Darya Saltykova, Serial Killer

In the 18th century in Russia, a noblewoman named Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova was well known in her area for treating her serfs with unique cruelty. But the true situation was far worse than the rumors. Eventually, she would be convicted of beating 38 young women to death, but many think she might have killed over a hundred more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Before we begin, just a little bit of housekeeping. I'm
sure you're tired of hearing about it, but I wrote
a book. It's a young adult novel called Anatomy a
Love Story. It takes place in the nineteenth century in Edinburgh,
and it's a story about the dawn of surgery, body
snatchers and and the like. And if you're looking for
a you know, post January holiday treat for yourself and

(00:25):
you wanted to pre order, that would mean a lot
to me. If you've heard anything about supply chain issues,
that's happening a ton of books, and so pre orders
are a really important way for publishers to make sure
that everyone who wants a book actually gets one. So
that's Anatomy a Love Story. Noble Blood is also on Patreon.
If you want to support the show, I upload episode

(00:45):
scripts there with you know, sometimes a little extra tidbits
or information. I'm also starting a brand new series where
my friend Karama and I go through the entire catalog
of the CW television show Rain for all of its
historical inaccuracies. So if that's something that you think might
interest you, that'll be over on the Patreon. There's also

(01:07):
Noble Blood merch at d F t b A dot com.
I use my Noble Blood beheaded Marie Antrinette tote basically
every time I go to the farmer's market, and I
don't care if I get weird looks. We have mugs, totes,
and pins which make a great holiday present. So without
further ado, here is this week's episode Welcome to Noble Blood,

(01:31):
a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild
from Aaron Minky Listener. Discretion is advised. In a town
square in the center of Moscow in seventy a woman
is chained to a small wooden platform. The woman's hair

(01:51):
hangs lank around her face. Her eyes are fixed to
the ground. She's ignoring the crowd gathering around her. Some
of the crowd is there just out of mere curiosity,
people who had heard rumors of this woman and who
wanted to see her face. Others in the crowd are
there to jeer and spit. Some are just there for

(02:15):
the spectacle of it all, the strangeness of a noble
woman reduced to this. The chained woman's name is Darius Saltikova.
Around her neck, she has a painted sign that reads
this woman has tortured and murdered. Being chained in the
town square was part of her sentence. She had to

(02:37):
remain out there in full public view, humiliated and scorned
for one hour. Her crime the murder of thirty eight
young women, though some believe that Darius Saltikova might have
murdered as many as one hundred more. In the annals
of popular history, female killers tend to be of particular fascination.

(03:03):
There's something about murderous is from Madame Lallery in New
Orleans to Lizzie Borden in Massachusetts, that people find strange
and scintillating. The extent of Darius Saltikova's crimes are extreme,
but I find that they're worth talking about, not just
out of prurient, morbid true crime fascination, but because of

(03:26):
the political context that enabled her dozens of murders, and
because of the political context in which she would finally
face consequences. I'm Danis Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.

(03:50):
In the previous episode of Noble Blood, I discussed Countess
Elizabeth Bathi, the Hungarian noblewoman who's become perhaps the most
famous female serial killer of all time. Her popularity is
in part because people love referencing the completely fabricated anecdote

(04:11):
about Bathory murdering servant girls so that she could bathe
in their blood. Elizabeth Bathory is certainly one of the
most famous historical figures in terms of appearances in trivia
books and in the true crime corners of the Internet,
but as I covered in my last episode, some recent
scholars have raised doubts as to whether Countess Bathory was

(04:34):
guilty of murder at all. To briefly refresh your memory,
Bathory was an incredibly wealthy landowning widow from the eastern
part of the Kingdom of Hungary, the Principality of Transylvania.
Her family was growing in power, and they were extremely
threatening to the Habsburg powers that be, which made Elizabeth

(04:56):
Bathory a prime target for a polit critically motivated framing.
Recent scholars also point to some of Elizabeth Bathori's Transylvanian
medical procedures, things like ice baths and cauterizing infections, which
could have been misinterpreted in more western Hungry as violent torture.

(05:18):
It's also worth remembering that Elizabeth Bathory was never publicly
charged or tried or convicted. The confessions that led to
her lifetime imprisonment were given under torture, and Elizabeth Bathori
was never allowed to speak on her own behalf. The
scholarship as to whether Elizabeth Bathory was framed or not

(05:39):
is still relatively recent and limited to academia, and plenty
of other historians still believed that she was guilty of
torture and murder to some degree, although probably not to
the degree of the hundreds of victims that some people
ascribed to her, and definitely not guilty of the blood
bathing thing. But suilty or innocent, The story of Elizabeth

(06:02):
Bathories is one of political power and privilege. If she
was framed, it was only because of her politically important family.
If Bathory actually was a murderer, her merely being placed
under house arrest was thanks to her noble blood and
her family's influence. Centuries ago, the justice system worked differently

(06:25):
for those with money and connections, very much in the
same way that unfortunately it too often does today and
sometimes today, as centuries ago, a conviction can be meant
as a political statement, meant to hold one man or
woman accountable for something. As an example, and so if

(06:47):
I ruined your favorite countess serial killer in my last episode,
consider this my consolation, yet another countess with yet another
slate of horrific murders, but of which this time she
is almost undeniably guilty. But the most interesting part of
the story of Daria sulta Kova, at least to me,

(07:10):
isn't her actual crime so much as her position in
Russian society and the balancing act that the reigning monarch
Katherine the Great was forced to do in order to
hold her nobles accountable for their actions while still keeping
them on her side. Daria Nikolayevna Ivanovna was born on

(07:34):
March eleven, thirty, just a few months after the future
Katherine the Great was born. Unlike Katherine, Daria was born
to a prominent family of Russian nobles, with princes on
both her mother's and her father's side of the family tree. Eventually,
that prominent lineage led Darya to make her own aristocratic

(07:57):
marriage to a man named Gleb Xyevitch Saltikov. The Saltikovs
make frequent appearances on the pages of Russian history. One Saltikov,
distantly distantly related to Gleb would be one of Catherine
the Great's first extramarital lovers, another Saltikov. Gleb's nephew, actually

(08:18):
would go on to be the tutor of Catherine the
Great son. Gleb himself was a captain in the Imperial Guard,
and it was thought that he would make a fine
match for the pretty young Daria, who as a young
woman was known for being pious and well behaved. But
Gleb died young. Though the couple had two children, Daria

(08:39):
would be a widow at age twenty five, living as
a single woman on a vast inherited estate south of Moscow,
with around six hundred serfs to work the land. One
of Daria's sons died when he was eleven, the other
would only survive until his early twenties. So even by

(09:00):
Shian standards, the salt Takova state was a sad and
gloomy place, strange and lonely, and there were stories that
surrounded the estate like mist. They said that the sound
of a cracking whip could be heard for miles away,
that the corpse of a woman was once wheeled away

(09:20):
in the middle of the night, hidden by darkness. According
to the rumor, the body was unmistakably that of a woman,
but all of her hair had been scorched, singed off,
and her skin was flayed from the chest. No One

(09:43):
in eighteenth century Russia expected that surfs were going to
have particularly long, fulfilling lives, but it seemed that the
surfs at the Saltakova state were particularly brittle and frightened.
Young girls would go to work for Darias salt Ko
now and none of them would ever be seen again.

(10:03):
According to allegations, saltic Cova's bitterness and loneliness curdled in
her heart into a twisted cruelty. If one of her
servants spilled tea or forgot one of their chores, salta
Cova would beat them with logs or shove them down
the stairs. She would set their flesh on fire, or

(10:23):
pour burning water from teapots onto their bare limbs. Sometimes
she would tie a surf up and leave them naked
in the Russian cold to freeze to death. She used
hot irons, she flayed flesh and burned hair off. She
allegedly once crushed a pregnant woman's belly beneath her boot.

(10:46):
Those saltic Coba would later say that any cruelty she
exhibited towards her serfs was just because they were ineffective
at doing their jobs. It's impossible not to see a
more personal aspect to her brutality. Most of her victims
were young women. They were pretty girls who reminded the
aging Saltikova that she was no longer the youthful girl

(11:09):
of promise that she once was. After her husband's death,
Saltikova did have a lover, a man named Nikolay Kyotchev,
but Nikolay left Darya in order to marry another woman.
As cruel punishment, Daria sent two of her serfs to

(11:31):
set fire to the newlywed's home. Rather than obey, the
serfs warned Nikolay and his bride, and neither was harmed,
although I do have to wonder what fate might have
befallen the SERPs when they returned to the Saltikova state
with their mission incomplete. Unfortunately, most of the scholarship around

(11:52):
Darius Saltikova's life and her murders is written in Russian
and remains untranslated, and though I was able to learn
a lot through the miracle of online translation, I still
found it challenging to parse out what was rumor and
what was actually confirmed when it came to the extent
of salt Dakova's sheer sadism. But how was a woman

(12:14):
able to go decades brutalizing dozens, possibly hundreds of people.
Serfs in Russia existed somewhere between slavery and freedom. In effect,
their labor, but not their personhood itself, belonged to their
master or mistress. The original purpose of the serf class

(12:34):
was to tie laborers to the land so that they
couldn't migrate. There were vast swatches of Russian land that
needed to be farmed, but which no one would want
to farm voluntarily, so the surf class was born. Although
the position of serfs continued to evolve well into the
eighteenth century, and this is just a very cursory overview

(12:56):
of a very complicated socio political issue. Serfs had little
recourse against physical or emotional abuse. They couldn't quit their jobs,
and they could be gifted or inherited to other estates.
But serfs weren't allowed to be outright killed, and though
they could be tortured in the name of discipline, they

(13:17):
weren't supposed to be tortured just out of sadistic pleasure.
It was Catherine the Great, a student and admirer of
the liberal politics of the Enlightenment sweeping Western Europe, who
attempted to advocate for more rights for the serfs in
order to, in her mind, poll Russia towards modernity. Not

(13:38):
only was want and cruelty forbidden under Catherine the Great,
but serfs also had a right to lodge complaints against
their masters. It should be noted, though, that most of
these complaints would be going to police forces who were
almost uniformly corrupt, police forces who worked primarily to protect
wealthy people like Daria Saltco buh So, just because surfs

(14:02):
were allowed to complain didn't mean necessarily that people would listen.
Russia was a very very large country, after all, with
a lot of serfs, and though the Empress Catherine the
Great purported to be liberal, there was still a deeply
entrenched power structure in place in Russia built to protect
the nobles. Even so, twenty one serfs conquered their fear

(14:27):
of what Darius Sultakova might do if she found out,
and they filed complaints against their mistress. But it would
be the twenty second complaint that would finally lead to
Saltikova's downfall. In the summer of seventeen sixty two, a
man who worked in the stables at the Sultakova state,

(14:50):
named her Malay Alien, fled the estate and made it
all the way to St. Petersburg, where he petitioned Catherine
the Great personally nil Ling on the throne room floor,
he informed the Empress that his mistress, Daria Saltikova, had
murdered three of his wives, one after another, every time

(15:11):
he got remarried. Darius Saltikova was arrested and held for
six years, while Catherine the Great authorized a full investigation.
For her part, Daria remained completely unrepentant. She maintained that
she did nothing wrong. She was merely disciplining her serfs,

(15:31):
and she maintained that story with full confidence that she
would face no consequences for her actions in this world
or the next. Even when a priest came to get
her confession, Daria didn't speak. The investigation would ultimately involve
interviewing hundreds of peasants. At the time, the Russian legal

(15:53):
system relied on an idea called odo brenno, which basically
translates to the notion of whether or not behave here
was considered acceptable by the wider community. The course of
the investigation against Darius Altakova yielded one hundred and thirty
eight suspicious deaths, all but three of them women and girls.

(16:15):
In the end, Darius Altakova was found guilty by the
Collegium of Justice of beating thirty eight female serfs to death.
This is a case unlike Countess Bathies, where the investigation
was thorough and the witnesses were interviewed at least to

(16:37):
the best of my knowledge, without torture. The verdict being
settled was the easy part of the process, at least
for the Empress Catherine. Sentencing accountess would be a more
complicated issue. The Empress wanted to set a larger example
to the country, to show that she cared about the

(16:57):
surf class, even though she didn't believe that she had
the political stability to eliminate serfdom altogether. Catherine also wanted
to live up to the ideals that she believed in
of the fair judicial systems of Enlightenment philosophers. She wanted
to make a statement both in Russia and also abroad,

(17:17):
that her empire had legal systems that were up to
snuff with what she believed to be the more rigorous
and egalitarian judiciaries in Western Europe. But on the other hand,
Catherine was well aware that her power in Russia was
dependent on the support of the noble class. Katherine didn't
inherit the throne she had claimed it, and the aristocracy

(17:42):
needed to feel protected to some degree. The death penalty
had been abolished in Russia in seventeen fifty four, and
even for a crime as brutal as mass murder, Catherine
still felt that execution would be too alienating to the nobility.
But Darius Saltikova was a brutal killer. Her crimes were

(18:04):
shocking and egregious. Katherine needed to make it clear that
that behavior wouldn't be tolerated when it came to nobles
and their serfs, and so Daria Saltikova Murderous, was sentenced
to life in prison at the Ivanovsky Cloister, where she
would stay in the dungeons below the surface, in a

(18:25):
windowless wooden room, away from sunlight and fresh air. A
nun would bring her food and one candle. Saltikova would
only be permitted to leave her imprisonment once a week
for church, but before her life sentence, Daria Saltikova was
sent to a town square in Moscow to remain in

(18:47):
chains with a sign around her neck for the public
to see her and to see what she had done.
Daria remained in the dungeons of the Ivanovsky Cloister for
eleven years, after which she was transferred to a monastery building.

(19:09):
The only primary change to her daily life was that
her room now had a window. Spectators could gawk through
the shutters, and Daria would spit back in their faces.
Countess Elizabeth Bathory also lived under house arrest, but she
only lived in prison for a few years. Darius selta

(19:30):
Kova lived for more than three decades in confinement until
her death at age seventy one. If she ever repented
for her cruelty, it wasn't recorded. I don't know whether
Darias selta Kova was mentally ill. It's difficult for me
to imagine the type of person who would be able
to torture and hurt other human beings the way that

(19:53):
she did. But I think that it's also worth remembering
that the system of serfdom was a system of d humanization.
It's easy to be able to dismiss an individual like
Darius Saltikova as a monster, and much harder to be
able to reckon with an entire broken system. That's the

(20:18):
story of the gruesome murders of Darius Saltikova. But keep
listening a little bit after the sponsor break to hear
a bit more about the way she exists in our
modern time. Elizabeth Bathy is far more famous than Darius Sultakova,

(20:40):
but even when it comes to lesser known killers, salta
Kova has something of a pr problem. Almost every photo
of her on the Internet isn't actually her. You can
google her now darias Seltakova, or you can even use
her birth name Daria Nikolevna Ivanovna, and one of the
most frequent portraits that comes up is a woman with

(21:03):
powdered hair in a deep blue dress with a square neckline.
The woman is pretty. She has pearls around her neck,
at her ears and in her hair. This portrait is
everywhere on the internet countless website about interesting historical murders.
But the thing is that portrait isn't of Daria Saltikova,

(21:24):
or rather it is, but not this Daria Saltikova. That's
a portrait of Daria Petrovna Saltikova, a lady in waiting
to Catherine the Great, who was born nine years after
the murderess. Because of their shared names, their portraits have
become almost interchangeable. That's one of the many problems with

(21:45):
the Internet, the speed at which misinformation is copied and
recopied again until it becomes indistinguishable from truth. Take it
from me, someone who writes this podcast every other week,
you always have to double check the details, or at
the very least check the Russian patron on mcmiddle name.

(22:10):
Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and
Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minkey. The show was written
and hosted by Dana Schwartz. Executive producers include Aaron Mankey,
Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. The show is produced by
rema Ill Kali and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on
social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn

(22:31):
more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com.
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