A child who liked anime, sometimes skipped classes and was bad at math – who would think this girl would kill, cook and sample a man together with her decade older boyfriend, then complain the meat was "too sweet?"

The blood-curdling story about the 12-year-old girl who is suspected of killing and partially eating a man together with her 22-year-old lover is rattling the Russian media. The girl, identified by the media as Valeria, lived in the southern city of Sochi before running away to the Leningrad region where she allegedly committed the heinous crime.

Conversations with people who knew Valeria seem to show a few troubling alarm bells – but nothing to predict the horrifying atrocity she would be complicit in.

Ruptly found the girl's distressed mother, Nadezhda, who refused to say much, only mentioning that Valeria liked anime. Indeed, her purported page on VKontake (the top Russian social network) has pictures in the Japanese cartoon style all over it, some of a lewd nature.

"In class, she behaved like a normal student," Yuliya Myakisheva, Valeria's teacher, recalls. Studying was "hard for her," especially math, she sometimes "misbehaved during breaks" and wasn't very keen on school overall. Myakisheva remembers talking to Valeria's mother, who said it was "hard to deal" with the would-be cannibal.

Valeria once triggered a police search when she went missing during school holidays, the teacher said. And according to the family's neighbor Georgy, she would sometimes "go out at night, come back home late at night, or not at all." The 12-year-old "went out with boys," he believes.

READ MORE: 12yo ‘cannibal’ & her lover kill, dismember landlord out of ‘hunger and curiosity’ – reports

The dismembered body of a young man, whose name according to different reports is either Aleksey or Aleksandr Popovich, was found at his home in a small village near St. Petersburg. Valeria and her boyfriend Arkady were soon caught – they were staying in the same house with Popovich's permission. His body was mutilated, and police suspect it was partially eaten by the pair.

Increasingly shocking details keep swirling around the story. Local media report that Valeria cooked and sampled meat from the victim's chest, and didn't like it because it was "too sweet." She did enjoy the man's brain, cooked either on a frying pan or in a microwave, a fact chilling enough for a real-life Hannibal Lecter parallel.

The 'cannibal' herself insists she killed Popovich while he was asleep, and disemboweled his body "out of curiosity." Her boyfriend says it was him who killed Popovich during an argument, while the girl cheered.

Both are in custody as police are trying to piece together what really happened. Valeria is below the age of criminal responsibility, so she is being treated as an underage witness. Arkady will bear the full responsibility for murder and cannibalism charges, in addition to pedophilia if it's proven he had sexual contact with Valeria.