The police said the remains recovered in a grave in a wildlife area near Sacramento are likely those of Adea Shabani.
Detectives in Los Angeles searching for an actress who disappeared last month from her Hollywood apartment found a body they believe is hers on Tuesday nearly 400 miles north, buried in a Northern California wildlife area, the police said.
The woman, Adea Shabani, 25, had been missing since the afternoon of Feb. 23, when a security camera in her apartment building captured her taking luggage onto an elevator with her boyfriend. Her friends and family never heard from her again, prompting the police to start what became an expansive investigation that spread out from Los Angeles to the foothills of the Sierra Mountains to Colorado.
The search ended on Tuesday. Along a creek in the Spenceville Wildlife Area, detectives recovered a person’s remains in a shallow grave in a vast nature reserve in Nevada County, about 20 miles northeast of Sacramento. While the coroner’s office has yet to identify the body, the police believe the remains belong to Ms. Shabani, Capt. William P. Hayes of the Los Angeles Police Department said at a news conference on Tuesday afternoon.
Shortly after her friends officially reported her missing on Feb. 25, the police focused on her boyfriend, Christopher Spotz, who was seen leaving the apartment with her. According to the police, Mr. Spotz, 33, who was engaged to another woman, told detectives that on Feb. 23, they stopped for coffee in Hollywood and then headed north for his father’s home in a town outside Sacramento.
But their road trip was cut short just miles outside Los Angeles, the police said he told them. The couple got into an argument, he said, and he let Ms. Shabani out of the car in Santa Clarita, a city about 25 miles from her apartment. However, detectives found no signs of Ms. Shabani in Santa Clarita or in Yuba County, where his father lives, Captain Hayes said on Tuesday.
By early March, friends still had not heard from Ms. Shabani, who was born in Macedonia and moved to Hollywood to pursue a career in acting and modeling. She played a small role in an independent movie released last year.
Around that same time in March, Mr. Spotz left California with his fiancée for Fort Morgan, Colo. The Los Angeles Police Department alerted other police agencies that they were searching for Mr. Spotz and his Toyota Tacoma pickup truck.
Last Thursday, San Bernardino sheriff’s deputies spotted his pickup truck near Interstate 10 east of Los Angeles. They tried to stop him, but Mr. Spotz took off, leading them on a roughly 60-mile chase that ended when he fatally shot himself inside the truck, the police said.
Captain Hayes said that despite the department’s frantic search for Ms. Shabani in late February, she was most likely dead the same day she left her apartment or the next morning. “Something happened, and I believe it to be somewhat untoward — that there was foul play involved,” he said at the news conference.
He added that detectives believe Mr. Spotz played some role in her death, which was being investigated as a homicide. “I do believe he was involved in it,” Captain Hayes said.
