San Diego

A woman whose nude, decomposing body was found almost two years ago in the 10900 block of Black Mountain Road in Rancho Bernardo was identified Monday.

The woman was Cheri Lee Galbreath, 25, a transient from Florida, said Sgt. Harry Smith of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. Her body was found April 13, 1988.

Galbreath was identified through the California fingerprint identification system, which contains “millions of prints of anyone who was been fingerprinted either for a job or because they have been arrested,” Smith said.

Smith said a newly operational database in San Diego County permitted detectives from the San Diego Metropolitan Homicide Task Force to identify the woman using the system.

Before last week, requests for fingerprint identification from law enforcement officers were routed through the California Department of Justice, whose files did not include many local prints.

Smith said detectives were able to identify Galbreath because she had been fingerprinted once before in the county, though she had no permanent address. Her prints had not been on file with the state Department of Justice. Smith did not know why Galbreath had been previously fingerprinted.

The task force of detectives from the San Diego Sheriff’s Department and the San Diego Police Department was created several months ago to solve the murders of young women, believed to be prostitutes, whose bodies dumped throughout San Diego County, said Bill Robinson, a police spokesman.