George Mudd, previously jailed for a 2004 assault, has been arrested for a 1999 cold-case murder. Photo / 123rf
From a corner of an eye, she saw the fist speeding towards her, a flick of motion before it struck, stunning her as she stood wrapping leftovers at her kitchen counter.
Next she was on the floor, with George Mudd on top of her, stifling her screams by stabbing her twice in the neck with a needle-like tool called an awl. The wounds “came within a fraction of an inch of severing her main artery”, a Washington DC police officer later wrote in a report.
It was the evening of April 29, 2004, in a rowhouse just off H St NE. The woman, then 29, had employed Mudd from time to time as a handyman in her home.
That night he had appeared unannounced – she had noticed him sitting on her front steps, looking despondent. When she asked what was wrong, she recalled recently, Mudd said his mother had just died.
In a gesture of sympathy, the woman said, she invited Mudd inside to pray and enjoy a home-cooked meal.
A little while later, with dinner finished and the leftovers half-wrapped on the counter, she lay dazed and bleeding on her kitchen floor, the victim of an unprovoked attack. And she heard Mudd, then 49, tell her, “We’re going to go upstairs”.
“I remember it flashing across that, ‘Oh, my God, I’m going to die, and nobody’s going to know,’” said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for her safety.
Miraculously for her, a tenant in her home heard the commotion and called police, who interrupted the assault and arrested Mudd.
Two decades after the attack – a crime for which Mudd served 10 years in prison – the fear she felt that night suddenly came flooding back when she learned in July that police had arrested Mudd again, this time in a cold-case homicide.
Authorities say DNA tests have linked him to a fatal stabbing in 1999, an attack similar to the one in 2004, except for how it ended.
The 1999 victim, Susan Noelle Cvengros, 24, was raped and killed in her Northeast Washington apartment, a five-minute walk from where the 2004 assault would later occur.
Cvengros also apparently had invited her assailant into her home before he violently turned on her, police said.
Mudd, who has pleaded not guilty to a murder charge, is being held in the DC jail, awaiting prosecution.
For the 2004 victim, the recent arrest has added a fresh layer to the story of her experience and rekindled memories of her long-ago trauma.
“Hearing about this, about how it seems he may have actually murdered somebody earlier, this has brought a lot of new emotions,” she said.
A few years before she was attacked by Mudd in 2004, the woman had purchased the rowhouse where the assault eventually took place.
“My mum and my stepdad, we would always drive around and look at real estate. I always knew that I was going to own a house and I would build wealth from that,” the woman said.
She already had established herself in a career in government that she continues to work at today. “Native Washingtonians staying in DC was also important to me,” she said.
When she first moved into the house, her mother stayed with her briefly. The woman soon realised that her new neighbourhood could be rough. Her car was broken into, and her backpack was stolen.
Then, a few days later, while her mother was in the rowhouse, a man knocked on the door and said he had found the stolen backpack on the street. He introduced himself as George Mudd.
“He then told my mum that he did yard work and small handyman-type jobs,” the woman recalled. “It was really my mum that introduced me to him.”
Over the next few years, Mudd did odd jobs for the woman around her house for US$20 to US$25 apiece. She sensed he was a fixture of the streets, a “round-the-way-type of guy”, she said. “Rough around the edges.”
According to court records, when the attack occurred, the renters living in a basement apartment in the rowhouse heard her hit the kitchen floor.
They called emergency services and when DC police arrived, an officer at the back door could see Mudd straddling the bleeding young woman. She said police entered the house just after Mudd told her, “We’re going to go upstairs”.
“He then started giving me instruction – it was like he had to be in control,” she recalled.
Her mother had moved back to her own house by then.
“He said, ‘Open the door, don’t tell them my name,’ stuff like that. The police took us both and threw us down on the back porch. I was just happy to see them.”
Even while police were holding the woman and Mudd on the porch, trying to assess the situation, the attacker continued to mutter commands: Don’t tell them my name, he said. Don’t, he said. Don’t.
“That whole time, he wouldn’t make eye contact with me,” the woman recalled. “His eyes went dark, like they were made of coal.”
After the attack, the woman decided that the rowhouse, which she had been so proud to call her own, was stained by the experience. “I used to be very scared walking back into my house,” she said. “I felt like every time I opened the door, I would see his face.”
She moved into her mother’s home for a while. The following year, as Mudd remained in jail awaiting trial, the woman tried to “create normalcy”. But she realised that the attack had stranded her in a new world of fear.
She recalled sitting outside with a group of friends one evening. The sound of a woman screaming from nearby cut into their chatter, and she felt a sinking feeling of dread. She told her friends they should call the police, even though they had no idea what the screams were about.
When Mudd went on trial in February 2005, the woman testified. She tried not to make eye contact with the defendant. After he was found guilty by a jury, she read a statement to the court that emphasised the betrayal she felt.
“My mum had befriended him and had been nice to him,” she said in an interview recently. “I had been nice to him. I invited him into my home and prayed at my kitchen table with him and fixed him a meal. He betrayed that.”
Not long after the verdict, the woman moved back into her rowhouse. “I was ready to let it go,” she said.
“You can keep looking at stuff as half empty or half full. The half-full view is that God blessed me. You’ve got to have faith and hope. If not, then you are wasting the life that God just saved.”
One memory that never went away from 2004: she recalls a detective telling her back then that the attack was similar to an unsolved homicide that had occurred several years earlier, just around the corner.
“I remember him telling me there had been this other case that had all the same earmarks,” she said.
Five years earlier Susan Cvengros had arrived in the neighbourhood, hoping to someday make her living as an artist.
Raised in a small town in South Carolina, she moved to the District in the late 1990s after living in Pennsylvania and Baltimore.
She moved into a two-bedroom basement apartment in a rowhouse two blocks south of the H Street corridor, initially sharing the place with a roommate, then with a pet rat and ferret.
“She was like me, she was open minded, game for anything, would do anything, spur of the moment,” her father, John Cvengros, said recently. But he said that after he split with Susan’s mother, and his Air Force career took him to postings overseas, he had little contact with Susan or her younger sister.
Cvengros began working as an exotic dancer at JP’s Nightclub on Wisconsin Avenue NW, earning US$500 a week.
“She was so sweet and friendly, but she never talked much about herself,” a co-worker told the Washington Post shortly after she was killed.
“You knew she had been through a lot of hard knocks,” another acquaintance said at the time, adding, “But she hadn’t gotten that hard DC edge yet.”
In March 1999, Cvengros quit her job at the club and began waiting tables at a Union Station restaurant for US$3 an hour, plus tips.
The life change was an opportunity to focus on her artwork, friends would later tell police and the Post. She used a mirror to complete a self-portrait that captured her likeness so well that it would stand next to her casket at her funeral.
Cvengros was found dead in her bedroom on May 21, 1999. She had been beaten and stabbed six times in the back, and her throat had been slit.
The apartment was littered with empty wine glasses and a Domino’s pizza box. Investigators interviewed two young men who had socialised with Cvengros and who lived nearby, according to a police affidavit filed in court.
The men said they drank, ate pizza and smoked with Cvengros on the night of her death. But they said they left her alive when the evening ended, and no evidence connected them to the killing.
The affidavit noted that the men were related to – and lived with – another man. His name was George Mudd.
Mudd’s later conviction in the 2004 attack eventually would be key to establishing his alleged involvement in Cvengros’ death.
According to court records, after Mudd’s 2005 conviction, a sample of his DNA was uploaded to the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System database, known as CODIS, a registry used to cross-reference DNA samples from cold cases.
In February 2012, investigators in the Cvengros case uploaded the assailant’s DNA, contained on vaginal swabs from the victim, and the DNA was identified as being Mudd’s, according to the affidavit, which was used to obtain a homicide arrest warrant for Mudd.
It’s unclear why the suspect was not arrested at the time of the DNA hit.
The affidavit says police then reinterviewed witnesses from the 1999 case, including the men who had been with Cvengros on the night of her death.
The men said they were related to Mudd and that he had been staying at their apartment off H St at the time of the killing. One of the men told investigators that “Mudd had been using crack cocaine every day” around the time of Cvengros’ death and that he had “let his hygiene go and barely showered”, a detective wrote in the affidavit.
The witness said Mudd “would get high” and start “tweaking” with a knife.
Mudd was first interviewed in connection with Cvengros’ killing in August 2012, after the DNA hit, according to the affidavit. At the time, he was still incarcerated for the 2004 assault. He denied attacking Cvengros, the affidavit says.
After Mudd was released from prison, the cold-case investigation into Cvengros’ death continued to focus on him. But police had a problem: the DNA sample from the vaginal swabs went missing. According to the arrest warrant affidavit, “for several years before 2024, the FBI was unable to locate the laboratory data file for this case”.
Police and the US Attorney’s office in the District declined to comment. The FBI did not respond to requests for comment.
After the old DNA data was finally located, police interviewed Mudd again.
“Mudd became agitated and said that he was a drug addict and got off drugs 17 years ago,” the affidavit says. “Mudd said that he was a junkie and that he could have sex with a female one day and the next day wouldn’t recognise her because he was so high.”
In July this year, Mudd, 70, was charged with first-degree murder while armed in Cvengros’ death.
“How does that happen,” the woman who was attacked in 2004 asked after learning about the missing DNA.
“That just means he [was] out here longer than he should be” after he was released from prison around 2015.
For the 2004 victim, life has never been the same since the attack.
“I am not probably a very social person,” she said. “It’s hard to trust people the same way you did. You never want to meet another crazy person like that, so you are just careful.”
She doesn’t live in fear, she said. She has a wide social circle, still goes to church, still lives in her rowhouse. The same tenants who summoned police still live in the basement apartment. “I never want to raise the rent too much,” she joked.
She said Mudd’s arrest in the 1999 homicide confirmed suspicions that have shadowed her thoughts since the 2004 attack: She could have been killed that night.
“But life has to keep moving on,” she said. “You can’t get stuck.”
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.