Detectives are examining forensic evidence from the body of Audrey Palmer — but concede it's going to be a very difficult job tracking down her killer.

Police in the United States are attempting to build a profile of whoever battered and strangled Ms Palmer before dumping her body in a dumpster in a Washington, D.C., parking lot in August 1990.

But they will be hampered by the fact it took 19 years to finally identify the mother-of-two, 26, who grew up in Bermuda but lost contact with her friends on the Island after moving to live in New York in the mid 1980s.

With her body cremated many years ago, detectives are relying on evidence collected shortly after the murder and stored on computer — but those details were not obtained using the state-of-the-art technology available today. "It will be a tough case because of the amount of time that has gone. These cases are very difficult to solve," Metro Washington Police Department detective Jeff Williams told The Royal Gazette.

"We are looking at all the forensic evidence. We want to see if there was any DNA evidence on her body we can use to put together a profile of the killer hopefully."

Mr. Williams has spent the two weeks since Ms Palmer was identified trying to find clues about her life by speaking to her family. He has discovered Ms Palmer left Brooklyn and moved to Washington several months before her death.

She told her family she was spending time with a friend she knew from Washington, and do not believe she had a job.

Her mother wired her some money and it is hoped records of those transactions will ultimately lead them to her address. Last month, Ms Palmer was identified from fingerprints that matched some taken when she was arrested in Brooklyn in 1989.

Mr. Williams says that arrest was for drug possession, but that doesn't necessarily mean she had a drug habit or had fallen into the wrong crowd.

Her identity took so long to work out because she carried no identification on her, nobody came forward to say who she was and her family never filed a missing person's report.

Regarding the family's failure to say she had disappeared, Mr. Williams said: "That was very strange. That kind of hindered us in our investigation.

"They were possibly lingering on the hope that she was alive; maybe they thought she was incarcerated."

Describing their reaction when he contacted them with the news of her killing, Mr. Williams said: "They were shocked because they couldn't believe she was dead.

"They were holding onto the sense that some day they would find out she was alive. Until someone comes knocking on your door to confirm your loved one is dead, you don't know. They were just appreciative that they now knew. But it isn't really closure because closure is to find out what happened and they haven't found that out."