BODIES KEEPING SECRETS COLD-CASE INVESTIGATOR HOPES TO FIND IDENTITIES.

Byline: ALEX DOBUZINSKIS Staff Writer

CASTAIC -- A flowery dress, a ring and a mangled, unidentifiable body. Dug up in 1969, these are the precious few clues investigators have in the case of Castaic Jane Doe.

Now a sheriff's investigator rehired out of retirement is working on a Texas link in the cold case. The inside of the ring bears an insignia of a Lone Star State jeweler.

``The big thing now is, all I want to do is get her identified and then figure out who killed her,'' said Investigator Richard Kennerly, 70, of the sheriff's Homicide Unit's cold-case division.

The insignia of three candles with the letters ``JA'' belongs to James Avery jewelers, a Christian-oriented company based in Kerrville in south-central Texas.

``A lot of these old (cases), there's not a whole lot I can go by. ... In this case I had the ring,'' Kennerly said. ``Also there was a dress, a hippie-type dress.''

It doesn't appear the mysterious victim, now known only as Jane Doe, was from the Santa Clarita Valley.

So Kennerly has talked to the Kerrville Daily Times about the case in an attempt to get it publicized in the town now home to more than 20,000.

The victim's body was dug up Sept. 7, 1969, from a shallow grave near Interstate 5 after her remains were found by off-road riders, Kennerly said.

The body had been there for months, and scavenging animals had torn it apart, he said. Not even a skull was left, but investigators determined the victim was 19 to 26 and that she had long, light-brown hair. It's possible she had been shot, Kennerly said.

As for the ring, the company that made it was established in 1954, with founder James Avery working out of a garage in Kerrville. Avery started a catalog in 1957, but in 1969 it was still a small company, and its first retail store had not opened.

``It was just him and word-of-mouth advertising,'' said Terri Armstrong, a spokeswoman for the company.

Now, the company has 41 stores.

Kennerly said he is unsure if the ring belonged to the victim or someone else. It's also unclear where the victim came from. She could have been a hitchhiker who was drawn to the Hollywood scene but ended up at a remote freeway truckstop, he said.

For Kennerly, who worked in the sheriff's Homicide Unit for 21 years and came out of retirement to work cold cases, Castaic Jane Doe is just one of 200 homicide victims he is trying to identify. It's a big caseload for an investigator, hired on a part-time basis, who works partly from home.

``I saw all those cases, the file, and said somebody ought to try to identify those people, and they gave me that job,'' he said. ``It's a challenge.''

Another decades-old case Kennerly is handling involves a young man whose headless and handless body was found Jan. 3, 1971, in the Angeles National Forest, near the junction of the I-5 and the Antelope Valley Freeway.

The body of the unidentified victim, believed to have been 19 to 25 years old, was spotted by a pile of rocks on a hillside.

On tables at his Sheriff's Department work station, Kennerly put out photos of the victims' many tattoos and a medal he had worn around his neck. That helped, because co-workers identified them as relating to Santeria, a set of religious beliefs common in Cuba.

Investigators believe the victim may have been from Cuba, but they still don't know who he was.

``No hands and no head; that's a little unusual,'' Kennerly said. ``It's hard to say what the hell they did with them. They weren't eaten off (by animals). They were cut off.''

Information on the two cases is posted on the Web site for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, at www.missingkids.com.

alex.dobuzinskis(at)dailynews.com

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3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color in SAC edition only) This is a photo of a ring that was found in 1969 in a shallow grave with a woman's remains off Interstate 5 in Castaic. The ring has been traced to a Texas jeweler in revived efforts to identify the woman.

(2 -- 3 -- ran in SAC edition only) A tattoo, shown at left, is among few clues to the identity of a body found with its head and hands cut off in 1971 in the Angeles National Forest near Newhall. At right, a flowery dress was found in 1969 in a shallow grave with a mangled, unidentifiable body off the Interstate 5 Freeway in Castaic. An investigator has come out of retirement for such cases.