Ten years after embarking on a search for her mother, Ilona Perry, a 29-year-old underwriting assistant, has finally found closure.

The search, which began on the Internet, ended last month at an unmarked grave in Miami, Florida ? Ms Perry's mother, Esther Perry, was murdered in her South Beach, Miami apartment in 1986.

The reasons why it took 17 years for her daughters to know the truth about her death remain shrouded in mystery.

Originally from Cuba, Esther Perry (born Diaz-Lanz) came to the Island with her Bermudian husband Jerome from the United States. Their two daughters, Tatyana and Ilona, were born here shortly after, but the marriage soured and the couple separated ? with Esther returning to the United States with her daughters in 1980.

A bitter battle for custody of the children began ? a battle Esther Perry was set to lose because she suffered from a severe mental illness ? and which continued after their divorce in 1986.

But the family was to lose contact with her soon after the divorce.

"We just thought that she gave up on the custody battle and was abiding by the court ruling," said Ilona Perry, who returned to Bermuda two years ago.

"But I've been searching for her pretty intently for the past ten years."

At one time she hired a private investigator who took her money and delivered nothing.

But an Internet search last summer turned up newspaper articles that her mother had been murdered in Miami in the early hours of the morning of December 15, 1986 ? which coincidentally happened to be Tatyana's birthday ? and just a few months after the divorce.

Police had been alerted to the South Beach apartment by neighbours who heard Esther Perry's screams for help.

But when they arrived, the 42-year-old substitute teacher had been stabbed multiple times and was already dead.

"The one thing I found out was that she had abandoned her bank accounts in 1986. So obviously nobody went out there and took care of her affairs because nobody knew," Ilona Perry said.

The investigation was seriously bungled when police set up a mentally ill man who confessed to the crime but prosecutors dropped the case after concluding that investigators had abused their powers.

Two years later another man, serial killer Donald Rhoads, confessed to murdering Ms Perry, while being held for burglary.

Rhoads ended up serving a 25-year sentence for that and other murders and died behind bars. "I want to know why he killed her," Ilona said days before news came that her mother's killer had in fact died.

"Now the circle is complete," she said after news came last month of Rhoads' death.

But there are still unanswered questions about Esther Perry's life and death.

For reasons not yet clear, police investigating Esther Perry's murder did not notify her former husband of her death, according to Mr. Perry, who told that he was to learn of it last summer from their daughter.

"Nobody ever talked to me," said Jerome Perry, a former police officer who noted that questioning the former lover or husband is standard procedure for a murder investigation.

"I'm so flabbergasted. Ilona is angry but how could all these events happen? It's my children who I think are the ones who are suffering the most.

"My youngest says what would you have done? I would have had to tell them ? it's not the greatest time in the world but this is their mother. If my mother had died I would have been deeply resentful if someone had kept it from me."

The lead investigator of Esther Perry's murder has yet to be found through her daughter's investigation.

A bigger mystery is a strange phone call Mr. Perry says he received a week or two before his ex-wife was murdered.

The caller said that Esther had been killed because she was in debt, but minutes later there was a knock on the door and Esther walked in, Mr. Perry said.

"I said 'somebody just called me and said you have been murdered. She said 'oh that's next week. I've come for the kids'."

Mr. Perry, who now lives in South Carolina, also recalls another mysterious telephone call some weeks after the murder.

The caller, who identified himself as 'Bob Davis', said then that his ex-wife had been murdered, and left a number for Miami police homicide department for him to call for more information.

But when Mr. Perry called the number a few days later, a woman answered the phone, angrily demanded to know how he came across the number, denied that a Bob Davis worked there and slammed the phone down.

Mr. Perry said he wrote both episodes off as probably a bizarre prank orchestrated by his ex-wife or another man she had been friendly with.

Esther Perry had talked about a photographer friend she was seeing, who worked part time for the Miami Police department. She had also been engaging in extreme and sometimes threatening behaviour as she waged a last ditch, desperate effort to regain custody of the children.

"Until this summer I truly believed that my ex-wife was still alive. I was surprised that I never heard from her and hurt ? not for me, but for my children," Mr. Perry said.

Because of her past behaviour, Mr. Perry did not make any attempts to go looking for her.

"I didn't want to push it because she truly made my life miserable and I figured some day she would just show up."

For all those years Mr. Perry assumed that his ex-wife's absence was part of a ploy to get the children back and take them off to Latin America, he said.

"I began to think after a couple of years that something was wrong but assumed that she had skipped off to Cuba," he said. "I truly did not believe that she was murdered. She was a fighter ? I mean she would have attacked you in a heartbeat."

Ms Perry's search for her mother also led to the discovery of a host of Cuban relatives living in Miami ? Esther was one of ten siblings, most of whom have been active opponents of Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba.

In another twist to the tale, many of Esther's siblings and other close relatives lived close by and knew of her murder.

One of Esther's brothers tried to contact Mr. Perry in Bermuda, but he just moved to Fort Myers, in Florida, Mr. Perry said.

According to Mr. Perry, the family were under the mistaken impression that he was living in West Palm Beach, quite close to the South Beach area where Esther was killed, and would have known of her murder.

The Perry sisters have found some comfort in knowing that their mother ? who had twice been committed to a mental hospital ? was well on her way to recovery when she was murdered.

"She had gotten a job teaching, had an apartment and her goal was to get her life together so she could have visitation and have custody again," said Ms Perry.

"My whole life we thought she didn't love us, that she had abandoned us. And she did love us ? all my uncles were saying how broken-hearted she was over losing the kids. We've had all sorts of different emotions. We've cried on the phone, we've been very happy, we've been very angry. We've gone through the gamut of emotions."