Cruise-Ship Romance Ended In Grisly Slaying -- Boyfriend Leads Police To Model's Remains, Is Charged In Killing

MANSFIELD, N.J. - Julie Scully was desperately seeking love, and the sultry model thought she had found it in a shipboard romance with a young Greek cruise officer.

She divorced her American husband late last year and moved to Greece last month to marry her new love, but her heart ached for her 3-year-old daughter, Katie. Scully told her family she wanted to come home. She never made it back.

Her decapitated body was found inside a suitcase in a swamp yesterday, after her seaman boyfriend - George Skiadopoulos, who is charged with murder - led police to her remains.

Scully met Skiadopoulos, a petty officer on a Caribbean ocean liner, in November 1997 on a vacation cruise with her then-husband, Tim Nist. After her cruise, Skiadopoulos began calling her and faxing messages.

Several months later, she and Nist took another cruise and again saw Skiadopoulos. While still married, she began having a relationship with him in February 1998.

In November, she divorced her husband, and in December she moved to Greece to marry Skiadopoulos.

Friends were at a loss to explain what attracted Scully - a stunning, outgoing brunette - to Skiadopoulos, a balding maintenance man who had quit his job on the cruise ship and was living off her $600,000 divorce settlement.

"I think he showed so much love for her that it overwhelmed her," said Tracey Allen, a close friend. "She was just so needy."

Others saw the relationship as a star-crossed mismatch between a

fun-loving young woman and a jealous manipulator. They said Scully would only call home when Skiadopoulos was away.

"It wasn't Julie at the end," said Susan White. "He pulled her away from a lot of her friends."

Julia Scully said she had tried to warn her only daughter about Skiadopoulos, a man she believed all along was only after her daughter's money. Julia said he wanted to be a "big shot" in Greece and was pressuring Julie to buy a taxi business for him.

Athens police say Skiadopoulos - "blinded by his passion" - strangled Scully in a jealous rage Jan. 8. He was about to be drafted into the Greek army, and she had told her family two days earlier that she wanted to come home to Mansfield, 10 miles south of Trenton.

Skiadopoulos, 24, showed police how he allegedly strangled the 31-year-old Scully before leaving her nude body in a swamp in Kavala in northern Greece, authorities said.

Police said he doused his lover's body with gasoline and set her afire, then put the former model's corpse into a suitcase, using a hacksaw to cut off her head so the body would fit inside.

Yesterday, a heavily guarded Skiadopoulos led police to the place where he placed her remains.

"I regret this," he said after leaving the offices of prosecutor Dimitris Papageorgiou.

Scully was known in Trenton for her 10 appearances as a "Page 6 Girl," posing in a bikini in the Trentonian newspaper. She appeared on the show "Hard Copy" in 1992 in a story about the Trentonian.