Karina Buduchyan (Barduchian), the girl killed and eaten by two goths in St Petersburg

On the evening of 19 January 2009, 16-year-old Karina told her mother she would be staying the night at a friend’s. She was in her final year of school in St Petersburg and doing well. For a few months she had been in love with an older boy, a singer the city’s goths called “Chérie”. That night she went to the flat he shared with a friend on Prospekt Kosmonavtov. She never came home. Two weeks later, Russia’s Investigative Committee announced that the two young men had confessed to killing her and eating part of her body.

The Russian press called it the case of the “cannibal goths”. In English and Italian it is usually known as the murder of Karina Barduchian. But that surname is wrong, and so are several other details that have circulated online for years. It did not happen in Moscow. It did not happen in 2008. And one of the killers is often given the wrong name. Here is the story, rebuilt from the Russian sources.

Her name: Karina Buduchyan, not “Barduchian”

In Russian, her name is Карина Будучьян. Transliterated, that is Karina Buduchyan, or Budutchyan, or Buduchian, depending on the system. It is an Armenian surname. The spelling “Barduchian”, with an extra “r”, appeared in international wire reports in 2009 and 2010 and was copied by many English and Italian websites. It does not match the original.

The same goes for one of the defendants. His name is Максим Главатских, Maksim (or Maxim) Glavatskikh. Early police statements mistakenly called him Golovatskikh, and that is the name most foreign media used. The other man is Юрий Можнов, Yury Mozhnov.

Who was Karina?

Karina was in the eleventh grade, the last year of Russian school. According to the Moscow daily MK, she was a good student and handed out flyers to earn some money. She lived with her parents, Nadezhda and her husband, and had a brother, Sergei. Interviewed in 2024 by the weekly Argumenty i Fakty, he described her as a fan of emo culture whose bedroom walls were covered in posters.

From summer 2008 Karina had started spending time with the city’s informal youth groups, emos and goths. That autumn she met Maksim Glavatskikh. He was 19, sang in a band and was very popular with girls. Karina fell for him. Her mother later found poems she had written for him on her computer. According to her brother, he did not feel the same.

The two defendants

Maksim Glavatskikh, born in 1989, worked as a florist for a St Petersburg company and called himself a goth. According to the news agency Interfax, he had previously been treated in a psychiatric hospital and had already been in trouble with the law. People who knew him described him as unstable.

Yury Mozhnov, the same age, was unemployed or, according to the business daily Kommersant, did casual building work. He saw himself as an emo. In court he would say that from autumn 2008 he had been a kind of “bodyguard” to his friend.

Early reports mixed up who did what. In February 2009 The Moscow Times wrote that Mozhnov was a florist with a criminal record and Glavatskikh a butcher at a local market. Later sources, including trial reports in the Russian press, describe Glavatskikh as the florist and Mozhnov as unemployed.

The two lived together in flat 135 at 66 Prospekt Kosmonavtov, in the Moskovsky district in the south of the city. The flat belonged to a young woman, Ekaterina Zinovieva (Екатерина Зиновьева), who lived there with them.

The night of 19 to 20 January 2009

On 19 January 2009 a small group of friends was at the flat. Karina phoned Maksim and he told her how to get there. Her brother, however, says it was Zinovieva who called Karina to invite her. A witness, Inna Bondar, told the court that after the call Glavatskikh made a remark about “meat on its way”, which she did not understand at the time. When Karina arrived, Maksim sent the other guests home.

What happened next was pieced together by investigators mainly from the first confessions. During the night the two young men, who had been drinking, lured Karina into the bath and held her under the water until she stopped breathing. Investigators said it was premeditated: the bath, they argued, had been filled in advance. The two then dismembered her body with an axe.

Part of the remains was cooked in the oven with potatoes and eaten. That is the detail that made the case notorious around the world. According to international wire reports quoting early police statements, the pair also served some to Zinovieva, who allegedly ate without knowing what it was. In court she said she had not been in the flat at the time; Karina’s brother says the evidence suggests otherwise. According to Interfax, neighbours had called the police several times about noise and screaming from that flat, with no result.

The next morning the remains were split into bags and dumped around the neighbourhood: in bins, on waste ground and, according to the Investigative Committee, in a pond. The two also took Karina’s things: her phone, camera, music player, some clothes and jewellery, worth about 21,000 roubles. Some of it was sold.

The search and the discovery

Karina’s mother reported her missing straight away. The date varies slightly. Kommersant says she left home on 18 January, saying she was going to study at a classmate’s; almost every other source says the evening of the 19th. For days the family searched without news.

On 31 January 2009, bags containing human remains were found on an abandoned lot at the corner of Ordzhonikidze Street and Lensoveta Street, also in the Moskovsky district. A few days later more remains were found among the bins near 9 Altaiskaya Street. According to her brother, volunteers made the discovery and an aunt identified Karina. Her parents could not bring themselves to see the body.

Arrest and confession: “We were hungry”

The FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service, joined the investigation. Glavatskikh was arrested in Sosnovy Bor, a town on the Gulf of Finland west of St Petersburg. Mozhnov was picked up in Kronstadt, on Kotlin Island. On 3 February 2009 the Investigative Committee released their names and described them as members of the informal youth groups “goths” and “emo”.

At a press conference, Andrei Lavrenko, head of the Investigative Committee in St Petersburg, said both had confessed to the murder and to cannibalism, and had explained it by saying they were hungry. Sergei Strelin, deputy head of the city’s criminal police, added that they had owned up straight away, saying they were drunk and hungry. That line went round the world.

The goth and emo panic

The news landed at a sensitive moment. Through 2008, as The Moscow Times noted, a kind of hysteria had built up in Russia around emo and goth culture. Politicians and senior officials saw the piercings and black clothes as a threat. A case like this seemed to confirm every fear.

Not everyone bought that reading. On 3 February 2009, Moscow Times writer Carl Schreck wryly asked how many subcultures were really known for murders like this. The St Petersburg news site Fontanka.ru interviewed Vladimir Gushchin, a local expert on youth subcultures, who said such crimes were completely out of character for these groups. Gushchin floated a theory: the two might have killed Karina during a row and then made up the cannibalism so they could plead insanity. Fontanka also reported another idea, which The Moscow Times called “highly dubious”: that the night before, the pair had watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which features a scene in a bathtub.

As the inquiry went on, the idea of a subculture clash or a satanic ritual faded. Investigators eventually spoke of “personal hostility”. In their first confessions, the two said they were irritated by how insistently Karina showed her interest in Maksim. Her brother also finds the ritual-killing theory hard to believe.

The psychiatric assessments

During the investigation both men underwent psychiatric assessment. According to the St Petersburg edition of Komsomolskaya Pravda, they were examined at the prison psychiatric hospital. The result, reported by Karina’s brother and borne out by the fact that both were tried and sentenced as legally responsible, was that both were sane. If Gushchin was right about a faked madness, it did not work.

Trial by jury

The case reached court on 11 February 2010, more than a year after the murder. The charges were murder committed by a group acting by prior agreement, under Article 105, Part 2, letter “zh” (ж) of the Russian Criminal Code, which carries up to life imprisonment, and theft. The defendants asked for a jury trial. It was held at the St Petersburg City Court before Judge Arkady Kurguzov. The prosecutor was Svetlana Efimenko. The family was represented by lawyer Dmitry Kuzmin.

The trial opened on 25 March 2010. Efimenko called the killing a “monstrous atrocity” that had shocked the city. Karina’s mother told the court she had spent months in a clinic for nervous disorders. As the defendants were led out, someone in the public gallery shouted: “Cannibals, be damned!” In early April a juror was taken ill while looking at prosecution photographs and the hearing had to be halted. Video of the discovery of the remains was later played to the jury with sound only, to spare them a severe shock.

There were disturbing incidents outside court, too. According to Kommersant, some prosecution witnesses were threatened, and Karina’s mother received online messages that appeared to come from her dead daughter.

The retractions: each blames the other

On 15 April 2010, after all the witnesses had been heard, the defendants changed their story. They withdrew their confessions and blamed each other.

Glavatskikh said he had invited Karina, but that Mozhnov had killed her. Jealous of his friend’s female fans, Mozhnov had drowned her by accident while trying to scare her. Glavatskikh admitted helping to dismember the body, but not the killing.

Mozhnov told it the other way round. He said he had been under Glavatskikh’s influence, had found the two in the bath, had been sent away, and only learned of the killing afterwards from his friend. He admitted suggesting they cut up the body, but said Glavatskikh did most of it.

Both denied cannibalism. The meat cooked that night, they said, had been bought in a shop. The prosecution answered with the transcripts and recordings of the first interrogations, in which both had described the motive and admitted everything.

Verdict and sentences

On 30 April 2010 the jury unanimously found both men guilty of premeditated murder acting together and of theft. It also found the dismemberment and partial eating of the body proven, and rejected any leniency. According to the daily Vzglyad, though, four of the twelve jurors felt Mozhnov was the follower and deserved a lighter sentence.

After the verdict the two mothers clashed in the court corridor. Nadezhda Buduchyan screamed that she hoped the other woman’s son would go to hell. Mozhnov’s mother, who led a support group for her son, accused the victim’s family of “bloodlust”.

The prosecution asked for 22 years for Glavatskikh and 20 for Mozhnov. On 5 May 2010 Judge Kurguzov sentenced Maksim Glavatskikh to 19 years and Yury Mozhnov to 18 years in a strict-regime penal colony, saying they could only be reformed if kept apart from society. The family had sought 5 million roubles in damages. The court awarded 1 million roubles for moral harm from each defendant, plus 21,000 roubles for material loss.

The two smiled as the sentence was read. Led past reporters, Glavatskikh hid his face behind a sheet of paper bearing an insult aimed at TV host Andrei Malakhov. It was a protest against Channel One’s talk show Pust’ govoryat (“Let Them Talk”), which had covered the case before the verdict. Karina’s grandmother called the sentence “cynical”: the family had expected life terms. The family’s lawyer, Kuzmin, said he was broadly satisfied. Russia’s Supreme Court later upheld the sentences.

What happened to Glavatskikh and Mozhnov?

Maksim Glavatskikh was sent to a penal colony in the Murmansk region, in Russia’s far north. According to MK, with the backing of the prison administration he took part in arts activities and even formed a band. On the night of 24 to 25 March 2017 he was found dead in the vocational school building inside Penal Colony No. 17. According to the independent outlet Mediazona, suicide notes were found and the Investigative Committee found no signs of foul play. His death was recorded as suicide.

Yury Mozhnov was held at a colony in Koryazhma, in the Arkhangelsk region. There, Fontanka reported in 2020, he learned to sew and kept a good record. But he never stopped trying to get out. In November 2012 he sued Fontanka for 800,000 roubles over an article published before the verdict, claiming it damaged his honour. On 28 February 2013 a district court threw the claim out, noting that Mozhnov did not dispute the facts reported. In September 2019 he asked to be moved to a “colony-settlement”, a lighter form of detention, and was refused. In October he asked to swap the theft part of his sentence for compulsory labour; that was rejected too, given the danger posed by the crime. In January 2020 his cassation appeal was sent back because only the Supreme Court could hear it.

According to MK, Mozhnov was still in prison in January 2026. Given his arrest in February 2009, his 18-year sentence should end in 2027.

Karina’s family

Karina’s parents only got their daughter’s remains back in August 2009 and buried her in a closed coffin. She lies in the Krasnenkoye cemetery in the Avtovo district of St Petersburg. Her brother Sergei told Argumenty i Fakty that both parents were admitted to a psychiatric clinic after her death. About six months later her father had a stroke that left him partly paralysed; he now lives in his ex-wife’s home, where she looks after him. Their mother, Sergei said, has left Russia, and he does not know where she lives.

“Case of Chérie”: the documentary that questions the official story

In 2018 director Tanya Bazhenova presented a 72-minute documentary at the Artdocfest festival, titled in English Case of Chérie, after Glavatskikh’s nickname. Bazhenova had access to the case file and offers an alternative account. According to the film, both defendants continued to claim innocence and argue that the file contains no direct physical evidence against them. It has not changed the legal outcome. The conviction is final, upheld by the Supreme Court, and rests partly on the confessions recorded in the first days.

A story still told wrong

More than fifteen years on, the murder of Karina Buduchyan remains one of the best-known and most brutal crimes in St Petersburg’s history, and one of the most garbled online. On international websites Karina has a surname that is not hers, the killing is moved to Moscow and backdated to 2008, and what survives is mostly the image of two “cannibal goths” who killed because they were hungry.

Behind that phrase is a 16-year-old girl who wrote poems for a boy, who told her mother one January evening that she was staying at a friend’s, and whose family searched for her for days and never recovered.

If you want to read about another cannibal case from St Petersburg, discover the story of Tamara Samsonova, the granny ripper.

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Sources

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