Darya Saltykova, Serial Killer

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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.

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 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 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, 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

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

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 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 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. 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 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 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

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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 more about the show over at Noble Blood Tales dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,