A Human Head on a Plate. Olives in the Eye Sockets. Christmas Dinner
Dmitri Bakshi was born in Russia on January 28th, 1982. His earliest years were spent in a Soviet orphanage as his biological parents had abandoned him. He was eventually adopted by a couple in Siberia, but the stability that was supposed to come with that never really arrived. His adoptive mother, a woman called Svet Lana, died of cancer when he was still a teenager.
His adoptive father’s response to that loss was to throw Dimmitri out of the house while he was still underage. Before he left, Dimmitri reportedly set fire to his room. He held various jobs in the years that followed, work arranged in part through his adoptive father, but his life remained unstable. By the 2000s, he had a criminal record, including multiple convictions for robbery and car theft.
By the time of the events of today’s case all began, all of those convictions had been cleared. He had landed in Crash Nadar doing manual work, apartment repairs, and contract jobs at the Crash Nadar Hire Military Aviation School of Pilots. Nothing that would draw attention, nothing that would make you look twice.
Natalyia Shapareno was born on January 25th, 1975. She trained in medicine and worked for years as a senior nurse at a hospital affiliated with the aviation school. She had no prior criminal record and by all external measures was a functioning professional. However, chronic alcoholism ended her nursing career. According to some unverified sources, Natalyia also served a short stint in a psychiatric facility.
Around this time, we might touch more on that in our afterthoughts. She was dismissed from her position, though she continued living on the base regardless. She had inherited the dorm room from a previous marriage, and nobody made her leave. Dimmitri and Natalyia met around 2010 or 2011 when they were both employed at the aviation academy.
They began living together in the dorm shortly after and married around 2013. >> On September 11th, 2017, a crew of road workers were doing a paving job on Rapina Street. At some point during the job, one of the workers, Roman Kamayakov, spotted a black Samsung cell phone lying on the ground. There’s no lock screen or password protecting this phone.
He picked it up and he and a few of the other co-workers gathered around to see what kinds of photos were on this phone. I’m going to guess that they weren’t checking the phone to necessarily help find out who the phone belonged to. However, what they were about to find would make them think twice before checking some random person’s phone for photos again.
But however you may feel about their choice ethically to do this, if they didn’t check those photos, there might be two evil, sick excuses of human beings walking the streets today. On the crack screen, one man had taken pictures of himself with human remains. But phrasing it like that doesn’t even begin to do justice explaining it.
Severed limbs, multiple severed heads, selfies taken with body parts held up to the camera or placed in his mouth. They looked like trophies. And this looked like someone who was very proud of what he was doing. Before Roman had even gone to the police, a man approached him on the street and asked if he had picked up a phone.
Roman, having already seen what was on it, admitted to nothing before going straight to the police and handing the phone over to the Ministry of Eternal Affairs. Police then traced the device through its SIM card, which led them to a dorm room at the aviation school, where, you guessed it, a 35-year-old man named Dmitri Box lived with his 42-year-old wife, Natalyia Bokshiva.
According to neighbors, the couple were difficult to approach. Anytime someone tried to knock on their door, the response was explosive to the point where nobody wanted to even talk to them if there was a noise complaint. A co-orker at the academy shared, “Each time we tried to enter their room, they started wild shouting and crying. Natalia is a scandalous woman, aggressive, so we did not risk it.
” A local store owner described their first encounter with Natalia as unnerving and said she would shriek and cry in the aisles. Those who share the dorm building said the same thing about her. They had once tried to complain about a persistent unusual smell coming from the boxi’s room.
A smell they identified as most likely the odor of corval. Corval, for context, is a seditive medication widely available over the counter in Russia. Two of its ingredients that you may recognize include a derivative of Valyrian root and phenibarbatl. It is used to treat anxiety and insomnia and has a very distinct medicinal smell.
And as investigators would later determine, it was apparently part of how the box would operate. They would apparently lure victims to their room and drug them with a mixture of corval and ether, causing them to pass out. I’m sure this explains why Dimmitri and Natalia were so protective of anyone coming in the room.
It seems like their plan was to make any interaction so unpleasant that the person would just decide it wasn’t worth the trouble and they would leave it alone. And it worked every time. But the red flags were obviously there and many people saw them. Shopkeeper we mentioned before said that they always bought way too much vodka and I assume when someone who runs a liquor store is saying that then it has to be a lot.
The neighbors knew something was off but the feeling that something is off and something unspeakable is happening inside that room are two very different conclusions. And although their behavior was very unsettling, wasn’t any sign that anyone could be in danger as long as the two were left alone. So everyone stayed out of it.
The box continued largely unbothered for years. When police searched the dorm room, they were not prepared for what they were about to walk into. Above and beyond the fact that it was completely filthy inside, like they had a chicken just thrown like chicken, whole chicken thrown in the fridge.
Above and beyond that, they had stumbled in a scene straight out of a horror film. They uncovered the body of a missing 35-year-old woman along with human remains preserved in jars and frozen meat of unknown origin. In the basement of the building and in the surrounding area, more remains were located and seized. Most disturbingly, police discovered human scalps that had been removed from the victim’s heads with such precision that they looked like wigs, one of which was sitting right by their microwave.
Now, the scale of what was in that room suggested that had been going on for a very long time. Local police reportedly discovered eight frozen body parts in the couple’s home along with 19 individual pieces of flayed human skin in a cache of footage called video lessons for cannibals along with images. The video apparently served as an instructional guide on how to butcher and cook human flesh.
Now, this was not a found file, not something downloaded from the dark corners of the internet. No, it was allegedly something that they had put together themselves. We want to sit with that title for a second because it tells you something about the mindset in that room. Whoever made that video thought of this as a skill, something worth documenting and something worth teaching.
And then there were the photographs. The earliest image investigators highlighted was dated December 28th, 1999. It appeared to show a human head served as a Christmas dinner. The head had been placed on a plate surrounded by fruit, oranges by some accounts. The eye sockets of the head had been stuffed with olives, and half of a lemon was placed on the nose.
Now, here’s the thing. Dimmitri and Natalyia did not meet until around 2010 or 2011, as we mentioned before, which means the 1999 photograph, whatever it shows, cannot depict something that they did together. Who was in that image and under what circumstances it was taken, has never been publicly established. Whoever arranged it and documented it was very proud of it.
And if the evidence pointed where investigators believed it did, then that room had been a place of horror for a very long time. Investigators believe the couple practiced cannibalism and had hidden victim’s remains in the freezer in saline-filled jars stored in the fridge. The meat stored in those containers, investigators believed, was being preserved to be consumed over the winter months, the same way someone might can vegetables from a garden.
Multiple cell phones were also recovered from the residence. Devices belonging to previous crime victims, which tells you something about how many people had passed through that room and had never left it. >> When Dimmitri was first brought in for questioning, he tried to play it off and attempted to convince officers that he had found the remains in a forest.
Some translations we found said he found the remains in some bushes. On the evening of September 8th, he then took these remains, put them in his backpack, went home, and then took pictures with them. He said he simply found them, didn’t kill anyone, and he just took some photos. That was his story. And of course, nobody bought it.
The evidence was too overwhelming, and when investigators pushed him, his story collapsed. Dimmitri ultimately confessed to desecration of the corpse, but maintained that he did not murder anybody, but he was charged with murder regardless. He also acknowledged a killing he took part in in 2012. The one victim they could prove was a 35-year-old woman who was living in Kraadar.
She was born on March 5th, 1982 in a city called Amutninsk in Russia’s Kiraov region. Her name was Elena Vakra. It should be mentioned that her name originally was not an easy one to find because the Russian media largely didn’t report it. In the days and weeks after the arrest, most outlets either withheld her name entirely or referred to her only as a local resident.
She was a confirmed victim of a violent murder in a public criminal case and was treated as a detail. We don’t have much on Elena’s life beyond what the court record tells us. her age, her hometown, and how she died. Her murder occurred outdoors on the night of September 7th going into September 8th in an abandoned area near Gastello Street, not far from the aviation school where the three had gathered to drink.
A fight broke out fueled by Natalia’s jealousy. She told her husband to kill Elena, reportedly saying, “Yes, kill this creature.” Dimmitri stabbed her twice in the chest and Elena died at the scene. couple then dismembered her body and brought portions back to their apartment in a backpack and disposed of other remains in the surrounding area.
Yes, based on the information, they dismembered her in public and nobody noticed. After the murder, this is when Dimmitri took selfies with the remains. Some of those pictures included him putting the hand in his mouth and up his nose. These images belong to a sequence of photos where he documented himself cutting off one of the fingers and eating it.
This is how the whole thing unraveled. Not through a police breakthrough, not through a tip, not through any investigative work at all. Because as far as the police knew, nothing like this was going on. This was because a man dropped his phone on the street after committing a murder and posing for photos with the body.
The investigation expanded quickly and what investigators initially presented as a single murder case began to look like something far far larger. Reports started coming out of Russia that the couple had confessed to a staggering number of killings. In fact, it’s been said that Natalia owned up to over 30 murders of missing area residents and then later recanted.
Investigators alleged the pair knocked their victims out with sedatives and then skinned them alive, though that was never proven in court. After his arrest, Dimmitri told investigators that he and his wife practiced cannibalism at least 30 times over two decades and that some victims may have been lured via online dating sites.
If the dating site allegation was true, it means the back she were not mere opportunists. They were actively hunting people. It was also alleged that the couple tried to turn soldiers at the military academy where they worked into unwitting cannibals, slipping canned human meat into their food. Natalya also had a side business of sorts.
She made pies and then sold them. One of the couple’s neighbors, a former nurse, told news outlets that Natalyia made and sold pies to supplement her income and would sometimes tell local cafe owners that they were filled with whatever’s around. We want to be clear about what we’re saying here. Investigators looked into whether Natalia was selling pies made with human meat to local cafes.
That is not a rumor we’re passing along. That is something investigators took seriously enough to actually investigate. They never confirmed it. They never ruled it out either. If it’s true, people in Krasnadar ate those pies at the cafes. They ordered the food and they didn’t know [music] and there was no public record of anyone ever being told about this.
The investigative committee stated repeatedly that had no evidence of a series of murders. As we mentioned before, officially the Bakshibi case involved one confirmed killing and that was the murder of Elena Vakrua. trying to figure out what the evidence supported and what the couple allegedly confessed to was never fully resolved. Russian investigators maintain that the physical evidence tied them definitively to one victim.
But the photographs, the stockpile of phones of people who were never identified in the sheer volume of preserved remains told a very different story. In the weeks following the arrest, both Dimmitri and Natalia underwent psychological evaluation. They were evaluated and determined to be mentally fit to stand trial. Two murderers who lived in a room full of preserved human remains, who sold pies to cafes and canned human flesh in jars, were ruled to be completely sane and fully aware of what they were doing.
While it’s easy to say those people are insane casually when reviewing a case like this, it shouldn’t be a surprising ruling given how much planning went into this whole operation, for lack of a better word. This wasn’t a temporary break from reality for either of them. These were repeated choices that spanned years.
Dimmitri was formally charged with murder under article 105 of the Russian criminal code and desecration of a corpse under article 244. Natalia was charged with incitement to murder under articles 33 and 105 and desecration under article 244. The cases were tried separately. Dimmitri had developed tuberculosis during the investigation requiring hospitalization.
So his trial was months later. Natalia’s trial began in February of 2019 at the Prububonsky District Court in KNAR. It was a jury trial. Her defense partially admitted involvement while shifting as much blame as possible onto Dimmitri. Natalyia denied any direct role in the killing and denied ever being a cannibal. Prosecution argued that jealousy during an alcohol-fueled gathering had prompted her to tell Dmitri to kill Elena, after which the body was dismembered.
Prosecution asked for her to serve just 12 years. February 27th, 2019, she was convicted and sentenced to a mere 10 years in a general regime penal colony. This is basically a forced labor prison following a year and a half of what they call restricted freedom. Basically, a probation that prohibits her from living more than 100 kilometers from Crosnidar and requires regular police check-ins.
Talia’s final statement before the court translated to, “I am only guilty of bringing my husband to a crime with my behavior.” This is someone that demanded a murder and was present for it. She helped dismember the body. Her attempt at showing remorse was basically my behavior made another person commit murder.
This is a woman who even at sentencing was still attempting to control the narrative. But this wasn’t going to help her at all because when she appealed on May 8th, 2019, it was denied by the Kranadar Regional Court and her sentence was upheld. Mitri’s trial followed in June of 2019 at the same court, and he chose to wave his right to a jury.
He plead guilty to desecrating Elena’s body, dismembering it, and storing parts in the refrigerator, but maintained his not-uilty plea on the murder charge. Was convicted of murder regardless. On June 28th, 2019, he was sentenced to 12 years and 2 months in a strict regime penal colony. Prosecutors originally demanded he serve 14 years.
He was also prescribed compulsory supervision and treatment by a psychiatrist. He appealed but was denied and the sentence began on December 18th, 2019. However, he never served his full sentence. February 16th, 2020, Dmitri Bakshave died in a prison hospital in the Rosttov region was 38 years old.
Official cause of death was type 1 diabetes complicated by keto acidosis, a condition that is entirely manageable with proper insulin treatment. The documented failures were specific. Examinations were delayed and the wrong insulin was administered and no fluids were given. I assume by wrong insulin they mean the wrong dosage. Not that you or I would have much sympathy hearing that this happened to Dmitri, but it’s still unjust and a clear human rights violation.
Natalia filed a lawsuit against the Federal Penitentiary Service and argued that the prison’s failure to properly treat his diabetes constituted negligence. A court agreed with her and awarded her 300,000 rubles in moral damages in 2023. This might sound like a reasonable amount of money to receive for a loved one dying, but this only comes out to about $3600 US.
And a chronologist who had treated Dimmitri was separately convicted of negligence in 2022, though that conviction was later thrown out on the statute of limitations. This case also fits into a broader pattern, one that helps explain how something like this could go undetected for so long. 2017 was also the year that Russia was dealing with male Pop Off, former police officer who had just confessed to 81 murders committed between 1992 and 2010.
His victims were ages 17 to 38, and he essayed all of them. In trial testimony, he shared that, and I quote, “In one life, I was an ordinary person. In my other life, I committed murders which I carefully concealed from everyone, realizing this was a criminal offense.” Mikuel Popoff had operated for 18 years before being caught.
The back she investigators were right, had operated for just as long. Russia’s postsviet investigative infrastructure, particularly in the 1990s and the early 2000s, was underfunded, overstretched, and operating in the chaos of a society that was being rebuilt from scratch. Missing persons reports were not always followed up on.
Disappearances in communities with high rates of alcoholism and transients were often assumed to be just that, disappearances, voluntary departures, or people who had simply moved on. It’s not an excuse. It’s the kind of environment that lets people like the Bakshies operate. And it’s one Russian authorities have been grappling with since as the full picture of what happened in Krasnadar began to take shape. Dimmitri is dead.
Natalyia is presumably still serving her sentence. Their dorm room has been cleared out. Rapena Street has long since been repaved. And somewhere in Russia, there are people who lost someone in the 1990s or the 2000s or later who are still waiting to find out what happened to them. But they may never get a straight answer because a lost phone and a selfie gave police enough to close the immediate case, but not enough officially to open all of the others.
That is where the Back Shivi case ends. Not with catharsis, not with a full accounting, not with anything that looks like a resolution. Just two sentences, one death in custody, and a lot of questions that the system decided for its own reasons did not need an answer.
