Turkey butcher found guilty of “chilling” murder that involved dismembering & burying girlfriend

A grisly story out of the UK depicts a lesbian couple’s home transformed into an abattoir of terror, as one of the women murdered and skillfully butchered her partner before burying her in the back garden.
Anna Podedworna, 40, was found guilty of murdering her partner, Izabela Zablocka, before she “dismembered Izabela’s body by cutting it in half with a large knife,” prosecutors said.
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They told the jury that police discovered Podedworna had previously been employed as a “skilled butcher,” and her work involved “deboning, and portioning out turkey carcasses using a large knife,” the BBC reports.
After cutting her lover in two, Podedworna waited until the dead of night to dig a hole large enough to accommodate the body parts. Zablocka’s remains were trussed up “like a chicken” with electrical tape in the effort, and discovered wrapped in garbage bags in a “filthy, makeshift grave,” the jury heard.
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“Considerable force” would have been needed to cut Zablocka’s body in half, prosecutor Gordon Aspden KC said. The motive for the murder remains a mystery.
How the body was found is not; the defendant was complicit in its discovery and her own conviction.
Two years ago, Zablocka’s daughter, a young child at the time of her mother’s death and living in the couple’s native Poland, began a search for Zablocka, first contacting a missing persons support and recovery group in Poland.
Polish organization Missing for Years contacted Podedworna via Facebook for information on the circumstances of Zablocka’s disappearance 15 years earlier. It was the first crack for the defendant in the facade of lies she’d been building since she killed her partner, prosecutors said.
Months later, a Polish investigative journalist contacted Podedworna, which the court heard “proved to be a tipping point.” Just days later, Podedworna contacted police and alerted them to the location of the body. Soon after, she was taken into custody.
Podedworna never provided a motive for the killing. She said it was an “accident” and the result of a violent confrontation; she killed her lover in self-defense, Podedworna said.
Prosecutor Aspden said there was “evidence of sexual jealousy” between Zablocka and Podedworna, and he described their relationship as “a stormy and turbulent one.”
Kasia, the victim’s daughter, told police she believed her mother wanted to undergo gender reassignment surgery but couldn’t afford it, Aspden said.
Detective Inspector Kane Martin, of Derbyshire Police, called Podedworna “a self-proclaimed, deceitful and manipulative liar,” adding that the killer’s “chilling account” to police, and subsequently the jury, was “vague and emotionless.”
“She clearly thought her careful and considered disposal of Izabela and the lies she told in the years that followed would help her to avoid responsibility for what she had done,” Martin said.
“Having cut Izabela in two, she did no more than throw her in the bin as she awaited the opportunity to dig the filthy grave and bury her in the dead of night.”
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