Loved ones showed up to the victim's home today, but did not want to talk as they looked in disbelief.
49-year-old Susan Woolf was found with packing tape around her neck. She was stabbed several times.
Woolf was left covered in blood in her Long Island City kitchen.
"I found three friends of the lady. They were hysterically crying and I was like, 'what happened?' They said, 'I found my friend in a pool of blood, laid down on her back in the kitchen,' " said Wendell Batista.
Batista is a dispatcher at the Tom Cat Bakery across the street from the victim's apartment. He says the woman's friends ran across the street and begged him to call 9-1-1 after finding their friend murdered.
"I was shocked because this is a very safe neighborhood. Although there are a lot of factories around, we feel pretty safe," Batista said.
The neighborhood is a very industrial -- meaning there aren't many residential buildings in the area.
Detectives say two women and one man went to check on Woolf at her apartment after she didn't call them back.
Police believe this was a case of domestic violence.
But Wendell Batista says he never saw any signs of a problem between the victim and her partner -- either her boyfriend or her husband. Instead, he says they often walked their poodle and helped him by moving their Subaru, so he could back out the trucks at his job.
"They had moved into the neighborhood around the end of the summer. They were pretty quiet people who walked their dog, most of the time when I saw them," said Batista.
So far no arrests have been made and there is no word from investigators on what other neighbors may have heard or saw.
