Two 20-year-old men, who killed and partially ate a girl, have received long jail sentences.
Maksim Glavatskikh will spend the next 19 years behind bars, while the second convict Yury Mozhnov, received an 18-year term. The terms are slightly shorter than what prosecutors insisted on.
Both men will also each have to pay about $33,700 compensation to the relatives of the girl.
The grizzly crime was committed in January 2009. Glavatskikh and Mozhnov had a party with a lot of booze. One of the guests was Glavatskikh’s 16-year-old girlfriend Karina, who stayed for the night.
The two young men for unknown reasons drowned Karina in a bath tub. They took the girl’s mobile phone and camera, which they later sold. The murderers also kept some of her effects as mementos.
The criminal duo dismembered the victim’s body and packed up the parts to dispose of them in different parts of St. Petersburg. Some of the parts they ate, possibly in an act dictated by their mutual interest in the Goth movement. Glavatskikh was actually the frontman of an amateur band that played gothic rock.
Police pinpointed the pair as likely culprits shortly after their victim’s severed head and other body parts were discovered. Suspicions grew stronger when Glavatskikh turned out to be a professional butcher, and turned into certainty when traces of blood were found in the apartment. The young men also had previous criminal records for robbery, threats of violence and abuse of animals.
During the trial, Glavatskikh and Mozhnov insisted that the killing was not intentional. A court jury anonymously ruled them guilty in late April.
When the cannibals where questioned by the court as to why they would consume human flesh, they simply replied that they had been hungry.