A woman murdered her girlfriend and dismembered her body before putting her remains in black plastic bin bags and burying them in her garden where she remained for 15 years, a court heard.
Anna Podedworna, 40, killed Izabela Zablocka, 30, out of ‘sexual jealousy’ before covering it up with a series of ‘deliberate, calculated, gruesome, and time-consuming acts’, jurors were told.
It was only when a journalist from Poland contacted Podedworna last year enquiring about Miss Zablocka’s whereabouts that she emailled Derbyshire police telling them they would find her body under concrete in the back garden.
Miss Zablocka had suffered a ‘violent death’ at the house the two woman shared in Derby sometime in August 2010 when she was last seen alive.
Podedworna denies murder, preventing a lawful burial and perverting the course of justice between August 27, 2010 and June 2, 2025.
Opening the case at Derby Crown Court on Wednesday, Gordon Aspden KC, prosecuting, warned jurors about details of the case they might find distressing.
He said Podedworna had cut Miss Miss Zablocka’s body in half before hiding her remains in a ‘filthy, makeshift grave’.
Mr Aspden said her actions showed how she was ‘determined to conceal what she had done, and determined to destroy all incriminating evidence of the murder she had committed’.
She then ‘got on with her life as normal’ Mr Aspden told jurors.
Izabela Zablocka who lost contact with her family in August 2010
The court heard Miss Zablocka was born and brought up in Trzebiatow, a small town in north-west Poland.
She married and had a daughter called Katarzyna but the relationship did not last and they separated and soon afterwards Miss Zablocka began a sexual relationship with Podedworna.
Mr Aspden said the two women rented a flat together in Poland but did not have much money so in 2009 they travelled to the UK in search of work.
Miss Zablocka’s daughter, then aged nine, was left behind with relatives in Poland.
Initially Miss Zablocka and Podedworna lived together in London but in 2010 they moved up to Derby and to a small terraced house in the Normanton area of the city.
The two women found work at a local poultry factory – Cranberry Foods in Scropton, Derbyshire.
Mr Aspden said that while in the UK Miss Zablocka kept in touch with her family in Poland by telephone and would call them every few days without fail.
On Saturday 28th August 2010 Miss Zablocka called her mother in the usual way and ‘they chatted, they caught up with each other’s news’.
‘Everything seemed quite normal,’ Mr Aspden said. ‘Nothing was amiss.’
It was the last time they would hear from her.
Mr Aspden said: ‘Following this telephone call Izabela’s family neither saw nor heard from her ever again.
‘To all intents and purposes she completely disappeared off the face of the earth. What had happened to Izabela? Where was she?’
He said shortly after her final telephone call to her mother Podedworna murdered her.
Mr Aspden said that having done so she then ‘dismembered Izabela’s body by cutting it in half with a large knife; trussed it up with electrical tape; placed these now bloody human remains in black plastic bin bags; and buried them in the back garden’.
‘A section of concrete hardstanding was then laid over the top to hide Izabela’s filthy, makeshift grave,’ he said.
‘By her conduct the defendant demonstrated that she was determined to conceal what she had done, and determined to destroy all incriminating evidence of the murder she had committed.’
He said her ‘post-murder cover-up’ involved a ‘series of deliberate, calculated, gruesome, and time-consuming acts which she carried out with resolve and purpose over a period of several days.’
Mr Aspden said precisely how and why the defendant murdered Miss Zablocka ‘only she now knows and, for obvious reasons, she will never reveal’.
But he said there was evidence of sexual jealousy, and of the relationship having been a stormy and turbulent one.
He said: ‘It was against this toxic backdrop and in this volatile setting that the murder of Izabela Zablocka was committed.’
Miss Zablocka’s family reported her missing; first to the police in the UK in November 2010, and then to the police in Poland in January 2011.
Mr Aspden said her family was ‘forced to live in a state of constant anxiety and dread – unsure whether she was dead or alive’ but to their ‘lasting credit’ never gave up on her and clung to the hope that one day they would see her again.
The court heard that in 2024, Miss Zablocka’s daughter, by then in her mid-twenties, contacted a Polish organisation named ‘Missing for Years’ asking for help finding her mother.
The organisation contacted Podedworna, who was still living in Derby, but she denied knowing Miss Zablocka and said she did not know what had happened to her.
Then in May 2025 a Polish television journalist named Rafal Zalewski contacted the defendant and requested an interview with her.
Mr Aspden said it was a ‘tipping point’. He said: ‘At last the defendant could feel that justice was finally catching up with her. The mounting pressure caused her to crack.’
On Wednesday May 21, 2025 Podedworna emailed Derbyshire Police and told them that she wished to provide them with evidence.
She later told them they would find Miss Zablocka’s body buried in the back garden of their former home in Princes Street, Derby.
Podedworna went to a police station where she told officers Miss Zablocka had died by accident during a violent confrontation between them and she was defending herself.
Mr Aspden said the ‘this new and freshly-created claim of self-defence was yet another lie by the defendant to conceal her guilt, to cover-up the murder, and to deceive and hoodwink those around her’.
She was arrested on suspicion of murder. During eight subsequent interviews she answered no comment.
The trial continues.
