Decapitated Body ID'd As Woman Who Vanished From Midtown In 1980

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — Forty-two years after a headless and handless body was found in a suitcase in the Hudson Valley, police have identified the victim as a woman who had vanished from her Midtown office days earlier.

The break in the 1980 cold case was announced last week by New York State Police, who said DNA testing had helped identify the murder victim as Anna L. Papalardo-Blake, a 44-year-old who was living in New York City at the time of her disappearance.

Papalardo-Blake was working as a receptionist at the Vidal Sassoon hair salon on Fifth Avenue near 21st Street, and had been seen leaving her workplace around 6 p.m. on March 18, 1980, police said.

She was reported missing to the NYPD, according to state police. Meanwhile, two days later, authorities made a gruesome discovery: a nude body stuffed inside a travel trunk near a dumpster at the Hudson View Apartment Complex in Fishkill, N.Y., about 90 minutes north of the city.

The green trunk, measuring 21 inches wide and 37 inches long, had been left there sometime between noon and 10 p.m. on March 18, the day of Papalardo-Blake's disappearance, according to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System.

"Various stickers on the outside indicate the trunk travelled from NYC to France in 1958 and returned to NYC in 1960," the entry reads.

In the ensuing decades, investigators "followed hundreds of leads trying to identify the victim and the circumstances surrounding her death," state police said in a news release.

But it was only thanks to new advances in genetic technology that investigators were able to get an identifiable DNA sample, which they used in May of this year to identify the remains as Papalardo-Blake, police said.

"At the time we didn't have DNA," state trooper A.J. Hicks told PEOPLE this week. "Forensically, we had a lot of limitations at the time and investigators wouldn't be able to foresee the changes and advancements. They weren't looking to set up investigators in the future."

No suspects have been named, and police asked anyone with information about the case to call investigators at 845-677-7300, referencing case number 3020974.