Moment Polish woman is arrested after ‘murdering girlfriend in row after she refused to change sex before chopping up her body and burying it’ is shown to court

This is the moment a woman was arrested after her girlfriend’s body was found buried in their former garden.

Anna Podedworna, now 40, was taken away for questioning after emailing Derbyshire police and telling them where Izabela Zablocka’s remains could be found.

Podedworna is now on trial accused of Ms Zablocka’s murder, preventing a lawful burial and perverting the course of justice. Which she denies.

Ms Zablocka’s body was found buried under hardstanding in the garden of a home the two women later shared in Derby in June last year.

She had been dismembered, bound with electrical tape and her remains put in two plastic bin bags having suffered a ‘violent death’ some time between August 28 and October 1 in 2010, a court has heard.

Jurors have been told Podedworna cut Ms Zablocka’s body in half using skills she learned while employed as a butcher and then ‘got on with her life as normal’ – including having two children with a local man before contacting Derbyshire Police in 2025 saying she knew where her missing partner could be found.

The court has been told the relationship between the two women, who moved to the UK from Poland in 2009, had been ‘tense’ and ‘volatile’. 

Jurors have heard Podedworna wanted Ms Zablocka to undergo gender reassignment surgery and made the operation ‘a condition’ of their relationship continuing but Ms Zablocka had lost interest in the idea before she disappeared in 2010 at the age of 30.

On Thursday, Ms Zablocka’s mother Bozena Kopcynska recalled the last time she spoke to her daughter.

Pressed on the exact date of the final phone call, which she said was on August 28, 2010, she said: ‘I remember quite well when I last spoke to my child.’

Ms Kopcynska, who appeared by via video link from Poland, said she spoke to her daughter regularly and feared something had happened to her when she did not contact her own daughter, Katarzyna, on her birthday in September 2010.

She told jurors she contacted Podedworna via social media to try to find out where her daughter was and she told her she had left Derby as she had ‘stolen money from a gypsy guy’.

Ms Kopcynska reported her daughter missing to police in Poland in January 2011. She was told her body had been found in Derby in June last year.

On Wednesday, jurors were shown the moment Podedworna was arrested at her home in Derby after the remains were found at the couple’s former home around the corner.

She was cautioned in the corridor of the property, where she was living with her mother and children at the time. 

Earlier, a Home Office pathologist told jurors it was not possible to determine exactly how Ms Zablocka had died due to the passage of time.

But Dr Stuart Hamilton said it would have required ‘severe force’ to have cut through Ms Zablocka’s spine bone.

Ms Zablocka’s daughter Katarzyna, 25 – known as Kasia – has told jurors her mother sometimes ‘tried to present herself more as a male than a female’. She said she heard the couple discussing ‘gender reassignment’ surgery before her mother went missing.

Giving evidence via video link from Poland on Wednesday, Kasia agreed her mother presented herself more as a man than a woman.

She said her mother did not discuss changing gender with her, but added: ‘I overheard when they were talking between themselves about changing my mother’s gender.’

Kasia said she was about seven when her mother started a relationship with Podedworna, who lived in the same block of flats in Trzebiatow, north-west Poland.

 She told jurors their relationship was ‘volatile and tense’ and recalled an incident in 2009 when Podedworna chased her mother with a kitchen knife.

Asked about the arguments, which she said followed the consumption of alcohol, she said: ‘From my point of view as a child and from what I heard, they were mainly about jealousy between my mother and Anna. 

‘This was a relationship between two women but what I noticed about Anna was that she preferred men.’

Recalling her mother, she said she had ‘very good’ memories of the time they spent together.

‘My mother was interested in my life, she played with me, she took me to school and we spent lots of time together,’ she said.

In 2009, her mother and Podedworna moved to the UK in search of work, leaving Kasia, then nine, in the care of relatives. Kasia said her mother ‘left to make money… so I could have a better life’.

The two women found work at a poultry factory. Kasia told jurors she spoke to her mother three times a week until the phone calls stopped abruptly in August 2010.

Jurors were told that in May last year, TV journalist Rafal Zalewski contacted Podedworna requesting an interview.

Prosecutor Gordon Aspden KC called it the ‘tipping point’ for Podedworna. Soon after she was contacted by Zalewski, she emailed Derbyshire Police.

She then went to a police station and told officers Ms Zablocka died in an ‘accident’ during a violent confrontation. The remains were found during a search days later. The trial continues.