Cannibal pensioner dumped dead husband’s half-eaten body in a children’s playground after she got fed up of the smell

A woman is under investigation by Russian police after pulling the partly mummified and ‘cannibalised’ body of her husband into a park where young children were playing.

The pensioner, known only as Lydia, dumped her husband’s remains near swings and a playground in Yekaterinburg, eastern Russia.

She then stripped off naked and told horrified locals that she had been eating her husband, but had decided to take the remains outside because they had started to smell so badly.

As children screamed in terror, she told horrified onlookers to look away ‘because this is an eerie sight’.

Lyudmila Troshkova, who was in the park, said: ‘She pulled the corpse into the yard on a blanket.

‘There were people around and was trying to dump the body.

‘But it did not work out, since the hand caught on a car, and she left the corpse where it fell.

Polya Nechaeva said: ‘She left the remains in the yard near the children’s playground and walked away.’

The face of the partly mummified body – identified as her common law husband Vladimir, 68, a former prison officer – had been ‘gnawed’.

A police officer at the scene said there were signs that she had ‘eaten’ the human flesh of the man, last seen alive around three weeks ago.

Detectives said there was no evidence the man had been murdered.

The dead man’s son challenged her over what had happened to his father – and where his missing legs were.

But the woman refused to answer him, and the police and the Russian Investigative Committee are now probing the case after protests from neighbors following their slow response.

Images published in local media show the corpse lying near a car with dozens of children standing nearby watching from the playground in the city of Yekaterinburg in central Russia’s Sverdlovsk Oblast region.

Neighbours said a horrible smell began emanating from the woman’s flat two months ago.

Police spokesperson Yevgeniy Krukov said: ‘According to preliminary reports, the wife tried to throw out her husband’s remains. She managed to drag the remains into the yard where the playground is and left them several metres from a dumpster.’

According to Krukov, the preliminary examination of the husband’s remains indicate that his death was natural.