YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) - DNA testing has confirmed the identity of a woman who vanished about seven years ago, authorities said.

The body of Sharon Lee Mason was found on Aug. 4, 2005, when she would have been 45, in a backyard burn pit in Grandview after Daniel Hugh Sauber told police he felt guilty about strangling and burying her sometime earlier.

Sauber, now 65, was later convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to life in prison without parole under the state's three-strikes law for violent offenders.

He told authorities he choked the woman after getting angry during an intimate encounter, but investigators also found her skull had been fractured, possibly by something that was swung at her head.

Also unclear is when Mason died. Relatives said they last saw her in 2000 but, because she frequently was out of contact, didn't report her missing until 2004.

Investigators believed from the outset the dead woman was Mason but could not be certain for lack of dental records or DNA, and Sauber was not sure who he had killed, Deputy Prosecutor Therese Murphy said.

"He didn't know her last name, and I don't think he knew her first name, either," Murphy said. "It wasn't surprising because he was a raging alcoholic."

Efforts to locate a dentist who had treated Mason were unsuccessful, so DNA samples were sent to the health sciences laboratory of the University of North Texas in Forth Worth, which offers free DNA testing to law enforcement agencies nationwide.

Because the criminal case had been settled, the testing was given a low priority and the results were obtained only last week, Murphy said.

She said she had been in contact with Mason's children, especially her three adult daughters, for the past three years.

"I wanted to seek closure for the girls," the deputy prosecutor said, "so that they never have to wonder if that was or was not their mother."