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The residents of Nizhny Novgorod, a large city in Russia, were on the edge of their seats as a puzzling ongoing investigation began to unravel in front of them. Starting in 2009, locals began to discover the graves of their loved ones desecrated, sometimes entirely dug up. Over time, this continued to happen, leaving no real answers for these bizarre incidents. There were only theories as to what was happening.
A common theory was that this grave robber was part of an extremist organization. Detectives suspected this to be the case, and responded by employing a team of experienced detectives that specialize in extremist crimes. However, two years came and went, and the case of the desecrated graves had yet to be solved.
In 2011, racism and anti-Muslim propaganda were running rampant in Russia. A terrorist attack at Domodossyevo airport in Moscow caused a spike in desecrated graves, specifically grave sites belonging to Muslims. While detectives continued to monitor the incidents, they became familiar with a local historian by the name of Anatoly Moskvin, who frequented cemeteries nearby.
While locals found his recurring presence at graveyards in the area unsettling, he rationalized that it was all part of his job. His line of work was writing macabre articles online about his fascination with the dead. He was an expert on local cemeteries, which caused people to side-eye him. He was often confronted by mourners, sometimes even physically, as people felt a dark discomfort in his presence.
This time, he would be confronted at a Muslim grave site by police and immediately apprehended. Once Anatoly was apprehended, police began their search of his parents' apartment where he lived. Detectives were specifically looking for anti-Muslim extremist propaganda, which could help prove why he was vandalizing these graves and digging them up. Nothing could have prepared investigators for what they discovered upon entering the home.
The apartment belonging to Anatoly's parents was in the condition of a hoarder's home. With the most rancid stench wafting through the doors, neighbors noticed the smell, but chalked it up to a dead animal in the basement. Detectives powered through the stomach-churning smell while they searched for evidence, discovering tons of life-sized dolls.
Upon closer examination, they made a discovery that would go down as one of the most disturbing crimes in history. Part 1: Kiss of Death Anatoly Moskvin was born in Soviet Russia in 1966 to parents Yuri Fedorovich and Elvira Alexandrovna.
Growing up, he was very intelligent, but was reported to have displayed some aggressive behaviors. He was bullied and struggled to develop socially, so much so that he never moved out of his town, still living in his parents' apartment at 45 years old. He was voluntarily celibate, having a repulsion to sex and taking a vow to refrain from it. Instead of focusing on dating, Anatoly zeroed in on his studies.
In his free time, he indulged in his interest in antique Russian dolls.
Despite being awkward, Anatoly, a history buff, journalist, and self-proclaimed necropolyist, was highly respected by his academic peers, and was even regarded as a genius. He was a regular contributor for a weekly publication about cemeteries and obituaries called Necrologies. The editor of this publication thought very highly of Anatoly, calling his work priceless and unique.
he would defend Anatoly to the end, fully believing in his innocence. On October 26, 2011, Anatoly published his last article. In this bizarre account, he tells a disturbing story that may or may not be true, but if it is, this may have contributed to his interest in the dead.
According to Anatoly, when he was 13 years old, he was walking home from school and going door to door asking for spare paper to use for a project. Upon approaching a house, he noticed a crowd and peeked inside. Through the window, he saw the open coffin of 11-year-old Natasha Petrova.
Anatoly knew who she was and knew of her recent passing. She had been accidentally electrocuted during a bath when she reached for a towel and grabbed onto an exposed electrical wire. Natasha's body was too small to sustain the shock, ultimately leading to her premature death. A group of men that were attending the funeral noticed Anatoly fixating on Natasha and urged him to get closer to her body.
Anatoly recalls crying and begging the men to let him go, but they forced him toward Natasha's body anyway. They were going to force him to kiss her corpse. Anatoly panicked, but was reassured by the young girl's grieving mother. Her mother promised Anatoly that if he kissed Natasha's body, she would repay him with money and a fruit basket. Realizing there was no other way out, he stopped resisting the forced kiss.
He wrote, "I kissed her once, then again, then again." According to Anatoly's story, the mother then proceeded to put a bronze wedding ring on his finger and the other on her daughter's dead body. After this bizarre mixed wedding and funeral ceremony, Anatoly was given the fruit and money as promised. He stopped on the way home to spend his money on a book. That night, Anatoly dreamed about Natasha,
He claimed that his experience sparked his interest in the occult and black magic. Writing "My Strange Marriage with Natasha Petrova" was useful. He described his dreams of her as vivid and says that she would sing haunting songs to him and demand that he learn how to practice witchcraft. Anatoly did tell his parents about these bizarre dreams, which likely could have been a result of PTSD from the traumatic funeral wedding he had experienced.
Anatoly's doctor assumed his bad dreams were just a result of puberty. He grew desperate to rid himself of these night terrors, even completing a magic ceremony under the instruction of Natasha to pass her along to another unsuspecting person. This didn't entirely work for Anatoly, however, as the classmate that he attempted to transfer Natasha to would not leave him alone. But he was at least free from the dreams.
The young schoolboy became infatuated with death after this traumatic event, spending a lot of time alone in cemeteries and sometimes walking through them with his parents. He was particularly fascinated with Krasnaya Etna cemetery, where Natasha was buried. A few years later, Natasha's mother moved away, and Anatoly claimed to be the only person that continued to care for her grave. Natasha's mother passed away in 1990,
So the story of the wedding has never been confirmed. However, there is a German tradition in which the dead and unwed are buried in wedding attire. And traditional wedding aspects are factored into the funeral and circumstances where the child didn't live long enough to marry, despite the traumatic events Anatoly experienced as a young boy.
He continued on a straight and narrow path and took his studies very seriously, mastering 13 different languages, some of which he taught himself as an adolescent. Anatoly eventually earned an advanced degree in Celtic studies and became a published scholar. Celtic mythology shows a great respect for the dead and different beliefs about reincarnation and the afterlife.
he became extremely fascinated with the occult and specifically pagan burial rites. Just as seriously as he studied his books, Anatoly studied the cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod. According to his record, between 2005 and 2007, he visited 752 cemeteries in the city while working on a directory for the dead in all of the cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod that he was commissioned to write.
He walked for miles every day in different cemeteries, studying the dead and taking notes. He even stopped to take naps and drink from puddles during his exhausting travels. This project took him a total of two years to complete. One time, Anatoly went as far as sleeping in a coffin that was going to be used in a funeral the following day, detailing his experiences in pieces of writing that he would later publish in a weekly newspaper.
These grim documentary series were titled "What the Dead Said" and "Great Walks Around Cemeteries." People were put off by Anatoly's unconventional interest, leading him to be stopped and questioned by police. Citing his work as his reason for hanging out at the cemeteries all day long, police found no reason to suspect him of any crimes. Because of this, he was never detained during these interactions.
Despite this, local citizens began to notice the graves of their loved ones desecrated and sometimes entirely dug up. Believing the crimes to be the acts of an extremist organization, the police developed a group of specialists to investigate. Initially, the police looked to Anatoly for his expertise, hoping to receive some insight from the cemetery expert that could help them find their suspect. However,
officers felt very strange about the way he carried himself. With no evidence other than a dark interest and a little bit of social awkwardness, they still had no reason to suspect Anatoly. And for two years, no leads helped to solve the string of crimes. Following a 2011 terrorist attack at Domodsiadovo Airport in Moscow, the reports of graves, specifically Muslim graves, being desecrated in Nizhny Novgorod began to spike.
Tips led investigators to a cemetery where Anatoly had been painting over photos of dead Muslims, but not harming anything else. Officers confronted him at the scene, apprehending him to gather evidence due to the blatant vandalization. The police brought him back to his parents' flat to look for anti-Muslim propaganda. But what they would find would be traumatizing for all. So much so, that police admitted they had to wash it down with vodka.
Part 2: The Dollmaker As investigators began to dig through Anatoly's parents' apartment, they found his room to be extremely cluttered and disorganized. They began to search for anti-Muslim propaganda, but instead were greeted by a ton of life-sized cloth dolls. While they were creepy, it wasn't a crime to have dolls. However, when one of the dolls began to emit a horrible stench, they took a closer look.
And to their horror, they realized that the dolls were mummified corpses. The longer they sifted through the cluttered home, the number of dolls multiplied. After doing a thorough search of the house, investigators found a total of 29 mummified bodies of young girls aged from 3 to 25 years old, as well as a pair of Anatoly shoes that matched footprints at the desecrated graves. Detectives also found a guide to doll making
a map of local cemeteries, and photos and birthdays of the deceased girls that he had stolen from their graves. He had studied these girls very intensely and knew a lot about their lives and how they died. According to Anatoly, he would connect with these girls before he would bring them home by sleeping on their graves, which he attributes to the culture of the Celts and Druids. He claimed that these girls communicated with him and asked him to take them out for walks.
Sometimes, during the process of bringing one of the girl's bodies home, he would first relocate their body to a more discreet resting place where he would connect with them more privately. After this, he would allow the body to dry out for a period, eventually bringing the body home and preserving it with a mixture of salt and baking soda. If his necromancer communications with the dolls came to a stop, he would return the body to the grave exactly how they were left,
He had dug up the graves of adult women in the past, but in time, learned that smaller bodies were easier to discreetly transport. Due to these little girls having been badly decayed prior to Anatoly digging them up, he covered their hands and other body parts with cloth. He put nylon stockings over their faces, using makeup to paint over them. The mummified bodies had been given button eyes, which Anatoly says was done so that they could watch cartoons with him.
He had also placed music boxes in their chests so that there would be some sort of response when he interacted with the dolls. One doll contained a voice box with a bone-chilling message: "Teddy Bear loves Honey very much." Some girls had pieces of their headstone, photographs, and other personal belongings inside their bodies. Their bodies were filled with rags in order to make them feel a little heavier. One girl was found with a dried heart inside her body.
Most of the dolls were still wearing the clothes that they were buried in, some dressed in snow suits or knee-high boots to hide visible decay. While most of the little girls' bodies were stolen for cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod, Anatoly admitted that some of the bodies had come from as far as Moscow, and that he had been collecting the bodies of deceased young girls for 10 years.
Anatoly's parents claimed to have no idea that these large dolls their son was collecting were actually mummified corpses. From their perspective, the large cloth dolls he was making were merely an extension of his interest in antique Russian dolls. His mother Elvira, however, did take issue when she found him speaking to the dolls, telling him that it was childlike to play with them.
Many questioned his parents, who would leave their flat every year from April until October, about their lack of knowledge about the dolls. Neighbors noticed a stench from the outside, so how did the parents not smell it? The neighbors were also shocked, as they hadn't thought anything sinister of the stench and had thought Anatoly to be a respectable man. During the months that his parents would leave, they would even take the family cat with them,
He admitted that he felt an extreme sense of loneliness, which he alleviated by connecting with the dead. Having no reason to believe that these dolls were dead bodies, visitors in their home even complimented Anatoly on the artistry of the puppets he had made. He kept one of the dolls, which he named Masha, in his parents' bedroom.
He once sat her down at the dinner table and introduced her to his aunt, saying, "This is Masha. Do not be afraid of her." Following Anatoly's arrest, his father suffered a heart attack, and his mother was hospitalized due to health issues that she attributes to the shock of her son's actions.
Due to such vile things happening in the parents' apartment without their knowledge, the judgment and ostracization they suffered was so heavy that Elvira suggested to her husband that they commit suicide, but he declined. Instead, the pair lived in isolation as an attempt to escape the weight of their son's actions. Part 3. Daddy Dearest
Although Anatoly's writings about his wedding with 11-year-old Natasha Petrova alludes to potentially inappropriate undertones as far as a motive, his interest with these little girls were not sexual or romantic in nature. Being a recluse with a sex repulsion, that didn't appear to be in his mind in the slightest. As investigators began to dig into his past, they discovered that Anatoly strongly desired to be a father to a little girl.
In 2003, he began a non-sexual relationship with a woman who had similar goals in life, including wanting to become a parent. Due to the nature of their relationship, they planned to adopt a child, and Atoli considered submitting an application to adopt the little girl he'd dreamed of having.
His application, however, would have been rejected due to his inconsistent income as a freelance journalist. It was revealed that Anatoly told his mother about his plan in May 2003, but was not met with the enthusiasm he had hoped for. Elvira was very disapproving of the idea of her son adopting a child, and she made no effort to hide that fact.
This angered Anatoly, and because his mother wasn't on board, he told her that he was going to perform black magic. Elvira didn't think much about this comment, as her son had always been eccentric. What she didn't realize at the time was that Anatoly would keep his promise, and it would be more horrific than she ever could have imagined. If he couldn't adopt a child, he was going to revive one from the dead, and he had already done his research.
Despite the abhorrent nature of the crimes, Anatoly was said to be gentle with the girls and treated them with care as if they were his own living children. He decorated their graves for the holidays, talked to them, watched cartoons with them, and read them stories. He kept their birthdays written on his wall, making sure to celebrate each one. Anatoly was quoted saying,
"What I would do with living children, I did with these. I thought they were alive, just temporarily dead." He described almost a hierarchy regarding the dolls, the least favored being stored in the garage. Supposedly, he did not like a couple of the dolls, while others were given titles like leader and deputy. He and the dolls developed their own language, and he had developed backstories for all of the girls.
When he talks about the dolls, he becomes very possessive, referring to them as his girls. He talked of a happy family life, keeping the dolls occupied with cartoons while he worked and talked. During his meals, he would leave food out for the dolls despite them being unable to eat it, which is a common pagan practice to show respect to spirits.
He even studied child psychology online, hoping to provide the best emotional care to the dolls that he could. According to Anatoly, he was aware that digging these graves up and bringing the remains home was a crime, but his intentions were to be a caretaker to these children that he felt such a deep empathy for. From his delusional perspective, preserving the bodies of the deceased children was allowing them the option to be cloned in the future.
when he expected it to be no longer prohibited in Russia. In his mind, he says, he wanted to give the children a second chance at life. Despite feeling bad for the children, Anatoly showed no empathy or remorse to the parents of the victims at the trial, outright saying, "You abandoned your girls. I brought them inside and warmed them up." He stated that in his mind, the girls were just girls and had no parents.
During his trial, he confessed to 44 counts of abusing graves. Although he was initially being investigated for desecrating the graves of Muslims, which is considered to be a hate crime, the charges were ultimately dropped. After a three-year stay at a psychiatric hospital and a paranoid schizophrenic diagnosis, Anatoly was ultimately found not mentally fit to stand trial, thus absolving him of any criminal responsibility.
The court ordered him to pay each of the families a restitution of $75,000 for the emotional damage they had endured as a result of his robbing and desecrating their loved ones' graves. The response of the parents were mixed, while some parents were disgusted and shouted out that Anatoly should go to prison for the rest of his life or be put to death.
one father refused to accept the compensation, stating that Anatoly had treated his daughter better than he had when she was living by dressing her, reading her fairy tales, and watching cartoons. In the eyes of Olga Chardimova's mother, however, Anatoly's actions were anything but caring. Part Four: Olga Chardimova While all of the families endured intense suffering and trauma due to being robbed of the bodies of their deceased children,
The family of 10-year-old murder victim Olga Chardimova experienced a new depth of evil that is unfathomable and devastating. Olga had finally convinced her mother to let her walk to her grandma's house, which was a block away by herself. She told her mom, "I'm 10 already, I can go by myself." Her mother agreed, and after her parents set off for work, Olga walked out the door and headed to her grandma's.
Unfortunately, she never made it. Walking down to the lobby of the building she lived in, she was ambushed by a drug addict who forced her back upstairs where he robbed her of her earrings. Olga made a quick attempt to escape and as a result, the man hit her over the head with a metal pipe. She was missing for five months before her body was found shoved behind pipes in the attic of the building. Her parents laid her to rest on October 2nd, 2002.
Months later, they built a fence around her grave and began to paint it on May 7th, 2003. The following day, they found that a wreath had been moved and felt an uncomfortable presence there. It wouldn't be long before the secret stranger began leaving notes at Olga's grave, addressing her as "little lady," which is enough to sound alarm bells in any parent's mind.
He congratulated her on life events, even remembering what day she would be starting a new school year and which day would have been the last.
Anatoly left these notes at a lot of the girls' graves, signing them "D.A.", which translates to "kind angel." He decorated Olga's grave at New Year's and often left toys and stuffed animals that had been stolen from other graves. Her family had grown to expect a new disturbing happening each time they visited their late daughter. The pit in Olga's parents' stomach deepened as they began to receive letters from Anatoly.
The notes that they received, however, were far more sinister than the ones left for Olga. For nine years, Anatoly victimized and ignited absolute terror in the mourning parents. He would often leave demands for them, instructing them to build a great monument to memorialize Olga. "If they didn't comply," he wrote, "he planned on digging up Olga's body and leaving it out in the open for them to see."
Despite the threatening letter, their daughter's body had already been removed from her gravesite, mummified, and was inside Anatoly's bedroom. Still, the letters and notes on her headstone continued, until he eventually destroyed her headstone with an axe. This led Olga's parents to report the anonymous harassment to law enforcement.
but unfortunately there was nothing they could do. The police told her mother that if she did come into contact with this crazed person, she could do what she wanted to him with no objection from law enforcement. Olga's mother admits that if she had come face to face with Anatoly at her daughter's grave, she would have killed him with her own two hands. While things kept being left at Olga's grave over the years, no evidence that led to a suspect was found.
Reports of young girls' graves being targeted started to spread throughout Nizhny Novgorod and on October 5th, 2012, just three days short of the 10-year anniversary of Olga being laid to rest, police decided to open her grave. Upon opening the grave, the police and Olga's parents were horrified to discover that a hole had been cut out of the top of the coffin where Olga's body once rested.
her remains had been moved away from her grave site. It would later be confirmed that Anatoly dug up Olga in May of 2003. Olga's parents were horrified to learn that after their daughter had been violently stripped from this world, she was further exploited even in death.
leaving them to unknowingly visit an empty grave for nine years while dealing with the mind games being played by an anonymous man with an unhinged obsession. Olga's parents now have a son named Alexei and moved out of the flat where their daughter was horrifically murdered. However, the psychiatric hospital that can be seen from the Chardimova's kitchen window serves as a daily reminder of the gruesome torment both they and their daughter have experienced.
This psychiatric hospital is where Anatoly Moskvin will likely stay for the rest of his natural life. Although Olga's parents do fear that in the future he may convince doctors and psychiatrists that he is healed and able to be reintegrated into society. It doesn't appear that this will be the case. Every motion to extend Anatoly's psychiatric stay has been approved thus far.
Even Anatoly's parents fear that if he were to be released, he would begin digging up graves again. Anatoly told police and families not to bother reburying the bodies deeper, as he would just dig them back up upon being released. Due to this, Olga's parents have reburied their daughter in an unmarked grave, in an attempt to make it harder for Anatoly to track her remains down should he ever walk free.
In one of the most heartbreaking statements imaginable, Olga's mother utters, "I had her for 10 years. He had her for nine." Although Anatoly Moskvin's works remain alive on the internet, he was sentenced to a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation in May of 2012.
and has remained in a psychiatric hospital ever since, with extensions added to his stay at each annual evaluation, despite attempts by his lawyer to have him released for outpatient treatment. His motivation to get out? Strangely enough, Anatoly wants to marry his girlfriend, a language student that he met after his arrest. He is unable to marry her under the conditions of his inpatient treatment.
and according to his lawyer, nine years of treatment has helped him get to a point where he feels ready to get a job as a language teacher and rejoin society, even planning to write a book. Still, Anatoly's release has not been granted, and his crimes continue to haunt Russia and the families of the mummified girls, who were forced to mourn their children a second time in such a horrific way.