The Killer Granny

When you think of a serial killer, an old granny probably doesn’t immediately spring to mind. But in fact, a Russian pensioner from St. Petersburg is said to have killed and decapitated eleven people between 1995 and 2015. The old lady in question is 68-year-old Tamara Samsonova, an educated woman with a degree from Moscow State Linguistic University who had worked in a travel agency and a hotel. Samsonova’s role model was serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, better known as the “Rostov Ripper,” who killed and dismembered 52 people. He was executed for this in 1994. Since Samsonova also dismembered her victims, she was nicknamed “Granny Ripper” in reference to Chikatilo. The Russian killer granny’s modus operandi was to give her victims an overdose of sleeping pills before dismembering them alive with an iron saw. She chopped off their hands, arms, and legs and then decapitated them. She often removed her victims’ lungs to eat them. She then packed the body parts into plastic bags, which she disposed of in St. Petersburg. The pensioner recorded her heinous crimes in her diary in Russian, German, and English. In it, the police also found a confession from Samsonova about the murder of her lodger Volodya. She had cut him up with a knife in her bathroom and then packed his body parts in plastic bags, which she distributed in the Fruzensky district. In total, she confessed to eleven murders in her diary. The police caught on to her when the decapitated corpse of 79-year-old Valentina Nikolayevna Ulanova, with her limbs severed, was found wrapped in a bathroom curtain on July 26, 2016, not far from a pond in house number 10 on Dimitrov Street. Ulanova had been living with Samsonova at Dimitrov Street No. 4 for some time, which is why the police questioned her. When the police entered Samsonova’s apartment and looked around, they discovered traces of blood and a torn bathroom curtain in the bathroom, whereupon Samsonova was arrested. Samsonova had purchased the prescription drug Phenazepam from a pharmacist in Pushkin. She mixed it into Ulanova’s food. When Ulanova was lying on the kitchen floor, she began to dismember her body. She then packed the body parts into black plastic bags. However, Samsonova was filmed by a camera while disposing of the body parts. A few days after her arrest, Samsonova was brought before the Frunze District Court in St. Petersburg on July 29, 2015. Samsonova was also suspected of having killed her husband, Alexei Samsonova, whom she reported missing in 2005 and who remains missing to this day. Tamara Samsonova underwent a psychiatric examination. It was determined that she posed a danger to herself and others. At the end of the examination, she was placed in a psychiatric facility. Following their assessment, she was admitted to a special hospital in Kazan in December for psychiatric treatment. Tamara Samsonova, who suffers from schizophrenia, remains in a state psychiatric facility to this day. This marked the end of the story of the grandmother killer of St. Petersburg.