Credit: DDP
Nearly half a century after her body was discovered in a high school parking lot, the DNA Doe Project has identified Ventura County Jane Doe as Maricela Rocha Parga. Born in Mexico but later a resident of Los Angeles, Parga was 22 years old and pregnant when she was killed by Wilson Chouest, who was convicted of her murder in 2018. Her identification was the product of seven years of genealogy research, making this the toughest case ever solved by the DNA Doe Project.
On July 18, 1980, the body of a young woman was found in the parking lot of Westlake High School in Ventura County, California. She had been raped and murdered a few hours beforehand, and it appeared that she had been killed elsewhere before her body was brought to the school. It was also determined that she was around four months pregnant at the time she was murdered.
Decades later, her killing was linked to another cold case. A different Jane Doe had been found in Kern County just four days prior, and DNA evidence suggested that the two women had been murdered by the same man. In 2015, Wilson Chouest was arrested and charged with these two murders, before being convicted of both in 2018. Finally, by 2021, the DNA Doe Project was able to identify the Jane Doe found in Kern County as Shirley Soosay, an Indigenous woman from Alberta, Canada.
In spite of all these breakthroughs, Ventura County Jane Doe remained unidentified. The Ventura County Sheriff’s Office had brought this case to the DNA Doe Project in 2018, and it was soon apparent to our team that the unidentified woman had roots in Mexico. But with only distant DNA matches and scant public records to work with, solving this case became the largest and most labour-intensive endeavour in the history of the DNA Doe Project.
“For seven years, I worked almost every week trying to solve the mysteries presented by this case,” said researcher Carl Koppleman. “I often wondered, after the passage of so many years, whether our Jane Doe still had living family members searching for answers.”
Over the course of seven years, the team on this case built a family tree comprising over 125,000 people. Over 40 DNA Doe Project volunteers worked on this case, devoting thousands of hours of their own time pro bono in an effort to give Ventura County Jane Doe her real name back. Investigators from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office worked tirelessly alongside the DDP team to follow up on leads and gather additional information to aid our research, with their hard work proving invaluable.
Finally, after years of research, the team began to home in on the family of the unidentified woman. A couple born in the late 1800s in the Mexican state of Zacatecas were identified as the likely great grandparents of Ventura County Jane Doe, at which point the team and investigators began tracking down their descendants.
On Dec. 9, 2025, investigators spoke with a great grandson of this couple, and he shared some critical information - his sister, Maricela Rocha Parga, had been missing since 1980.
Maricela was born in 1958 in Monterrey, Mexico, but she later moved with her family to Los Angeles. Following her disappearance, her siblings spent years looking for her, but they were never able to find out what happened to her. After speaking with investigators, two of Maricela’s siblings immediately booked flights and flew to California the next day, where they provided DNA samples. These samples were later used to confirm that the woman known for decades only as Ventura County Jane Doe was in fact Maricela Rocha Parga.
“Having spent over six years working on this case, I was honored to play a part in finally giving Ventura County Jane Doe back her name,” said team leader Rebecca Somerhalder. “Our hearts go out to Maricela’s family as she is finally returned home to her loved ones, who kept her in their thoughts for all these years.”
The DNA Doe Project is grateful to the groups and individuals who helped solve this case: the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office, who entrusted the case to the DNA Doe Project; Fulgent Genetics for DNA extraction and sequencing; Greg Magoon for bioinformatics; GEDmatch Pro and FamilyTreeDNA for providing their databases; our generous donors who joined our mission and contributed to this case; and the DNA Doe Project’s dedicated teams of volunteer investigative genetic genealogists who work tirelessly to bring all our Jane and John Does home.
Republished courtesy of DNA Doe Project