D.C. man, 70, charged with first-degree murder in 1999 stabbing

Washington Post

09-07-2025

A 70-year-old D.C. man has been charged with murder in the long-unsolved stabbing of an aspiring artist found dead in her Northeast Washington apartment 26 years ago, police said Wednesday.
The victim, Susan Noell Cvengros, 24, who had worked as an exotic dancer in D.C., was found dead in her bedroom by a former roommate on May 21, 1999, according to police and news accounts at the time. Her body was partially clothed and sprawled across a bed. Her throat had been cut, and she had been stabbed several times.
Police said George Mudd, of Northeast Washington, who was in his mid-40s when the killing occurred, was arrested Tuesday and charged with premeditated first-degree murder while armed. The court affidavit that police used to obtain an arrest warrant in the case was not immediately available Wednesday, and authorities, in announcing the arrest, disclosed no details about their years-long investigation.
Mudd was scheduled to make his initial appearance in D.C. Superior Court on Wednesday.
Some friends in 1999 described Cvengros as shy and quiet, a small-town South Carolina girl who moved to the city with aspirations to become an artist. She was found dead that May night in her basement apartment in the 400 block of F Street NE.
'She was so sweet and friendly, but she never talked much about herself,' one fellow dancer at JP's Nightclub on Wisconsin Avenue NW told The Washington Post at the time. Cvengros worked at the club for about a year. Being quiet and reserved was 'really unusual at a place like this,' the dancer said, 'because most people open up quite a bit about themselves.'
Earlier in 1999, Cvengros had decided that she wanted to get out of exotic dancing, friends said back then. She quit JP's, where she had been making more than $500 a week, to work at America restaurant at Union Station, where she made $3 an hour plus tips.
'She was trying to straighten out her life,' the owner of JP's said at the time. 'She wanted to get a regular daytime job.'
The club owner and the owner of the restaurant where she worked said in 1999 that Cvengros had complained that the lock on her apartment door was broken and that she was planning to move for safety reasons. A woman who had lived with her for several months told The Post that she had recently moved out because of safety concerns.
'She had a lot of positive karma, and it messed up the chemistry of the whole restaurant when she was killed,' the restaurant owner said at the time. 'Her nature was so positive. You knew she had been through a lot of hard knocks. … But she hadn't gotten that hard D.C. edge yet.'
This story is developing and will be updated.