Headless Body Found In South Bay Identified After Decades

REDONDO BEACH, CA — More than 20 years after police recovered a woman's headless remains from a backyard in the South Bay, authorities identified her as a woman who lost contact with her family in 1981.

The woman was Catherine Parker-Johnson, who disappeared when she was 24 years old, according to the Redondo Beach Police Department.

Parker-Johnson's identification is a major development in the decades-old cold case that stumped investigators and left her family members with unanswered questions.

On Aug. 29, 2001, construction crews working on a new home site in the 1600 block of Wollacott Street uncovered a plastic bag in the backyard that had a headless skeleton inside. At the time, investigators believed she died sometime between 1974 and 2001 and that she was white.

With no evidence indicating the identity of the skeleton, the case went cold.

In 2019 the Redondo Beach Police Department investigators reopened the case and began working with the DNA Doe Project, a nonprofit group that helps identify missing people by working with DNA collected at crime scenes.

Researchers at the DNA Doe Project developed a DNA profile from the remains and were able to analyze relationships between the unknown woman's relatives to find crucial clues about her identity.

"One of the first things researchers found when a DNA profile was developed from the remains was that she was actually of Sub-Saharan African descent, and not Caucasian as originally thought," officials at the DNA Doe Project said.

Based on the group's preliminary work, a DNA comparison test was conducted in March of this year on two women who were subsequently determined to be the sister and daughter of the dead woman, who was then tentatively identified as Parker-Johnson, police said.

Later that month, a familial DNA sample collected in Tennessee was sent to the California Department of Justice, and state investigators in April confirmed the remains were those of Parker-Johnson.

Though she lost contact with her family in 1981, she was never reported missing, police said.

At a news conference Monday morning, Redondo Beach police Chief Joe Hoffman said investigators were faced with a number of obstacles in their efforts to solve the crime.

"The crime occurred so long ago, and the condition that the partial skeleton was found, and the residence had turned over," Hoffman said. "There is very limited information about the actual direct connection to that location. However, that has been explored by the investigators. And the little bits and pieces about the location — the residential area — and the time frame have provided some useful information but no direct connection to that residence."

RBPD classified the case as an active homicide investigation and asked anyone who could have had previous contact with or information about Parker-Johnson to contact cold case investigators at 310-937-6675 or janedoe2001@redondo.org.

City News Service contributed to this report.