A Russian man who robbed the graves of 29 young girls and lived with their mummified corpses could soon walk free.
Anatoly Moskvin, 59, turned dead children into ‘dolls’, dressing them in stockings, clothes and knee-length boots before applying makeup to them.
The historian – an expert on cemeteries and a former military intelligence translator – marked the birthday of each of his dead victims in his bedroom in chilling rituals.
Until now, courts repeatedly refused to release him, but pro-Kremlin news outlet Shot says psychiatric doctors are recommending that he is safe to return home.
They are ‘submitting documents to the court to discharge the patient and place him under the care of relatives’.
They want to re-categorise him as ‘incapacitated’, which means he could live with friends or relatives or in a care institution, which does not lock him up.
The secure hospital in Nizhny Novgorod city refused to comment.
Moskvin was detained in 2011 and confessed to 44 counts of abusing the graves of girls aged three to 12.
Parents of the dead children whose graves he opened and robbed have long pleaded to keep him incarcerated for the rest of his life.
They fear the multi-lingual historian – and author of several books – will return to his sinister habit, which saw him living with some children’s remains for up to ten years.
Moskvin has consistently refused to apologise to the families of his victims.
The corpse of murder victim Olga Chardymova, aged ten, was one of the 29 he dug up and turned into mummified dolls, some with music boxes wedged in their chests.
Her mother, Natalia Chardymova, 53, did not realise that on her regular visits to her daughter’s graveside, the coffin was empty because Moskvin had stolen Olga’s remains for his sick collection.
During an earlier attempt by the doctors to free him, which was ultimately overturned by the court, she said: ‘I am also very afraid that he will go back to his old ways.
‘I have no faith in his recovery. He’s a fanatic. And it will be very hard for us, God forbid, to go through those events one more time – exhumation and reburial – if he again finds the place she was reburied.
‘My health is failing me, and I don’t think I can face this. I do not want tragic events. Life is tough anyway now….. This creature brought fear, terror and panic into my life.’
The bodysnatcher earlier told the parents: ‘You abandoned your girls in the cold – and I brought them home and warmed them up.’
In Soviet times, Moskvin worked as a translator for military intelligence in the Red Army, and later wrote several history books.
His mother, Elvira, 86, said: ‘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.’
She claimed after a 2020 decision against releasing him that the court was biased against her son, who was ‘not able to be in society, work, or get married’.
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