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A spattered trail of blood leading from her apartment door to the stairwell and down the steps marked the final horrific moments in the life of Diana Gabrielle O'Brien.

The body of the young model from Saltspring Island, B.C., was sprawled in a pool of dried blood when it was discovered by a cleaning lady in the stairwell of a Shanghai apartment tower. She had been repeatedly stabbed, and her upper body was covered with blood.

“There was blood everywhere,” said Ouyang Xiaoli, the cleaning lady who found the body at 5:30 a.m. on Monday.

“I was horrified and I had to turn my face away. I ran down and reported it to the security guards. I could hardly speak when I tried to tell them that a person had died. My heart was beating so fast.”

Her brother, who collects the trash in the 19-storey apartment tower, had noticed stains on the sixth floor of the building around dawn on Monday. He asked Ms. Ouyang to mop up the stains. But as she mopped the floor, she realized they were blood stains, leading from Ms. O'Brien's sixth-floor apartment door to the stairwell.

She followed the trail of blood and discovered the Canadian woman's blood-soaked body on the stairs, near the fifth floor. It appears that Ms. O'Brien had been attacked in her apartment and had managed to flee to the stairwell, where she may have been attacked again or simply collapsed.

“She was a beautiful girl,” Ms. Ouyang said in an interview. “I sometimes saw her in the building with other girls. She often seemed a little unhappy when I saw her. But I never spoke to her.”

Dozens of police and security agents, including many plainclothes agents, were swarming Wednesday around the apartment building where Ms. O'Brien had lived and died. The police set up a command post in a lawyers' association office on the main floor of the building, and they were studying the surveillance video from security cameras.

Ms. O'Brien had arrived in China on June 24 on a modelling assignment with JH Model Agency, a little-known Shanghai business. Less than two days after the slaying, the agency closed its doors, shut down its website and refused to answer any questions about the case.

Her friends were told that the agency put Ms. O'Brien in an apartment in a “safe” neighbourhood of Shanghai. But in reality, the neighbourhood is filled with many brothels and seedy massage parlours, with women in skimpy clothing openly soliciting for business from passing men.

According to her Canadian friends, Ms. O'Brien was unhappy with some of her modelling assignments, which involved dancing on pedestals in nightclubs to promote whisky and other products. She cut short her three-month contract and planned to fly home this month.

Ms. O'Brien's boyfriend, Joel Berry, said he was told that her apartment had been ransacked and electronics were stolen. But there was no sign of any forced entry in the apartment and its door seemed normal, Ms. Ouyang said.

About two hours after finding the body, Ms. Ouyang saw another foreign woman returning to the apartment building – perhaps one of the two women who shared Ms. O'Brien's apartment. She was accompanied by two foreign men. “She was crying as if her heart was broken,” the cleaning lady said.

Charlotte Wood, a 21-year-old model from Victoria, was one of Ms. O'Brien's roommates in Shanghai. She also worked for the JH agency. She is still in Shanghai, but has declined to comment.

A former employee of JH Model Agency confirmed Wednesday that Jiang Jiawei, a 28-year-old self-described “international modelling agent” in Shanghai, was the co-owner and co-founder of the agency. But when contacted by The Globe and Mail this week, Mr. Jiang refused to say anything about the agency or the model's death. He would not even confirm his own connection to the agency.

On its website, JH boasted of being one of the biggest modelling agencies in Eastern China. In fact it was one of the smallest and least-known agencies in the city, according to leaders in the industry.

Chinese authorities, meanwhile, have been reluctant to provide any information on the slaying. The Shanghai police did not even confirm the killing until two days after it happened.

On Wednesday, in their first confirmation of the incident, police issued a terse statement, referring to the victim as “Diana” without any surname. The four-sentence statement said only that the woman's death had been reported to the police at 5:30 a.m. on Monday. It said the investigation was continuing.

With its showcase Olympics due to open in Beijing in less than a month, China has been sensitive to the release of any embarrassing information, especially if a foreigner is involved. It has launched a massive security campaign, cracking down on dissidents, petitioners, beggars, street vendors and anyone else perceived as a potential troublemaker.