On the morning of July 3, 2005, a taxi driver travelling along a road in Viladecans, southwest of Barcelona, Spain, came across something that would begin a mystery lasting twenty years. Beside the road was the body of a young woman.
She had apparently been dead for less than twenty-four hours, but investigators soon discovered something that made the circumstances even more troubling. This did not appear to be the place where she had died. Evidence suggested that her body had been moved sometime during approximately the twelve hours before it was discovered. Someone, it seemed, had brought her there.
But if investigators were going to determine what had happened to this woman, they first needed to answer an even more basic question. Who was she? There was no identification that immediately provided an answer. Police had no confirmed name, no address and no obvious missing-person report that led them back to her.
They could describe her, though. She was approximately 160 cms / 5ft 3in tall, with blue eyes and naturally brown, wavy hair that had been dyed a copper color. A small mole was visible on her abdomen. Investigators initially estimated that she was somewhere between twenty and twenty-five years old. And then there were her clothes. The woman had been wearing fuchsia or pink three-quarter-length trousers and a pink floral-print top. Even her black sandals incorporated pink. She also wore gold hoop earrings and a gold bracelet decorated with stars.
It was such a distinctive appearance that, without a real name to use, she became known by a nickname: The Woman in Pink.
Spanish authorities tried to determine who she was, but the usual investigative avenues led nowhere. Her fingerprints didn’t immediately reveal an identity. Her description apparently couldn’t be connected conclusively to a missing woman. Publishing information about her failed to produce the breakthrough police needed. That created an enormous problem.
When police investigate a suspicious death, understanding the victim’s life can be essential to understanding how they died. Investigators normally want to know where the person lived, where they worked, who their friends were, whether they were in a relationship, who they had spoken to recently and where they had spent their final hours.
With the Woman in Pink, investigators had virtually none of that. They had a body without a life attached to it. There were theories. Spanish reporting has suggested that investigators at one point considered whether the unidentified woman might have been involved in sex work. However, no reliable evidence has emerged publicly establishing that she was a sex worker, and the stronger official sources do not describe it as part of her known history. It was simply one possibility investigators apparently considered while trying to understand who this mysterious woman might have been.
The years began passing. Five years became ten. Ten became fifteen. Still, nobody could give the Woman in Pink her name. Somewhere there may have been people wondering what had happened to a woman they once knew. Somewhere there may also have been someone who knew exactly how she had died. But neither group had apparently been connected to the unidentified woman lying in a Spanish morgue.
Nearly two decades after her discovery, however, advances in international cooperation offered investigators another opportunity. INTERPOL had launched an initiative known as Identify Me, designed to help establish the identities of unidentified women found dead in Europe, particularly women whose deaths involved suspicious, unexplained or violent circumstances.
The concept addressed one of the fundamental problems with unidentified-person investigations. People don’t necessarily die in the same country where they were born or where their families live. A woman discovered in Spain could have come from France, Germany, Eastern Europe or almost anywhere else. Her family could have reported her missing in one country while her unidentified remains were being investigated in another. Unless those records were successfully connected, both investigations could remain unresolved indefinitely.
In 2024, Spanish authorities submitted the Woman in Pink to the Identify Me campaign. Suddenly, a mystery that had existed largely within Spanish investigative files was being presented to an international audience.
Her physical description was released. Her jewelry was shown. Her unusual pink clothing became recognizable again. And investigators asked the public to help identify her.
Tips began arriving. One of them appeared especially promising. Information suggested that the Woman in Pink might have been a woman reported missing from Bulgaria. Authorities took the possibility seriously. Photographs, fingerprints and genetic information were examined in an effort to determine whether two mysteries in different countries involved the same woman.
For a moment, after nearly twenty years, it looked as though investigators might finally have found her identity, but they hadn’t. The Bulgarian lead was eliminated and The Woman in Pink still had no name.
But something else was happening behind the scenes. INTERPOL’s effort wasn’t limited to asking members of the public to recognize a photograph. Biometric information associated with the unidentified women was also being circulated internationally. And thousands of kilometers from the roadside in Viladecans, the Woman in Pink’s fingerprints eventually reached investigators in TĆ¼rkiye. Turkish authorities compared those fingerprints against records in their national biometric database.
This time, there was a match. The Woman in Pink was a Russian citizen. Her name was Liudmila Zavada. And another assumption investigators had carried for twenty years turned out to be wrong. Liudmila wasn’t twenty to twenty-five years old when she died, she was thirty-one.
The fingerprint match was an extraordinary breakthrough, but investigators needed more than a database result before conclusively declaring that the twenty-year mystery had been solved. DNA would provide the final confirmation. Authorities obtained genetic information associated with one of Liudmila’s close relatives. Spanish reporting later indicated that the comparison involved the genetic profile of a deceased sister. The result confirmed what the fingerprints had suggested. The unidentified woman discovered beside the road in Viladecans on July 3, 2005, was Liudmila Zavada.
In September 2025, twenty years after her body was found, her identity was publicly announced. The Woman in Pink finally had her name back, but almost immediately, the discovery created an entirely new set of questions. Very little has been publicly revealed about Liudmila’s life before her death. We know she was Russian. We know she was thirty-one. We know she somehow came to be in Spain in the summer of 2005. Beyond that, much of her story remains frustratingly unclear.
Publicly available reporting has not established exactly when she left Russia or why she travelled to Spain. It isn’t clear whether she had been living permanently in the Barcelona area, staying there temporarily or simply passing through. We don’t know where she was living during her final days. We don’t know what work she was doing. We don’t know who her friends were in Spain. Nor has the available reporting clearly established whether her disappearance was ever formally reported to authorities under her real name.
And there is another intriguing question. Why were Liudmila’s fingerprints in a Turkish biometric database?
Whatever the explanation, that record ultimately became the thread connecting a dead woman in Spain to her real identity two decades later. Now that investigators know her name, they can potentially begin reconstructing the parts of Liudmila’s life that were inaccessible to them in 2005.
Travel and immigration records may reveal when she entered Spain. Addresses could identify where she stayed. Employment information could reveal colleagues. Old telephone records, official documents or witness interviews might help establish the people she associated with.
And those people could help answer the most important question of all: Who was with Liudmila shortly before she died?
Because one unsettling fact from the original investigation remains. Liudmila apparently did not simply collapse and die beside that road. Investigators believe her body had been moved. If that conclusion is correct, someone knew where she really died. Someone may have known what happened to her. Someone may have transported her body. And someone may have deliberately chosen the place where a taxi driver would eventually find her. That changes the significance of identifying her.
For twenty years, people who had known Liudmila Zavada could conceivably have encountered news reports about the Woman in Pink without realizing those stories were about someone they knew. A former friend might have seen the unidentified woman’s reconstruction and failed to recognize her. An acquaintance might have heard about the case but never connected it with Liudmila. Even someone who knew something important about her final days might never have realized that Spanish police had spent two decades searching for information about her. Now that barrier is gone. Her name can be searched. Her history can be reconstructed. People who knew her can recognize her.
And investigators can finally begin asking questions about Liudmila Zavada rather than trying to reconstruct the identity of an anonymous woman. It is tempting to say that the Woman in Pink cold case was solved in 2025 because in one sense, it was.
The twenty-year mystery surrounding her identity is over, but the mystery surrounding her death is not. No publicly identified person has been established as responsible for Liudmila’s death, and authorities continue to regard the circumstances surrounding it as suspicious. That leaves her story in an unusual place.
For two decades, investigators were trying to answer one question: Who was the Woman in Pink? Twenty years of investigation, international cooperation, fingerprints and DNA finally provided the answer. She was Liudmila Zavada, a thirty-one-year-old Russian woman who somehow found herself in Spain during the summer of 2005, but giving Liudmila back her name didn’t end her story. Instead, it revealed the mystery that had been hiding underneath the first one all along.
Somewhere between Liudmila’s known life and the roadside where her body was discovered are approximately twenty-four hours that investigators still need to reconstruct.
Where did she go? Who did she meet? Where did she actually die? Who moved her body? And why?
For twenty years, the mystery was the identity of the Woman in Pink, but now there is a different question.
What happened to Liudmila Zavada?
If you have any information regarding Liudmila Zavada’s case, please contact any of the following:
Spanish National Police / INTERPOL Identify Me: This is the best contact for a tip specifically concerning Liudmila Zavada. Her official case designation is 2024-ES06 – āThe Woman in Pink.ā INTERPOL maintains a dedicated contact form that routes information to INTERPOL and the Spanish police.
Official Liudmila Zavada / ES06 case and contact form: https://www.interpol.int/What-you-can-do/Identify-Me/Countries-in-which-the-bodies-were-found/Women-found-in-Spain/ES06-The-woman-in-pink
PolicĆa Nacional (Spanish National Police): Spain’s Ministry of the Interior lists 091 for PolicĆa Nacional emergencies and +34 91 322 34 00 as the main switchboard of the DirecciĆ³n General de la PolicĆa. For someone outside Spain, I would use the INTERPOL form rather than 091.
INTERPOL National Central Bureau – Madrid: Spain’s INTERPOL National Central Bureau is located in Madrid and coordinates international police information between Spanish law enforcement, other countries’ NCBs and INTERPOL. This is especially relevant here because Liudmila’s identification involved cooperation among Spain, TĆ¼rkiye and Russia.
Sources: El Caso, El Pais, Interpol, La Vanguardia, Infobae
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