Posted by Tamara Samsonova, born in 1947, was arrested in St Petersburg in July 2015 for the murder of her neighbour Valentina Ulanova, 79, whom she had drugged and then dismembered. In her diaries she described other murders, including that of a tenant in 2003. Declared a danger to herself and others, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital in Kazan.
Tamara Samsonova is a sweet little Russian granny whose hobby is killing and (perhaps) eating people. In 2015 she was caught trying to get rid of the body of a 79-year-old friend after boiling some of her remains. Remind you of anyone? 😉 Here is her story.
Tamara Samsonova, the Russian granny ripper
On the evening of 26 July 2015 a mutilated body wrapped in a shower curtain was found near a pond in a St Petersburg neighbourhood. It was Valentina Ulanova, a 79-year-old woman who lived with a carer, her neighbour Tamara. Once the investigation began, CCTV footage from the building where the woman lived showed Samsonova going out 7 times in one night with strange plastic bags. What they found in her flat would leave investigators speechless.
Who is Tamara Samsonova?
The granny ripper was born on 25 April 1947 in the Russian town of Uzhur. After finishing school she moved to Moscow to attend the Maurice Thorez Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages (now Moscow State Linguistic University). After graduating in languages she moved to St Petersburg (then Leningrad), where she married Alexei Samsonov.
Neighbours remember her as a loving, kind and caring woman, if sometimes a little odd. Never suspecting, though, what lay behind that mask. Tamara worked in tourism for the Intourist agency, in particular at the Grand Hotel Europe, and by the time she retired she had 16 years of work behind her.
In 2000 her husband disappeared without a trace and, despite police searches, was never found. Some theories claim Samsonova got rid of her husband, but so far there is no conclusive evidence. After her husband disappeared, Tamara began renting out a room in her flat, and it was from then on that she found the perfect way to kill without being noticed.
The murders
The discovery of Ulanova’s body led investigators to search her flat and that of her carer, who had been living with her for a few months. In the latter they found a saw still stained with blood, the torn shower curtain and disturbing diaries in which Samsonova described as many as 11 murders in three languages: Russian, English and German.
Alongside the diaries they also found books of black magic, one of Samsonova’s passions together with the infamous Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. In one of the diaries Tamara wrote that she had killed a tenant, Volodya, dismembering him in the bathroom and then leaving his remains around the neighbourhood.
The confession
Tamara Samsonova confessed to investigators that she had killed Valentina Ulanova after an argument about washing up some cups. At the time Tamara was living with her neighbour because her own flat was being renovated. Valentina had offered to put her up, but once the work was finished Samsonova did not want to leave the flat, which was much more comfortable than her own. Relations between the two were therefore beginning to deteriorate.
Perhaps that argument was the last straw that made something snap in Samsonova, who in one of her diaries says she loved Ulanova, whom she affectionately called Valya. She bought some sleeping pills, crushed them and put them in her victim’s favourite dish, Russian salad (very popular in Russia, where it is known as “Olivier salad”), then went to bed.
She woke up at 2 in the morning and found Valentina’s body lying on the kitchen floor. According to some accounts the woman was not yet dead, but Tamara began to mutilate her all the same, starting by cutting off her head, which she boiled together with the hands in a pot on her landlady’s stove. Then she cut off the other limbs and disposed of them bit by bit. It was during these comings and goings that she was caught on the building’s CCTV.
The arrest
Tamara was arrested and told the judge she deserved to be punished. She is also suspected of killing a man 12 years earlier, Sergei Potanin, her 44-year-old tenant, killed on 6 September 2003 during an argument, whose mutilated remains were found on the very street where Samsonova lives and whose business card was found in the granny ripper’s flat.
On 26 November, exactly four months after Ulanova’s body was found, Tamara underwent a psychiatric assessment, which concluded that she was a danger to herself and others. A month later she was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Kazan for treatment.
We don’t know exactly how many murders she committed. According to her diaries she killed 11 people, and some claim she also killed her husband as well as Valentina Ulanova. She is currently being investigated in connection with 14 murders.
🦋 Emadion lives through its readers. If this story kept you up at night, buy me a coffee: it helps me bring you the next nightmare.
☕ Support Emadion on Ko-fi
