But Sgt. Tina Mohrmann, a police spokeswoman, said last night that Ms. Hill and other members of the family did not connect her disappearance with the reports of the girl slain in the Bronx. "They did not suspect foul play," she said. "She had been missing before and they were hoping she'd turn up."

Investigators said the girl was believed killed in an apartment in Hunts Point on Aug. 22. She may have been raped, they said, and her throat was cut and her body was stomped and packed in a large cardboard box by two men.

The two, joined by a third man who became a police informer in the case, carried the box a few blocks to Whitlock Avenue and East 165th Street, leaving it under the Sheridan Expressway near Bruckner Boulevard. One of the killers later returned, doused the box with gasoline and set it afire, the police said.

A passenger on a No. 2 train, running on elevated tracks nearby, saw the flames and called the police. Detectives found the body badly burned. There were no clothes, jewelry or other means of identification. "All I saw was that her hair had been worn in corn rows," Sergeant Garvey recalled.

The Medical Examiner was unable to determine a precise cause of death and listed it only as "homicidal violence." For days, the girl was known to detectives only as a face in a sketch drawn from the informant's description -- a frail girl about 4 feet 2 inches tall, with narrow-set eyes, broad cheekbones and a strong chin.

But while the girl's identity remained a mystery, detectives with the informant's help last Sunday arrested Luis Morales, 18, of the Bronx, and Carlos Franco, 20, of Brooklyn, and charged them with murder and manslaughter in her death. They said Mr. Morales had been acquitted of murder and arson charges in another case last year after a witness recanted testimony.

After Ms. Hill reported her daughter missing last Tuesday, Detective Prince noted a similarity to the girl in the morgue. "I was pressing the victim's mother for information about her school and medical history, and finally today she cooperated," the detective said.