Court finalizes case of girl starved and tortured by couple
On 29 January 2026, the Novosibirsk Regional Court concluded the hearing on the case of the torture and murder of a nine-year-old girl in the village of Kamenska. The child was brutally abused for several days by a married couple, Oleg and Anna Goldina — friends of the mother, whom she asked to look after her children during her business trip. The spouses diligently recorded the abuse, humiliation, and actual torture. He did it on video, she did it in her diary. Details were learned by Anna Skok.
«Poisoned by Candy»
On 17 June 2024, a 9-year-old girl died in the intensive care unit of a children«s hospital without regaining consciousness. The cause of death was not immediately established, but investigators from the Investigative Committee of Russia (SK) still began a check. And not only because it is a mandatory procedure for all cases of child deaths.
Doctors immediately understood that before her death, nine-year-old Arina (the minor«s name has been changed here and below) had been brutally abused. The girl»s stomach was bloated, and her body was literally lashed with nettles. Later, when experts examined the body, they counted at least 60 traces of blows, both old and fresh, a source told NGS.
Questioning the girl«s mother, Maria Z., was useless: she had only returned from a business trip the day before and, according to acquaintances, arrived at the house at the same time as the ambulance. Arina had already lost consciousness by that point.
The ambulance was called by the woman«s friends, who looked after her three children in Maria»s absence — Oleg and Anna Goldina.
«The people who were with the child provided first aid, were on the phone with the ambulance while it was driving for 20 minutes, they resuscitated her. The ambulance arrived, performed the first [resuscitation] actions and took her to the hospital,» said in June 2024 an acquaintance of Maria Z.
At that moment, both the family«s neighbors and the mother of the deceased child clearly believed that the girl had died as a result of a sudden illness or accident, and that the spouses who were looking after her had tried to save her. As an NGS source familiar with the investigation told, this was far from the first time Maria had left the children with the Goldinas; she trusted them completely.
«The child suddenly started having diarrhea and vomiting, the child passed away. <…> It had happened before that she would vomit — she really loved sweets,» said Maria Z. to an NGS journalist on 18 June 2024.
That day, the Goldin spouses were detained, and on 20 June they were sent to arrest. The man did not answer any of the numerous questions from journalists, and the woman insisted that she was not involved in the murder.
«The spouses, acting jointly and in concert, repeatedly applied physical and psychological violence against the nine-year-old girl. Including not feeding the child for four days, while recording the unlawful actions on a mobile phone camera,» — told in the investigative department of the Investigative Committee of Russia for Novosibirsk Region. — «After committing further criminal actions, the minor died.»
Tortures
The gruesome details of little Arina«s death began to leak through the secrecy of the criminal investigation almost immediately, but the exact cause of the girl»s death was only announced during the trial, which began in April 2025. Oleg Goldin was accused of brutally murdering a minor girl, his wife — of torture.
«The married couple, based on a false understanding of upbringing methods, deprived the child of solid food for four days and did not allow her to go to the toilet. Goldin also systematically struck the girl with nettles on her body, forcing her to stand barefoot on the plant,» — told then in the Novosibirsk Regional Court.
Deprivation of food and whipping with nettles did not limit the «upbringing process» and included actual torture. As an NGS source told, the evidentiary base for the case was meticulously collected by the spouses themselves all four days while they were looking after Arina, her brother, and sister. Oleg Goldin filmed the abuse of the child on video, Anna described the events in her diary.
«They believed that some entity had possessed the girl, that she was demon-possessed. Allegedly, she behaved badly and didn»t do housework, this entity was preventing her from being a positive child,« — told an NGS source. — »They exorcised this entity precisely by inflicting pain and depriving her of solid food. The Goldinas forced her to urinate in the living room in the presence of outsiders — themselves and the older brother, while Oleg Goldin filmed what was happening on video. In the recording, he threatens to send this video to all of the girl«s classmates.»
In the footage, according to the source, Anna Goldina also appeared, who spoke about some «extinguished fire». The girl«s older brother did not stand up for her, but it would not be correct to call him another participant in the »exorcism«; rather, the child became another victim. According to the source, Oleg Goldin was a role model for the boy, and he willingly obeyed him, hardly understanding what was happening.
«The ambulance doctors were surprised at how calm the boy was when they arrived, although his sister was already in a state of clinical death by that time,» — noted the NGS interlocutor.
What killed Arina, as medical experts established, was the last punishment: a real medieval water torture.
«The girl was drinking water, and Goldin [for this] started shouting at her, and then pouring [into her] water,» — told an NGS source. — «In two hours, he forcibly poured more than eight liters of water into her. The child had already started vomiting, involuntary defecation, and he still continued to pour water. A doctor testified that on an empty stomach, water intoxication and brain edema occur very quickly, and the girl was not given solid food for four days. Allegedly, they fed her milk, honey, and butter.»
On one of the days, the interlocutor reported, Anna Goldina wrote in her diary: «We were cooking potatoes, Arina asked. Denied.» Later, the diary became one of the material evidences in the criminal case.
Trial
During the trial, Anna Goldina did not admit guilt. According to an NGS source, the woman claimed that she did not torture the child, and was only guilty of «showing cowardice» and not stopping her spouse when he got too carried away with upbringing methods. The woman«s defenders even asked to reclassify the charge from Article 117 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (torture) to Article 125 (abandonment in danger). But the trio of judges considering the case left the initial charge.
«Goldina said that no one deprived the girl of food and products were accessible. Allegedly, they simply monitored that the youngest of the children ate properly, and didn»t monitor Arina,« — told the source. — »Moreover, she said that she did not agree with her husband about any «exorcism of the entity».«
The court considered these arguments as a defense tactic, and ultimately found Anna Goldina guilty of torture.
«The woman was sentenced to four years of imprisonment in a general regime correctional colony,» — told about the outcome of the trial in the SK.
Oleg Goldin, who was accused not only of torture but also of murdering a minor girl (Part 2 of Article 105 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), did not live to see the end of the trial.
«Oleg Goldin»s native sister agreed with the termination of the criminal case on non-rehabilitating circumstances, but the court considered it possible to consider the case on its merits and establish his guilt in murder and torture,« — commented on the outcome of the proceedings the state prosecutor in the case Angelika Egorova. — »From the qualification, the helpless state of the victim and special cruelty were ultimately excluded (this would not have affected the maximum punishment in any case. — Ed.). In connection with the fact that on 14 August 2025 Goldin died in a medical correctional institution, the case against him was terminated.«
In February 2023, the regional court put an end to another case of child murder, which also shocked with its cruelty even investigators and judges accustomed to everything. A drunken married couple beat to death a 6-year-old boy because he could not read a passage from a book.
