Noble Blood - Darya Saltykova, Serial Killer

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 19th century in Edinburgh, and it's a story about the dawn of surgery, body snatchers and the like. And if you're looking for a, you know, post-January holiday treat for yourself and 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 in 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 episodes. scripts there with, you know, sometimes 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 dFTA.com. I use my Noble Blood beheaded Marie Antoinette tot, 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 IHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. In a town square in the center of Moscow in 1768, 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 Darya Salticova. 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 38 young women. Though some believe that Dariya Saltykova might have murdered as many as 100 more. In the annals of popular history, female killers tend to be of particular fascination. There's something about murderesses, from Madame LaLaurie in New Orleans to Lizzie Borden in Massachusetts, that people find strange and scintillating. The extent of Darya Salticova's crimes are extreme, but I find that they're worth talking about,

not just out of purient, 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 Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. In the previous episode of Noble Blood, I discussed Countess Elizabeth Bathory, 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 politically motivated framing. Recent scholars also point to some of Elizabeth Bathory's Transylvanian medical procedures, things like ice baths and cauterizing infections, which could have been misinterpreted

in more Western Hungary 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 Bathory 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 believe 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 ascribe to her, and definitely not guilty of the blood-bathing thing. But guilty or innocent, the story of Elizabeth Bathreys 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 Darya Salticova, 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, Catherine the Great,

was forced to do in order to hold her nobles accountable for their actions while still keeping them on her side. Darya Nikolaevna Ivanovna was born on March 11, 1730, just a few months after the future Catherine the Great was born. Unlike Catherine, Darya was born to a prominent family of Russian nobles, with princes on both her mothers 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 Alexievich Saltikov. The Saltikovs make frequent appearances on the pages of Russian history. One Saltikov, 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's son. Glebb himself was a captain in the Imperial Guard, and it was thought that he would make a fine match for the pretty young Darya, who, as a young woman, was known for being pious and well-behaved.

But Gleb died young. Though the couple had two children, Darya would be a widow at age 25, living as a single woman on a vast inherited estate south of Moscow with around 600 serfs to work the land. One of Darya's sons died when he was 11. The other would only survive until his early 20s. So even by Russian standards, the Saltikova estate 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 18th century Russia expected that serfs were going to have particularly long, fulfilling lives, but it seemed that the serfs at the Salticova estate were particularly brittle and frightened. Young girls would go to work for Darya Saltikovna, and none of them would ever be seen again. According to allegations, Salticova'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, Salticova 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. Though Saltykova would later say that any cruelty she exhibited toward her serps 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 Salticova that she was no longer the youthful girl of promise that she once was. After her husband's death, Salkova did have a lover, a man named Nikolay Tjotchev. But Nicolay left Darya in order to marry another woman.

As cruel punishment, Darya sent two of her serfs to set fire to the newlyweds home. Rather than obey, the serps warned Nicolay 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 serps. Salticova's state with their mission incomplete. Unfortunately, most of the scholarship around Darya Salticova'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 Salticova'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 surf 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 18th century. And this is just a very cursory overview of a very complicated sociopolitical 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

states. 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, pull Russia towards modernity. Not only was wanton 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 Darya Salticova. So just because serfs 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, 21 serfs conquered their fear of what Darius Alticova might do if she found out, and they filed complaints against their mistress. But it would be the 22nd complaint that would finally lead to Salticova's downfall.

In the summer of 1762, a man who worked in the stables at the Salticova estate named Ermelae Ilyan fled the estate and made it all the way to St. Petersburg, where he petitioned Catherine the Great personally. Kneeling on the throne room floor, he informed the Empress that his mistress, Darya Salticova, had murdered three of his wives, one after another, every time he got remarried. Darya Saltecova was arrested and held for six years, while Catherine the Great authorized a full investigation. For her part, Darya 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, Darya 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 Breno, which basically translates to the notion of whether or not behavior was considered acceptable by the wider community. The course of the investigation against Darya Salticova yielded 138 suspicious deaths, all but three of them, women and girls. In the end, Darya Salticova was found guilty by the Collegium of Justice of beating 38 female serfs to death. This is a case unlike Countess Bathory's, where the investigation was thorough and the witnesses were interviewed, at least to the best of the case. of my knowledge without torture.

The verdict being settled was the easy part of the process, at least for the Empress Catherine. Sentencing a countess 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. Catherine 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 1754, and even for a crime as brutal as mass murder, Catherine still felt that execution would be too alienating to the nobility. But Darya Salticova was a brutal killer.

her crimes were shocking and egregious. Catherine needed to make it clear that that behavior wouldn't be tolerated when it came to nobles and their serfs. And so, Darya Zaltikova, murderous, was sentenced to life in prison at the Ivanovski 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, Darya 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. Darya remained in

the dungeons of the Ivanovski cloister for 11 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 Darya would spit back in their faces. Countess Elizabeth Bathory also lived under house arrest, but she only lived in prison for a few years. Darya Salticova lived for more than three decades in confinement until her death at age 71. If she ever repented for her cruelty, it wasn't recorded. I don't know whether Darya Salticova 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 dehumanization. It's easy to be able to dismiss an individual like Darya Salticova 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 Alticova, but keep listening a little bit after the sponsor break to hear a bit more about the way she exists in our modern time.

You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance, and then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of understanding.

uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and IHeart Podcasts presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the hips since high school.

Absolutely. Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips, wider. This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. with all the snacks and drinks. Sidebar. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?

They had a bogo. Well, then you got it. Do you want a white color or something here? Just take it. What are y'all doing? Microphones? Are you making a rap album? Oh, I would.

Come on. Could you move? I would buy it. Go. Go. Go. Go. It's good.

That sounds delicious. Oh, you're lucky. I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky. I'm not an alcoholic. You are. You are. I'm not a killer.

I love this team. And I'm really. trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on. Oh. Listen to Soccer Moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Elizabeth Bathory is far more famous than Darya Saltykova, but even when it comes to lesser-known killers, Salticova has something of a PR problem. Almost every photo of her on the internet isn't actually her.

You can Google her now, Darya Selticova, or you can even use her birth name, Darya, Nikolaevna, 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 websites about interesting historical murders. But the thing is, that portrait is, that portrait is, isn't of Darya Salticova, or rather it is, but not this Darya Selticova. That's a portrait of Darya 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 patronomic middle name. Noble Blood is a production of I-Heart Radio and Grimmin-Mild from Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz.

Executive producers include Aaron Manky, Alex Williams and Matt Frederick. The show is produced by Rima Ilkaiali and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noblebloodtales.com. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who. who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance.

And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.