Butcher ‘killed her girlfriend with horse figurine, then cut her in two’
Anna Podedworna says it was ‘the only way’ to hide Izabela Zablocka’s body
A young woman feared for her life before she killed her girlfriend with a horse figurine and cut her body into two pieces, jurors have heard.
Anna Podedworna, 40, is on trial at Derby Crown Court, charged with the murder of Izabela Zablocka more than 15 years ago.
The pair were in a sexual relationship and shared a terraced house in Normanton, Derby.
They had moved from Poland to the UK and worked at Cranberry Foods, a poultry factory in Scropton.
Ms Zablocka, 30, stopped contacting her family in August 2010, the court heard on Tuesday.
Giving evidence, Podedworna told the jury that Ms Zablocka was “angry” on the day of her death and asked why Podedworna had come home late from work.
The defendant alleged that her former partner, who would regularly drink alcohol, grabbed her, pressed her up against the wall and strangled her until she found it “difficult” to breathe.
Defence barrister Clive Stockwell KC asked Podedworna: “What were you thinking at the time?”
Podedworna replied: “That she was going to kill me,” and added that she was “terrified”.
She thought “that was the end ... that she would kill me,” she said, adding that she tried to push Ms Zablocka away.
The defendant told the court that Ms Zablocka had held her by the neck and threatened to kill her two or three weeks before the fatal injury.
She told the court: “At that time I was scared to be around the house … I was scared of speaking to her because I did not know what was going on.”
Speaking about the day Ms Zablocka died, Podedworna told the jury she wanted her “to leave me alone, to let me go”.
Podedworna told the court that she tried to grab Ms Zablocka’s neck before she got hold of a figurine of a horse from a window and hit her with it.
She said: “I checked her pulse on the neck. I was trying to resuscitate her.”
Podedworna denied that she wanted to hurt Ms Zablocka.
Asked why she did not call the police or an ambulance when she could not find a pulse, the defendant said she had “no witness” and nobody would believe she was defending herself.
She added that she thought she would “go to prison for the rest of my life”.
Podedworna said: “I was just terrified, I felt fear. I thought, ‘I will bury her’. I took the decision I would bury her in the garden.
“I wanted to pick her up whole. I just did not have the strength to pick her up. I had an idea to cut her down. It seemed the only way … to cut her into two.”
The trial previously heard that Podedworna was a skilled butcher whose work involved “skinning, deboning, and portioning out turkey carcasses using a large knife”.
Podedworna put Ms Zablocka, who was the mother of a young daughter at the time, in plastic bin bags and buried her in a hole in the garden, the court heard.
Asked how she felt doing this, the defendant replied: “That I’m some type of a monster.”
Podedworna, of Boyer Street, Derby, told the jury that she argued with Ms Zablocka, often over money or jealousy, and that on one occasion while they were living in Poland, her partner gave her a black eye.
Ms Zablocka’s daughter previously told the court that she recalls Podedworna chasing her mother with a knife in Poland, which the defendant denied.
Podedworna has pleaded not guilty to murder, preventing a lawful burial and perverting the course of justice.
The trial continues.
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