It’s not every day you hear of an elderly woman feasting on number of butchered bodies. Well, it’s not every day you hear of anyone living the life of Hannibal Lecter. But, in this case, the horrific killer comes in the form of a 68-year-old granny who keeps journals of her fun, murderous tendencies. Tamara Samsonova of St. Petersburgh, Russia, was arrested last week over the murder of her 79-year-old friend Valentina Ulanova, and when the police raided her house, they found evidence of more possible murders.
The serial killer, who has appropriately gained the name ‘Granny Ripper’ confessed to 11 murders in a gruesome diary, Russian police have said. Samsonova is believed to have beheaded and dismembered a number of victims for the last two decades, allegedly including her husband. Granny Ripper entered the details of her secret reign of terror in a number of diaries which were kept in Russian, English and German, and were found in her home alongside black magic and astrological books. Her arrest last week was prompted by a CCTV camera which caught her near her home in St Petersburg removing the body of her most recent victim in a black plastic bag. According to The Daily Mail, detectives suspect that the woman ate body parts she removed from her victims as she chopped of their heads, arms and legs.
Evidence also suggests that Samsonova gave her latest victim an overdose of sleeping pills. While she was still alive Samsonova dismembered the body with a hacksaw. The police are not ruling out cannibalism whatsoever, and it is claimed that the woman often gauged out and ate her victim’s lungs. Sources in Russia’s equivalent to the FBI have indicated that internal organs, particularly lungs, were removed from the bodies. Samsonova admitted that the murder of her friend Ulanova was in response to a tiff about unwashed cups, and apparently told investigators that she made her friend sleep then ‘cut her into pieces’.
Currently police are comparing her elaborate diary entries to a number of unsolved murder cases around the city. A business card connects her to an instance 12 years ago, where a headless, and limbless man’s body was found on the same street. Somsonava’s husband went missing in 2005, and Granny Ripper is suspected to be behind that as well. One particular diary admitted to murdering one of her former tenants, writing:
I killed my tenant Volodya, cut him to pieces in the bathroom with a knife, put the pieces of his body in plastic bags and threw them away in the different parts of Frunzensky district.
But, Samsonova seems to have been ready for her arrest, claiming she’d been getting ready for it for dozens of years, and this last murder closed the chapter, ‘it was all done deliberately’. Whether that means she has something up her sleeve, or she’s just ready to call it quits, we can’t tell. But I expect we’ll be seeing someone make a horror movie out of this mess. It sounds like Hannibal Lecter meets Little Red Riding Hood. Granny Ripper: All The Better To Eat You With.
