Tamara Samsonova: The Granny Ripper

hello everybody welcome back to a brand new episode of the casual criminalist as always i'm your host simon and in this one today i believe this is actually a recommendation from one of our viewers uh i think it came in on youtube maybe by twitter if you want to suggest something for us to cover on the future at the can in the future on the casual criminalist well i am at simon whistler on twitter and i think also on instagram but don't reach out to me on instagram because i never check it twitter is the place to find me this is tomorrow samsonova the granny ripper uh i'm imagining i think i looked into this super briefly after i saw the suggestion just to make sure it was something that i wanted to cover and i believe it's to do with an old age serial killer so uh that's what we've got for you today as always what happens on this show is callum has written me a script it's a big one i'm gonna go through and read it as always i've not read this before i am on a journey of discovery with you and let's just jump into it shall we i'm gonna add comments as i feel that sort of thing if you if you're new here this is useful if you're not well you know welcome back [Music] russians are made of tougher stuff than most i've seen the dash cam baseball bat deals to prove it oh my god the rush i think it's also just because russians seem to have a lot more dash cams i have no idea why but like they everyone has a dash cam in russia apparently and i have seen some insane videos from those dash cams there was one there was a guy he was just cycling along and a car was traveling too close to him so when they get to the the traffic lights the guy the cyclist and the good the driver was being a dick i mean so deserved maybe but he just drags the driver out of the car the cyclist drags the driver out of the car and just starts slamming the door against his legs it's like oh dude i'm not this might have been an overreaction although it's generally a lovely place to visit plenty of westerners still see mother russia as a strange and menacing land to be avoided at all costs and they don't always have to look hard for stories to reinforce the stereotypes i've never been to russia i guess callum's been i've been to ukraine which is fairly close to russia but that's and they speak russian and also ukrainian i believe i feel like i should know that but it was very nice some of the crime stories out of russia really pushed the limits in terms of brutality and bizarreness that's the kind of case i have for you today a recent story out of some petersburg the city which served as the backdrop for crime and punishment but this particular narrative is a bit too dismal even for dostoyevsky oh my this is going to get dark then at the center of it is one of the most unlikely criminals you're ever likely to come across an elderly russian granny and not the cheery eurovision song contest kind i i don't think i've ever seen the eurovision song contest and i'm very maybe when i was very young but i'm generally glad that i mean who cares how is this still a thing let's move on rather than spending her days down the bingo this mature murderer had some far darker interests to keep her busy during retirement and if the suspected death toll is to be believed she was a very busy woman indeed this is the story of the so-called granny ripper a septigenarian slavic slayer that'll have you picking up the pace every time you walk past a retirement home from now on husband's disappearance in the year 2000 petersburg police were called to investigate a missing person report a man named alexi samsonova had disappeared from the apartment on dimitrova street which he shared with his wife tamara the distraught tamara told the police there was a chance alexi may have run off with another woman although she couldn't say for sure whatever the case she must have been devastated that who had been married for around 30 years tamara had met alexi when she first moved to saint petersburg after graduating from moscow state linguistic university in the late 1960s the lovebirds soon settled down together in a new apartment block he began to work in a car repair plant while she found work in the tourism industry first at a travel agency then at the grand hotel europe now retired at the age of 53 she was looking at the prospect of spending her twilight years alone in her aging apartment it would just be a tragic little story if it were to end there but please withhold your sympathies to the end yeah this would be the most boring episode of the casual criminalist ever it's like and then she retired and lived happily ever after she definitely didn't brutally murder her husband alexi she she probably did i'm just joking let's carry on life after loss [Music] to fill in the silence left behind after her husband went missing samson over decided to take on a lodger oh wait maybe maybe the husband did just leave and that turned her into a serial killer oh my here we go she invited a man named vladimir i feel this is the most classic russian name ever to come and live with her in the summer of 2001 and the two became close however after a falling out near the end of the year he took off in 2003 she finally found a longer-term lodger this was a man in his early 40s named sergey pottenin from the distant northern city of norelsk is it i i really feel like this is just stereo stereotypical russian names her first lodger was called vladimir her second lodger was called sergey the two had the odd falling out during his tenancy partly because samsonova wasn't exactly the most easy person to live with she was a strict and volatile audible sensitive to any perceived slight from her housemate her neighbors said that she would often swear at them in the hallways and bang on the radiators sergey must have grown pretty sick of it all because one day he apparently decided up sticks taking off abruptly in 2003. without any relatives in the city nobody could figure out where he had gone off to most assumed he had made an abrupt return to narelsk and left it at that oh is she killing them all these guys are not just like leaving she's she's she's getting rid of them right so life went on for samson over just as it did after the last man in her life unexpectedly disappeared she continued to host lodges on and off throughout the years with mixed success they were typically men younger than her by at least a few years they came and went over the next decade with tamara enjoying a relatively comfortable retirement from the income and arrangements generated then by 2015 she once again found herself living alone in march of that year her apartment was due for renovations and so a mutual acquaintance put her in contact with valentina nikolevner ullanova a 79 year old who lived on the same street sam sanova was in need of a place to stay during the renovations so she worked out a deal with the ailing lenovo to stay at her place in exchange for doing chores around the house samsonova was now well into her 60s and age had done nothing to dull her stubbornness after getting comfortable in ulanova's apartment for several months she decided she wasn't all that interested in leaving just like your mate who comes over on friday night and is still sleeping on your couch on sunday she tested the patience of a host to the extreme yeah that is the worst situation i've had this and it's like oh please leave and it's like please get out of my house i have things to do eventually ulenova decided she'd had enough the two women had been arguing all day and the older of the two just didn't have enough days left on earth to be spending them bickering so she asked samson over to kindly gtfo or whatever the acronym would be in russian poisoning samsonova was upset about the prospect of going back to her empty apartment so she took matters into her own hands after setting things straight with her host she continued going about her business as usual we can actually see video footage of her online taking out the bins on that summer night of 2015. in the footage samsonova stands by the apartment building door in a baby blue raincoat looking like every other old deer running out to grab some milk and eggs she must have bought a hell of a lot though because the bag she was dragging around in the clip looks heavy is there a body in the bag or part of a body as it turns out of any good samaritan had tried to help this little old lady carry her bags that night they'd have inadvertently become an accessory to murder yes inside that plastic bag was mrs ulinova or should i say parts of her in case it's not clear enough already she was dead callum when you say that her body parts are inside a bag i'm assuming she didn't just surgically remove like her arm put that in the bag and then you know made sure that she carried on living so how in hell does a bit of a domestic disagreement and like that well the final straw in the whole thing turned out to be an argument over whose turn it was to wash the teacups i remember that kind of crisis happening in my uni flat chair but it only went as far as a passive aggressive post-it note oh in my uni house it went like who's who's left this stuff here and then norm would clear it up and he'd be like well i guess we'll just throw this cup away because it's now covered in mold that wasn't exactly santanova's style though on july the 14th 2015 she traveled to the city of pushkin to visit the pharmacy she needed a pretty conspicuous dose of the prescription drug phenazepam a russian-made schizophrenia pill which some casual connoisseurs abuse as a kind of muscle relaxant somehow she was able to convince the pharmacist to sell it to her over the counter and she returned home picking up an olive olivier salad on the way this was olanova's favorite dish and the perfect peace offering after another big domestic bust up that's how it must have seemed to the older of the two pensioners anyway she's probably poisoned that salad or maybe she's using that drug on it but also more importantly how do you persuade a pharmacist to give you drugs i mean i know it's russia but it's still you need a prescription from a doctor right they can't just be handing out the drugs rather than helping the poor old deer into bed samsonova did the next best thing she started cutting her apart with her hands oh my god hold on that's about the worst possible thing she could have done the details coming up next are pretty awful so consider this fair warning yes maybe this one gets the explicit rating i mean although callum i felt like we could have done with the warning before we described her getting caught up with a hacksaw although i get the feeling it's just gonna get worse using the hacksaw samsonova removed the limbs cut the torso of a victim in two and then used two kitchen knives to separate it all into smaller pieces gruesomely it's thought the dullenova was still breathing at the start of the horrific process oh god further cctv footage reveals samsonova walking up and down the stairs of the apartment block over and over to dispose of the bags of body parts which must have been hell on her knees the poor old deer i really have to impress on you the bizarreness of watching her do this looking like the stereotypical russian grandmother in her babushka hair scarf and all hardly the typical look of a killer the final leg of her horrific workouts awesome the final leg saw samson over carrying a large saucepan downstairs instead of a bin bag to paraphrase brad pitt in seven what's in the pot have she not covered the top with a lid you'd have been able to see the answer for yourself it was the seventh head of oolanova why can you use a bag did you run out of bags this is so grim kids the next time your granny asks you to wash the dishes wash the [ __ ] dishes investigation and arrest it would be another few days before anyone on dimitrov street had any inclination that something horrible had happened in their neighborhood a young couple down the street went out walking on the 27th with their dog when it started acting strangely as they passed by a pond a dog stopped and dragged them towards something dumped among the bushes by the banks a shower curtain wrapped around something when they peeled back the plastic they were confronted with a heap of disfigured human remains the heaped pieces of a torso that's the sort of image you probably don't soon forget yeah no you definitely wouldn't forget that also this seems like a terrible you just did you just throw the body away in a park wrapped in a shower curtain oh i mean i know on casual criminals people i'm often like guys can you do your crimes better please i mean it is just a little bit disappointing when people i mean come on come on you could at least try it was like the guy was this a was this a casual criminalist video where a guy robbed a store with uh he was just wearing a plastic bag on his head but just a clear plastic bag it's like come on get a balaclava or something it's probably like three dollars the couple called the police who canvassed the local residents to find out if anyone had seen anything suspicious in the area or if any residents weren't accounted for that this was the only way to get a reliable id on the remains given the absence of a head or even fingers of course they discovered that old valentina nikolavina oh god something uhlanova hadn't been seen recently while her tenant had been spotted doing some late night garbage disposal not too long ago satisfied that the body was all over investigators went to search the deceased's apartment where her lodger and caretaker were still living again guys do your crimes better you're the most like you're the first person they're going to ask and you threw the body away in a park come on given what you know about dear old samsonova you might be expecting her to confront the police hatchet in hand but on the contrary she was actually bizarrely polite and mild-mannered when they knocked on the door when she led them into ulinova's place they found traces of the victim's blood splattered around the bathroom and kitchen which tends to happen when you carve up a body and the shower curtain had been ripped off its fittings you're a terrible criminal when pushed to explain the incriminating scene samsonova calmly told the cops that dulanova had insulted her so she was forced to end her life she had been scared to go back to her own house and acted accordingly with this matter-of-fact confession the initial mystery was solved however the police just opened a can of worms that would lead to a massive investigation that is still going on to this day okay so i'm going to assume i don't know like i said i don't read these before that samsonova was killing the tenants in her apartment previously but if she is such a terrible criminal and just hid the body in a park and then like confessed to it i mean maybe she just decided enough was enough but how'd you get away with it for so long when you're so bad at crime samsonova maintained her relatively relaxed demeanor throughout the whole affair after first being arrested she threw out a flurry of wild red herrings to the cops but soon calmed down speaking calmly and candidly about her crimes it seems like she did just decide that i'm done with hiding or being on the run or whatever so i'm just gonna confess to it all i guess by that point you've like you've already come to terms with it on july 29th she sat in a windowed pen at the frenzy district court of saint petersburg apologies for my russian pronunciation there wearing a red sweater red hair in a messy perm she cut a fragile non-threatening figure an image completely at odds with the crimes which she was brought in for this was her first hearing after being detained a small event and not particularly long when pushed for her version of events mrs samsonover had no problem admitting to the murder of her friend and actually expressed a bit of relief that the whole affair was over when reporters got a chance to photograph her she blew them a kiss and said i knew you would come it's such a disgrace for me all the city will know from the tone you'd think that she was talking about missing a church meeting or having a bust up with essel down at the bingo maybe they would maybe it wouldn't be [ __ ] it would be something more russian ethel's seems super british name towards the end of the hearing the judge asked her i'm asked to arrest you what do you think she told him you decide your honor after all i am guilty and i deserve a punishment he ordered samsonover to be held in custody for the duration of the investigation to which she smiled earnestly and gave a little burst of applause this is she really has come to terms with it hasn't she she's like yeah yeah yeah it's time it's time this must have been one of the most compliant suspects that the saint petersburg judicial system has ever dealt with she even went back to her apartment with the officers to reenact how she had cut up the body of ulanova which seems just a little bit unnecessary to be honest using a creepy orange dummy in place of the victim she displayed the exact order in which she took apart the body starting with the head she told them how she wrapped up each piece in parts of the shower curtain before packing them into plastic bags seen in the video she's confessed do we really need to take her to the apartment to never carve up a dummy body it's like she did it we know she did it there's enough evidence do we really need to do this guys but i'm glad they did because it makes for a good story here on the casual criminalist she was forced to abandon the heaviest parts the head legs and hips in the backyard the rest she dumped in the frazinski district samsonover then showed officers how she had taken lenovo's head and boiled it in the saucepan in an attempt to hide her identity oh that is grim oh sorry did you think the saucepan was just for transportation no this story is far madder than that you should know that by now yeah i should have guessed shouldn't i that is that is grim that is grim the killer but that does seem like a smart crime move like that seems a lot smarter than her other crime moves the killer did the same with a victim's hand in an attempt to hide the fingerprints and then set about scattering the pieces around the neighborhood as best she could i guess she's not heard of dna and i mean even if this woman doesn't have the dna on profile they're going to sample her dna and then when that's other woman goes missing from her problem they could get some like dna off a hairbrush or whatever and compare it and then they would no anyway of course the old deer was no spring chicken so it was taking a while to properly get rid of the evidence giving the police plenty of time to catch her interestingly she never did disclose where the head and internal organs were hidden oh god she took the internal organs out what was going on a neighbor suspected that she may have disposed of them in the communal rubbish bins which would have been collected and taken to landfill before any alarms were raised but will never know for sure well so actually disposing of the stuff in the bin of the apartment was actually better than trying to hide it wrapped in a shower curtain in the park i would think like that'd be a terrible place to dispose of body parts but i guess i would be a terrible criminal the more you know although samsonover hadn't done a good job of covering her tracks this time in a younger days she'd have been able to get rid of the body without arousing any suspicion at all and that's not just speculation on my part see the arrest of samsonova was just the beginning when the police searched her house they found a bizarre scrawly diary written in russian german and english alongside mundane details about her eating habits and daily chores it also spoke in painstaking detail about a career of a murderous terror stretching back decades as it turned out this old lady had more skeletons in her closet than anyone could have possibly guessed well that's pretty grim right it's like yeah yeah had tea ate a scone murdered my lodger cut his hands off boiled them in a pan oh my god ullanova was far from her first victim actually it seemed like the departed old deer was almost a way for samsonova to finally bring an end to a decade-long spree one last murder which she knew she couldn't get away with just to finally be done with it all in a later court appearance she is quoted as saying i was getting ready for this court action for dozens of years it was all done deliberately there is no way to live with this last murder i closed the chapter the police however were just beginning to open the book on one of russia's most gruesome true crime stories the deeper they dug into samsonova's life the more bizarre unsettling details would come to light once you're all filled in you won't look at those old biddies down the post office the same ever again well i don't think statistically old grandmas are the biggest murderers it's got to be young men right young men have got to be the biggest killers i i'd guess like 30s 40s that's got to be a prime murdering age right her dark inspirations [Music] each grizzly new detail provided fresh fodder for the tabloids in the uk some hack at the sun newspaper dubbed her the granny ripper which sounds more like someone who murders elderly ladies rather than the other way around but far be it from me to criticize such top tier journalists if you're internationally listening and not familiar with what the sun is it's it's a fairly fairly low brow tabloid newspaper in the uk by fairly i mean very much of the fascination came from the fact that such a mild-mannered old lady could be secretly capable of such horrific crimes so before we look at how many victims samson overclaimed let's first interrogate her motives how exactly does a perfectly normal saint petersburg housewife turn into the sort of person who chops up corpses well as you might have already guessed there was certainly some severe mental illness at work back in the courtroom she told reporters i'm haunted by a maniac upstairs who forced me to kill oh she was on schizophrenic medication right so this is you know something's not right with her and that does sound pretty schizophrenic when she moved in with ulanova she realized that these voices in her head quietened down which is why she was in such a panic at the thought of having to leave the story about the renovations had been just made up so that she could get out of her home in the first place so violent schizophrenia seems to have formed the basis for her series of bloody misdeeds but the killer granny also augmented her delusions with a healthy amount of reading i'm not talking about agatha christie novels samsonova's tastes were a little more niche oh god what's she going to be into well let's find out black magic well we found out there we go that was easy as if only to cement her place as the most black metal granny of all time samsonover apparently also dabbled in the dark arts the diary which set police on the hunt for her past victims wasn't the only book in her flat it was found atop a pile of texts on astrology and magic and not the teen friendly harry potter guys oh all of this nonsense one of her neighbors told the police that the killer was a keen reader of all things a cult that in itself isn't the sure sign of a murderer but when someone's this into it it's a pretty solid red flag it's like yeah all occult people are murderers i mean i definitely disagree with that i just think you know it's a bit silly isn't it it's like it's like fantasy but people think it's real i don't know why it's such a mystery to me an astrology and all of that [ __ ] why stop it boomers are impressionable people after all the minute they read an infowars article about five g towers turning people gay they're willing to write an angry letter to their local council oh i made a video the other day about 5g it was like the best 5g conspiracy theories obviously tongue-in-cheek and some of them are so ridiculous 5g causes covered 5g causes brain tumors i decided that the best path might be to start an anti-conspiracy theory saying like 5g cures cancer and this is because this would be the only way to fight it who knows what havoc beelzebub could wreak if he started taking out facebook ads i mean he certainly got good mileage out of stepson over judging by the contents of the diary the police judged that she must have been actively murdering for at least two decades some of the killings were easier to verify than others for example when the cops flicked through a spell books they found that some pages had been ripped out as it happened one of the missing pages was an exact match for a leaf found on a discarded body of an unknown man back in 2003. can you guess who it is yet uh it's probably her husband or one of the early lodgers would be my guess also again can you imagine just game of the body and it's like whoops i left i left a page of a book on him come on do better or don't so we can more easily catch you because we don't encourage crimes cannibalism [Music] i'll come back to that soon but first i want to absolutely ruin your day with another fun fact this daughtering old demon didn't just stop murdering her victims there's a solid chance that she also had a bit of a nibble on them as well oh god why grandma why come on yes although it's not been conclusively proven the police suspected that samson over may have had some cannibalistic tendencies we already know that she bawled the head and hands of oolanova ostensibly for the sake of concealing the victim's identity why though would she have gone to all the trouble of cutting out the victim's lungs i don't know cause she's schizophrenic maybe it's thought that those were in the saucepan along with the head cooking them would do nothing to hide the victim's identity so many believed that she had done this for the sake of eating parts of them this isn't baseless speculation either her diary also made repeated references to cannibalism according to the police ah it reminds me of that uh what's that tv show with hannibal it's like based on hannibal maybe it's actually called hannibal where he has those recipe cards for like making things out of people no it's never been outright confirmed beyond all doubt that samsonova had a taste for human flesh but in the absence of any clear physical evidence we have the next best thing the woman herself admitted to doing it just like it said in her diary i'd say that's pretty solid if she wrote it down she was doing it at the time and then later said yes i did what i wrote down why would we disbelieve her in those pages she suggested that she would eat parts of the lungs legs and even the heads of her victims before disposing of the rest you best try and shift that image out of your head before next sunday's roast to your nan's house andre chicatilo as for how a little old lady even became exposed to all this mutilation and cannibalism in the first place one of her neighbors thought she might have the answer marina krivikenko lived right next door to the killer and she told the papers that samsonova was fascinated with the story of another violent maniac who terrorized the soviet union several decades earlier andre chicolito the butcher of rostov apparently some petersburg's oap serial killer had been collecting information about this violent rapist murderer and how he went about his crimes as a result some of the russian papers even dubbed her a female version of that retro serial killer to understand her fixation and how it might have influenced her own murders it's worth taking a short detour into that historical case be warned though things are going to get rough callum i feel like throughout this script it's like things are going to be horrible and then they proceed to get horrible and then he's like get ready for them to be more horrible and then they get more horrible i'm just concerned there are five or six pages left and you keep saying it's getting worse i mean she was eating the lungs of her victims and eating their head flesh what's going to be worse than that born in ukraine in 1936 chicolito spent his early years suffering from the famine which had swept over the country on account of stalin's collectivist agriculture reforms the young ukrainian and his family often had to resort to eating grass just to put something in their stomachs sorry undergrads communism sucks yes my opinion of communism is not a high one and it's like everyone i know like i live in a country which used to be communist if you don't know if you're new to the show i live in prague in the czech republic nobody here likes communism uh people i know in the uk and americans i know people who grew up and never had communism in their country they're all like oh that sounds good that sounds good once you've actually had it you realize it's a piece of [ __ ] if you're watching on youtube feel free to smash that dislike button his mother even told the boy that once he had an older brother who was kidnapped and eaten by some of their neighbors before he was born good lord although that story has never been confirmed throughout the war and german occupation things only got worse chicolito had to witness all kinds of horrors including possibly the sexual assault of his own mother by nazi soldiers if you need an origin story for serial killer that basically checks all of the boxes gigolito would go on to spread the same kind of terrible violence throughout the ussr for the rest of his days at the start of his teaching career he was forced to quit his first two jobs after reports that he had been assaulting female students chronically impotent chicolito had always had severe sexual insecurities which became a key part of his motivations for murder usually he would attempt to sexually assault his victims and fly into a murderous rage when unsuccessful it was 1978 when he did this for the first time another local sex offender ended up facing firing squad for the killing leaving chicolito free to embark on an extensive spree that would leave dozens dead why are we talking so much about this chickalito guy and what does this have to do with our granny killer she's not sexually assaulting anyone is she i mean i hope not i don't know how i won't go into each murder one by one because you don't need that in your life right now too true callum quite frankly there's not really enough time all we need to know for now is that his brutality only increased with each killing he bit pieces from his victims cut out their organs and removed their eyes in the superstitious belief they would capture his image in their dying moments doesn't that happen in a film and they cut out the eyeballs and they use like a projector to look at what the last person looked out looked at and i remember seeing that film i think i was a kid and i was like that's not real is it it's definitely not real it wasn't until 1990 that he was finally caught when a mass surveillance operation was launched to ensnare him he was spotted attempting to quest children into following him and finally arrested on the 20th of november while trying to draw potential victims in with a jar of beer chicalito confessed to all of the murders linked to the manhunt 56 in total bloody hell providing insider knowledge of most he told police that he had found the struggling and muffled cries of his victims relaxing the psychopath equivalent of whale sock i guess oh no he also admitted to eating parts of the victims in some instances including their tongues and reproductive organs that is that is grim in the end the butcher of rostov was successfully convicted of 52 killings with nine later appealed for lack of proofs still the total of 43 was more than enough to secure a death sentence and with a pistol tucked behind his ear he was executed with a single shot on the 14th of february 1994. we could go even deeper into this story with a full episode but christ it'd be heavyweight yeah let us know um if you do want to cover that i mean maybe by then i'll have built up my tolerance to these a little bit more i have to say i do i don't know why but i do find it easier to record these myself than to listen to them like when i listen to other true crime podcasts or like watch it on youtube i'm always like this is way more brutal but i think that might just be because i'm kind of like distancing myself from it a little bit when i read it myself but yeah i don't know why for now we can move on back to the case of the granny ripper the disturbed pensioner undeniably had some echoes of chickalito in her modus operandi the act of cutting out the organs from the victims for example was potentially borrowed from her gruesome idol as was the extent to which she defaced the corpses of her victims oh and there's also the touch of cannibalism of course why did she cannibalize people ah just because she really liked this guy who did as well that is that is a terrible reason to be a cannibal there are plenty of differences between them though chicolito for example only made a cursory attempt to hide the bodies of his victims and took a manic pleasure out of murdering them in a frenzy sampson over on the other hand was relatively careful to fly under the radar and cut up her victim's bodies so they would be extremely difficult to piece back together and identify still given her fascination one has to wonder that when samsonova spoke of a maniac upstairs forcing her to kill was she making a coded reference to her mental health issues or did this mean something a bit more literal to her there's no hard evidence to show just how far her obsession with the butcher went but given her mental state and apparent interest in this story i don't think it's too much of a stretch to speculate that he might have played at least a small part in her psychotic delusions the extent of her crimes as i mentioned chicolito managed to kill over 50 victims before his capture but how about samson over was she ever able to match the awfulness of her idol i mean unless there's a lot that callum hasn't mentioned she only murdered a few of her lodge although he said there were a lot of lodges right so well let's find out shall we both of them certainly got a similar treatment in the media for sure while the soviet era slasher was called an evil vampire samsonova was nicknamed baba yaga a forest-dwelling creature from old slavic folklore which has the form of a haggard old woman in some versions the monster is said to trick people into trusting her before killing and eating them a sensationalist as that nickname is i have to admit it is not a bad fit samsonova did tend to target people who she had managed to draw into her confidence and in many instances are home i'm sure you've already made a good guess as to who a couple of her victims were indeed we have callum a diary entry from 2003 revealed that she had killed one of her earliest lodgers whose then unidentified torso and limbs have been found with pages from an occult book resting on top the remains could now be identified because samsonover had written about his distinctive shoulder tattoo in previous diary entries it was sergey partonin her second known lodger she had poisoned his borscht with nitrazepam those with a keen memory will remember that this wasn't the first man to make a speedy disappearance from samson over his life that was her husband wasn't it first her husband went missing back in 2000 and although the diary didn't conclusively reveal his fate suspected that he met a similar end to sergey after that there was vladimir the first lodger when the police went searching for him they got a pleasant surprise he turned up safe and sound to aid police in the investigation that guy got away that's lucky he told them that he and samsonova had shared a personal relationship throughout the summer and autumn but he decided to break it off that was the subject of the argument i mentioned before not long after he was admitted to hospital with poisoning symptoms and decided to get as far away from his landlady as possible also she tried to kill him she just didn't use enough poison i guess she didn't make that mistake again well we know she didn't because the second one died judging by the diary vlad wasn't the only one with that name to take up residence with the granny ripper and the other wasn't so lucky while he entries reads i killed my tenant volodya short for vladimir i cut him to pieces in the bathroom with a knife put the pieces of his body in plastic bags and then threw them away in different parts of the frazenski district i mean we often returned to this on casual criminalist but don't write down your crimes come on if we take the whole book at its word then many of the others who set up in the baba yaga's spare room throughout the years met the same fate as vlad ii some believe that she drew in her male victims using her sexuality enticing younger men to come and live with her before ending their lives wasn't she quite old i thought she was in she was retired wasn't she in her 50s and 60s i mean not the 50 and 60 year olds can't be attractive but it's not exactly what you would imagine in your minds right her neighbor krivenko backed up this narrative she reported that the elderly killer had been a good-looking woman in her day and that she often sat on the windowsill of her apartment topless showing off with her back to the street she noted how men came and went from the apartment after just a few weeks or months nobody really thought anything of it for example a man named alexander barashev was a resident there for just one week before he went missing without a trace samsonova confessed to killing him shortly after her arrest before quickly retracting her story she told the officers i was just joking hilarious it wasn't just her neighbors who came to give evidence against her one of her old classmates named anna battalina told police that samson over had once boasted about killing her mother-in-law too she never came forward out of fear of the woman who once threatened to cut her up and feed her to her dog's bloody hell and again i mean i feel like there's the you know rule number one which we learn on casual criminalist is criminals don't write down your crimes because you often do it's a mistake rule number two don't boast about your crimes so that's a lot of information a lot of hearsay a lot of different angles so how about some cold hard statistics instead well all in all based on the diary and witness testimony samsonova was under suspicion for at least 11 murders if we include the other unsolved cases in which body parts were strewn around some petersburg in the same style the number might actually be closer to 21. in the majority of the cases she's thought to have followed the same brutal methodology immobilizing her victims with drugs before cutting them up while still alive tough to think of a worse way to go in my opinion it's worth noting only a handful of the deaths had enough evidence around them to bring official charges and none of them have been tested in court as of yet unless the perpetrator is one day deemed fit to stand trial they probably never will be where is she now [Music] for now though samsonova is enjoying her retirement in a psychiatric ward after cheerfully asking to be punished for her crimes she was carted away for a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation yeah something's not right with her i mean she is a schizophrenic right so does that mean you're not fit to stand trial i guess not but then you shouldn't be leaving the mental institution on november 26 2015 it was concluded that she should be confined to kazan psychiatric hospital while the investigation was taking place it was there that her paranoid schizophrenia was officially diagnosed the soviet era building was one of the favorite dumping grounds for laventry barrier the vicious police chief of joseph stalin's regime i've actually made i have another channel called biographics where we do biographies of notable people from history in the present day and uh we did a video about the venturi barrier he was a horrible person and we've also done a video about joseph stalin and ussr videos are really popular so we've covered a lot of the kind of bad ussr dudes those designated as enemies of the state could find themselves confined within this tightly guarded compound in squalid conditions i'm hoping they've at least done a bit of redecorating since its gulag days but at any rate i'm sure it's not the most pleasant place to stay samsonova was only set to remain there until the authorities were ready to take her back to trial in some petersburg however in 2017 on the advice of her psychiatrists the judge sentenced her to life in the high security institution where a trial to go ahead much of the prosecution's case would be based on the testimony of a clearly very unstable person and many written records of murders without bodies to match instead it was determined that the best outcome for all was to confine the balliaga to within those walls for life so a full trial for the two confirmed murders valentina and sergey will never likely take place although that doesn't mean the police have put the case to bed with samsonova pushing 74 in many murders potentially connected to her it's likely that the pieces of her legacy of terror will be getting uncovered long after she's gone as for the deadly pensioner herself she believes she's right where she's supposed to be she's quoted as saying i have nowhere else to live i'm a very old person and i put the whole matter to rest deliberately i have thought 77 times about it and then decided that i must be in prison i will die there and the state will probably bury me that's a realistic assessment for sure wrap up given what we already know it's likely that there are plenty of bloody revelations left unknown in the case of tamara samsonova this was a woman who had no qualms about dismembering living people dumping pieces of corpses in public places and probably even consuming parts of a victim's organs hers is a case so bizarre that it seems custom-made for over-the-top daily mail headlines such as black magic murder graniata bingo buddies brains the daily mail is another uh uk newspaper newspaper inverted like in quotes there um it's worse than the sun because it passes itself off as having real whereas the sun is like yeah it's a tabloid you know it's kind of a bit of celebrity gossip with you know four line news articles thrown in the daily mail actually pretends to be a news source and it is a giant piece of [ __ ] in my opinion allegedly but behind all that media sensationalism it's the story of a severely disturbed individual it's up to far more knowledgeable people than me to figure out exactly what drove her to commit such terrible killings all the rest of us can do is look on in horror and remember that murderers come in all shapes sizes and ages so the next time old doris invites you for a cuppa run for your life [Music] dismembered appendices number one on the night of the slavic pagan ivan kapala festival a neighbor of samsonova had spotted pentagrams and strange writing drawn on the back wall of their building she thought it was some kids pulling a prank but in retrospect she realized it might have been the resident occultist still don't get carried away in rem the real driving force behind this case was schizophrenia not satan number two if samsonova was really inspired by the butcher of rostov she wouldn't be the first he's basically the poster boy of slavic psychopaths named as an inspiration by moscow's chessboard maniac slayer an ex-cop in siberia who killed dozens of victims a nazi sympathizing cannibal from belinsky and the beast another ex-cop who may have murdered as many as 200 women in ukraine good lord that's a wikipedia rabbit hole that you don't want to go down agreed number three the hacksaw which samson over used to carve up the bodies of all her victims was actually borrowed from her neighbor marina kravenko i doubt she's itching to get it back anytime soon remember the police aren't giving that back remember if your neighbor ever comes to borrow any diy tools from your shed be sure to wipe all your fingerprints off first and we've got a fact checking note here from callum this is sort of appendix i suppose this is another one for which the dates are all messed up in many of the english articles a lot of lots say the husband disappeared in 2005. but as far as i can see this is a misinterpretation of russian language articles which say over 10 years ago then specify 2000. slapdash journalists instead just read it as 10 years ago 2005 2010. okay that makes sense thanks thanks for the clarification because people might call that out and uh well now i don't have to explain it in the comments the names of the victims are also messed up in many reports russian sources show that vladimir the first lodger survived and came back to give a statement her diary did mention vladimir who she killed but it cannot be the same one tabloids have just linked the two people together and mixed them together with sergey well i mean they do have these two very common russian names but do a little better journalism anyway this has been an episode of the casual criminalist did you enjoy it no simon it was absolutely horrific well i do hope you found it interesting if you did please do if you're watching this on youtube hit that like button below if you're not subscribed you know what to do subscribe if you're listening to this as a podcast please consider leaving us a review it does make a difference it does get this show in front of more people and that's always a good thing and thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: The Casual Criminalist

Views: 400,531

Keywords: true crime

Id: 3M9LT8-WIvU

Length: 41min 59sec (2519 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021