About the author

Carl Schreck cut his journalism teeth as a crime reporter for The Moscow Times and now spends an unhealthy amount of time scanning the web for the most disturbing and tragicomic crimes Russia has to offer. He is currently a freelance writer based in Moscow and can be reached by e-mail at this address.

Another grisly tale of crime and dismemberment, this time at a Siberian branch of the U.S. sandwich chain Subway.

The 21-year-old waitress was working an evening shift on July 17 at the Subway sandwich shop smack in the center of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk but went missing shortly after, Komsomolskaya Pravda cited local investigators as saying.

Two days later some local homeless men were rummaging around a dump near a local cemetery when they discovered plastic bags containing severed human remains, regional investigators told RIA-Novosti. The young woman's passport was among the remains, and the 25-year-old cook was subsequently detained and confessed to the murder, they said.

"According to his account, due to bad blood between the two (she did not want to enter into a relationship with him), first he strangled her right there in the restaurant and then dismembered her, placed the body parts in plastic bags and took them out to the trash cans,” regional Investigative Committee spokeswoman Alina Shcherbakova told RIA-Novosti. “All of this happened right in the city center.”

The suspect faces up to life in prison if convicted of aggravated murder.

The local radio station Avtoradio Krasnoyarsk reported on its web site that the Subway shop remained open the day after the murder but that it has since closed its doors.

The ever-staid web site Life.ru tastefully flanked its report with a file picture of a cleaver slicing into a pork steak. They never really know when to hold back over there, do they?