Mother of woman found dead in freezer: ‘We hadn’t spoken in three years’

The mother of a woman who was found dead in a freezer in east London has said she hadn’t spoken to her daughter in three years.

Henriett Szuke, 34, was identified by police earlier this week after her body was found alongside another woman’s inside a freezer in Canning Town.

Ms Szuke was a Hungarian national who had been in the UK for several years but did not have a fixed address.

She had come to the UK looking for work after giving up her job in a factory in the industrial city of Miskolc. But she soon found herself destitute and sleeping rough and had made no contact with family and friends in Hungary for three years.

Her mother, Maria Rusznyak, has told Hungarian media that Ms Szuke had “abandoned” her children to live in the UK.

She said police asked “about identification marks, whether I recognise her…and if we kept in touch but ever since she left the children here we didn’t. Apart from that, nothing”.

She added: “Since she left her family we don’t know anything. I fell out with her when she abandoned her two kids, as I also have three.

“My son began to look find her on Facebook three years ago to ‘find her, let’s find her’ but we didn’t. We thought she must have lost her phone but we never thought about this terrible thing.”

Mrs Rusznyak said the situation was “terrible” adding “we can’t get over it”.

She said: “I don’t feel responsible for this whole story, it was her decision, she was an adult, she controlled her own life, I don’t get involved in any of my children’s life.

“Everyone should take responsibility for what they do. But if they need help, I’m 100% standing by them.”

The family does not know whether they will be able to travel to the UK, as they said their finances may not allow and they have no details for a funeral.

It comes after Sky News spoke to manageress Sonia Lynch from the Welcome Centre homeless charity in Ilford, east London, who said Ms Szuke had “no issues with drugs and alcohol and other issues”.

She added: “She was always sketching, it was a kind of therapy for her I think. She was very talented and would do drawings and give them away to other clients.”

In Hungary, a neighbour who lives in the house where Ms Szuke used to live said she didn’t know much about her, but that everyone is “shocked” and “very sorry about her”.

Andras Szajiko added: “They had two small children, a boy and a girl. But since they moved I don’t know, whether they got divorced [Ms Szuke and her husband].”

Another neighbour, Nikolett Lazar, described her as “very decent”.

He said: “[Their] grandmother is raising the two children. But they are grown now.

“We haven’t seen her for years. There are no words about her. The children are taken care of very well by the grandmother, they go to school, so I don’t think anyone was actually missing her… to be very honest.

“She did not have a bad name either, I did not really know her because when we moved here when she wasn’t good with her husband, they were already separated. All I know is that the children are with the grandmother, nothing else.”

After naming her on Tuesday, Detective Chief Inspector Simon Harding, of the Homicide and Major Crime Command said: “We understand she was last heard from in the summer of 2016 when she spoke to somebody she knew in Hungary on the phone.

“We need to establish if that was the last-known contact with Henriett and I would ask anyone who heard from her after that time to contact my team.”

(c) Sky News 2019: Mother of woman found dead in freezer: ‘We hadn’t spoken in three years’