As coroner’s officials excavated human remains from inside the wall of an apartment at a Lomita housing project Thursday, relatives of a woman who went missing six years ago said there’s no doubt they belong to their long-lost loved one.

It could take weeks before the remains are identified, sheriff’s investigators said. According to family members who spent the past few weeks scouring neighborhoods with fliers, authorities were led to the grisly scene by an anonymous tip generated in the missing-person case of Raven Joy Campbell.

Campbell was 31 when she went missing on June 4, 2009, from the apartment in the 26800 block of Western Avenue where sheriff’s deputies discovered the body. Family members described her as developmentally disabled.

Her case had grown cold until about two weeks ago, when it was featured on a television news program and fliers were distributed near the last areas she was seen alive.

A caller saw a flier and directed deputies to a section of wall in the Harbor Hills Housing Project, said Campbell’s sister, Cynthia Kemp.

When deputies arrived, they brought dogs trained in smelling cadavers. Two dogs indicated, on separate occasions earlier this week, that they smelled human remains in the area behind the wall, said Lt. Steve Jauch of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

“As a result, we came back today and we assisted the coroner’s Special Operations Response Team and they excavated what we believe to be human remains,” Jauch said. “We don’t know the identity of the victim, age, sex, race, or certainly the cause of death.”

• PHOTOS: Human remains found in Lomita housing project wall

Sheriff’s officials relocated a family that was living inside the apartment and received permission from the county to knock down a wall, where they found the remains Thursday.

Jauch would not describe the condition of the body or indicate exactly where in the apartment it was found because he said it could compromise the investigation. The cause of death was not yet known.

Campbell lived with her mother in Los Angeles until 2008, when the woman had a stroke and Campbell moved in with her brother in Hesperia. She had a son who did not live with her, and she survived on government disability benefits, Kemp said.

Things didn’t go well in Hesperia, so Campbell moved into an assisted-living home in Los Angeles.

She grew distant from her family members and, months later, they learned she had moved in with a high school friend named Nicole, who lived at the Harbor Hills apartment where the remains were found.

“We did not know she moved here until she went missing in May 2009,” Kemp said, adding that the friend’s story about Campbell’s disappearance never made sense to her. “Nicole convinced her to move here with her. She told us that Raven left one day to go shopping downtown and never came back.

“It just didn’t make any sense,” Kemp said. “And she eventually gave me all of Raven’s belongings — even the purse she always carried with her.”

The purse was a fixture that Campbell nearly always wore strapped across her chest when she left home, said family members.

Kemp said that, though the family suspected that the woman knew what happened to Campbell, sheriff’s investigators never found a lead in the disappearance.

“We asked them to bring dogs to check the apartment (in 2009) but they wouldn’t do it,” she said. “Then the anonymous tipster told them to look in the downstairs closet because there’s a big hole behind the wall.”

Anyone with information about the case is asked to call sheriff’s homicide detectives at 323-890-5500.