Meet Margarita,Her Hands Were Cut Off By Her Husband

Meet Margarita Gracheva. She is from Serpukhov, a small town south of Moscow, Russia.

On December 11th, 2017 Dmitry, her estranged husband, abducted her in his car, drove to the forest, tied her wrists with tourniquets, and chopped her hands off with an ax.

Then he escorted her bleeding back to his car. Yelling at the top of his lungs “adrenaline rush!” he drove her to the hospital and dumped them at the ER.

Margarita had stayed conscious the whole time

Margarita and Dmitry lived in a rented apartment with their two sons. They were married in 2012, and their son Dmitry was born in 2013, and Daniel in 2014. By all accounts, they were a picture of a perfect, ideal, loving family.

Margarita’s career was on the rise after coming back from maternity leave. She was the head of the marketing department in the local newspaper, and with her sister, she co-owned a successful beauty salon, while Dmitry’s career was stuck in a rut. She was making more money than he did and always tried to look beautiful doing manicures, hair, and buying and wearing nice clothes.

Dmitry tried to control every aspect of her life: he checked her emails and text messages, called her up at work. He was jealous that she was doing better than he was, but also suspected that she was secretly going out with another man. He didn’t beat her up but verbally abused her all the time, ripped up her passport, and broke her mascara in a bout of jealousy. Margarita filed a complaint at the local police station, but nothing came out of it.

They drifted apart and finally, Margarita mustered up the courage to ask for a divorce. Dmitry vehemently refused. After some time he calmed down and moved out to his mother’s apartment, still not granting her a divorce.

Shortly after, under the pretext of picking up kids from school, Dmitry took Margarita to the forest. Dmitry came prepared with tourniquets and an ax in the trunk of his car.

As she later stated,

“He took me to a forest, to an isolated place. And he yelled at me: ‘Put your hands on the tree!’"

“I screamed , cried, and begged him not to hurt me.”“He told me not to look and started cutting off my hands.”

Dmitry knew how to use tourniquets and took her to the hospital not out of pity, but because he knew that if she survived and he came clean, during the trial these would be seen as extenuating circumstances and he would get a lighter sentence.

Margarita was lucky. Not only did she make it through this gruesome ordeal, physicians in the Moscow hospital after nine hours of surgery managed to reattach her left hand that had been recovered in the forest. Unfortunately, they couldn’t save her right hand.

The story received nationwide TV coverage and millions of people learned about this gruesome crime. Margarita quickly collected 6m rubles ($100k) through personal donations for an operation in Germany to attach a bionic hand.

Dmitry was sentenced to 14 years in a maximum-security prison. All his appeals were denied. Somehow he managed to slip out threat notes to Margarita.

Margarita said...

“My children do not know about this incident. They think I had an accident. It's difficult for them to see me like this. I don't know how I will explain this to them.

 Now the best thing for me is that they give him life imprisonment. That would keep me safe. If he eventually lives nearby, that won’t be safe for me or the kids.”

Margarita is doing fine. Her popularity gave her many new friends from all walks of life. She vowed to leave it all behind and start a new life.

Read also about, RUSSIAN MAN LIVED WITH GIRLS' MUMMIFIED CORPSES, TURNED THEM INTO 'DOLLS'