Murdered on Xmas Eve
Barmaid, 22, killed in park ‘by stranger’ yards from front door
A BARMAID walking through a park on her way to a friend’s house to celebrate Christmas was murdered in what appears to have been an attack by a stranger, police said yesterday.
The body of Iuliana Tudos, 22, was found in an outbuilding next to a sports pitch only 500 yards from her front door.
The Russian bar worker had been stabbed in the abdomen and had a head injury.
She had been taking a short cut through the park when she was assaulted by the stranger on Christmas Eve, police believe.
Her body, which friends said was in a ‘terrible state’, lay undiscovered for three days.
Last night officers traced her family, said to be in Cyprus and Russia. Friends and flatmates of the victim, who described herself as single on social media, launched a huge appeal to find her after she failed to show up at her friend’s house in Enfield, north London, where she was due to celebrate Christmas.
Miss Tudos, who was 5ft 1in tall, was last seen at 8pm getting on a bus from Camden to Finsbury Park, north London, and may have decided to take the 13-minute short cut from her local bus stop through the park in the dark when she was attacked. The victim, known to friends as Julie or Juliana, had been due to pop home before going later to Enfield, but she never showed up.
Fears grew after Miss Tudos, who is from Moscow, failed to show up for work at 4pm on Boxing Day at the World’s End pub in Camden.
When her landlord opened her locked bedroom in a shared house, her passport and all her belongings were found untouched.
Friends criticised police saying officers only treated her disappearance as ‘medium risk’ when she was first reported missing, despite it being out of character. But officers said the report was taken very seriously from the outset.
Her friend Laszlo Judit posted several pictures on Facebook of the heavily tattooed barmaid smiling with friends.
She wrote: ‘Juliana Lilith Tudos has gone missing on the 24th of December 8pm, latest time of any kind of interaction we know about was with me saying that she was gonna come back to my place to spend Christmas together. She hasn’t been online, her phone is off and she’s not at home, hasn’t showed up for work. Our friend at the police said we have to wait 72 hours to report it.’
Hours later, she added: ‘Finished with the police, normally for adults the risk is low but they put this one in medium risk since it’s a highly unusual behaviour.’
Miss Tudos’s body was found by a member of the public around 4.30pm on Wednesday. A postmortem examination last night established how she was killed. No arrests have been made.
Detective Chief Inspector Nicola Wall said: ‘Iuliana’s body was discovered in an outbuilding next to a sports pitch. We believe that she may have been attacked on Christmas Eve, but we want to hear from anyone who saw anything suspicious in that part of Finsbury Park over the Christmas period.
‘ We are still trying to piece together a timeline of events and are pursuing a number of lines of inquiry as regards to a motive.’