On the evening of July 27, 2015, police officers knocked on the door of an apartment in Kupchino, a grey residential district on the southern edge of St. Petersburg. The door was answered by a small, white-haired woman of sixty-eight, who smiled and invited them in. Within hours, Tamara Mitrofanovna Samsonova was under arrest for the murder and dismemberment of her seventy-nine-year-old neighbour, Valentina Ulanova. What investigators found when they looked deeper stopped them cold.

The Granny Ripper traces the full arc of Samsonova's life and crimes — from a Siberian childhood in Stalin's Soviet Union, through decades working as a multilingual Intourist guide in Leningrad's grandest hotel, to the panel-block apartment in Kupchino where she killed, dismembered, and disposed of her victims across fifteen years without anyone noticing. Drawing on forensic records, psychiatric evaluations, and the handwritten diaries recovered from her apartment — written in Russian, English, and German — this is a forensic, psychological, and social history of a case that exposes the hidden vulnerabilities of post-Soviet urban life.

Artorius White's meticulous account refuses the monster mythology that the tabloid press attached to this case. In its place, he offers something more disturbing: the story of a severely ill woman, a failing system, and the forgotten people who paid the price for every net that failed to catch them.

The Granny Ripper: Murder, Madness, and the Hidden World of Tamara Samsonova

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