A missing phone found on the ground was the only reason any of this ever came to light. In September 2017, road workers in Krasnodar noticed a black Samsung lying in the dirt along Rapina Street. It wasn’t locked, so they started flipping through the photos out of curiosity. What they saw made them stop joking.
The man in the pictures had photographed himself with severed limbs, multiple heads, body parts held up to the camera or placed in his mouth. The dead weren’t props. They looked like trophies, and the man looked proud. One of the workers, Roman Komayakov, was walking away with the phone when a stranger approached him and asked if he’d found it.
Roman denied everything and went straight to the police. The SIM card led them to a dorm room at the Krasnodar Higher Military Aviation School, where a 35-year-old man named Dmitry Baksheev lived with his 42-year-old wife, Natalia. The neighbors could have told you something was wrong long before. The couple kept to themselves, but not quietly.
If anyone knocked on their door, the Baksheevs would explode with shouting and crying. A coworker remembered that every attempt to enter their room turned into a scene. One local shopkeeper described Natalia’s behavior in the aisles as openly bizarre. Residents complained about an unusual medicinal smell seeping from their apartment, like Corvalol, a sedative.
No one pushed further because no one wanted to deal with them. So everyone stayed away. When police entered the room, they found filth on every surface. A whole chicken sat rotting in the fridge.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. They found the remains of a missing 35-year-old woman. They found preserved organs in jars, frozen meat of unknown origin, and human scalps removed so precisely they looked like wigs. One scalp was sitting near the microwave.
In the basement and around the building, they found even more remains. The scale of it suggested this had been going on for a very long time. Police recovered 19 pieces of flayed human skin and eight frozen body parts. They also found a cache the couple had labeled “video lessons for cannibals,” their own homemade instructional footage on how to butcher and cook human flesh.
They weren’t just committing the acts. They were teaching them. And then there were the photographs. The oldest image investigators found was dated December 28, 1999.
It showed a human head served on a plate for Christmas dinner, surrounded by fruit, with olives stuffed into the eye sockets and half a lemon placed on the nose. Dmitry and Natalia hadn’t even met until 2010 or 2011, so whoever arranged that photo remained unknown, but it proved this kind of horror wasn’t new to that room. Dmitry tried to explain it away. He told investigators he’d found the remains in a forest a few days earlier, brought them home in a backpack, and simply photographed them.
He insisted he hadn’t killed anyone. The story collapsed almost immediately. They charged him with murder and desecration of a corpse. Natalia was charged with incitement to murder and desecration.
The one confirmed victim was a 35-year-old woman named Elena Vakhrusheva, born in Kirov region. In the nights before the phone was found, the three of them had been drinking together in an abandoned area near Gastello Street. Natalia’s jealousy boiled over, and she turned to her husband. “Yes, kill this creature,” she told him.
Dmitry stabbed Elena twice in the chest. She died at the scene. The couple dismembered her body there, packed parts into a backpack, and took them home. Some of the selfies Dmitry took after that showed him cutting off one of her fingers and eating it.
In others, he put her hand in his mouth and up his nose. The case didn’t unravel because of police work. It unraveled because Dmitry dropped his phone on the street after murdering someone and photographing the body. Once the investigation opened, it grew.
Investigators alleged the couple drugged victims with Corvalol and ether to make them pass out. They speculated that victims had been lured through online dating sites. Dmitry told investigators he and his wife had practiced cannibalism at least 30 times over two decades. Natalia reportedly confessed to more than 30 murders, then later recanted.
Official records never confirmed a single other killing, but the sheer volume of unrecovered phones and preserved remains told a different story. There were also rumors that couldn’t be ignored. Investigators looked into whether Natalia, who sold homemade pies to supplement her income, had occasionally used human meat in her baking. They never confirmed it, and they never ruled it out.
Both Dmitry and Natalia were evaluated by psychiatrists and declared mentally fit to stand trial. They were sane, aware, and had made repeated choices over years. Dmitry developed tuberculosis during the investigation, so his trial took place months after Natalia’s. Natalia’s defense admitted partial involvement while shifting blame onto Dmitry.
She denied any direct role in the murder and denied ever being a cannibal. The prosecution argued jealousy had driven her to tell her husband to kill, and asked for 12 years. In February 2019, she was convicted and sentenced to only 10 years in a general regime penal colony, followed by restricted freedom. In her final statement, she said, “I am only guilty of bringing my husband to a crime with my behavior.
” She had demanded the murder and helped dispose of the body. She appealed. Her appeal was denied. Dmitry’s trial came in June 2019.
He pleaded guilty to desecrating Elena’s body, dismembering it, and storing parts in the refrigerator, but maintained his innocence on the murder charge. He was convicted anyway and sentenced to 12 years and 2 months in a strict regime colony. He was also ordered to undergo compulsory psychiatric supervision. He never served the full sentence.
On February 16, 2020, Dmitry Baksheev died in a prison hospital in the Rostov region. He was 38 years old. The official cause of death was type 1 diabetes complicated by ketoacidosis, a condition that requires careful insulin management. Examinations had been delayed, the wrong insulin was administered, and no fluids were given.
Natalia sued the Federal Penitentiary Service, arguing negligence caused his death. In 2023, the court agreed and awarded her 300,000 rubles, roughly $3,600. The case fit a pattern in post-Soviet Russia, where missing persons reports in poor, transient communities were often written off as voluntary departures. It was the kind of environment that allowed a couple living in a military dorm, surrounded by preserved human remains, to operate for years without anyone finding out.
Dmitry is dead. Natalia is still serving her sentence. The dorm room has been cleared. Rapina Street has been repaved.
Somewhere in Russia, there are families who lost someone in the 1990s or the 2000s and are still waiting for an answer. They may never get one. A lost phone and a selfie gave police enough to close one case, but not enough to open all the others.
The Baksheev case ends not with resolution, but with two sentences, a death in custody, and a pile of questions the system decided didn’t need answers.
