore. After Ada was identified, Thompson was assigned to the case to investigate her homicide.
The detective’s first order of business? “Try to find anybody who knew her,” Thompson said. “I was able to find very [few] people.” She was able to speak with Ada’s husband. “I was given information that she had left this relationship, and that was pretty much it,” she said. “The information I got about her is very -- very little to none, to be honest.”
Thompson learned Ada was not from Kern County but from the Canyon Country neighborhood of Santa Clarita in Los Angeles County, about an hour and a half from Arvin. The detective has not found any ties Ada may have had to the area where her remains were found.
She learned Ada did not work and was not reported missing in 2011. “I can’t find family members that actually spent time with her, that -- that knew her. She doesn’t have any children,” Thompson said. “She doesn’t have any friends that I could find.”
That’s why Thompson is trying to bring attention to Ada’s story: “To see if somebody can even recognize her,” she said. “It’s very hard to find out who she was because she was very alone.”
Thompson is hoping to piece together a picture of Ada’s life and the people who knew her. “I’m really just looking for anybody who’s ever had an interaction with her that remembers her, and remembers who she was, or anything about her,” she said. Then, she hopes, she’ll be able to figure out what happened to Ada.
Thompson told Dateline it bothers her that no one seems to care about Ada. “I get phone calls from loved ones all the time asking me about updates,” she said. “I don’t receive any phone calls for Ada. Nobody’s -- nobody is fighting for her.” So Detective Thompson is.
“It’s a big, big case for me that I just -- I want to be able to just solve,” she said. “Because if I don’t solve it, I don’t think anybody’s gonna care.”
If you have any information about Ada’s case, please call Det. Thompson’s direct line at the Kern County Sheriff’s Office at 661-391-7593. If she doesn’t answer, please leave a voicemail with contact information.
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