Passersby Find 25 Bodies Over 10-Year Period : Crime: A Camarillo man’s corpse found in a car is the most recent. Six have been discovered along California 33.

The badly decomposed body of a 22-year-old Camarillo man who had been stabbed to death was found Feb. 23 in the trunk of a car in a Fillmore neighborhood.

And the corpse of a 44-year-old woman was discovered Jan. 15, slumped in the front seat of a car at a Simi Valley bank.

The two gruesome discoveries represent what authorities believe may be the latest examples of body dumpings--cases in which people are killed or die in one location and their bodies are disposed of in another.

In addition, the bleached white skull of a young woman who died one to five years ago was discovered last week off the side of a remote stretch of road north of Ojai by a California Highway Patrol officer. Authorities say the woman could have been the victim of a traffic accident, or her body may have been dumped there.

Since 1980, about 25 bodies have been discovered in the county by passersby, authorities said. Almost half of the victims lived outside Ventura County. Ten of them were Los Angeles County residents, authorities said.

“Any area where a person can be somewhat unobserved probably will end up having bodies dumped,” Ventura County Sheriff’s Lt. Joe Harwell said.

Indeed, detectives said remoteness is the key to the most popular dumping spots. While bodies have been scattered throughout the county, authorities said the Lockwood Valley in the Los Padres National Forest and canyons in the east end of the county have proved popular.

The area with the highest number of body discoveries is an isolated stretch of California 33 that runs into the Los Padres National Forest. Six bodies have been found along California 33 since 1980.

“Sometimes I wonder how many we actually do find of the total up there,” Harwell said.

Authorities speculate that the road is favored because it is easily accessible and in good condition. Most important, however, are long stretches of road uninterrupted by houses or passersby.

“If you’ve ever done anything wrong where you felt you had to evade capture, you feel there’s eyes behind every tree,” Sheriff’s Lt. Paul Anderson said. “You get up in rural areas like Highway 33, and there just isn’t anything.”

Most recently, a woman’s skull was discovered Wednesday under brush about 500 feet down an incline by a CHP officer who was investigating cars abandoned off the side of the road.

The coroner’s office has determined that the toothless skull is that of an unidentified young woman. Meanwhile, sheriff’s detectives said they plan to return to the area and look for evidence that may indicate how the woman died.

Najat Chehade’s body was discovered about 10:40 a.m. Dec. 17 on the side of California 33 by a Sheriff’s Department employee who was taking inmates to the Rose Valley Work Camp, authorities said.

Chehade had been strangled with a cord 16 to 17 hours earlier, Harwell said. It appeared that her body was dumped off the side of the road after dark, and whoever dumped it probably intended it to roll farther down the embankment, Harwell said.

Detectives traced her address to a Los Angeles apartment that she shared with Louis Hayden Gary, 42. Gary, who was arrested last month in Boise, Ida., has pleaded not guilty to murder.

Authorities said that while killers often look for remote spots to dump bodies, no spot is sacred.

The body of Ramiro Costilla, 22, of Camarillo was discovered in a Fillmore neighborhood on Feb. 23 after residents called sheriff’s deputies to report a foul odor from a car that had been parked there for at least a week, authorities said. Deputies discovered the decomposed body of Costilla, who had been stabbed to death. The case is under investigation.

The body of Dorothy May Brinkley, a 44-year-old legal secretary, was spotted in the parking lot of a Simi Valley bank by a passerby on Jan. 15. Brinkley, who was found in her 1988 Mercury Cougar, had been killed, apparently in another location, by blunt and sharp injuries to her head and neck, authorities said.

Bodies have turned up in other unexpected places.

On Oct. 20, 1985, divers exploring the Channel Islands marina came face to face with a human head encased in a plastic bag that was weighted down, Harwell said. Authorities determined that the woman, who may have been the victim of a killer or a grave robber, was 35 to 40 years old. But her identity has not been discovered and the case remains open, he said.

Authorities said identification becomes a tricky problem after bodies have been in the open for a long time. Sometimes animals disturb the corpses, leaving authorities without the teeth and fingerprints that they most often use for identification. Decomposition can also make it difficult to retrieve the prints, they said.

Six of the bodies discovered remain unidentified, authorities said.

One body that was identified--against all odds--had no head or hands. The corpse was found by hikers on Nov. 4, 1985, in a homemade coffin near Lake Piru, said Municipal Court Commissioner John V. Paventi, who was a deputy district attorney at the time. The mutilation probably was an attempt to prevent identification, Paventi said.

But investigators matched the corpse, using the clothing, approximate height and a case of psoriasis, to a description of 69-year-old Edmund Rigeilski, who had been reported missing from North Hollywood, Paventi said.

Authorities discovered that Rigeilski had befriended a former butcher, Ronald Allen Galeska. Galeska allegedly tried to assume Rigeilski’s identity--cashing his checks and putting his house up for sale, Paventi said. He subsequently pleaded guilty to first-degree murder.

Dumping bodies also sometimes slows cases because investigators have no murder scene to search for evidence.

“If you have a shooting where you have people around, it’s a matter of you knowing where the gold mine is, and you just have to mine it,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard E. Holmes said. “If a body is dumped somewhere, you have to find the gold mine.”