On the evening of July 26, 2015, a resident of Dimitrov Street in the Kupchino district of Saint Petersburg took a closer look at a bundle that had been lying for several days beside the pond behind building number 10. It was wrapped in a bathroom curtain and held parts of a woman's body, without the head. The next day, after questioning the residents of the neighborhood, police identified her as Valentina Nikolaevna Ulanova, seventy-nine. When officers knocked at Ulanova's apartment, the door was opened by Tamara Samsonova, sixty-eight, who had been living there. There was blood in the bathroom and the fastening of a torn-off curtain. Security cameras had recorded Samsonova making trip after trip out of the building with plastic bags and a saucepan. She was arrested on July 27.
She was born Tamara Mitrofanovna in Uzhur, in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, on April 25, 1947; some accounts give February 5. After school she went to Moscow to study at the Maurice Thorez State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, then moved to Leningrad and married Alexei Samsonov. In 1971 the couple moved into a newly built panel block, number 4 on Dimitrov Street. She worked for the Intourist travel agency, including at the Grand Hotel Europe, and retired with sixteen years' service. Neighbors said she had spent time in psychiatric hospitals; she had been admitted three times, and doctors suspected schizophrenia.
In 2000 her husband disappeared. She reported it to the police, and nothing was found. After he vanished she let out a room in the apartment. On September 6, 2003, according to investigators, she killed her tenant, Sergei Potanin, forty-four, in a quarrel, dismembered him and left the remains outdoors on Dimitrov Street; the case went unsolved for twelve years. In April 2015 she went to the Frunzensky District investigators herself and gave a statement about her husband's disappearance fifteen years earlier.
That March a mutual friend had asked Ulanova, who lived alone in the same street, to put Samsonova up while her own apartment was renovated. She stayed for months and helped with the housework, but the two fell out, and when Ulanova asked her to leave she refused. She went out to Pushkin, talked a pharmacist into selling her the prescription sedative phenazepam, and mixed the pills into an Olivier salad, one of Ulanova's favorite dishes. On the night of July 23 she found Ulanova lying on the kitchen floor and cut up the body with two knives and a saw. She later told investigators the argument had been over unwashed cups, and she walked them through the apartment showing how she had done it.
The police found diaries, kept in Russian, English and German. One entry read that she had "killed my tenant Volodya, cut him to pieces in the bathroom with a knife" and thrown the bags away in different parts of the Frunzensky District. The press named her the Granny Ripper and reported, on the condition of Ulanova's remains and the saucepan, that she might have eaten parts of her victims; that has never been established, and investigators publicly asked reporters not to rush to pin a series of murders on her. In court on July 29, 2015, before the Frunze District Court, she blew kisses to the cameras, said she was guilty and had been waiting ten years to be caught, and was seen celebrating when she was ordered held in custody.
A forensic psychiatric examination concluded on November 26, 2015, that she was a danger to society and to herself. In December 2015 she was transferred to a specialized psychiatric hospital with intensive supervision in Kazan for compulsory treatment. She was not tried in the ordinary way. Investigators went on examining her possible connection with fourteen deaths, but beyond Ulanova, and the 2003 killing of her tenant, none has been established.