68 Year Old Woman Crushed 50 Sleeping Pills Into Friend’s Salad Before Cutting Her Head Off

A pensioner named the ‘Granny Ripper’ crushed 50 sleeping pills into a friend’s salad – before severing her head and boiling it in a saucepan, Russian prosecutors said.


Tamara Samsonova, 68, was caught by CCTV cameras as she took the pan outside and threw the boiled remains into a skip.

Today, Russia’s powerful Investigative Committee – the equivalent of the FBI – sent her case to court, as prosecutors alleged that her friend Valentina Ulanova, 79, died ‘on the spot’ from a huge drugs overdose.

Samsnoova used a handsaw to slice up Mrs Ulanova, for whom she was a carer, in July last year, using plastic bags to dispose of other body parts.

Samsonova is also suspected of involvement in other killings, including lodgers, her husband and her mother-in-law.

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 – who once worked in one of St Petersburg’s top hotels which had many foreign visitors – confessed to police that she was responsible for killing Ulanova after poisoning the elderly woman’s salad.
She refused to cooperate with investigators on up to 11 more feared killings which she indicated in diary entries written in Russian, English and German.

Police do not rule out further charges but sources admit difficulties in proving other suspected murders because they cannot find human remains.

A police source said, ‘We may never know the extent of this granny’s killings’’
Samsnova was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and sent 950 miles in a specially guarded train to the notorious Soviet-era Kazan mental hospital.

‘On the results of the forensic psychiatric examination, the woman suffers from chronic mental illness in the form of paranoid schizophrenia,’ authorities said in a statement.

‘A criminal case was sent to the court for a decision on compulsory medical measures’

Source: metro.co.uk