American nurse, 31, killed while on holiday in Budapest

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FILE – A photo at Freedom Square in Budapest on November 30, 2019. Photo: FOX Television Stations

An American woman was killed this week while vacationing in Budapest, Hungarian officials said.

The victim, 31-year-old Mackenzie Michalski of Portland, Oregon, was reported missing on November 5 after she was last seen at a nightclub in downtown Budapest.

Hungarian authorities launched a missing person investigation and began reviewing security footage from local nightclubs, seeing Michalski in several clubs with a man who was later identified as a suspect. People Magazine reported that her friends had photos of her at the popular ruin bar Szimpla Kert.

FILE – A photo of the main bar of Szimpla Kert, a popular ‘ruin bar’ in Budapest, Hungary, from November 29, 2019. Photo: FOX Television Stations

Michalski has since been reported dead and a 37-year-old Irish national was taken into custody on November 7.

Investigators said Michalski and the suspect met at a nightclub and danced before leaving for the man’s rented apartment. The man killed Michalski while they were engaged in an “intimate encounter,” police said.

The suspect, identified by police by the initials LTM, confessed to the killing but said it was an accident. Police said he tried to cover up his crime by cleaning the apartment and hiding Michalski’s body in a wardrobe before buying a suitcase and putting her body inside.

He then rented a car and drove to Lake Balaton, about 150 kilometers southwest of Budapest, where he disposed of the body in a wooden area outside the town of Szigliget.

Video released by police shows the suspect leading authorities to the location where he left the body.

Police said that before his arrest, the suspect had searched the Internet about how to dispose of a body, police procedures in missing persons cases, whether pigs actually eat dead bodies and the presence of wild boars in the Lake Balaton area.

It is also said that he searched the Internet for the competence of the Budapest police.

Who was Mackenzie Michalski?

Mackenzie Michalski was a 31-year-old American woman who was murdered while on vacation in Hungary.

She lived in Portland, Oregon, and was originally from Fredonia, New York a GoFundMe page. She worked as a neurosurgical nurse at Providence St. Vincent, she said a local report from FOX 12 KTPV.

A statement from the hospital to KTPV said “Kenzie’s” coworkers described her as kind and loving.

According to a post from an administrator of a Facebook group called “Find Mackenzie Michalski,” which was created on Nov. 7, Michalski “will forever be remembered as a beautiful and compassionate young woman.”

Michalski’s family traveled to Hungary in the wake of her disappearance and attended a candlelight vigil in Budapest on Saturday.

Her father told the Associated Press that Michalski had previously visited Budapest and called it her “happy place.”

“The history, she just loved it and she was so relaxed here,” he said. “This was her town.”