Eighteen years and two months ago the body of a man was found in bushes at the side of a road in Brighton. His head and lower arms had been crudely cut off.

Detectives investigating his death made identifying the body their first task. At the time DNA was not routinely taken from criminals, and there was no chance of looking for a fingerprint match.

A pathologist thought that the victim, who was white, was aged between 45-60. The one distinguishing mark was a star-like mole on his upper right thigh.

He had been stabbed once in the chest, but this was not thought to be the fatal wound. With little to go on, and after trawling through thousands of missing persons records, the case was put to one side. In 1994, three years after the body was discovered, the unknown victim was buried.

Retired detectives routinely review unsolved cases and in October last year, 17 years after the investigation began, the file was reopened. Officers believed that with the advances made in forensic science it was worth looking at again.

The body was exhumed in March. Detective Superintendent Andy Griffiths, of Sussex Police, said: “The point of doing this was to try and solve the crime which we couldn’t do without identifying the victim so we had to find scientists that would help us do that.”

Professor Wolfram Meier-Augenstein, from Dundee University, and Dr Jurian Hoogewerff, from the University of East Anglia, have been studying the body to try to determine where the victim had been living. Using a femur, rib and toenail, tests indicated that the dead man had ingested chemicals in food and water that were found in the Southern Alps area and the South East of England.

The chemical composition suggested that he had been living in Germany, Poland or Austria during the last decade of his life with the last few months spent in England or on the Franco-German border. Further studies put the victim’s age at the time of death as mid-30s, rather than over 45. That increased the likelihood that the killer and witnesses to the murder were still alive.