‘My daughter was killed and eaten by cannibals’

Originally published 18 May 2010;

When Karina Barduchyan went missing, her mother Nadya feared the worst – but nothing prepared her for the unspeakable horror that unfolded.

Two weeks later, she learned her 16-year-old daughter had been murdered, her body cut up and sickeningly turned into a casserole by her cannibal killers.

Evil Maxim Glavatskikh and Yury Mozhnov, both 20, then dumped the rest of her dismembered remains in lakes and skips. So far only her severed head and arms have been found.

Shockingly, Nadya, 46, from St Petersburg, Russia, only found out the grisly way her daughter had been killed – and eaten – by watching a TV news report.

'I collapsed and thought my heart was going to explode,' sobs devastated Nadya, who hadn’t been told Karina had been cannibalised. 'What they did was barbaric.'

Karina, an only child who dreamed of becoming a journalist, went missing in January 2009 after telling her mum she was staying the night at a friend’s.

However, unknown to Nadya, Karina had visited Maxim, a butcher.

'Karina had told me about him, but I tried to warn her off because he seemed to play with her emotions,' recalls Nadya, who briefly met Maxim four months before the killing. 'He was too old for her and gave me the creeps.'

When Karina didn’t come home the next day, worried Nadya reported her missing. She later found love poems to Maxim in Karina’s diary and begged police to question him about the disappearance.

But it was two weeks before she found out her daughter was dead. Horrified, she then discovered Karina had gone to Maxim’s flat where he and Yury drowned her in a bath and sliced up her naked body with a meat cleaver.

The depraved pair then stewed parts of her torso and thighs with potatoes, onion and seasoning, before eating them.

After their arrest they told police they were drunk and hungry.

In February, Nadya faced Karina’s killers as they went on trial for murder. They coldly admitted they’d killed her because they were 'fed up with her.'

'They were oblivious to the pain they’d caused. When they murdered Karina, they killed my hopes for the future. Now I cling on to an image of her laughing and joking.'

'They were so calm and matter of fact as they told how they’d killed and cooked her. I still don’t understand why they did it.'

Last month Maxim and Yury, a florist, were found guilty of murder and jailed for 19 years and 18 years respectively.

But for devastated Nadya, whose marriage to Karina’s dad Oleg, 49, an engineer, broke down under the strain,

the jail sentences aren’t anywhere near long enough.

'They should be locked up forever,' she says. 'Karina will never marry or have kids, but one day they’ll be free to have families.'

Nadya, who now hopes to adopt to help get over her grief, feels she failed her loving, kind-hearted daughter.

'I brought her up to be trusting but I was wrong,' says Nadya. 'Life is empty without her and the pain of letting her down will never leave me.'