Translated material
Granny in a headscarf
In 2015, a dismembered body was found on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Residents of nearby houses suggested that the murdered person could be 79-year-old Valentina Ulanova - she had not been seen for several days. When the police arrived at Ulanova’s apartment, the door was opened by her friend, 68-year-old Tamara Samsonova. Investigators searched the apartment and found Samsonova’s diary. There she spoke in detail in three languages about her life - and about the murders that she had committed for many years. Details of the story are in the material of the weekly true crime column “Cold”.
In St. Petersburg, a pensioner dismembered her friend. From her diary, investigators learned about other murders
On the evening of July 26, 2015, on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, in Kupchino, a resident of the area walking with her dog discovered a strange package. She was walking through Kupchinsky Square when the dog ran up to the pond and began digging through the garbage. The woman came closer and saw a bathroom curtain in which a human body was wrapped - without a head or limbs.
Police officers who arrived at the scene walked around the area and found a plastic bag with legs near the park next to a residential building.
Local residents reported that they had not seen 79-year-old Valentina Ulanova, who lived nearby, for several days. The police came to her apartment, but the door was opened by 68-year-old Tamara Samsonova, a thin, red-haired pensioner. She said that she was caring for Ulanova, who supposedly needed help due to her age and poor health.
The police didn't believe it and went inside. There were brown spots in the hallway and kitchen. There were traces of blood in the bathroom. There was also a saw lying there, and the curtain was missing. Samsonova was detained.
"Bright, lively and erudite"
Samsonova’s past is known only from her words. She was born in 1947 in the city of Uzhur, Krasnoyarsk Territory. After school, she moved to Moscow, where she supposedly entered the Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages, where she studied to become a philologist. According to friends, Samsonova spoke English and German well.
Tamara moved to St. Petersburg in 1971. That same year, she married Alexei Samsonov, and later moved into his apartment, where she lived for the next few years. He worked at an auto repair plant, and she got a job as a floor attendant at the Evropeiskaya Hotel - now the five-star Grand Hotel Europe on Nevsky Prospekt.
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Samsonova said that she and her husband had a close relationship: “I was like a mother to him, he was like a son to me.” However, those around them thought differently: “Tamara often did not let her husband Lesha into the house. Sometimes he would sit on a bench until nightfall. All so pathetic, thin, red-haired, toothless, with a rag bag,” a neighbor named Lyudmila told reporters.
In 1996 or 1997, Samsonova and her husband came to see a psychiatrist. Samsonova seemed to the doctor “bright, lively and erudite,” and her husband, on the contrary, “poor, downtrodden and moronic.” “A red-haired, small, nondescript man. Quiet, like a mouse,” said Lyudmila. According to her, Samsonova complained about her husband: she claimed that he was “abnormal, he cut all his things with scissors.” However, other neighbors also said that Alexey was a “very quiet person” and Samsonova “ shut up ” him.
In the early 2000s, Samsonova's husband disappeared . She explained his disappearance in different ways: she told some that he had left for another woman, and others that he had died from cirrhosis of the liver. Samsonova had no children, and those around her did not know anything about her relatives either.
Neighbor Marina met Samsonova 15 years ago when she moved into an apartment in the same building. “We didn’t have a landline phone back then. I had to call from neighbors. The first person I knocked on was Tamara Samsonova. We drank coffee in the kitchen and talked,” she told reporters. Almost immediately, Marina noticed a “strangeness” in the behavior of her new acquaintance: “Someone, according to her, constantly came to her house and cut her clothes. To confirm, she showed me a robe, which had a hole in it due to wear and tear,” she recalled . “And she opened the door for me only if I knocked in a special way, agreed upon in advance.” According to Marina, Samsonova often sat on the windowsill near the open window of the first floor - reading a book or sunbathing topless.
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Samsonova constantly told her neighbors that she did not have enough money. Back in the early 2000s, she began renting out one of the rooms in a two-room apartment on the first floor, and lived in the second one herself. However, for some reason the guests quickly moved out . “I remember that she lived with a girl and a guy, students, then a woman with a child, two men. Only none of her tenants stayed with her for more than a month,” Lyudmila, Samsonova’s neighbor, told reporters. “She personally complained to me: “Can you imagine, they want to use not only the bathroom, but also the stove!” And everyone was so dirty.” I could have quarreled with someone.”
Over time, others began to notice more and more strange things. During the day, Samsonova was at home almost all the time, but at night she went out “for a walk”: she scratched walls and doors, picked keyholes, looked into mailboxes and rang residents’ doors. She walked barefoot along the entrance and street even in winter. She also constantly muttered something under her breath and spoke incoherently out loud.
Most of all, Samsonova had conflicts with her neighbors on the second floor. “She didn’t let them live, she constantly knocked on the radiator: it seemed to her that their dog was loudly clicking its claws on the linoleum,” Lyudmila recalled . “Then she began to claim that the neighbors were threatening to kill her, cutting her things with scissors, stealing her jewelry.”
Neighbors sought to have Samsonova admitted to a psychiatric hospital and collected signatures. In January 2015, orderlies actually took her away. However, in March she was discharged.
After returning from a psychiatric clinic, Samsonova wrote in her diary that she felt unwell: she was tormented by insomnia and strange voices. And I was very worried about loneliness.
In order not to live alone, Samsonova even lied to the social security employee that her apartment was being renovated and there wasn’t even a sofa or refrigerator at home. She offered to live in another place for a while and asked her friend, who lived three houses from Samsonova, to shelter her. This is how she met Valentina Ulanova, a 79-year-old pensioner who, according to friends, “was ready to help anyone,” and did not remain indifferent to Samsonova’s “problem.”
“Take your own can of coffee and drink it at home.”
Ulanova was a survivor of the siege, whose parents were shot during the repressions, so she received a good pension - unlike Samsonova. She began to help her new friend.
“This Tamara came to our house practically barefoot and naked. She had some kind of rags on her. Valya collected clothes for her herself, and asked me, “Look, maybe you have something you don’t need, give it to Tom,” Ulanova’s friend Natalya Fedotovskaya told reporters. In gratitude, Samsonova regularly bought sweets and cookies for tea. “I love Valya, she’s good, she gave me coffee,” Samsonova wrote in her diary.
She liked living with Ulanova: her insomnia went away, she began to eat well. “I recovered and began to visit the city, museums, parks, theaters, suburbs,” she later said . But Ulanova grew increasingly tired of her tenant: she rarely washed the floors and did not clean up after herself. “If she did something, it was completely inadequate. Here's an example: one day she washed the floors and wiped the table with the same rag! — recalled one of Ulanova’s acquaintances. — Valya’s neighbor, who was visiting her at that moment and observed the picture, said to Samsonova: they say, what are you doing? And she just waved it off.”
It was the fourth month of their life together, and Samsonova still had no plans to move out. Then Ulanova could not stand it.
““Go back to your home, you probably got some repairs done there. I’m very tired with you,” Samsonova later recalled that conversation. “He says, ‘Take your can of coffee and drink it at home.’” Samsonova “was in a panic” - she “lived very scared” at home, and she didn’t want to go back there.
"Disgustingly sticky"
On July 22, 2015, Samsonova went for a walk in the city of Pushkin. At a local pharmacy I bought phenazepam, a tranquilizer that has a hypnotic effect. “For big gifts,” the saleswoman dispensed the drug without a prescription. On the way back, already in Kupchino, Samsonova went to the supermarket for Olivier salad - she knew that Ulanova loved it very much. That same day, she added the entire pack of phenazepam, 50 tablets, to the salad and offered it to Valentina, while she went to bed.
She woke up at three in the morning and went to the kitchen to check on Ulanova. She was lying on the floor and, according to Samsonova, was already dead. Then she took two knives and a saw and began to dismember the body. I did it right in the kitchen: I didn’t have the strength to move the body to the bathroom.
The next day, a social worker rang the doorbell at Ulanova’s apartment. At that moment Samsonova was wiping blood from the floor. “I tell her through the door that Valentina Nikolaevna has gone to Kolpino to bury her friend. She: “Let me in.” And I tell her that I don’t have the keys. And she left,” she later recalled .
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Ulanova’s friend Natalya Fedotovskaya noticed her disappearance before the police. “She and I have been friends for a thousand years. And they were always in touch. We called each other almost every day, went to visit each other - fortunately, we live on the same staircase,” she told reporters. “But last Thursday [July 23] Valya stopped taking her cell phone and stopped answering her home phone. It was all very strange." Fedotovskaya went to her friend’s apartment. Samsonova let her inside, after which she immediately locked the door.
Samsonova assured that Valentina Ulanova “got drunk” and then “slept through it and went somewhere.” Fedotovskaya didn’t believe it. According to her, Samsonova was “disgustingly sticky”: “She started telling me how wonderful I was, how grateful she was to me, that I was worried about Valya. She even calmed me down! But she looked very strange at the same time,” Fedotovskaya recalled .
She noticed that both refrigerators were working in the apartment - although the second one was noisy, and Ulanova turned it on only when she defrosted the first one. However, at that time she had not yet guessed what was in that refrigerator.
Not finding her friend, Fedotovskaya was about to call the police. Samsonova begged not to do this: “Tamara muttered: “I can breathe well here, it’s so calm here, I feel so good here!” Until Valya’s relatives are found, I would live here for another six months,” Fedotovskaya recalled . “Then they hit me on the head like a blow, I ask: “So, do you know that Valya is no longer alive?..”.”
However, the first thing she did was not call the police, but the chairman of the HOA - he advised to wait another day: what if Ulanova “shows up”.
At 2:21 a.m. on July 25, a surveillance camera captured a pensioner in a headscarf and blue raincoat dragging a large package up the stairs. After 10 minutes she returned, and four minutes later she came down again, carrying a shopping bag in her hands. At 3:54 a.m., the pensioner reappeared in the camera's field of view, this time with a metal pan covered with a white lid. Before leaving, she put the pan on the floor to press the button and open the door.
Later, the pensioner was identified as Tamara Samsonova, and she was carrying Valentina Ulanova’s head out of the house in a saucepan.
Samsonova left one of the packages at the trash can near the neighboring entrance. “Samsonova knew that garbage is collected on Saturdays and at 6 am. The expectation is that they [the remains] will be taken to the landfill almost immediately,” suggested Ulanova’s neighbor. The recordings from the cameras show that at six in the morning a car actually arrived, where the janitor threw the package left by Samsonova.
Diary and book on esotericism
On August 4, at around 10 o’clock in the morning, forensic experts approached a nine-story building on Dimitrova Street. With a grinder and other tools, they entered the two-room apartment on the first floor, where Samsonova lived before moving to Ulanova.
The apartment was littered with things: all surfaces were occupied by boxes, bags, clothes, papers. On the table by the window were pots with almost wilted flowers. The room smelled unpleasant.
The search lasted more than three hours. Criminologists found Samsonova's diary, where she wrote mainly in German, although there are entries in Russian and English . The pensioner recorded everything she did during the day - she numbered each action. “I get up at five in the morning. I drink coffee. Then I do housework. My money is 20+2+1550 and change... Then I go to “Vitebsky” and visit “Lenta,” Samsonova wrote in German. — I don’t sleep very well. I go home, then go buy coffee and go to the film “One Left” and buy food... I go to “Aurora” <...> buy marshmallows and sit near the F. Station. Every day I am at home. I call O, Ray and N.A. and eat in the dining room.”
Samsonova also wrote down her grievances against her acquaintances in her diary: for example, she suspected her neighbor of witchcraft because she looked at her badly.
“I see something terrible. This woman is a genius. I drink some. I sleep, eat a lot... I think this woman is visiting my room. I drink coffee, then go to Labas, buy food, this woman E.P. meets me. This is scary,” Tamara wrote .
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Samsonova also thought about ways of revenge - for example, poisoning or cutting off her head.
Having looked up archival files, investigators learned that in 2003 a body without a head and limbs had already been found in this area, and suggested that Samsonova could be involved in the murder. This was later confirmed by the results of the search: old traces of blood were found under the baseboard in the kitchen, and a worn esoteric book with torn out pages was found on the cabinet in the room. It was these pages that were found next to the remains in 2003. In addition, in Samsonova’s diary she accurately described the tattoo of the deceased - an animal grin and two crossed daggers.
It was stuffed on the body of 32-year-old Sergei Potyanin. He came to St. Petersburg from Norilsk and rented a room from Samsonova. On September 6, 2003, they quarreled , after which she killed the tenant, dismembered and hid the remains. Potyanin probably also died from poisoning, because Samsonova’s neighbors did not report any suspicious sounds from her apartment. She herself did not deny the murder: “I’m tired of him,” she said during interrogation.
Samsonova also confessed to other murders. For example, she said that in 2000 she killed her tenant Volodya - she dismembered the body and put it in bags, which she distributed throughout the area. In total, her diary contained information about 10 murders. However, investigators did not charge Samsonova with these crimes, since the bodies were never found.
“Maybe I should go out?”
On the afternoon of July 29, Samsonova was taken to the courtroom. The charge included only the murder of Ulanova. At the trial, she addressed reporters: “I knew you would come. I’m a shame on the whole city,” and blew a kiss to the cameras. In response to the judge’s words, “You have the right to make a comment,” Samsonova, sitting behind the glass, said : “It’s stuffy here. Maybe I should go out?
The judge granted the investigation's request to place Samsonova in a pre-trial detention center. She greeted her decision with applause: “I thought about this murder 77 times. I want to go to jail. “I killed because my neighbor tormented me for a long time,” she said . “I have been preparing for this trial for decades. This is all conscious. There is no way out to live. With this murder I put an end to it.” Soon, however, she began to deny the accusations.
In August, Samsonova was transferred from the pre-trial detention center to a psychiatric clinic to conduct a psychological and psychiatric examination. The experts came to the conclusion : “The accused was declared insane, both at the time of the act accused of her and at the present time, and poses a danger to herself and others.”
In August 2016, the prosecutor's office reported that Samsonova suffers from a "chronic mental disorder in the form of paranoid schizophrenia."
On March 27, 2017, she was sentenced to compulsory treatment - at that time she was already under guard in a clinic in Kazan, where she was supposed to remain further. Due to the diagnosis, Samsonova was released from criminal liability. The court did not satisfy the civil claim; the relatives of Valentina Ulanova did not receive compensation for moral damage.
In 2019, employees of the Kazan clinic confirmed that Samsonova was alive and “still being kept with them” - “no one plans to release her,” since there are “no grounds for this.”
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Author: Kholod editorial board Illustrations: Nastya Pokotinska