A woman who ran away from home as a teenager and was pronounced dead has been found in the Russian city of Tula – alive and the mother of three. Over the two dozen years she had been missing, she was a member of a religious cult, but managed to escape.
READ MORE: Moscow to launch anti-sect program after police bust major cult
Julia G. ran away from her home in Vologda in Central Russia at the age of 13, reportedly after having a dispute with her parents.
Her family looked for her for years, but she was pronounced dead by a Russian court in 2005.
However, on May 27, 2016, police found an unattended child sleeping on a bench in a park in Tula, and in a little while a woman with two children came by and declared that it was one of hers.
“She called herself Julia Nikolaevna G. and said it was her child. She had no ID, and no documents confirming her relationship to the child,” Tula police stated, as reported by RIA Novosti news agency. She was then taken to the local police department for identification.
Police discovered that Julia had been born on April 6, 1979, and was listed as dead “in the database of information and reference records.” Julia told police that she had been living in Tula since December of 2015, but had previously lived in another region “under the influence of a religious cult, banned in Russia,” from which she finally had managed to escape. Police have not disclosed the name of the cult.
“She wandered, begged, spent nights in the Orthodox churches in Tula, which gave her a temporary refuge,” police stated, adding that the only documents the mother could provide were her children’s birth certificates from maternity hospitals in different Russian regions.
Julia’s children were sent to a hospital for medical examinations, while police tried to determine her identity.
READ MORE: Moscow court bans Church of Scientology over ‘irreligious’ trademark restrictions
Finally, they apparently found her family. Julia’s presumed relatives said that she was “a native of Vologda, and ran away in 1992 at the age 13, sought ever since by her family, but proclaimed dead in 2005 by the decision of the Vologda court.”
Julia’s presumed mother came to Tula to see her daughter, and police say that the two women recognized each other. At the moment, law enforcement authorities are providing assistance in formalizing the children’s paperwork and rehabilitating them.
READ MORE: 11,700 slaves trapped in modern Britain’s ‘shadow economy’ – report