Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova was born in 1730 into the high Russian nobility and was widowed at twenty-six, inheriting some six hundred serfs and estates around Moscow. She was devout, a regular pilgrim, and by every account normal until her husband died.
Over the following seven years she beat, scalded, starved, burned and had flogged to death an unknown number of the serfs on her estates. Almost all were women and girls, most of them house servants punished for the standard of their washing or floor-cleaning.
She used a rolling pin, logs, boiling water, and had them held down and whipped by her stewards. Twenty-one deaths were formally established. The investigation named 138 as possible. She is known in Russian as Saltychikha.
Serfs had no standing in law to complain about their owner. Twenty-one attempts to do so were dismissed, and several of the complainants were flogged and returned to her.
That is the mechanism of the case. It was not that the deaths were hidden. They were reported, repeatedly, by people whose reports could not be received.
What changed it was that two men, Yermolai Ilyin and Savely Martynov, whose wives she had killed, got a petition directly into the hands of Catherine II in 1762, in the first weeks of her reign, when the new empress had a use for a demonstration.
The investigation ran six years. In 1768 Catherine signed the sentence personally. Saltykova was stripped of her noble title and made to stand for an hour in a Moscow square under a placard reading that she was a torturer and a murderess.
She was then imprisoned in an underground cell in the Ivanovsky convent with no daylight, and moved years later to a cell with a window, where visitors could look at her for a fee. She died there on December 27, 1801, having served thirty-three years.
She was stopped in the twenty-second year of complaints, by a change of monarch rather than a change of evidence.