She looked like someone's sweet grandmother. White hair. Soft wrinkles. A gentle smile. Behind that mask lived a monster who butchered her victims, boiled their heads in pots, and may have fed human flesh to neighborhood children.

Tamara Samsonova, known as the Granny Ripper and Baba Yaga after the terrifying witch of Slavic folklore, was arrested in July 2015 when police caught her on CCTV carrying body parts in plastic bags. Inside her St. Petersburg apartment, investigators found diaries spanning nearly two decades, detailing how she dismembered tenants, her husband, and at least fourteen suspected victims. She poisoned neighbor Valentina Ulanova with sleeping pills mixed into her favorite Olivier salad, then decapitated her and boiled her head in a saucepan. Another tenant, Sergei Potanin, was killed in 2003 during an argument. She chopped him up and scattered his remains across the Frunzensky District. Her diary chillingly reads: "I killed my tenant Volodya, cut him to pieces with a knife, put the pieces in plastic bags and threw them away." Declared mentally unfit for trial, Samsonova was sent to a psychiatric hospital in Kazan. The full number of her victims may never be known. Turn down the lights, put on your headphones, and press play because the sweet old lady was hiding bodies, not baking cookies.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/red-tree-crime--6847553/support.