A badly decomposed and headless corpse discovered on a beach in Amagansett on Sunday has been identified as that of a man of unknown race, slight in stature, and between 20 and 30 years old.
The results of an autopsy by the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office have so far revealed that there was no obvious trauma and that the head was missing because of decomposition, police said. Officials believe that the body had been in the water for a significant length of time. Also missing was a portion of the left leg from the knee down, again because the body had been in the water for so long. The East Hampton Dive Team had found a finger in Gardiners Bay on Sunday afternoon in a search for other body parts.
East Hampton Town Police Chief Ed Ecker said on Tuesday morning that his department will handle the discovery as a missing persons case. “Now it’s time to just beat the bushes,” he said.
The body was found by a man who was walking his dogs between Big Albert’s Landing beach and the Bell Estate, according to police.
A data base will be compiled by the Medical Examiner’s Office, the Coast Guard, the Suffolk County Homicide Squad, and the East Hampton Town Police to match missing persons reports in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. The Medical Examiner’s Office has already conducted X-rays on the body that determined that the skeleton was intact, and now it will perform DNA tests and make an anthropological composite to try to identify the body.
“It’s up to us to go out now and try to find somebody that’s missing that we can compare to,” Chief Ecker said.
“We have a big area to check,” he added, including Block Island and Long Island Sound. “From my experience, I’d say it’s been in the water through the winter,” which makes it difficult to determine where the body first went into the water or which way it traveled.
“You don’t know if they had a personal flotation device,” he said.
“It certainly doesn’t appear to have anything to do with” 
the bodies found at Gilgo Beach, the chief said, given that 
it’s “both the wrong direction and the wrong sex.”
“We’ve had bodies wash up before. It’s not an unusual occurrence,” Chief Ecker said. The body of a man who had been reported missing in Connecticut washed up on the ocean beach in Amagansett last year.
http://www.27east.com/news/article.cfm/Amagansett/384545/Body-Washes-Up-In-Amagansett