Serialously with Annie Elise
280: She Went On A Tinder Date, Then He Cut Out Her Tongue | Zaliya Shamigulova
Sun, 25 May 2025
When 29-year-old Zaliya Shamigulova vanished in what seemed like paradise, the truth that emerged would shock even the most seasoned investigators. What began as a casual Tinder date spiraled into a scene of unimaginable horror. Zaliya believed she was meeting someone in search of love, but instead, she found herself trapped in a deadly encounter that would end with her tongue cut out… 🔎Join Our True Crime Club & Get Exclusive Content & Perks 🔎 Join The Club: https://www.patreon.com/annieelise 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to EXTRA deep dive episodes every week on Apple! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/serialously-with-annie-elise/id1519456164 🌸 SPRING MERCH IS OFFICIALLY HERE! 🌸 Shop now at https://annieelise.com/collections/shop-all Don't miss out before your faves sell out! 🛒🌷 Follow Annie on Socials 📸 🩷Instagram: @ _annieelise 💜TikTok: @_annieelise 🗞️ Substack: @annieelise 💙Facebook: @10tolife ⭐️Sponsors ⭐️ Buffy: Get 20% off your first Buffy order using code AE at http://Buffy.co. Quince: Go to http://Quince.com/ae for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Shop Annie’s Closet & Must-Haves! 👗 Poshmark: https://posh.mk/Tdbki6Ae0Rb ShopMY: https://shopmy.us/annieelise Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/shop/10tolife?ref_=cm_sw_r_apin_aipsfshop_BKN1ZMCMEZHACVFQ2R75&language=en_US Disclaimer ‣ Some links may be affiliate links, they do not cost you anything, but I make a small percentage from the sale. Thank you so much for watching and supporting me. 🎙️ Follow the podcast for FREE on all podcast platforms! Apple:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/serialously-with-annie-elise/id1519456164 Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/6HdheEH8WeMTHoe5da34qU All Other Platforms: https://audioboom.com/channels/5100770-serialously-with-annie-elise Get Involved or Recommend the Case 💬 About Annie: https://annieelise.com/ For Business Inquiries: [email protected] Episode Sources 🔗 5plus Business Insider ChannelNews Dagospia Defimedia E! News IMDB Irish Mirror Law & Crime Mirror NBC News The Sun WAZAA FM Вся Башкирия *Sources used to collect this information include various public news sites, interviews, court documents, FB groups dedicated to the case, and various news channel segments. When quoting statements made by others, they are strictly alleged until confirmed otherwise. Please remember my videos are my independent opinion and to always do your own research. •••••••••••••••••• Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this video are personal and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company. Assumptions made in the analysis are not reflective of the position of any entity other than the creator(s). These views are subject to change, revision, and rethinking at any time and are not to be held in perpetuity. We make no representations as to the accuracy, completeness, correctness, suitability, or validity of any information on this video and will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries, or damages arising from its display or use. All information is provided on an as-is basis. It is the reader’s responsibility to verify their own facts.
Chapter 1: What shocking event happened to Zaliya Shamigulova?
Hey, true crime besties. Welcome back to an all new episode of Serialistly. Hey everybody, welcome back to an all new episode of Serialistly with me, Annie Elise. Boy oh boy guys, I'm glad we're all friends here because this case is enough to make you want to probably vomit. I really hope you haven't just had a meal or hopefully you don't have a sensitive stomach because this one is disgusting.
And it also is one more time as though if we needed any more examples, it is one more glaring...
bright illustration of how scary online dating can be truly because this episode it's about obsession it's about people who just like do not take no for an answer at all it's about a woman who goes on this dream vacation and then goes missing she's last seen getting into a car with a guy who she's you know casually dating and then days later this woman's body is found horribly me mutilated.
And I am talking like stabbed multiple times, even with her tongue cut out. It is a difficult one to hear. But before we get into all of that part of it, we got to figure out how this all started, what really went down. So we are going to jump right in.
Chapter 2: How did Zaliya's dream vacation turn into a nightmare?
Cut her clothing off. And was that symbolic or in a ritualistic kind of a fashion? The removing of a tongue has often happened as a way of punishment for betrayal or lying.
She was found naked, which into itself is very vulnerable. Then she was murdered. But this is the part that really stuck out with me. Her tongue was cut out of her mouth. Now let's start with this.
Vacations, we can all agree, are supposed to be relaxing, right?
regardless what your personal opinion is of how you relax i know i used to have ex-boyfriends who like to do the hiking the activities the sightseeing that is not my idea of relaxation my idea of relaxation and vacation is either being parked up on the beach or at a pool with a cocktail in my hand and just like laying in the sun that is my idea of relaxing but regardless whatever avenue you go whatever path you choose
It's a chance to like be on vacation and hit the reset button. Maybe you're taking a few photos along the way, posting them on Instagram, making your friends a little like jelly because you're in Hawaii, whatever it is. But vacations are happy. They're stress-free. They're enjoyable. Well, in August of 2024, 29-year-old Zalia Shamigulva felt the same way.
She was getting ready for a day in true paradise. I mean, she was on her dream vacation, thousands of miles from home. And even better, she was about to go on what should have been a fun and romantic date with somebody that she had met on Tinder. So that day, she left her rental apartment, she hopped into a car, and she headed out to go see the sights, hoping for an unforgettable day.
She was hoping for it to be something straight out of a romantic movie, you know, a perfect dream vacation with a guy she met online, what could be better? But by the next morning, Zelia was missing. Now, as far as anybody knew, she wasn't the type of person to ever just disappear like that. But as the hours went by, worry turned into panic for a lot of her friends and family.
And over the next week, they would learn that their worst fears and so, so much more were all about to become reality. See, Zalia hadn't just vanished into paradise. Something horrifying had happened to her. And the details, well, they're almost too awful to even believe. So in 2024, Zalia was 29 years old. She was adventurous, and she was super excited about going to Mauritius.
It's an African tropical paradise that's halfway around the world from where her home in Russia was. And it was no surprise that Zalia was kind of like all in on going on an adventure. I mean, she was smart, she was independent, she was full of life. She worked at a university and she was known for her ambition and drive.
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Chapter 3: What were the strange circumstances surrounding Zaliya's disappearance?
It almost kind of sounds like, I know this is a weird comparison, but it kind of sounds like it might be like the Florida of Africa, you know, where everybody goes to retire, it's beautiful, it's sunshine most of the time, something like that. So Zalia jumped headfirst into the trip, hoping to reset, recharge, and dive into a new culture and meet new people along the way.
And let me just read you one of her Facebook posts from June 18, 2024. And obviously, let's be real, I can't read Russian, so I've translated it, but here's what she wrote. At the end of April, I stopped working, took a pause on all projects, and went to the desert for the May holidays.
i lived without a schedule and a professional role in may i finally transferred things to a new company and continued to take on client jobs but my focus from work shifted more to communicating with my friends making new friends and going for walks my google calendar has finally become like a normal person not a robot i also started a new hr project winter began in cape town so i bought a ticket to mauritius island and flew here to warm up
I got to know the local culture and began to learn French. Many speak it here. I'm also having many ideas and finding motivation to jump into a new level of life. It'll be very interesting for me. And then she posted again on June 21st. And again, I've translated this from her native Russian, but here we go. She said, 1. I continue to work in recruiting and hone my skills.
2.
I do career consulting. I am a certified career guidance counselor for adults. I conduct career sessions and help people build their vector of professional development, find a job that matches their values, and solve career problems.
Three, I went into employment, grew from HR manager to HR director, restructured the work of the department, brought order to different processes, and built a corporate culture in the company. Four, I took on a project to streamline a company's organizational structure, systematize all regulations and instructions, and it was not easy, but I was very successful.
And five, I have been teaching for four years already. I have graduated countless groups, and I have been supervising for three years. With the new generation of HR, we are building a modern vision of personnel management, which is all about technology, business needs, and a systematic approach. This is all about work, which has been and remains a very important part of my life.
And also, I have been living abroad for seven months now, learning new cultures, going through my personal transformation, through life by the ocean, and meeting new people. Zelia was the kind of person who was always growing, always improving herself to move forward into the next chapter. She wasn't afraid to dive headfirst into anything, and she was good at whatever she put her mind to.
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Chapter 4: Who are the key suspects in Zaliya's case?
Chapter 5: What role did online dating play in Zaliya's story?
He lived and worked on the island, so he was also able to show Zelia all of the sites, the local hangouts, the places that she might not know about as a tourist. And all in all, he seemed like an average, friendly local. a person that Zelia could connect with, who could also just kind of give her a dose of adventure and romance, what she was really looking for.
According to her own Facebook page, on August 10th, 2024, she even went to a wedding on the island. She posted, I became a guest at an Indian wedding. Hashtag our perfect world. So she had clearly made some friends on the island too. I mean, so much so she was going to a wedding. She definitely was fitting in, right?
But then on August 17th, just a week after attending that wedding with her friends, things went from a dream vacation to a total nightmare. On the day that she went missing, security cameras showed Zalia leaving her apartment, but that was the last time that she was ever seen.
She was wearing a blue and white outfit that morning, and she was on her way to go meet Pierre, this guy that she had been dating, the guy that she had been spending time with. The plan was for them to go sightseeing around the island. So a blue car pulled up, picked her up at the apartment, she got in, but then she didn't come back. Now, eventually, Zelia's friend, Elena, started to get worried.
She had been expecting Zelia to come home sometime that evening or that night, but Zelia just didn't show up. By the next morning, Zelia still wasn't home, and this was super out of character for her.
I mean, sure, she was, yes, out on a date with Pierre, and maybe it could have gone well, and maybe she stayed overnight with him, but from the sounds of things, it wasn't normal or expected for Zelia to spend the night with him. Not at all. and it just kind of sounds like maybe they didn't even really have that kind of relationship.
So Elena didn't even consider the possibility that Zelia was out with him. Instead, she reported her missing. It just sounds like she knew in her gut that something wasn't right. And here's where things start to get a little weirder even, because apparently after Zelia didn't make it back to her apartment that night, her family started getting text messages from her.
But as her family was reading through these messages, they noticed something very strange about them. The tone, the words, even the phrasing. It just did not feel like Zelia. Not one bit. Okay, I want you to just picture your dream bedding for a second. Like your picture perfect dream, the sheets, the duvet, the comforter, the fluffiness, all of it.
For me, when I picture my dream bedding, it's soft, it's breathable, it's cool enough. It's like soft pillowy moon cloud and something just like, you know, super luxurious feeling. And I found it, my friends. And I'm going to tell you what it is so that you can upgrade your life and have a life hack like me. And it is Buffy.
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Chapter 6: What evidence pointed towards a possible crime?
Absolutely. And we see this happen in many cases where a predator takes control of victim and their phone, and it's a way to buy time to go in and manipulate the phone. So what becomes important in the interview process is that the past behavior of this individual is really understood.
And that's where interviews with the family, looking at her social media accounts, looking at her just regular text messages on her phone gives you this sense of what this person's activity is and how much they're willing to expose in a public light.
It just didn't sound like something that she would ever say. Ever. Not at all. But remember, Zelia was from Russia. That's where her parents were from too. They couldn't just exactly like march down to her apartment and start asking questions and bang on the door and investigate things on their own. They were completely helpless.
So obviously, her family wanted answers, and they wanted these answers as fast as possible, because with every single second, the hope of finding any missing person, as we know, it gets smaller and smaller. You have to act fast. Now, at one point, someone actually reached out to Zelia's family, specifically to her brother, Timur, and this person claimed to know exactly what happened to her.
However, this person wasn't just being a good Samaritan trying to share the information they knew. They weren't trying to do this out of the goodness of their heart. Instead, they were asking for cash in exchange for information. Now this, of course, set off a lot of alarm bells for her brother and his family. They knew a scam when they saw one and heard one.
And they weren't sending any information to some random stranger who just texted them out of the blue. So instead, they decided to trust the police and let them solve the case on their own. Now as far as suspects go, there was obviously one person who stood out right away, the guy that Zalia had been seeing, Pierre.
Obviously he and Zalia had only just started seeing each other though, so it wasn't like they had a ton of history to even go off of, and it's also like they didn't really know each other all that well. But sometimes we know people can develop these intense attachments really fast, especially when things feel new or feel exciting.
So even though he hadn't been around very long, the police and Zalia's loved ones did have to start to wonder if maybe he had developed something more than just a crush, maybe an obsession, and maybe he was a dangerous person.
Add in the fact that Zalia was not super committed to her relationship with him and was also planning to leave the island really soon, I mean, it was safe to wonder if he could have done something to her because he didn't want her to be out of his grasp. And we've seen stories like this too, right?
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Chapter 7: How did Zaliya's family react to her disappearance?
So, it's of course worth looking into in my mind. So, I mean, those were the top three theories, the top three suspects in all of this. At first, it was Pierre, it was Elena, and it was the driver. But there was also the possibility that Zelia had been hurt or taken by somebody who didn't even know her. I mean, Zelia was a young, attractive woman traveling mostly solo through this foreign country.
She might have been a victim of a stalker, a predator, or just about anyone. We also can't rule out the fact that maybe Zelia did disappear on her own, as she said. Now, I personally don't find that very likely, given everything we know about her and how driven she was in her life, but stranger things have happened, right? And it really did seem like anything was possible.
So the police began their investigation by speaking to people who might have seen her that day. And no surprise, Pierre, the guy, was a major part of their investigation. He admitted that, yeah, he had been with Zelia on the day that she had vanished, but he also said that he hadn't done anything to her. The disappearance had happened after the two of them were done hanging out.
He said he dropped her off later that day near his workplace. He said it was around 1.15 p.m. However, the issue with that, though, was that the police couldn't actually verify that part of his story. Because conveniently, there were no CCTV cameras in that area. After this initial questioning, the police did end up letting him go. However, they did keep his car for further investigation.
And at that time, I've got to imagine that they were still hoping that they would track down Zalia, that she would be alive, that she would be okay. However, these hopes were completely shattered on August 26th, just a few days after her disappearance. Because that's when the police found a body about 40 kilometers away from where Zalia had been staying. And unfortunately, it was Zalia.
All right, so Father's Day is literally right around the corner. And if you're like me, it started back with my dad, but now it's with my husband. And I always, always, always struggle with what to get them for Father's Day. Like, do I get them socks, grilling tools, tools? I mean, what do I get them? But this year, I decided I'm going to upgrade it
And I am also going to use a place that I personally shop from that I am obsessed with. And you guys know who that is. It is Quince. I have bought coats, sweaters, jewelry, shoes, throw blankets, sheets for our guest bedroom. So much stuff from Quince and I am obsessed.
And what I didn't really ever look into because I'm so selfish and always shop for myself, Quince actually has all the pieces that dads actually want to wear too. I picked up a couple of their cotton silk polos and some European linen beach shorts that I know Jer will love, especially for the summer because we're going to be traveling.
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Chapter 8: What are the theories surrounding Zaliya's fate?
They're just like such a vibe, super lightweight, really high quality, and they just look good. And let's be honest, sometimes the men in our lives, they need a little help dressing. So I am here to be that person. So I got them for Jer and I feel like he's going to absolutely love them. And again, just kind of, you know, I want to dress him and make him look
as flawless as i know he can and the best part about everything is everything at quince is priced like 50 to 80 percent less than what you would find at similar high-end brands it's because they work directly with the factories and they cut out the middleman so you're actually getting legit luxury but without that extra markup and they only partner with factories that are ethical and sustainable so you can also feel good about what you're buying too
So for the dad who deserves better than basic, Quince has you covered. Go to quince.com slash AE for free shipping on your order and for 365-day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash AE to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash AE. Zalia's body was found naked, and she had been stabbed 20 times in the chest. Her face had also been slashed.
Now, honestly, the state of her body was just horrifying. It was clear that this wasn't some kind of accident or random attack. I mean, whoever did this, they made it personal.
It's not entirely clear to me if her missing clothes were nearby, like maybe if the killer had stripped her and then left her outfit there right there on the ground, or if maybe all of her clothing was just straight up missing. But there are some reports that say the police are still searching for at least some of her clothes.
I'm not sure if that means they have found some other items or if everything is missing. I'm not really sure. But they're also looking for missing parts of Zalia's body. And that gives me the impression that her killer must have really been trying to dismember her or butcher her and cut pieces off of her in the process.
Either way, when someone strips their victim like that, it does have the potential to tell you something. I mentioned before that this attack felt personal, right? It didn't feel like Zalia was attacked at random. And stripping her naked was part of that. It came across like it was all done in an attempt to humiliate her.
That said, another possibility that's worth mentioning is that maybe the killer might have removed her clothing to try to get rid of the evidence. particularly if they left blood, hair, or other DNA on her clothes. In that case, it's not so much a case of trying to humiliate Zelia, but more so an attempt for the killer to cover their track.
Now, beyond the removal of her clothing, another key piece of evidence in this case was how Zelia was buried. Her body was found in a shallow grave, and it wasn't hidden well at all. In fact, the grave was in somewhat of a residential area, a residential area that had like decent foot traffic, a lot of people who were in and out all of the time.
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