Mariia nikolaevna saltykova serial killer

Petersburg, where they eventually brought a petition before Empress Catherine II. The empress ordered the College of Justice to begin an investigation regarding torture and murder.

Saltychikha was arrested in She was held for six years while the authorities conducted a thorough investigation. Most surviving victims and witnesses were too afraid to give evidence, in case she was acquitted and released.

She was totally unrepentant of her terrible deeds. Even the priest whose mission it was to make her confess to her killings failed to make her talk. She was absolutely sure she would escape punishment. Some hypothesize that Saltykova was a sadist who found pleasure and even sexual gratification from humiliating her servants and causing them pain.

The investigating official counted as many as suspicious deaths, of which the vast majority was attributed to Saltykova. She was found guilty of having killed 38 female serfs by beating and torturing them to death. But the Empress was still unsure about how to punish her, as the death penalty had been abolished in Russia in , and the new empress needed the support of the nobility.

She was then hauled off to live out her remaining years in the basement of a convent. Her sentence required her to be incarcerated in a monastery dungeon in chains and in darkness. A windowless wooden room was built for her, so for a long time she lived in complete darkness. She was under hour guard. During an extensive six-year investigation, the serfs who lived on or near her vast estate were terrified of incurring her wrath.

An abusive unchecked aristocrat, she inflicted cruelty to those around her. Since her death, her legend has grown to a point whereby it is based more on fiction than on reality, which makes it hard to truly understand her motives, if any existed. With the little information that remains about her viciousness and cruelty, can we still call her a serial killer, or was she an abusive Russian landowner, like many of her era?

Darya Saltykova was a Russian aristocratic who attained fame as a serial killer after being found guilty for the death of serfs under her care. Public domain. As with most aristocrats of the time, Darya's life was one of opulence and glamor. Her family enjoyed connections to an elite circle of wealth, including the Tolstoy's , Davidov's, and Musin-Pushkins.

Though little is known about her early childhood, she grew up during a time when wealthy Russians were in a hurry to adopt customs and material goods from Western Europe. As a result of this westernization of Russian culture, Darya may have grown up wearing ostentatious French and Italian dresses, not to mention eating pastries made by imported European chefs.

These extravagances would only be available to the wealthiest of Russians, who still owned large tracts of land and presided over the poorest of serfs. Sometime in the 's, at the age of 20, Darya married the Imperial officer Gleb Alexeyevich Saltykov and found herself holding immense power within the Russian Royal court.

Meanwhile, Gleb's nephew, Nikolai Saltykov, was the royal tutor for Catherine's children. Darya gave birth to two sons by Gleb, Theodore and Nicholas, with whom she spent little time. They were sent away for their schooling, leaving Darya alone on her estate. When Gleb died of unknown causes in , Darya was left a wealthy widow at the age of In charge of the Troitskoe estate, as well as several other properties, she was responsible for over serfs.

As if a character from a tragic Russian fairytale, Darya rapidly transformed from being a wealthy year-old widower into the vile Saltychikha. While no evidence has been found to explain this dramatic metamorphosis, legend has it that the change was triggered by the actions of an unfaithful lover. Shortly after the death of her husband, Darya was courted by the land surveyor Nikolay Tyutchev, grandfather of future poet Fydor Tyutchev. Instead, he rejected her and eloped with a younger, red-haired woman.

Luckily, Nikolay and his bride received word of the assassination attempt and fled to Moscow. Portrait of Countess Darya Petrovna Saltykova. Some versions claim Nikolay simply lost interest and stopped visiting Darya, while others contend that he grew tired of her violent treatment of her servants and left without Darya noticing.

All in all, she is supposed to have murdered women and three men. The male deaths, apparently, were accidental. Several accounts maintain that Darya's violent mood swings were to blame for most of her servant's deaths. There was a variable range to her violent temper and abuse. At the slightest offense, she would begin with throwing objects at serfs and servants she felt were lazy or incompetent.

On the other end of the scale, she is said to have stepped on the belly of a pregnant woman, killed the wife of a hated male serf, and in some accounts, performed acts of cannibalism. The other cruelties, for which Darya became infamous, were the burning of hair, throwing servant girls outside, naked, in the dead of Russian winter, the pouring of boiling water from head to toe, the severing of ears with hot pokers, and whipping her female servants until the bones of their backs were exposed.

Saltytchikha was known for her enraged fits of cruelty, usually enacted against women. In another testament to her cruelty, she is said to have become enraged with one male serf she deemed ungrateful and plotted to kill his wife. On succeeding in this endeavor, she continued to torment the serf: When he remarried, she proceeded to kill his second wife, and then his third.

Darya's plan was to break the spirit of the man who failed at showing her respect, and watch him suffer. Given her wealth and her family connections to the Russian royal family, her abusive crimes on her estate were able to continue for almost ten years before anyone brought this to the attention of the Imperial court. So, why did this continue for so long? Did it have to do with her wealth alone, or was there a cultural aspect that is often overlooked, such as the treatment of Russian serfs?

During 17 th century Imperial Russia, serfdom was a form of feudal slavery whereby people were tied to the land in which they dwelled. Serfs were the legal property of whichever landowning noblemen owned the land. Serfs had few rights and were subject to whatever rules noblemen saw fit.

Though it was technically illegal to sell serfs without their land, many noblemen continued the practice quietly, changing the terminology from "peasant and land" to "hiring servants. Most noblemen had complete ownership and dominance over the lives of their serfs. Before the Great Emancipation of , it was estimated that over 20 million privately owned serfs were being traded, bought, sold, and exploited. Before the Great Emancipation of , which effectively abolished serfdom, over 20 million privately owned serfs were being traded, bought, sold, and exploited.

Because of Darya's immense wealth and her intimate connections with the Romanov family , most Russian authorities ignored the rumors regarding abuse and murder taking place on her land. In some cases, those who were brave enough to bring attention to her activities were punished. It wasn't until that relatives of some of the victims were able to escape to St. Petersburg and bring a petition to Catherine the Great herself. The serf who had lost three wives to Darya's wrath, was one of them.

The name Saltychikha became a synonym for bestial treatment of the peasants. Darya Saltykova was a Russian Countess who over a period of years turned from a noblewoman into a vicious serial killer. Her maiden name was Ivanova. Saltykova married young to Gleb Saltykov and was widowed by the age of She became the richest widow in Moscow.

With her husband's death, she inherited the beautiful estate near Moscow called Troitskoe, where she lived with her two young sons and over serfs. She also had good property in Moscow. While she was married, no one had noticed anything special about her. She just seemed gloomy most of the time. Also she was a very pious woman, who donated a lot to churches and monasteries. One day Saltykova met a young and very handsome Nikolay Tyutchev the grandfather of well-known Russian poet, Fyodor Tyutchev.

As she was getting older and was very lonely, the affair with him raised her spirits a little bit. She soon learned that Tyutchev had a love affair with a young girl and they were even secretly married in church. In blind fury, Saltykova nearly killed her unfaithful lover. Out of revenge Saltykova wanted to kill them, the opportunity was lost.

Soon she started wreaking her anger on her serfs, mostly women. She hated them all. The younger they were, the more she hated them. She treated them as her rivals, giving her enemies no quarter. She tortured children and pregnant women to death by beating them, breaking their bones, throwing them out of the house naked into the frost, pouring boiling water on their bodies and many other vicious and bloody tortures. She killed the ones they loved.

One of her serfs lost, one by one, three of his wives. Then, transported with range, she would beat, whip and torture young girls and women to death. She was a sadist who enjoyed physically abusing her servants. Many early complaints to authorities about the deaths at the Saltykova estate were either ignored or resulted in punishment of the complainants, because Saltykova was well-connected with powerful members of the royal court.

Complaints about her possibly killing those who worked for her fell on deaf ears due to her standing in society. After an uproar from many of the victims grieving family members, Saltykova was finally tried and convicted for killing only 38 women — about fewer than in reality. In the summer of peasant serfs Sakhvely Martynov and Ermolay Ilyin the latter had lost three of his wives, beaten to death on orders of Saltychikha fled from the estate to St.

Petersburg, where they eventually brought a petition before Empress Catherine II. The empress ordered the College of Justice to begin an investigation regarding torture and murder.

Saltychikha was arrested in She was held for six years while the authorities conducted an investigation. Most surviving victims and witnesses were afraid to give evidence. Stepan Volkov was the investigator who allowed an action to proceed. Saltychikha was not admitted mad or ill. She was unrepentant of her terrible deeds. Even the priest whose mission was to make her confess to her killings failed to make her talk. She was absolutely sure she would escape punishment. According to forensic detectives, over the period of six to seven years Darya Saltykova murdered by various methods people, mainly women only three of her victims were men , including young girls of The investigating official counted as many as suspicious deaths, of which the vast majority was attributed to Saltykova.

She was found guilty of having killed 38 female serfs by beating and torturing them to death. But the Empress was still unsure about how to punish her, as the death penalty had been abolished in Russia in , and the new empress needed the support of the nobility.

At a public beating in Red Square, she was chained on a platform for an hour in front of the crowd, with a sign around her neck with the text: "This woman has tortured and murdered. Saltykova was sentenced to life imprisonment in lieu of capital punishment.

Her sentence required her to be incarcerated in a monastery dungeon in chains and in darkness. A windowless wooden room was built for her, so for a long time she lived in complete darkness. She was under hour guard. A nun would bring food and a candle. After meals the candle would be taken away.

The Moscow cloister was notorious as a place where many women of aristocratic lineage were imprisoned against their will. Their families would typically make sumptuous offerings for the monastery towards the upkeep of their female relation. It is here, often under the guise of mental illness, that secret female prisoners of the Investigation Department and the Secret Investigations Bureau would be sent, typically involved in political and criminal cases.