Why couldn't he just be happy with Barbie dolls?

Those of us who marvel at the vagaries of the human psyche recently received a gift in the form of a Russian man, Anatoly Moskvin, 45, who had dug up the bodies of 29 women and dressed them up like dolls to decorate the three room apartment he shared with his parents. (Ma and Pa sure set a new standard for parental leniency there.)

The NY Post reported that police investigators were shocked at what they found in the city of Volga River city of Nizhny Novgorod. Moskvin reportedly stole just the bodies of young women. (Well, at least he wasn't a pervert.)

 

From this one snapshot it looks as if his apartment could have been selected for an episode of Hoarders. Three rooms does seem an awfully small space in which to fit 29 bodies, as well as three living people.

Moskvin is a professional historian who supposedly speaks 13 languages, and was described as a "genius" by his neighbors. (If he can actually speak 13, then he merits that description.) He once stated that his interest in the dead dated from the time he was 12, and was made to kiss the face of a dead 11-year-old girl.

Moskvin has the thin lips of a serial killer, and his sneer and unkempt appearance in this picture certainly make him look creepy enough. But Moskvin didn't kill. He was more spiritual cousin to Ed Gein, the infamous Wisconsin man who stole the remains of nine women from local graveyards in the late 1940's and early 1950's, and occasionally dressed up in their skins. (Gein also killed two women, and was used as the model for Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs.)

When the police searched Gein's house, they found nine masks made from human skin, bowls from human skulls, human skin covering several seat chairs, nine vulvae in a shoebox, a belt made from female human nipples, a pair of lips on a drawstring for a window shade, and a lampshade made from the skin of a human face.

You can decide for yourself who's weirder -- Anatoly Moskvin for dressing corpses up as dolls, or Ed Gein for occasionally wearing someone else's skin. 

Or me, for being so fascinated by these guys.