Body Found in Winnetka Is Believed to Be Missing Model’s

Human remains found inside a truck parked at a San Fernando Valley self-storage center are probably those of a missing part-time model who police suspect was killed by her lover, investigators said Wednesday.

Iryna Singerman, 21, was last seen by her husband on July 25, two days before Los Angeles Police Department officers were directed to a trash bin behind a Canoga Park business, where they found garbage bags containing a blood-streaked baseball bat, towels and documents bearing the name of the Ukrainian-born woman.

Last week, investigators searched the Woodland Hills home of Singerman’s boyfriend, 59-year-old Brian Joseph Cullen.

Investigators said there were signs of a struggle in the home, and they seized documents that led them to a Winnetka storage center where a woman’s decomposing body, her purse and other effects were found under a truck-bed cover.

Employees at the business told police that on July 26, a man identifying himself as Cullen paid them three months’ rent on a storage unit and said he was “going away for a long time,” said Det. Rick Swanston of the LAPD’s West Valley Division.

Investigators are exploring several possible motives for Singerman’s probable slaying, but Swanston said he believes this is “a domestic violence incident between two people. She’s dead, and he’s on the run.”

Singerman met her husband, Ronald, a certified public accountant, a year ago through an agency that matches American men with Russian women, Swanston said.

He brought her to the United States and the couple married, settling in Ronald Singerman’s West Los Angeles home.

Swanston said it was unclear when Singerman met Cullen, who owns a coupon book business and is on federal parole for a wire fraud conviction in the 1980s.

Cullen had been seeing Singerman for at least several months, police said. Singerman told her husband that her frequent absences were related to her modeling work.

Swanston described Singerman as an aspiring model with a portfolio.

She was not employed by a modeling agency.

Cullen, who also goes by the name Mark Corbett, may be traveling with a 14-year-old boy, whom he told friends he adopted last year in Mexico.

He was last known to be driving a gray Ford Focus with California license plate 5PBS947. Anyone with information on the case is asked to call homicide detectives at (818) 374-7721.