Lady Killers Read online

  This could have been the moment Darya was brought to justice. She had just killed a pregnant woman, and there were multiple witnesses to both the crime and the aftermath: the husband, a serf who’d been forced to beat Grigorieva too, another serf who buried the baby, the priest, the police, and the doctor(s) who performed the autopsy. If this complaint had been properly investigated, tens—or possibly hundreds—of lives would have been saved. But no one bothered. These were serfs, after all. Nobles were already selling them “like cattle.”

  So Darya killed and killed again, confident in her impregnability and furious at her serfs for each petty mistake, for getting in her way, for being her responsibility, for existing. If she was a god, then her serfs were her pitiful playthings. She could make them clean; she could make them cook; she could make them scream and bleed and beg. Typically, she would force another servant to begin the beating, and then she’d take over until the victim died. Sometimes she commanded her male serfs to beat their wives or relatives in front of her. In Troitskoye, she threw boiling water onto a peasant girl and then beat her to death. Villagers remembered seeing the body: the scalded skin had actually begun to peel off the bones.

  Mostly, Darya killed women, but occasionally she’d turn on a man. One of her male serfs, Chrisanthos Andreev, was in charge of overseeing the unfortunate housemaids, and when Darya became convinced he was doing an inadequate job, she beat him and threw him outdoors to stand in the cold for the entire night. The next morning, Andreev was brought back inside, nearly frozen, where Darya clamped a pair of red-hot tongs over his ears. She then proceeded to pour boiling water over his body and, when he fell to the floor, she kicked and punched him. When she’d finally had enough, she asked another manservant to drag the bleeding man away from her. As soon as the poor peasant was out of Darya’s sight, he died.

  It went on and on, a litany of horrors. Darya lit one woman’s hair on fire and pushed an eleven-year-old girl down a stone staircase. She fed her servants once a day so they were perpetually weak. She would grab logs of wood—tucked in every room, meant for fireplaces—and use them as makeshift clubs. Neighbors heard her screaming, “Beat more!” When one of her male serfs dared to insult her, Darya grabbed his hair and began smashing his head against a nearby wall.

  Though her stablemen and housemaids repeatedly escaped and cried murder to the local authorities, they were captured and brought right back to Darya, where they would be beaten and shackled, or even sent into exile. “You will not do anything to me!” Darya scoffed at one stableman who attempted to report her. “No matter how much you report or complain about me, the authorities will not do anything to me. They would not trade me for you.”

  Her fearlessness wasn’t irrational bravado. As Grigorieva’s death proved, the system supported Darya, and by this point Darya had been falsifying evidence and bribing key authority figures for years. If the priests refused to bury one of her victims, then her superintendent, Martian, would file counterfeit papers about the death, saying the girl died suddenly of sickness and didn’t have a chance to make her confession, or the priest was late, or the girl was so sick she couldn’t speak, making a final confession impossible. Sometimes the papers would claim that the victim had run away, when in truth she was buried right there in the graveyard. The paper describing the death of the eleven-year-old girl that Darya pushed down the staircase said that the girl had simply . . . stumbled.

  If the complaints reached the officials, Darya bribed the officials. She kept a ledger of the gifts she sent to these powerful men: food, money, even serfs themselves. In fact, one official was so accommodating that he would actually visit Darya and teach her how to deal with the denunciations that kept popping up against her. “Had Saltykova not been sheltered and helped by her protectors, there would have been fewer beatings and deaths,” raged one of her stablemen, who had seen the atrocities go on, unchecked, for years.

  At one point, while watching yet another girl get beaten to death, Darya started to scream. “I am my own mistress,” she cried. “I am not afraid of anyone.” This belief that she was superior, unassailable, and even consecrated by the law was integral to her sense of self. Perhaps she killed to prove one simple point: that she could.

  Love and Gunpowder

  Today, in the dark corners of the Internet, you can find people attempting to pin Darya’s many crimes onto something kind of melodramatic, palatable, and easy to understand: a broken heart.

  After her husband’s death, Darya took up with her handsome young neighbor, Captain Nikolai Andreyevich Tyutchev, whose Troitskoye estate brushed right up against hers. All their serfs knew they were having an affair. But their love didn’t last, and the couple broke up just before the Lent of 1762, when Darya was about to turn thirty-two.

  The captain didn’t stay single for long, and Darya took great offense to this fact. Then she learned that not only was the new woman younger than her, but the captain was planning to marry this beautiful upstart. Darya couldn’t take it. She paced around, determined to enact some sort of horrible revenge on them both, and finally hit upon a deranged plan: she was simply going to have to blow them up.

  Blinded by vengeance, Darya sent one of her men to purchase five pounds of gunpowder, which she then mixed with sulfur and wrapped in hemp cloth. She commanded her serf to hide the flammable mixture around the new woman’s house, and then to lie in wait until the captain arrived. Once the lovers were ensconced inside, the servant was instructed to set the house on fire, blowing them up in flagrante delicto.

  This scheme was too crazy, even for Darya’s hardened male servants. The first servant she sent over simply refused to burn the house down, so Darya beat him to a pulp when he returned. She then sent him back, along with another servant, but they claimed that their attempts to start the fire had failed. Frustrated, Darya changed her approach. If bombing wasn’t going to work, maybe assault was the ticket. She commanded a new crew of serfs to lay in wait along the roadside until the couple drove by in their carriage, and then to leap out and beat them both to death.

  At this point, the serfs decided that their only way out of this unhinged revenge fantasy was to secretly inform the captain that Darya was plotting against him. So they did, and the captain immediately strode to the police and filed an accusation against his ex.

  Darya was unflappable when the police questioned her about it. “I did not send the peasants Roman Ivanov and Leontiev to set fire to the house of Ms. Panyutina, nor did I commanded others to beat them,” she responded coldly. She claimed that during the time of the alleged assassination attempts, she’d been sick, holed up in her Moscow estate with a priest nearby. In other words, she was a good religious woman who would never dream of revenging herself on a single soul, no matter how horribly he’d betrayed her.

  Clearly, Darya was a bit upset with the captain. But this broken heart was in no way the wound that turned her into a vicious serial killer. She had been murdering serfs long before any of this happened. The event simply serves as a neat hook on which to hang the hat of our speculation: that in order for Darya to be able to commit such atrocities, she must have been driven half mad by something else.

  “Madness,” in fact, is a common explanation for Darya’s crimes. When the people of Moscow found out about them, they thought she was insane, and people today still wonder the same thing. (Surely every serial killer in history has been thought insane at one point or another. How else to explain the repetitive, horrible, practiced violence?) But rather than insane, Darya comes across as horribly logical. The drama with the captain demonstrates her terrible ability to plot and outline and rationalize: she purchased the correct materials, revised her plan as necessary, and smoothly denied her guilt. Even the logic behind her serf killings was pretty consistent. If a servant did not clean properly, she deserved to die. If a servant complained to the authorities, he deserved to die. The serfs were her property, and she was allowed to give them performance reviews. It was all perfectly reasonable to Da
rya.

  Anyway, madness and logic have always been cousins. The writer G. K. Chesterton once spoke of the “exhaustive and logical theory of the lunatic,” saying that the madman “is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity.” Darya certainly wasn’t hampered by charity, or by anything at all. If she occasionally wanted to blow up an ex-boyfriend, she didn’t want to hear that she was being “crazy.” She simply wanted to know that the naked bodies of her former lover and her rival were sizzling like pigs on a spit. If she told her serfs to do something, she wanted the act done, no questions asked. God in heaven! Was no one listening to her?

  The Escape of the Husbands

  Nobody knew about Darya’s reign of terror better than Yermolai Ilyin, the man who took care of her horses. Ilyin had been married three times, to three hardworking women, each of whom had the terrible misfortune of being “employed” by Darya. They had beautiful names: Katerina, Theodosia, Aksinya. And Darya slaughtered them all.

  Darya knew Ilyin loathed her because of what she’d done to his wives, but warned that if he ever attempted to report her, she would whip him to death herself. Ilyin knew her well enough to know she wasn’t making empty threats—but there’s only so much cruelty that the human psyche can take. Finally, desperate and reckless, Ilyin decided to fling himself on the mercy of a system that didn’t care whether he lived or died.

  In April 1762, Ilyin and his fellow serf Savely Martynov showed up in the city of St. Petersburg, ready to make their case against Darya. They clutched a letter containing an almost inconceivable accusation: that over the past six years, Darya had killed more than one hundred people. The two were convinced that if only they could get their letter into the hands of the brand-new empress, Catherine the Great, she would do something about it.

  It was a suicide mission—but it worked. Their story sounded just outrageous enough to catch the attention of the St. Petersburg authorities, who forwarded it to the Justice Board along with a note asking the board to begin an investigation into the life of Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova—the noblewoman, the mother, the widow of a fine man, the upstanding churchgoer.

  “I Do Not Know Anything; I Did Not Do Anything”

  If Darya flew into rages over unclean floors and ex-lovers, we can only imagine her wrath when she found out that two of her serfs had managed to turn the authorities against her. But she couldn’t make good on her threats to beat them to death, because the great eye of Empress Catherine was slowly turning toward her, and life as she knew it was about to change forever.

  In a way, this case surfaced at the perfect time for Catherine the Great. See, Catherine was trying to show the world that this was a new era for Russia—a humane and enlightened era, when having noble blood was no longer an excuse to do whatever you wanted—and so she needed to make an example of someone. Because before the law, everyone was equal!

  Well, sort of. The truth was that Catherine was also under a lot of pressure to handle the case diplomatically. Since Darya belonged to a prestigious family, other aristocrats were taking particular interest in this, ahem, unfortunate situation. They wanted to make sure Catherine didn’t set any precedents she couldn’t take back. (Surely they, too, had blood on their hands: serfs whose beatings had gone a little too far, stories of bribes and hasty burials.) Still, the accusations against Darya were far too serious for Catherine to sweep under the rug with a wink at Moscow’s noblest families. By now, the number of deaths attributed to Darya had skyrocketed to 138. Like it or not, the Justice Board was dealing with one of the worst serial killers in history, male or female.

  Due to Catherine’s personal interest in the case, the investigation against Darya was incredibly methodical. This was no semi-shady Báthory trial: investigators talked to hundreds of witnesses in both Moscow and Troitskoye, carefully confirming and reconfirming each allegation against the noblewoman. These witnesses were as knowledgeable and precise as an investigating officer could wish. They remembered the names of the dead peasants and the dates on which they died; they corroborated each other’s stories. If the slightest shadow of a doubt were cast on any witness—contradicting testimonies, qualms about the witness’s veracity, or facts that couldn’t be proven—the Justice Board interpreted that particular case in Darya’s favor. They also threw out multiple cases for lack of evidence. Darya’s stance on the 138 deaths was short and sweet: “I do not know anything; I did not do anything,” she said, over and over.

  Despite all this, the Board still found her guilty of thirty-eight murders, and under suspicion of murder in twenty-six more cases. The fact that Darya refused to confess, however, caused Catherine a great deal of anxiety, and her concern is demonstrated in the sheer number of letters she wrote about the case. On principle, Catherine strongly disapproved of torture—writing, famously, “All punishments by which the human body might be maimed are barbarism,”—but she wanted Darya to admit to at least something. At one point, she wrote to the Board, “Explain to Saltykova that the testimonies and facts of the case mean that official torture will have to be performed if, frankly, she does not confess her involvement in the crimes. Therefore send her a priest and make him accompany and exhort her for a month. And if she does not repent, then prepare her for torture.”

  Catherine didn’t really intend for Darya to be tortured, but she hoped the idea of torture would scare her into acknowledging her crimes. “Show her the torture chamber,” Catherine wrote, “so that she will know what awaits her. Give her one last chance for admission and repentance.” At the same time, Catherine was anxiously re-reminding the authorities that no matter what happened, Darya wasn’t to be harmed. Establishing a precedent of torture or executing members of the aristocracy was deeply unpopular and far too risky. “Carefully observe that there be no unnecessary bloodshed,” she wrote, “and all those involved in these crimes be properly questioned, and all the facts be collected and recorded. After that give it all to me.”

  Darya never confessed to a thing.

  “A Completely Godless Soul”

  “Here is the decree we give to our Senate,” ran Catherine’s imperial verdict on October 2, 1768. “Having considered the report provided to us by the Senate on the crimes committed by the inhuman widow Darya, the daughter of Nicholas, we have found that she does not deserve to be called a human being, as she is actually worse than the most famous murderers, extremely hard-hearted and cruel, not able to curb her rage.” The decree laid out her punishment: First, Darya would be led to a scaffold in Moscow’s central square, where she would hear the Justice Board’s sentence, which was to be read without ever mentioning Darya’s family name or her husband’s name—erasing her identity as a social human, effectively shattering all the familial ties she had in the world. Then, she would be locked underground for the rest of her life.

  During the years of the investigation, Darya had become infamous. Now there were crazed rumors circling around Moscow that she was a cannibal, and people were dying to see this notorious killer in person. Catherine encouraged the spectacle by sending invitations to all the noble houses, demanding that they come and watch Darya’s punishment. This was also a veiled threat: she was warning the nobles that their abuses of power had real consequences. There was an Enlightenment coming, after all. They couldn’t get away with everything anymore.

  October 18 was a Sunday, and the season’s first snow fell on Moscow, but that didn’t stop the crowds of people who came to Red Square to gape at the “inhuman widow.” At noon, Darya was brought outside and bound to a pole. A sign hung around her neck: THE TORMENTOR AND THE MURDERER. A guard stood next to her as her sentence was read aloud. One fascinated viewer allegedly reported that Darya’s eyes were “not of this world.” After an hour, she was taken away in shackles.

  Darya’s punishment wasn’t bloody, but it was long and horribly isolated. She was put in an underground prison cell called a repentance chamber, accessed only by a nun and a custodian. Not a single beam of light was allowed inside, except for a candle d
uring meals. She sat this way, in total darkness, for eleven years. Aside from eating and drinking, she had only one activity: every Sunday, she was allowed to stand under a ventilation tunnel that led up to a local church, so that she could hear the liturgy.

  What did Darya think, Sunday after Sunday, as she heard the priest pray, “Oh holy God, who out of nothing has brought all things into being, who has created man after Thine own image and likeness, and hast adorned him with Thine every gift”? Did Darya feel anything for the bodies she’d broken, created in that “image and likeness”? When the liturgy touched on sin and evil and the need for sanctification, did she think about herself? Or did she simply stand there in the darkness, under the ventilation tunnel, with her mind far away and her otherworldly pupils dilated from lack of light?

  Horrible Darya. She had internalized the conditions of serfdom so deeply that perhaps she truly believed she was virtuous in the eyes of God for disposing of these monstrous, unworthy, subhuman souls. Her entire world told her she was superior: she watched the serf orchestras, gasped at the serf ballets; she saw that serfs were punished for even attempting to criticize their masters. Even in her beloved church, she was probably never taught that serfdom was wrong. A pastoral guide published in 1776 “virtually ignored the existence of serfdom.” The historian Richard Pipes spelled it out even more forcefully when speaking of the Russian church: “No branch of Christianity has shown such callous indifference to social and political injustice.” The silence of the priests would have said it all: These serfs are nothing to us. Nothing to God. Nothing.

  And so Darya simply carried this mindset to the logical extreme: if the serfs were nothing, if they were lesser life forms than she, if she were the valuable one—upheld by the law, coddled by the church—then she could do whatever she wanted to them. She felt entitled to their work, their blood, and perhaps even their very souls.