Anatoly Moskvin, a well-educated historian, was found to have mummified many young girls and kept them in his bedroom at the house he lived in with his parents.
Moskvin loved history and was fluent in 13 languages. He traveled often, taught at the college level, and worked as a journalist in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod.
Moskvin was also interested in cemeteries. He called himself a “necropolyst,” which a colleague thought was “invaluable” for his work.
Moskvin took his skills to scary new levels, which was a mistake.
Anatoly Moskvin’s parents thought he collected old dolls, but they were actually the bodies of young girls that had been mummified.
In 2011, the body parts of 29 girls between the ages of 3 and 25 were found mummified in the historian’s apartment.
A Bi-zare Ritual
Moskvin knew everything there was to know about cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, where he lived. He says that his obsession with the macabre started in 1979, when he was 13 years old.
He wrote about how he became obsessed with the dead in Necrologies, a weekly magazine about cemeteries and obituaries.
In one of his articles, Moskvin wrote about being stopped on his way home from school by a group of men in black suits.
They were going to the funeral of 11-year-old Natasha Petrova, and when they got there, they dragged him to her coffin and made him kiss her dead body.
Moskvin said:
“I kissed her once, then again, then again.”
“The girl’s grieving mother then put a wedding ring on Anatoly’s finger and put a wedding ring on her dead daughter’s finger.”
Moskvin never stopped being interested in the corpse-kissing incident. He started going to cemeteries when he was in school.
He went from graveyard to graveyard. Moskvin said he went to 752 cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod between 2005 and 2007.
Desec-ration of G*raves
In 2009, people in the area started to find that the graves of their loved ones had been broken into and sometimes even dug up. Moskvin’s secret mission became known at that time.
The Cre-epy Dolls
Moskvin shared a small apartment with his parents. He was said to have been lonely and a bit of a pack rat. Inside, the police found doll-like figures that were the size of real people.
It was found that when Moskvin went to the cemeteries, he dug up the graves, carried the bodies back to his apartment, mummified the dead children, and dressed them up like dolls with stockings, girls’ clothes, and knee-high boots. Even lipstick and make-up were put on their faces by him.
He also put music boxes inside their rib cages, which was a very cruel thing to do. Moskvin also put up a birthday card for each person he killed in his bedroom.
Moskvin had kept one of the girl’s bones for nine years before the police caught up with him.
Investigators also found music boxes or toys that made noise when touched inside the bodies of the girls.
Moskivn admitted to the horrible crimes in court. He told the parents who were upset:
“You abandoned your girls, so I brought them home and warmed them up.”
Surprisingly, Moskvin’s parents said they didn’t know where his “dolls” came from at first.
His mom told him:
“We saw these dolls, but we did not suspect there were dead bodies inside. We thought it was his hobby to make such big dolls and did not see anything wrong with it.”
Moskvin said he had abused graves and dead bodies 44 times.
Moskvin told the people who questioned him that he did what he did because he was waiting for science to figure out how to bring the dead back to life. In the meantime, he kept the girls alive with a simple mix of salt and baking soda.
Moskvin was diagnosed with schizophrenia and put in a psychiatric hospital for the rest of his life.
