WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT Police say she is being investigated in connection with up to 14 murders, but how many victims the so-called Granny Ripper truly claimed may never be known
There’s a horror movie trope which shows elderly women as frightened, frail, and at risk of becoming the monster’s prey. But what happens when they themselves are the monster?
In the case of Russian pensioner Tamara Samsonova, that’s exactly what happened. Earning the nicknames “Granny Ripper” and even “Baba Yaga” , after the terrifying witch of Slavic folklore, Samsonova may have looked like a quiet grannie, but this blood-thirsty pensioner turned out to be one of Russia’s most gruesome and prolific killers.
Now in her late 70s, Samsonova was born in the harsh region of Siberia in 1947, with Russia still reeling from the financial and societal cost of World War Two. While not a lot is known about her early childhood, we know she moved to Moscow as a young woman before settling in St. Petersburg before marrying a man named Alexei.
Her few surviving friends say she lived an unremarkable life in the city, working in the tourist industry in various roles. In 2020, Alexei mysteriously vanished and despite Samsonova reporting it to police, the case went nowhere. Many suspect foul play on Samsonova’s behalf, although this has not been proven.
Following her husband’s disappearance, Samsonova began taking in lodgers to her apartment. In 2003, during an argument, she allegedly murdered one of them, 44-year-old Sergey Potanin, before cutting his body into pieces and scattering the remains across the neighbourhood. The killing went unnoticed for more than a decade.
Despite the brutality of the murder and the clumsiness of her disposal, the murder went unsolved. 12 years later however, Samsonova would not be so lucky. In early 2015, Samsonova moved into her neighbour Valentina Ulanova’s flat while her own home was being renovated. At first the arrangement worked but the two began squabbling. When Ulanova asked her to leave, Samsonova refused, and instead began planning her next gruesome murder.
She managed to get her hands on phenazepam , a powerful prescription sedative, which she crushed the tablets into Ulanova’s favourite Olivier salad. After her neighbour collapsed, Samsonova set about sawing her body into chunks. Reports at the time described Samsonova beheading her neighbour, before boiling her head in a pot.
She then proceded to make multiple trips outside with bin bags in the dead of night, hiding them in several locations. Thankfully, one of these bags was discovered by police near a residential pond. When the authorities went to question Samsonova, she calmly lead them into a bathroom streaked with blood and a curtain missing from its rail, identical to the one wrapped around the corpse.
Following their discovery, the horror deepened when detectives found her handwritten diary, in which she allegedly bragged about previous killings, describing how she dismembered victims and disposed of their body parts around St. Petersburg.
One extract of her diary is reported to read: ‘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.’
Samsonova was quickly ruled mentally unfit for trial and sent to a secure psychiatric hospital, where she remains to this day. Russian police say she is being investigated in connection with up to 14 murders, but how many victims the so-called Granny Ripper truly claimed may never be known.
