Video captures figure dragging large bag shortly before Queens mom Orsolya Gaal found dead
The Forest Hills mom found dead in a hockey duffel bag spent some of her final hours puttering around her yard and enjoying a night out — before video caught a mysterious figure lugging her makeshift casket down the street.
Cops are trying to piece together how Orsolya Gaal, 51, went from a well-to-do, seemingly typical stay-at-home married mom of two to a slay victim.
“It’s a mystery,” an NYPD source told The Post on Sunday. “Now it’s a question of piecing together everything she did that night.”
The source said that during Gaal’s final hours Friday, “She goes out with friends.
“We’re pulling video and receipts from those places,” the source said.
Gaal returned home before midnight and a short time later, her killer arrived, another NYPD source said.
“[Then] around 4:30 a.m. [Saturday], you see somebody rolling this [duffel bag] down the sidewalk from multiple cameras,’’ the first police source said.
“[Cops] actually traced it backward from the scene to the house,” the source said, referring to a blood trail from the bag.
“She knew the people she was out with,’’ the source added of the victim. “We’re talking to them. We also have to figure out, did she meet some mysterious stranger along the way?”
Gaal’s body was found with multiple stab wounds in a hockey bag, not unlike the one used by her son, the second law enforcement source noted.
Detectives have found no sign of a break-in at the house. They believe the suspect knew his victim and stabbed her out of anger, a source said.
Police on Sunday released surveillance footage that showed a person dragging a duffel bag across the sidewalk.
A large contingent of police officers was back at the home, which was surrounded by crime-scene tape, about 6 p.m. Sunday.
Neighbors of Gaal — whose body was discovered by a dog-walker around 8 a.m. Saturday, less than a mile from her upscale home — said they were shocked by the violence.
“I saw her [Friday] in her backyard,” said John Blankson, who lives next to the family’s stately, Tudor-style home.
“We share a common backyard with [her] dog,’’ the resident said, apparently referring to an adorable little brown pooch that Gaal posed with in a slew of Facebook photos on her page.
“[Saturday] morning, we were like, ‘Why can’t we hear the dog this morning?’ It’s super shocking,” Blankson said.
“They were a normal family,” he added.
Gaal’s body was found by a resident who was walking his two hounds in nearby Forest Park when the Rhodesian ridgeback dogs latched onto the scent coming from the duffel bag.
The NYPD said Sunday that surveillance footage from the area captured “an unknown individual” dragging a wheeled duffel bag from the direction of Gaal’s home.
The hockey bag containing her corpse was discovered about four hours after the person appeared on the footage, and cops followed the blood trail from it to the side door of Gaal’s Juno Street home, authorities said.
When police got to the house, officers found Gaal’s 13-year-old son on the top floor of the home, authorities said.
“He stated he lives at the location but does not know where she is,’’ cops said in a statement.
The boy was taken into custody to be interviewed and later released, law enforcement sources said.
The high-up NYPD source added to The Post that detectives don’t believe the boy left the house overnight.
Neighbors said the youngster had been scheduled to have his bar mitzvah a few weeks ago but that the family had to cancel the event because his dad contracted COVID-19.
Gaal’s husband, businessman Howard Klein, was reportedly in Portland with the couple’s 17-year-old son on a college hunt at the time she was murdered, according to social media posts.
Neighbors said Klein, the founder of RK Equity Advisors — a boutique capital markets advisory firm focused on lithium-ion battery materials — wanted his older boy to attend the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, his alma mater.
A source said Klein received a threat from his wife’s cellphone shortly after the killing.
Klein told The Post on Saturday that he was on his way home, while repeatedly saying the family’s lives “are at stake.
“There are concerns about our safety,” he said. “Our lives are at risk.”
Police said they previously responded to a 911 call at the house after Klein reported his wife missing May 29, 2020. The husband later told the cops his wife had been found.
The couple’s older son also went missing in July 2021 but was later found about a half an hour later, police said.
Klein and the boys returned home Sunday, but it was unclear if they had been questioned by police.
In a since-deleted tweet announcing his recent out-of-state trip with his son, Klein also made a pitch for hedge-funder Bill Browder’s book about Vladimir Putin.
“Just landed Portland OR before evaluating Ann Arbor again with my 17-year-old son,” Klein wrote. “Highly recommend ‘Freezing Order’ @Billbrowder a man I’ve followed closely and admired since I started on Wall Street in 1997 broking EMEA & Russian equities to hedge funds like Hermitage.”
The book is subtitled “A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder and Surviving Vladimir Putin’s Wrath.”
Blankson’s wife, Nicola, said Gaal and her family had lived in the leafy neighborhood for about eight or nine years.
Nicola described Gaal as “pretty calm, sociable.
“She was out there living her life and making sure her kids were well-looked-after, like any mother would,” Nicola said. “This is the last thing I’d expect to wake up to.”
Local Susan Ram added, “I was just watching ‘Criminal Minds’ and it’s like that. This is [a] TV psychopath thing.”
Another area resident who would only give his name as Rick called the whole ordeal “horrifying.
“I can’t even understand how terrifying this is,” he said. “It’s very unusual to see this. I don’t know how this could happen around here.”
Additional reporting by Larry Celona, Joe Marino and Georgett Roberts
