When Judy Cajuste turned 12 two years ago, her mother, Magalie, bought a pair of gold rings — something "pretty" for each of them to wear, she said.

Though they weren't exactly alike — one had three gold bars, the other had two — the rings were symbolic of a bond between mother and daughter.

On Friday, Cajuste used Judy's ring to identify her body.

The 14-year-old high school freshman from Roselle was found Jan. 13 — strangled and naked except for the ring — in a Dumpster in Newark's Weequahic Park. But it took a week to positively identify the body as Judy's because authorities originally believed the person found in the Dumpster was in her 20s.

Judy had been missing since Jan. 11, when she failed to call home after a track meet at Roselle's Abraham Clark High School.

"I said, `Let me wait. She's probably coming soon,'" Cajuste said yesterday.

The call never came.

So Cajuste got in her car and began searching for Judy. She stopped at the homes of her daughter's friends, all the while clutching a cell phone in case Judy called. After a sleepless night, Cajuste drove to Abraham Clark High the next morning, thinking her daughter, who had run away once before, might show up.

She didn't, and Cajuste filed a missing persons report with Roselle police.

For the next nine days, Cajuste waited anxiously at her Crescent Avenue home, spending hours in front of the window, hoping Judy would return, and jumping every time the phone rang or someone knocked at the door.

She began to lose hope she'd ever see Judy again — dead or alive.

"I prayed to God, `If she's not still alive, I want to see the body.' So I say thank you, God, for giving us the body," Cajuste, 39, said yesterday, her gold ring still on her finger. "She was my princess. I couldn't let my princess go to the garbage."

Authorities in Roselle and Essex County don't have many leads. But they plan to search for clues in Judy's computer, law enforcement officials said.

Judy had a profile posted on MySpace.com, an online social networking service popular with young people, and told friends at school that she had met someone on the site — a man in his 20s who lived in Newark and Paterson. The girl's MySpace profile indicates she last logged on at 6:43 p.m. Jan. 10, the day before she disappeared.

Cajuste, a nurse's assistant who emigrated from Haiti 10 years ago, said she knew nothing about a boyfriend. "We had a deal. If you have a boyfriend, tell me. But she didn't say," she said.

A slight girl who stood 5 feet 2 inches, Judy was born in Haiti and lived in Queens before moving to Roselle with her mother. She was a freshman sprinter on the track team at Abraham Clark and dreamed of becoming a teacher, nurse or police officer, Cajuste said. While her mother was at work, Judy helped take care of her 5-year-old half-brother.

Judy's father, who is separated from Cajuste, still lives in Haiti.

At the family home yesterday, the pink outfit Judy wore to church the Sunday before she disappeared still hung in her bedroom. On her desk, next to her computer, was an Usher CD and a white leather-bound Bible. At the high school, classmates remembered Judy as adventurous and a "peacemaker" who went out of her way to make classmates feel included.

"She was down for anything," said Jareth Ortiz, 14. "Anything we would do, she would do. But she wouldn't do anything bad."

"I couldn't stop crying when I found out she was gone," said another friend, Tyrell Watkins, 14. A school guidance counselor set up a memorial in a hallway with Judy's middle-school graduation photo surrounded by roses and notes from friends, classmates said.

"She was a really sweet girl," said Nicko Rice, assistant to the vice principal. "Everybody here's taking it really hard."

The day after Judy disappeared, an Essex County maintenance crew found the body of a female in a Dumpster at Weequahic Park. Authorities said the victim was killed elsewhere, then dumped in the park sometime after late afternoon Jan. 12.

But authorities had trouble identifying the body, which they thought was that of an adult.

"We didn't know we had a child on our hands," one Essex law enforcement official said yesterday.

County investigators tried to trace the fingerprints and issued an alert on the National Computerized Information Center, which noted the body's height, weight and other physical characteristics.

In Roselle, meanwhile, police were continuing their search for Judy.

Because she had never been arrested, she had never been fingerprinted and there was no match.

A week after the body was discovered, authorities matched the missing persons report from Roselle to the description on the NCIC alert. Roselle police contacted Essex County authorities Friday and within hours, Cajuste was in the county medical examiner's office in downtown Newark looking at photos of her daughter, and the gold ring.

Cajuste will bury her daughter Saturday. But she has one more favor to ask of God.

"I want justice," she said.