Remains of woman identified decades after she was unearthed in desert, CA officials say

Almost 30 years ago, a woman in her late 50s was found wrapped in a plastic sheet and partially buried in the desert near Thousand Palms, California.

This week, local authorities announced that they had identified her as Patricia Cavallaro, who was 57 years old at the time of her death, according to a news release from the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office.

Cavallaro was from Bellflower, about 110 miles west of Thousand Palms, City News Service reported. A detailed sketch of her was created and circulated at the time but deputies found no solid clues about her identity, the outlet reported.

The Riverside County coroner’s office and sheriff’s department attempted to identify the remains when they were found, but exhausted all leads, the release said. The case went cold until 2021, when the district attorney’s cold case unit worked with a lab in Texas to locate a potential DNA match from a surviving biological child of Cavallaro’s and match it with her remains, the release said.

California’s Department of Justice confirmed to the county’s cold case team in mid-December that it was very likely the body was Cavallaro’s, the release said.

The investigation into Cavallaro’s cause of death is still ongoing, the release said.

But senior investigator Mike Thompson told the Palm Springs Desert Sun that an autopsy revealed Cavallaro died from homicidal violence, and that she was likely killed elsewhere before being buried in the desert.

Cavallaro wasn’t reported missing until 2001. Her husband told police at the time that she had just “walked away” from home, the Desert Sun reported. He died in 2017.

“You follow the evidence and you see she was there, and then she just stopped existing in 1994,” Thompson told the outlet. “After that, there’s no evidence that she’s alive or dead, no marriage or divorce records, no death certificate.”

Thousand Palms is about 115 miles east of Los Angeles.

This story was originally published January 3, 2022 at 3:15 PM with the headline "Remains of woman identified decades after she was unearthed in desert, CA officials say."