DOVE CANYON : Victim in Ravine Undergoes Tests

Sheriff’s investigators were attempting to determine Wednesday whether a 22-year-old woman found partially clothed in a ravine near the Dove Canyon development had been raped.

Medical tests are expected within the next few days to help authorities determine what happened to the woman, Sheriff’s Lt. Dick Olson said.

The woman has told investigators several versions of what happened, but she could have been confused because of the effects of exposure, Olson said. She told investigators that she had been in the ravine since Sunday, he said.

Olson said that investigators were to interview the woman again Wednesday night or today after she had rested.

“She stated that she was walking along and fell into the ravine,” Olson said. “We don’t know for sure if that is what occurred.”

The woman was found Tuesday afternoon by three teen-agers who had been on their way to a lake in the area. The boys heard her moans and called sheriff’s deputies, authorities said.

“We just started looking through the bushes, and we found her,” said Jeremy Swirck, 15, who lives in the area. Swirck said that she was wearing only a shirt. Some of her clothes lying nearby had bloodstains, he said.

“She couldn’t really talk. . . . I just asked her what was wrong, and she said she couldn’t move,” Swirck said.

Paramedics said that the woman was conscious and had no apparent physical injuries except for the effects of exposure when she was found behind a row of unoccupied new houses on Highpoint near Dove Canyon Road. She was treated and released from Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo, Olson said.

Sheriff’s Lt. Larry Abbott said evidence at the scene indicated that she might have been sexually assaulted. He said the victim lives in a rural area within about three miles of Dove Canyon in the largely undeveloped, hilly country of southeast Orange County.

The area in which she was found is near new tennis courts for the exclusive Dove Canyon community, protected by locked gates in a fast-growing section of the county near Coto de Caza and Rancho Santa Margarita.