A dismembered body found dumped along a Queens highway in August belonged to a troubled stripper who was identified by her unique rose tattoo, her grieving cousin told The Post on Monday.
Christina Purdie, 27, had been “battling a lot of things” and was working as an exotic dancer when she disappeared in May after cutting off ties with her mom — who never suspected the butchered body discovered along a stretch of the Jackie Robinson Parkway was her daughter, said the relative, Geneva Purdie.
“She just cut herself off [from] the entire family,” Geneva, 41, said of Christina. “I know that she was stripping and selling her body. I don’t know if she was, like, escorting, but she was in that lifestyle.”
The cousin said that at some point, the family saw the photo that cops had put out of a distinctive rose tattoo on the dead woman’s body and recognized it as Christina’s, leading her distraught mom to identify her daughter’s remains at the morgue.
“We don’t know if it was a serial killer or someone that was close to our family because it seemed as if it’s just sitting there,” she said of the murder case. “Like, it’s going to be one of those cold cases.”
Christina’s death was ruled a homicide, but her killer remains a mystery.
A city Department of Transportation worker made the grisly discovery while mowing the grass near the area’s famed Cypress Hills Cemetery around 10:30 a.m. on Aug. 6, according to police.
The only clues cops had to the victim’s identity were the tattoo and jewelry found on its badly decomposed remains.
Christina, nicknamed “Gemini” by friends and relatives, had moved out of her mom’s house after the two had a falling out and largely kept in touch with just one relative, another cousin named Desmond.
“We always made sure: ‘Desmond, did you see her today? Did you see Gemini?’ ” Geneva said. “He’s like, ‘Yeah, I saw her. I saw her in the corner,’ or, ‘Yes, she called me. I came over to where she lived.’ They was always close. Until one day he was like, ‘I haven’t seen Gemini in about a week.’ “
Geneva said Christina had been living in The Bronx with a boyfriend and his mother, who never told the family that Christina went missing sometime in May.
“She just had a really good spirit,” Geneva said of her slain cousin. “She didn’t have to be drunk in order for you to smile. She was goofy. She liked to clown a lot.
“But not clown you where you feel bad,” she added. “But clowning you just to get you to be happy.”
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