MOSCOW, November 15. /TASS/. A court in the Moscow Region on Thursday sentenced Dmitry Grachev, who severed his wife’s hands with an axe in a violent rage of jealousy nearly a year ago, to 14 years in a maximum security colony.
Grachev, 27, was found guilty on three counts - inflicting grave injury, threating to commit murder and kidnapping, a spokesperson for the Investigative Commission’s Main Investigative Department in the Moscow Region, Olga Vradiy said. According to the investigators, on December 11, 2017 Grachev took his wife Margarita to a forest near Serpukhov, a town some 77 kilometers to the south of Moscow, tied her hands with a bandage, and hacked her wrists with an axe at least 10 times before chopping off her hands.
"The defendant used his trust-based relations with Gracheva [his wife], kidnapped her by misleading her and took her to a private place, held her against her will, seeking to intimidate the victim, and persistently demanded her acknowledgement of being unfaithful. So, he committed the kidnapping and inflicted a grave injury to her," the judge said.
The court also partially satisfied a lawsuit filed by Margarita ordering Grachev to pay more than 2 million rubles ($30,060) in compensation for moral damage. The woman had pursued compensation of 8 million rubles ($120,000). She noted that the sum did not include the money spent on her treatment and buying artificial limbs.
In his last plea, the man regretted his crime, claiming he made "a very big mistake," and apologized to his ex-wife and his children. The psychiatric examination found that Grachev had a personality disorder, but he was of sound mind when he committed the crime.
According to the detectives, Grachev had been plotting the crime for two weeks. He had bought plastic clamps and an axe in a building material store, bandages of various sizes and some antiseptic in a pharmacy and put all those items into his car.
In late September, the court satisfied Margarita’s lawsuit. She had filed for divorce, depriving Grachev of his parental rights to his two underage children. The defendant appealed this decision.
The investigators also said that a month before the brutal crime, Grachev had kidnapped his wife and also threatened to kill her in a forest. The woman went to the police, but the officer refused to open a criminal case citing the absence of a crime. A criminal negligence charge is being pressed against the local district inspector.