Russian 'Dressed Up Mummified Corpses as Dolls'

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Historian Arrested for Desecration

Russian 'Dressed Up Mummified Corpses as Dolls'

Police in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod have arrested a 45-year-old local historian after reportedly finding the mummified bodies of 29 people in the flat he shared with his parents. In an interview, the man had boasted that no one knew the city's cemeteries as well as he did.

He was renowned in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod as a leading local historian, a linguistics expert specializing in Celtic culture who had studied 13 foreign languages and had written several books.

But Anatoly M. was also known for his interest in cemeteries and the dead -- and the 45-year-old has now been arrested after police reportedly found the mummified bodies of 29 young women in his apartment. M. is accused of digging the corpses up, taking them home and dressing them before draping the bodies over chairs and sofas.

A police video of the man's home showed a macabre collection of what looked like life-size dolls, dressed in bright clothes and headscarves, their hands and faces wrapped in what appeared to be cloth. All the bodies were those of young women, reportedly between 15 and 25 years old when they died.

Police also found instructions for doll-making as well as photos and nameplates from grave sites, which could help with identification of the remains.

752 Cemeteries

The arrest followed a long-running investigation into the desecration of graves at several cemeteries in Nizhny Novgorod beginning in 2010, police spokeswoman Svetlana Kovylina said. She did not explain how they tracked him down. The national daily Moskovsky Komsomolets said the suspect was detained at a cemetery while carrying a bag of bones. But Kriminalnaya Khronika, a crime news website in the Nizhny Novgorod region, said police investigators discovered the bodies when they visited Anatoly M. to consult with him about the desecration.

According to the Komsomolskaya Pravda, the suspect's parents -- who also lived in the flat -- had become suspicious of their son's activities when they returned from their summer dacha suddenly, surprising him during the preparation of one of the corpses. It was not initially clear how his parents could have remained ignorant of their son's activities for so long.

The newspaper quoted from an old interview given by Anatoly M. to a journalist from Nizhny Novgorod in which he declared: "By my calculations, I have visited 752 cemeteries in the past two and a half years." He had been wandering through cemeteries since he was in the seventh grade, he added, and claimed: "I don't think anyone in the city knows them better than I do."

Just last month, he wrote a piece for a publication on necrology to explain his interest in the dead. He said that when he was 12, he came across a funeral procession whose participants forced him to kiss the face of a dead 11-year-old girl.

"An adult pushed my face down to the waxy forehead of the girl in an embroidered cap, and there was nothing I could do but kiss her as ordered," M. wrote in Nekrolog. He said he later also grew interested in the occult.

Source: Spiegel Online