St. Petersburg, 1912.
A lone news article is printed that soon circulates around the world, telling of the unspeakable crimes done in a place called "Kurdia".
On July 20, 1912, Ivanova Tamarin, and her 17 year-old daughter, Olga were seized at Kurdia. In the weeks leading up to their capture, there had been reports that men and women enticed to the Tamarin house were never seen again. Thus, a search was made of the nearby woods. An unknown number of corpses, mutilated beyond all recognition, were discovered there.
The murders were so brutal that a force of gendarmes led by a Colonel surrounded the Tamarin household. Ivanova and Olga did no go quietly, though. Once the officers had subdued the women, after "violent resistance", a search of the house revealed it to be a slaughterhouse.
27 corpses were found in a storehouse, along with a great many personal possessions including watches, purses, and male and female clothing. It seemed the Tamarins' motive was clear, that is, until the eating room was found.
The eating room had a trapdoor to the cellar. In the cellar were "murderous instruments and fetters of [text illegible] sorts." It seems the women not only stripped and robbed their victims, but used them as a unique protein source. It isn't clear whether they tortured their victims or simply bound them in the darkened cellar until they butchered them.
The women confessed to leading a gang of 30 other peasants who, over the course of recent months, robbed and murdered 40 people. The rest of the murderers were rounded up, but nine escaped.
And here the story ends.
Sadly, this is all we know of the horrifying events surrounding the Tamarin household. Short of diving into a Russian archive, there are no other news articles about these heinous crimes. After this, one suspects the women were summarily convicted and executed. Perhaps their house, with its "eating room", was demolished.
Research is further impeded by the confusion surrounding where these crimes took place. Kurdia isn't a place that exists, at least in this day and age. It might refer to anything from a selection of small villages in Estonia, or possibly to a section of Russia occupied by ethnic Kurds.
I wish that more information was available. I wish we knew what the Tamarins were like. Were they beautiful, or beguiling? Were they upstanding members of the town or were they outcasts living on the edges of society? How were they able to kill for so long before being found out?
Perhaps someday more will be uncovered, but until then the Tamarins will remain a bloody footnote, an oddity, of serial killing history.
-Joanna
