New York police are appealing to the city's Irish community to help identify a female murder victim whose skeleton was found in a run-down Manhattan basement, writes Sean O'Driscoll
A gold ring found on the skeleton's right hand was engraved with the letters PMcG, leading police to believe that she was of Irish or Irish American origin.
"The name could signify Paula McGlynn, or Patricia McGuire, or something like that. We're going through a lot of missing person files trying to find a match," Det Gerald Gardiner said.
Construction workers found the skeleton in a makeshift concrete coffin hidden behind a boiler.
Police said that prostitutes and their pimps squatted in the building in the late 70s and early 80s, around the time the body may have been hidden.
Det Gardiner said that the woman was aged between 16 and 21 and showed signs of expensive dental work mixed with badly deteriorating teeth, perhaps showing that she came from a stable home followed by years of prostitution and neglect.
Police have also been searching through a list of all women arrested in New York State with those initials and have found two possible fits.
A nationwide search of women with similar initials puts the possibilities at about 30 to 40.
Medical examinations have confirmed that the victim was white, had red or brownish hair and was 5ft 4inches. She had been tied up and strangled before being wrapped in a rug and entombed in concrete in a building near Times Square.
Det Gardiner said construction workers broke open the coffin on February 10th while clearing out space for a neighbouring restaurant.
He said police would shortly be calling a press conference to show a facial reconstruction of the victim.