Anatoly Moskvin, 45, a resident of Nizhny Novgorod, was arrested in November 2011 for desecrating graves. In Moskvin's apartment, operatives found 29 mummified bodies of girls and children, dressed in multi-colored dresses, skirts and scarves. Anatoly tried to turn corpses … into dolls.
Moskvin was a fairly well-known person in his city. A philologist by training, he spoke thirteen languages, wrote several textbooks, was engaged in local history and journalism.
One of Moskvin's hobbies was necropolis, a discipline whose subject matter is everything connected with cemeteries and funeral rites.
According to Moskvin's stories, as a student, he was a member of the Luciferian society (which he distinguished from Satanists), performed rituals with dead animals, passed tests in black magic, took a vow of celibacy and abstinence from alcohol and smoking, rejected Christianity. He considered himself a pagan. According to G. Scheglov, editor of the publishing house where Moskvin published his books, he wanted to adopt a girl.
He said that in two and a half years he walked around 752 cemeteries. He spent the night in the cemetery gatehouses, and once he even had to spend the night in a coffin … Voyages to cemeteries took almost all the time, Anatoly did not have a permanent job - he led excursions, worked as a tutor, wrote essays in local publications - again, mainly on cemetery topics …
There was no personal life either. According to Anatoly himself, he once had a girlfriend. Once she hitchhiked to St. Petersburg and disappeared … After which he vowed to wait for her and not meet other women. There were also rumors that in the cemeteries Moskvin was looking for the grave of his beloved … Perhaps then he went mad …
And then he began to tear up graves. He was especially interested in those who did not die by their own death - they became the victim of a murder or had an accident. These were mainly girls and young women from 12 to 30 years old. The culprit dragged the excavated bodies into his apartment, dressed them up, sometimes even in wedding dresses, like brides.
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The most interesting thing is that the parents, very intelligent people, knew about their son's hobby, but were sure that he needed the corpses for work. It is strange that they were not interested in where he gets the dead bodies from … Although, according to one version, it was the parents who returned from the dacha and found Anatoly making another dead "doll" and reported to the police.
For a long time, law enforcement agencies could not figure out Moskvin. The fact is that he worked in different graveyards: while the investigation into the opening of the grave in one cemetery was underway, the criminal was doing his dirty deed in another …
However, by the nature of his work, Anatoly was still on the list of suspects. The weather let him down: in the evening he came to the cemetery, and then it started to rain … The operas managed to find footprints of shoes of size 43 and a can of paint with fingerprints on it. The rest turned out to be a matter of technique.
When they came to Moskvin with a search, it turned out that he had arranged in his room of a small-sized "treshka" a whole workshop for the manufacture of terrible exhibits. On the shelves were piles of photographs of the deceased, ripped off from the gravestones, instructions for making dolls, as well as schematic maps of cemeteries in the Nizhny Novgorod region. And most importantly - the "dolls" themselves, from which a corpse smell emanated.
Later it turned out that Moskvin was often approached by people looking for the graves of their relatives. He thoroughly remembered all the burials. Once he even indicated where to look for the grave of a girl who was killed in 2002 by Vladimir Zhukov, a “Nizhny Novgorod Chikatilo”. He abused the child, killed and hid the body.
The neighbors of the Moskvins said that some time ago an unpleasant smell appeared in the entrance. They called the ZhEK employees. Plumbers emptied the basement and found the body of an unknown woman. Now tenants think that this is one of Moskvin's "victims".
And yet - in 2004, at Starosormovsky and Sorting cemeteries, someone desecrated the graves of young girls buried in wedding dresses. The unknown criminal took off the girls' dresses and changed them into some kind of rags. Perhaps this is the handiwork of Moskvin. But no confession was received from him on this matter.
In May 2012, a trial took place. Moskvin was declared insane; the court exempted him from criminal liability and ordered compulsory psychiatric treatment. The prosecution was satisfied with the decision and refused to appeal the verdict.
Moskvin was sent to a psychiatric hospital for six months, but every six months the court extended the term for another six months. In the summer of 2015, Moskvin was sent for a second psychiatric examination and on July 30, compulsory treatment was extended.
The head of the Investigative Department of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Nizhny Novgorod Region V. Stravinskas called the Moskvin case an exceptional case that has no analogues in modern forensic science. Colleagues spoke of the defendant as a kind, brilliant and punctual specialist-researcher, strangeness was attributed to the "whims of an intellectual" …
