Add thelocalreport.in As A Trusted Source
A young woman feared for her life before she died Killed her girlfriend with a horse statue and cut her body in half, jurors heard.
Anna Podedworna, 40, is on trial at Derby Crown Court charged with murder Isabella Sabloka more than 15 years ago.
The pair had a sexual relationship and lived in a townhouse in Normanton, Derby.
They moved to the UK from Poland to work at Cranberry Foods, a poultry factory in Scropton.
The court heard on Tuesday that Ms Zablocka, 30, stopped contacting her family in August 2010.
Giving evidence, Podworna told the jury that Ms Sablokka was “angry” on the day of her death and asked Podworna why she came home late from get off work.
The defendant claimed her ex-partner, who drank regularly, grabbed her, pinned her against a wall and strangled her until she found it “difficult” to breathe.
Defense lawyer Clive Stockwell KC asked Podworna: “What were you thinking at the time?”
Podworna responded: “She’s going to kill me,” adding that she was “scared.”
She said she thought “this was the end … she was going to kill me”, adding that she tried to push Ms Zablokka away.
The defendant told the court Ms Sabloka had choked her and threatened to kill her two or three weeks before the fatal injury.
She told the court: “I was scared to be around the house… I was scared to speak to her because I didn’t know what was going on.”
Speaking of the day Ms Sabloka died, Podworna told the jury she wished she had “leaved me alone and let me go”.
Podworna told the court she tried to grab Ms Sabloka by the neck before she grabbed a horse statue from the window and hit her with it.
“I checked the pulse in her neck. I tried to revive her,” she said.
Podworna denied she wanted to harm Ms Zablokka.
When asked why she didn’t call the police or an ambulance when she couldn’t find a pulse, the defendant said she had “no witnesses” and no one would believe she was defending herself.
She added that she thought she was “going to spend the rest of my life in prison.”
“I was just scared, I was terrified. I thought, ‘I’m going to bury her,'” Podworna said. “I decided to bury her in the garden.”
“I wanted to pick her up whole. I just didn’t have the strength to pick her up. I had this idea to cut her down. That seemed like the only way… to cut her in half.”
The trial heard before that Podworna was a skilled butcher whose duties included “skinning, deboning and carcasses of turkeys using a large knife”.
The court heard Podedworna put Ms Zablocka, who was the mother of a young daughter at the time, into a plastic bin bag and buried her in a hole in the garden.
When asked how he felt about doing so, the defendant responded: “I’m some kind of monster.”
Podworna, of Boyer Street, Derby, told the jury she often argued with Ms Zablokka over money or jealousy and on one occasion her partner hit her while they lived in Poland.
Ms Sablokka’s daughter previously told the court she remembered Podworna chasing her mother with a knife in Poland, but the defendant denied this.
Podworna has pleaded not guilty to murder, preventing lawful burial and perverting the course of justice.
The trial continues.