Nightmare on Elwood Avenue; How did Maria Cruz, a 35-year-old analyst for Barclays Capital who vanished on April 13, 2003, end up buried beneath a concrete slab at an old mansion in Newark, New Jersey.

BYLINE: Bryan Burrough

She was a tiny woman, barely four feet eleven, and quiet, the kind you wouldn't notice on the subway or the crosstown bus. Her name was Maria Cruz. She was 35, but looked 10 years younger. She had come to America alone from the Philippines in 1992, leaving her family in an effort to find a better life. And she found it.

Earnest and industrious, Maria had worked her way through Manila's Maryknoll College, graduating cum laude with a degree in communications, then moved to New York, where she enrolled at Fordham University and received her M.B.A., with honors. After taking an analyst's job at Citibank, she moved with a team of fellow employees to Barclays Capital in 2001, where she was listed as a senior credit analyst. She lived alone in a small, tidy apartment on the West Side and attended Mass every day- one more immigrant success story in a city teeming with them.

What got Maria noticed was something that happened one year ago, on Palm Sunday, April 13, 2003. That day a friend glimpsed her around 11 a.m. in the crowd listening to Mass at St. Malachy's Church, on West 49th Street. After the service, Maria swung by her office, on Park Avenue, to pick up some papers she needed for a meeting the next day.

After that, she vanished.

Maria's boss, Hans Christensen, was among the first to notice she wasn't at work. He called her apartment several times, as did co-workers; no one answered. Everyone agreed it was unlike Maria to miss a day of work without explanation. On Tuesday a co-worker, unaware that Maria had moved, checked an old address; others telephoned Barclays' human-resources department to ask for her emergency contact numbers. On Wednesday, another colleague checked her apartment and found three days of Wall Street Journals piled in front of her door.

Worried, Christensen called Maria's contact number, belonging to an aunt in New Jersey. In turn, the aunt alerted her three sons, two of whom lived in Queens. They arrived at Maria's apartment that afternoon. Turned away by the building manager, they returned with a couple of police-