"She was a chronic runaway," said Detective Grace Prince of the 28th Precinct, who drew the crucial connection between the missing person's report and the girl in the morgue and uncovered the dental records that led to the identification.

Capt. John Creegan, commanding officer of the Eighth Detective Division, said Ms. Hill reported her daughter missing on Aug. 10, but canceled the report the next day after learning that the girl was staying with a sister on Neptune Avenue in Coney Island.

One of the men charged in her death also lives on Neptune Avenue, near the sister, and may have met Ebony during her stay in the neighborhood, Sgt. Garvey said. "It's too much of a coincidence," he said. Ran Away Again

The girl returned home on Aug. 21, Captain Creegan said, but ran away the same day -- and was dead 24 hours later. The girl's mother could not be reached last night, and it was unclear why she waited until last Tuesday to report her daughter's most recent disappearance.

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."

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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.

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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.

At a clinic on West 125th Street where the girl had had a medical and dental checkup in May 1992, Detective Prince found the dental X-rays that provided the crucial link to identification.

"Our job is not over," said Detective Garvey. "We have to go to court."