80-Year-Old Woman Killed Tenant, Kept Body Parts In Fridge

An 80-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of killing her tenant and storing his organs inside her fridge in Khabarovsk, Russia, on Tuesday.

The incident came to light after some children playing near an apartment block found a severed arm and informed their parents. Police arrived at the scene and found other parts of the man’s body in several plastic bags around the complex. The bags were dragged around by dogs.

The dead man was identified as a 52-year-old Ukrainian tenant of the woman, whose name was not revealed, through his fingerprints. Police questioned the woman and during the house search, they found the victim’s internal organs in her fridge.

“The bowels and other inner organs of the man were found in her fridge and she threw away the bones,” a law enforcement source told local media, the Sun reported.

Neighbors said they heard “loud knocks in her apartment until almost midnight, as if somebody was using an axe.”

They told police that the woman worked as a butcher on a pig farm throughout her life and wouldn’t have had problems killing a man and storing his body parts. They had also previously complained of the woman torturing a cat.

Some of them also said they believed the woman was a cannibal and had stored the organs to consume later on.

Russia Investigative Committee, however, did not confirm the cannibalism accusation.

Leading Russian psychiatrist and criminologist Mikhail Vinogradov said, the woman “doesn't feel a sense of conscience or repentance if lives are destroyed because she has slaughtered the living creatures all her life,” local daily Bors Online reported.

This was not the first time the woman’s tenants had gone missing. A woman tenant went missing a few years ago along with a large amount of cash. The woman’s passport was found at the 80-year-old’s house.

A neighbor also disappeared in the past and the police have now decided to re-examine the unfinished cases.

The woman will be held in jail for two months. The first hearing date into the case was not set.

In a similar incident in October 2018, a body chopped up with an axe was found in a house in the Kirov district of the Leningrad region, Russia. Neighbors informed police after they saw smoke coming out of a house in the area. When officials reached the house, they found Aleksey Popovich's body with his head in the stove beside a frying pan. The same day, police arrested two people who lived in the same house. They confessed to the murder and said they wanted to cook the flesh.