THE body of a young woman found in a block of units in the eastern Sydney suburb of Queens Park could be that of 18-year-old Lyndsay van Blanken who has been missing since November, police said yesterday.

The body was found by a maintenance worker in a sports bag which had been dumped in the common storage area of the units. She was last seen alive about 400m away. A post-mortem was held yesterday but the body has yet to be formally identified.

However, police said that jewellery and clothing found on the body appeared to be those of Ms van Blanken.

Ms van Blanken, who worked as a trainee animator at Walt Disney Animation, went missing after getting off a train in Bondi Junction.

She was described by work colleagues as a “funky” teenager who changed her look almost by the week.

She lived in a flat in the same Waverley property as her mother Cynthia Pleasance, who at the time of her disappearance made heartfelt pleas to the public for assistance in finding her. Both her previous boyfriend, the last person known to have seen her alive, and her current boyfriend, a 22-year-old American hairdresser she had met over the internet a year before, provided alibis to the police at the time of her disappearance.

Residents of the Queens Park unit block had complained of a foul odour for weeks, Detective-Inspector Adam Purcell from Eastern Suburbs police said yesterday.

“The body is yet to be identified formally, although clothing and jewellery discovered on the body is consistent with jewellery and clothing that was on Lyndsay van Blanken at the time of her disappearance in November 2003,” Detective-Inspector Purcell said.

Meanwhile, the parents of Mike Lee, the Kings Cross barman and Indonesian student whose body was found headfirst in a wheelie bin at the back of a Surry Hills brothel last week, are expected to speak to police today after having flown in from Indonesia. They are to assist with the formal identification of the body.