A dog pulling at a plastic bag near a pond led to the discovery of a dismembered body. The trail from there led to a 68-year-old retired hotel worker, a diary written in three languages, and a case Russian investigators still haven't fully closed a decade later.
An Ordinary Life, on the Surface
Tamara Samsonova was born in Siberia in 1947 and built what looked, from the outside, like an unremarkable life. She studied foreign languages in Moscow before settling in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) with her husband, Alexei, in 1971. She worked for years at the Grand Hotel Europe through the Soviet-era Intourist travel agency, retiring after sixteen years of service. Neighbors who knew her described a polite, multilingual woman — the kind of person nobody would look at twice.
In 2000, Alexei disappeared. Samsonova reported him missing, but the case went nowhere. Years later, she would resurface the matter herself with investigators, in circumstances that — given what came later — have left people wondering whether that was a genuine attempt to find him or something else entirely. He's never been found.
A Body by a Pond
In July 2015, a couple walking their dog near a residential pond in St. Petersburg discovered a dismembered, partially identified body inside a plastic bag. Investigators traced security footage to a woman seen dragging garbage bags and a saucepan out of a nearby apartment building two nights earlier. That woman was identified as Tamara Samsonova, a longtime resident of the building.
When questioned, Samsonova didn't deny anything. She led police directly to her bathroom, where they found blood, a missing shower curtain matching the one the body had been wrapped in, and a large kitchen knife.
The victim was identified as Valentina Ulanova, a 79-year-old woman who had taken Samsonova in temporarily while Samsonova's own apartment was being renovated. According to the account that emerged, the two women's relationship soured, and when Ulanova asked her houseguest to leave, Samsonova refused. She's said to have drugged Ulanova's food with a powerful sedative before killing her.
A Diary That Raised Far Bigger Questions
The search of Samsonova's apartment turned up something far more disturbing than evidence of one killing: a diary, written across entries in Russian, German, and English, describing what appeared to be a string of killings going back roughly two decades. One entry, dated 2003, described the killing and dismemberment of a male tenant — details that lined up closely with an unsolved case from that same year and neighborhood, where a torso had been discovered and never connected to a suspect.
In total, investigators came to suspect Samsonova in connection with as many as 14 deaths, based largely on the diary's contents and their partial corroboration against old, unsolved cases in the area.
It's important to be clear about what's actually been established here, because the public retelling of this case has often run ahead of the facts: Samsonova was formally investigated and charged in connection with Ulanova's killing. The broader number of additional victims — sometimes reported as high as 14, sometimes higher in less careful retellings — comes primarily from her own diary, which she has since told investigators was, at least in part, a work of fiction. None of those additional cases have resulted in independent confirmation or formal charges, and the true scope of what she actually did remains genuinely unresolved.
Found Unfit for Trial
Following her arrest, Samsonova underwent psychiatric evaluation. In November 2015, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and found unfit to stand trial in the conventional sense — a legal determination, common in cases involving serious mental illness, that means a person isn't tried and convicted the way a sane defendant would be, but is instead committed for treatment based on the danger they're found to pose.
In December 2015, she was sent to a high-security psychiatric facility in Kazan, roughly 950 miles from St. Petersburg, where she remains today under Russia's system of indefinite, periodically reviewed psychiatric confinement.
Where Things Stand Now
As of the most recent reporting, in her late seventies, Samsonova remains institutionalized at the Kazan facility, described as stable but held under strict ongoing monitoring. Russian law requires periodic psychiatric review of her case, but given the severity of what she's connected to, no release is considered likely.
Her husband's disappearance remains unresolved. The full scope of what happened in that apartment on Dimitrov Street over two decades — whether it was one killing that spiraled into a panicked cover-up, or something closer to what her diary described — is something that, even a decade later, investigators still haven't been able to fully separate from fiction.
Sources
Tamara Samsonova — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamara_Samsonova
The Chilling Case of Tamara Samsonova: Russia's Granny Ripper — Utterly Interesting https://www.utterlyinteresting.com/post/the-chilling-case-of-tamara-samsonova-russia-s-granny-ripper
Inside 'Granny Ripper's' terrifying diary detailing alleged dismemberments — Yahoo News UK https://uk.news.yahoo.com/inside-granny-rippers-terrifying-diary-225429028.html
Tamara Samsonova — Murderpedia https://murderpedia.org/female.S/s/samsonova-tamara.htm