Widowed in 1756, she abused her newly inherited power to torture and murder at least 38 serfs (plus, most likely, an additional 26) over the next six years, generally for trivial offenses like failure to clean a floor satisfactorily. Due to aristocratic connections and/or bribery, nothing was done for six years; serfs who tried to report her were sent back for more abuse and murder.

For reasons that are unclear, a denunciation finally reached Empress Elizabeth in 1762, and a serious investigation was started. Saltychikha's surviving serfs were made safe (at last) under a trusteeship, and Saltychikha's prosecution dragged on for 6 years.

In 1768, Saltychikha was found guilty and sentenced to one hour in a pillory on Red Square (Moscow), followed by life imprisonment in a nunnery. In later years, sightseers would sometimes peer through the barred window of her cell, to be met with spitting and cursing. She died of natural causes in 1801.

Comment from the Ideology Department:

Saltychikha was a typical representative of landlord capitalism under the Tsarist regime, overthrown by the Great October Socialist Revolution (1917). Anyone questioning the wise decisions of the Party led by Lenin and Stalin, is a monster no better than Saltychikha, deserving the supreme measure of social defense.

Almost nothing has appeared in English, and little in Russian.

We offer extracts of an article in the scholarly journal "Russkaya Starina" ("Russian Antiquity") (1874), but only in Russian for now.

Cross-cultural crime notes:
Our attention had earlier been directed to Scottish cannibal patriarch Sawney Bean, supposedly a mass killer of the Sixteenth Century. But the historical consensus now is that he was only a legend:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sawney_Bean