St. Petersburg Pensioner Tamara Samsonova Held Over Friend's Dismembered Body
Samsonova, 68, was charged with poisoning and cutting up a 79-year-old friend, as police linked her to a 2003 killing and investigators warned against talk of a series.
Published
The woman in the glass courtroom cage was sixty-eight, a retired translator who had worked for the Intourist travel agency, and she did not look like anyone's idea of a murderer. On July 29, 2015, a district court in St. Petersburg ordered Tamara Samsonova held in custody until September 26 on a single charge of murder. Police had detained her two days earlier, on July 27.
Investigators alleged that on the night of July 23, in a flat on Dimitrov Street in the city's Frunzensky district, she poisoned a 79-year-old friend, then cut up the body with a saw and a knife and carried the remains away in bags, dumping them in the neighboring residential block. It was the discovery of those remains that led police back to her door.
What made the case notorious was everything said about her beyond that charge. Law-enforcement sources told reporters she had also been exposed in the killing of a lodger, a 44-year-old man from Norilsk, on September 6, 2003. A source told Interfax that after her arrest she had written a confession describing other killings, among them a lodger in November 2000. Russian media wrote of a diary said to list nine more deaths, and of a husband who had vanished years before and never been found. Neighbors were quoted as saying she had been treated in psychiatric hospitals.
The Investigative Committee pushed back. Its St. Petersburg investigators said they had no objective evidence that she had killed anyone else and asked the press not to rush to call her the author of a series. By early August the committee was explicit: there would be no further charges without bodies, the reports that her husband's remains had been found were untrue, and she faced one murder count. A forensic psychiatric examination was ordered.
That examination later found her a danger to herself and to others, and in December 2015 she was sent for compulsory treatment at a specialized psychiatric hospital in Kazan. She was never tried in the ordinary way.
What this story covers. The detention date, the custody order to September 26, the allegation about the poisoning and the dismemberment, the link police drew to the 2003 killing of the lodger from Norilsk, the unconfirmed diary reports and the psychiatric examination come from Delovoy Peterburg's report of July 30, 2015. The Investigative Committee's position, the single charge, its denial that her husband's remains had been found, the date of the 2003 killing and the source's account of a confession mentioning a lodger killed in November 2000 come from Interfax's report of August 5, 2015. In 2015 all of this was allegation; the other killings attributed to her by the press and by unnamed sources were never charged. The outcome in the closing paragraph is set out, with its sources, in this archive's case file on Tamara Samsonova. The woman she was accused of killing is not named here because neither report opened for this story names her.
Sources
- Пенсионерка из Петербурга, Delovoy Peterburg (dp.ru)
- Interfax report on the Samsonova case, Interfax