A woman found dead in Spain 20 years ago has been identified after an international campaign to resolve cold cases.
"The woman in pink" case dates back to July 2005, when a body was found by a road in a small town in Barcelona. The woman was wearing a pink floral top, pink pants and pink shoes, the international police agency Interpol said in a news release. She had been dead for less than 24 hours, and authorities believed her death was suspicious because evidence showed her body had been moved before its discovery.
In 2023, Interpol launched the "Identify Me" campaign, which seeks to name women who were murdered or died under suspicious circumstances in Europe in recent decades. Details from cases examined under the initiative are widely shared online and in the media. Interpol issues images of facial reconstructions, personal belongings and tattoos. It also shares biometric data from the initial investigations with its 196 member countries and asks law enforcement to run that data through national databases.
Police in Spain submitted "the woman in pink" case to the initiative in 2024. This year, police in Turkey ran the woman's fingerprints through a biometric database and determined that the prints matched those of Liudmila Zavada, a Russian national.
Liudmila Zavada.
Interpol
One of Zavada's close relatives provided a DNA sample that was compared to the sample investigators had from the initial investigation. The samples matched, allowing officials to confirm that the woman was Zavada. She was 31 at the time of her death.
"After 20 years, an unknown woman has been given back her name," Interpol Secretary General Valdecy Urquiza said in the news release. "Each successful identification brings fresh hope to the families and friends of missing persons and creates new leads for investigators."
"Identify Me" has led to two other successful identifications so far. In 2023, family members of a British woman found murdered in Belgium 30 years earlier identified her as Rita Roberts after recognizing an image of her tattoo on the news. In March 2025, a woman who was found hanged in Spain in 2018 was identified as Paraguayan citizen Ainoha Izaga Ibieta Lima, previously known only as "the woman in the chicken coop."
There are 44 women left in the "Identify Me" campaign, Interpol said, with the oldest case dating back to 1976.
Kerry Breen is a news editor at CBSNews.com. A graduate of New York University's Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism, she previously worked at NBC News' TODAY Digital. She covers current events, breaking news and issues including substance use.
