A well-known historian in Russian academia, fluent in 13 languages, taught at universities, published books, and published many scholarly works. When colleagues around him mention him, they all call his work "priceless."
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Morskovin, a 45-year-old historian, has been living with his parents.
The family lives in the central Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, where they get along well with their neighbors and are usually quiet and low-key.
The only thing that made the neighbors a little uncomfortable was that when the door to their house opened, there was always a smelly smell wafting from the house. However, many of the local buildings are some years old, and the basement will always have a rotten, unpleasant smell. So, the neighbors didn't think much of it.
In 2009, local people found that their family's graves were showing signs of being excavated or destroyed, so they called the police.
However, this phenomenon occurs only occasionally. So, for more than two years, the police have received police from time to time, but there is no clue.
In 2011, things took a turn for the better.
The local people saw someone sneaking in front of a cemetery, so they immediately called the police. Eight police officers caught Moskven in front of the grave.
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Police went to the apartment where Moskovin lived to gather evidence.
They found shoes in the apartment that matched the footprints found near the previous grave, and when the police searched further in the apartment, they found something even more shocking.
As you can see from the video released at the scene, the whole room looks messy, full of books, documents and miscellaneous items. A rotten, foul-smell filled the room.
There are also many life-size, doll-like dolls in the house.
They are very similar to antique dolls, wearing elaborate costumes, and some have national characteristics. Some of the dolls wore knee-length boots, some had groomed makeup on their faces, and their hands were wrapped in sleeves.
Some of them sit on the shelves, some lie on the couch, and some stay in a mess of books.
The dolls look very weird. When the police moved one of them, the doll also played music automatically, and it turned out that the doll's body was embedded with a music box.
The next findings made the investigators very uneasy.
The police found that these were not toy dolls — but real human girls, wearing the same clothes they were buried in.
They have a lot of personal belongings in their bodies, some are their own funerary objects, some are their own tombstones with their names written on them, and some have hospital labels with the date and reason of the girl's death.
They were all mummified by Moskvin.
These are mummies to us, but in Muskwin's eyes, these dolls are alive and are his children.
Usually, he would talk and interact with the dolls, sing songs for them and watch cartoons together, and even throw birthday parties for his favorite dolls.
In the end, police found a total of 29 life-size dolls in Moskovin's house. Their ages range from 3 to 25 years.
One of the mummies was preserved by him for almost 9 years.
Here is a picture of the victim and her mummified body.
When the news came to light, the victim's family said it was hard to accept, and the girl's father said angrily:
He had been living in his bedroom with my daughter for nine years, I had her for ten years and he had her for nine years.
However, Moskovin's response to the outside world was:
You abandoned your girls, and I took them home and warmed them up.
There are so many weird dolls in the house, and the smell is so bad, didn't Moskovin's parents notice anything abnormal?
Moskvin's parents say they know nothing about the true origin of Moskovin's "doll."
His mother said: "We see these dolls, we think these dolls are his hobby, we don't think there is anything wrong with it. "
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What was Moskovin's motivation for doing so?
After his arrest, during police interrogation, Moskovin said he was single, lonely, and especially wanted a child, and wanted a daughter.
He once tried to persuade his parents to adopt a little girl, but was rejected by his parents, and in order not to regret it for the rest of his life, Muskwin decided to make a doll himself.
He knew he was committing a crime by doing so, but he felt that the dead child was "asking for help" from him, and he thought that in the future he could find a way to resurrect the dead through scientific research. In his opinion, it was more important to save the child than to obey the law.
Moskvin, an expert on Celtic culture, learned that the ancient Druids slept on graves in order to communicate with the souls of the dead. He also studied the culture of the Siberian peoples, especially the ancient Yakuts, and found that they had similar practices of communicating with the dead.
From the beginning of his visit to the cemetery to the time he was caught, the historian walked through more than seven hundred cemeteries.
He often walked 30 kilometers a day, drank water from puddles when thirsty, spent the night in haystacks and abandoned farms, and at one point even slept in a coffin prepared for a funeral.
He made detailed records of each cemetery and delved into the history of the people buried there. These records and discoveries were edited into text by him and published in local magazines and weekly magazines.
It was his fascination with death that made him a "cemetery expert" and a "necromantist".
His observations, however, are not just observations.
Moskovin began searching for obituaries of dead children. When he finds a child "talking" to him, he sleeps on her grave to determine if the child's soul wishes to be resurrected.
Moskovin said that in the beginning, he never dug a grave without the child's permission. As he grew older, sleeping on the grave became painful for him, so he began to bring the bodies home. He wants his children to stay in a safe, warm home rather than underground.
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Why did Moskovin have such a strong interest in death?
It turned out that when he was 13 years old, he underwent a strange ritual.
That day, on his way home from school, he was stopped by a group of people in black suits. They took Moskven to the coffin of an 11-year-old girl and ordered him to kiss the girl.
"I kissed her again, again, again."
The grieving mother then put a ring on his and his daughter's hands.
This strange ritual made Moskovin interested in magic, and instead of being frightened by kissing corpses, he began to wander around the cemetery frequently.
This interest in death even led him to great academic achievements.
He studied the history and folklore of the Celts, as well as linguistics. He mastered about 13 languages, and after graduating from the Linguistics Department of Moscow State University, Moskvin rose to fame in academia.
Moskvin had a keen interest in cemeteries, funeral rites, death, and the occult.
Colleagues described Moskovin as a genius and a freak.
In the early years, many of his articles in the press had already shown some signs. His colleagues considered him a loner with "certain quirks."
Who would have thought that his quirk would be to mummify the corpses of dead girls!
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As an adult, Moskovin lived a life of seclusion, and he never married or dated.
Until his arrest, he lived with his parents.
The judge at the trial claimed that Muskwin's case was really too special.
In the end, the historian was not prosecuted, but ruled paranoid schizophrenia. In 2012, he was taken to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.
The latest news is that his lawyer applied to the court, and after nine years of treatment, he has now recovered, applying to be discharged from a mental hospital for rehabilitation at home. And he had a date, planning to move to Moscow and get married.
However, Moskovin's request to be discharged from the hospital, already 55, was denied.
Will Moskovin be free in the future?
The mother of one of the victims believes that Moskwen should have been kept in hospital for the rest of his life.
When Moskovin was arrested, he said not to bother burying the girls too deeply, because he would help them out after they were released.