She told the neighbors that her daughter was simply sick. She assured her only relative that the girl was sleeping soundly. She lived with the corpse in the same apartment for 365 days. What is this? A mother’s grief that reaches the point of madness or the cold-blooded calculation of a cruel killer? It happened in the very heart of the so-called wild nineties, when the country was bursting at the seams, and human life seemed to have lost its value completely.
But even against the backdrop of general chaos, this story stands out for its monstrous, irrational cruelty. Winter 1994 . Ryazan region, workers’ settlement of Zaozerny. The name is misleading; there have been no lakes here for a long time. Only depleted rotting peat bogs, the eternal stench from the old boiler room, a single grocery store with almost empty shelves and several rows of identical dilapidated two-story barracks built back in the fifties.
This is a place where time stands still and hope died long before it could be forgotten. Vera Krevtsova lived in one of these barracks on the second floor in apartment number 12. At that time she was 57 years old. Neighbors, who years later would recall this story with a shudder, spoke about it little, but always in the same way.
Strange, unloved, with a mind of her own. Vera almost never went out into the yard. In the summer, when all the windows in the barracks were wide open to escape the stuffiness, her windows were tightly curtained with old, dirty blankets. She didn’t greet her neighbors in the common corridor, and she didn’t sit on the bench near the entrance.
The shared toilet on the floor was cleaned only late at night, when there was guaranteed to be no one in the corridor . She had an only daughter, Marina, 17 years old. A quiet, frightened ghost girl. She was seen in the village even less often than her mother. She hardly went to school. Vera took her documents a long time ago, declaring a transfer to home schooling.
In fact, as it later turned out, no training was conducted. Her mother simply did not let her leave the house, categorically. It was difficult to call them a family . A man of faith, Semyon Rabotyaga Starfyanikov, died about 5 years ago in 1989 . An industrial accident resulted in a crush by a tractor. Neighbors recalled that it was after her husband’s death that Vera seemed to have been replaced.
She hadn’t had an angelic character before, but after the funeral she started drinking. At first, quietly in her room, and then she went on heavy, hopeless drinking binges. Alcohol changed her beyond recognition. As soon as she got drunk, she became crazy, as they said in the village, the neighbors heard everything.
The cardboard walls of the barracks concealed nothing. They heard Vera howling, not just screaming, but howling at Marinka. The insults were monstrous. A parasite of a brat, just like her father. the same slug. And soon after the screams, the idols began to appear. At first, the deaf people seemed to be moving furniture.
But very soon the inhabitants of the corridor learned to unmistakably recognize the sound of a stool hitting the wall, the clang of broken dishes, and the dull, heavy sound of a body falling to the floor. The noise in apartment number 12 was terrible. No one dared to interfere. It was the nineties. The local police officer, one for three such villages, himself did not appear in Zaozerny very often and, as a rule, was no more sober than his charges.
Who would interfere in someone else’s family? This unspoken law of barrack life worked without fail. They were openly afraid of the same faith. Sober, going to the village store for another bottle, she was quiet, with her eyes half downcast . But as soon as she returned and locked the door, hell began to break out from behind the thin plywood, and her heavy, unblinking gaze discouraged the neighbors from asking any questions.
Marina tried to escape several times. Neighbor Zenaida Pavlovna, who lived door to door, recalled at least three such attempts. The girl ran out onto the stairwell wearing only a basaya nightgown. Despite the winter cold, she was shaking all over, covered in fresh bruises and could not utter a word, only crying silently, choking.
One time Zinaida dragged her to her place and tried to give her some hot tea, but less than an hour had passed when Vera started pounding on her door , completely sober, which was even more frightening, with angry, dry eyes. “Give me mine,” she hissed. And the neighbor opened the door. Vera grabbed Marinka by the hair and silently dragged her to her room in the twelfth.
The girl didn’t try to run anymore. Everything came to an end at the end of 1992, beginning of 1993. No one knows the exact date, but everyone remembers that it was right after the New Year, during the most severe January frosts. A scandal broke out again in the Krevtsovs’ apartment . This time, according to the recollections of neighbors, he was especially cruel.
screams, squeals, and then a terrible crash, as if a heavy wardrobe had collapsed. And immediately after that there was dead, absolute silence. There was such silence that it made the barracks corridor even colder. The neighbors exchanged glances, but did not knock on the door. They decided that the mother and daughter had fallen asleep drunk.
In the morning, Vera left the apartment, calm, even peaceful. which was completely unlike her. She silently walked into the store, took some bread and a bottle of vodka. In the corridor she was intercepted by that same Zenaida Pavlovna, whose heart was still not in the right place. “Vera,” she asked as quietly as she could.
” Where’s Marinka? I can’t hear her at all.” Vera stopped, slowly turned her head and looked at her neighbor without blinking, and in a quiet, even voice answered: “Sleeping!” She was very tired. She needs peace. She turned around, entered her apartment and locked the door twice.
From that day on, January 1993 , no one saw Marina Krevtsova alive . Later, the investigation will piece together the picture of what happened behind that door. This was not just a domestic conflict. That evening, drunk Vera once again attacked her daughter. The reason was trivial. She didn’t look at me right and didn’t answer right away.
The quarrel instantly escalated into a brutal beating. The girl, already accustomed to beatings, tried to lock herself in the corner of the room near an old closet. She tripped and fell on her back. Vera, who had fallen into an insane alcoholic rage, did not stop. On her feet she had on heavy winter boots, dutik boots with thick, molded rubber soles.
In a rage, she hit her lying daughter on the head with this boot several times with all her strength . Marina’s death occurred almost instantly. When Vera realized that her daughter was not breathing or moving, she fell silent. It was the same silence that the neighbors heard. According to her own, extremely confused testimony, she sat next to the body for several hours until the room had completely cooled down.
She did not call an ambulance or the police, and then, as forensic psychiatric experts would determine , her consciousness simply switched off. It refused to accept the monstrous reality. In her head, in her own sick world, nothing irreparable happened. My daughter was simply sleeping very soundly.
In a panic, but already in a state of acute psychotic breakdown, Vera decided that everything could still be fixed. You just have to wait. Wait until Marina rests and wakes up on her own. The most terrible year in the history of Zaozerny has begun. A year during which the mother lived in the same apartment with the dead body of her daughter, caring for her as if she were sleeping.
For Vera Krevtsova, time stood still on that January day in 1990 . But for the physical world, no. The first thing her madness encountered was not remorse or fear of punishment, but the inexorable laws of nature. The fierce Russian winter became salvation for her collapsed psyche. The apartment in the barracks was almost unheated.
The temperature in the rooms barely stayed above freezing. Vera moved Marina’s body from the hallway where the murder took place to the far room onto her old bed. She covered her with a blanket and laid her head on the pillow. In her mind, her daughter was simply sleeping, and this sleep needed to be protected.
Forensic psychiatrists would later call this condition acute psychotic denial of death. The consciousness of faith, unable to process the monstrous fact that she, the mother, killed her own child, instantly built a protective barrier, an alternative reality. In this reality, Marina was alive, but simply very tired and needed rest. Vera took on the role of nurse.
This terrible ritual continued day after day. In the morning she came into the room and quietly said hello. She spoke to the body out loud, telling it what was happening outside the window and complaining about the neighbors. She brought her food, a plate of cold porridge or bread, put it on the nightstand and a few hours later took away the untouched plates, grumbling that Marinka had no appetite at all .
She began to change her clothes, taking old dresses and dressing gowns out of the wardrobe. She sat her body on the bed, leaning it against the wall, as if Marina was simply dozing, sitting up. This process was monstrous, but for faith it was only part of departure. But winter gave way to spring, and then came the sultry, rotten summer of 1993 .
And what the cold had been holding back began to manifest itself. Vera no longer opened the door to apartment number 12 to anyone. She boarded up the windows from the inside with plywood. The smell in the barracks corridor was already heavy, a mixture of dampness and mold. old rags and filth from an overflowing toilet. But now a new, incomparable, sweetish, heavy stench was mixed with it.
The neighbors knocked, asking why it smelled like that, and whether the sewer had burst. Vera did not open. She shouted from behind the door that everything was fine, and that everyone should get out, otherwise she would call the police. They had avoided her before, but now they shied away from her door. She almost stopped going out.
Only on rare nights, once a week, did she go to the general store for cheap vodka and bread. Over these months, she grew thin, turned black, turned into a living skeleton, obsessed with one idea: to protect her daughter’s sleep. But there was one person who still occasionally visited this house. Vera’s youngest niece, thirteen-year-old Lena, lived in a neighboring village.
Vera, who needed food but was afraid to leave the sleeping Marina for long, began using the girl as a courier. She met her on the stairs, gave her crumpled money and a list: vodka, three loaves of bread, pasta. Sometimes she still let her niece inside, but strictly forbade her to make noise. The door to the back room where Marina was kept was always tightly closed.
Lena, intimidated by both her aunt and the atmosphere of the apartment, later told investigators that the same terrible smell that made her eyes water was coming from behind that door. At that moment, Vera was sitting in the kitchen, putting her finger to her lips and whispering: “Quiet, quiet, Marinka is resting.
The doctors said we shouldn’t disturb her. She’s nervous. Don’t make any noise, or she’ll wake up.” The girl felt something was wrong. She saw that her aunt was talking to herself and that the apartment was unsanitary. But Vera held her tightly in her arms. She intimidated her niece, grabbed her hand with icy fingers and hissed: “Don’t tell anyone that if I find out what you were saying here, I’ll kill you.
” Do you understand me? Elena remained silent. She was afraid. This nightmare, hidden from everyone behind the thin door of apartment number 12, continued throughout 1993. Summer passed, the rotten, damp autumn passed, a new winter came, just as cold as the previous one. A year of denial, a year of living with a corpse. Vera was completely out of touch with reality.
She stopped paying rent a long time ago. Electricity bills were growing. And it was precisely this everyday communal detail, and not cries for help or intervention from neighbors, that ultimately destroyed her terrible, insane illusion. The denouement came in January 1994 . Exactly one year after Marina Krevtsova fell asleep, the illusion was destroyed not by conscience or neighbors, but by a banal household debt.
For 12 months, Vera Krevtsova did not pay a penny for electricity. In the reality of a poverty-stricken village, where there was a fight for every kilowatt , the debt of apartment number 12 reached a critical point. On a cold January day, when the temperature dropped below 20 degrees, a team of utility workers arrived at the barracks.
Two sullen electricians with a toolbox, tired of constantly visiting non-payers, and their task was to disconnect apartment number 12 from the main network. They knocked for a long time on the thin, leatherette-covered door. They pounded with their fists, then with their feet.
There was no sound coming from behind the door . The electricians, having decided that no one was in the apartment, were already preparing to cut the wires on the panel in the hallway. But then, from behind the door, a dull, stifled voice of faith was heard. Go away, I have paid everything. The workers began to explain that they had an order to turn off. In response, Vera began to scream.
It was not [the music] of curses, but a panicked, broken whisper. Go away, don’t make noise. Will you wake her up? She can’t. This reaction puzzled even the utility workers, who were used to everything. Quarrels, drunken threats. It was the order of things. But this is a panicked, frantic request to maintain silence.
Something was wrong. According to the instructions, in the event of inappropriate behavior by residents or denial of access, they were obliged to call the local police officer. The local police officer, Senior Lieutenant Sidorov, showed up an hour later, a tired, frozen man who had seen everything the turbulent nineties had to offer in a depressed workers’ settlement.
The same neighbor Zenaida Pavlovna went with him as a witness . Sidorov attempted to negotiate. Krevtsova, Vera Pavlovna, open up. Police, if you don’t pay, your power will be cut off . You’ll freeze here. From behind the door came only heavy breathing and muttering. You can’t, you can’t make noise. Marinochka is sleeping. The local police officer realized that the woman was not herself.
Perhaps drunk, perhaps delirium tremens. He decided to force the door open, fearing that there might be a child locked inside or that the owner herself was in danger. The simple barracks lock couldn’t withstand it. The local police officer’s shoulder and the electrician’s crowbar did their job. The door swung open.
The first thing that hit my nose was not the smell. It was a blow, a heavy, thick stench that made everyone instinctively recoil back into the corridor. It wasn’t just the stench of dampness or sewage. It was a chemical cocktail of vinegar, caustic bleach, and mold. and something else unbearably sweet and dead.
The local police officer, holding his nose with a handkerchief, stepped inside. The apartment was immersed in semi-darkness. The windows, boarded up with plywood, barely let in the dim winter light. Everywhere there were piles of dirty rags, empty bottles of vinegar and vodka, and mountains of old newspapers. Vera herself was sitting on the floor in the kitchen.
She had become a shadow, withered in a dirty robe, with sunken eyes that burned with a mad, feverish fire. When she saw people, she didn’t scream, but hissed, putting her finger to her lips: “Quiet! I asked you to! Quiet.” Sidorov looked around. He looked for the source of the smell. The door to the far room was tightly closed and propped open with something from the inside.
He pushed aside the old chest of drawers and pushed the door. She opened. The room was icy. The window was broken and snow was blowing in. In the dim light coming from the corridor and in the beam of a flashlight that one of the electricians directed there . They saw it. On the bed, propped up against the pillows in a sitting position, was a figure.
She was covered with an old, faded robe. The local police officer stepped closer. It was not a doll, it was a body, almost completely mummified. Cold, constant drafts and aggressive chemical treatment did their job. The body did not decompose, it dried up, turned black, turning into a terrible parchment shell.
The electricians, men who had served in the army and seen everything, turned around silently and ran out into the corridor. They vomited right there on the stairwell. Zenaida Pauna let out one short, piercing scream and sank to the floor. At that moment Vera jumped up. She rushed past the dumbfounded police officer into the room, rushed to the bed and adjusted the robe on the mummy’s shoulders.
She sat down next to him and stroked his withered, branch-like hand. Turning to the policeman frozen in the doorway, she looked at him reproachfully and quietly, almost tenderly, whispered: “Why are you shouting like that? Don’t make noise, she’s sleeping. She’s so tired, she’ll get up soon.” At that moment, the icy air of the barracks seemed to freeze completely.
Senior Lieutenant Sidorov, a man who had seen drunken brawls, stabbings, and the darkest manifestations of everyday decay in his time, stood on the threshold of the room, unable to move or look away. The words of faith, spoken with a quiet, almost tender, maternal reproach, pierced the silence and paralyzed the will. He backed away, instinctively slamming the door to the terrible room, isolating reality from this madness.
Pushing aside the numb, pale utility workers, he ran out onto the stairs to his radio. What started as a routine call about unpaid electricity bills turned into a gruesome murder case in an instant. An hour later, the village of Zaozerny, usually immersed in winter hibernation, was buzzing.
The squalid two-story barracks were cordoned off by the police. An investigative team arrived from Ryazan , along with investigators from the prosecutor’s office, gloomy forensic experts with heavy suitcases, and a forensic expert. Even for them, people whose profession was death, what they saw was a shock. It’s one thing to find a body, quite another to find it in such a state, in such a terrible context.
Apartment number 12 was sealed and turned into evidence. The forensic experts worked in respirators; breathing the caustic mixture of chlorine, vinegar, and decay products was physically impossible. There were traces of her horrific ritual everywhere. The main find awaited them in the far room .
The body of Marina Krevtsova, 17 years old. The forensic expert recorded it. Partial natural mummification, enhanced by aggressive chemical action, Vera in her madness proved to be a frighteningly effective embalmer. There were signs of her care everywhere, piles of dirty linen and rags with which she had obviously wiped her body. Dried plates with fossilized, moldy porridge on the nightstand, a row of empty bottles of bleach and vinegar essence.
In the corner stood a basin of dim frozen water. Vera herself was led out by the arms by two policemen. She didn’t resist or scream. She was completely, utterly detached from reality. The only thing she asked was to keep quiet in a monotonous whisper . When the forensic experts began their work and began to pack her daughter’s blackened body into a black plastic bag, Vera did not cry.
She just stared blankly at the wall, shaking her head slightly, as if she couldn’t believe that these rude strangers dared to so unceremoniously disturb her girl’s sleep. Her condition was recorded in the protocol as depressed, detached from reality, in a deep psychotic state. The body was immediately taken to the regional morgue.
The cover-up confirmed what investigators already understood. Death did not come from illness, cold or hunger. The cause was a severe, life-incompatible closed craniocerebral injury caused by multiple targeted blows to the head with a blunt, heavy object. On the withered body, traces of old, poorly healed fractures of the ribs and forearms were still visible, silent witnesses to the many years of domestic hell that unfolded behind this door.
Investigators began to methodically reconstruct the picture. It was then that Vera’s very heavy winter boot with a thick cast sole came into play. It was found in the hallway at the entrance, thoroughly washed, but forensic examination will reveal microscopic cracks in the soles. The marks completely matched the nature of the injuries on Marina’s head.
The interrogations began. The frightened neighbors, including Zinaida Pavlovna, vied with each other in telling everything they had been afraid to say out loud for so long about the terrible binges of faith, about the screams, about the sounds of blows, about how Marina tried to run away barefoot in the cold, and about how for the last year they had heard only dead silence and smelled this terrible, inexplicable smell, which they attributed to rats and a rotting basement. The key witness was the
thirteen-year-old niece Lena. The girl, broken by horror and guilt, finally told everything: how she brought her aunt vodka, bread and vinegar, how she met her at the door without letting her in. How she hissed so that she wouldn’t make noise, because Malinka was resting, she was nervous. To the investigator’s main question.
Did you guess that Marina was dead? The girl, choking on tears, only shook her head. She had no idea, she was simply panicky afraid of her aunt. The murder scene, committed a year ago, was practically proven. The motive was a domestic quarrel against the background of alcohol intoxication. But the main question that tormented the investigators was not who and how, but why.
Why didn’t she get rid of the body? Why didn’t you bury it, take it away, or burn it? Why did you stay with him? While putting together this horrific, insane spectacle, Vera Krevtsova was placed in a pretrial detention center cell, but it quickly became clear that she didn’t belong there. She did not respond to investigators and did not answer questions about the merits of the case.
During interrogations, she sat staring at one point, and only monotonously repeated that her daughter was sleeping in the hospital and that she needed to be given warm socks and jam. A comprehensive inpatient forensic psychiatric examination was ordered. Investigators and the court had to get an answer to the most important question.
Was Vera Krevtsova sane on that January day in 1993 ? when she hit her with a boot and what happened to her after. Her future fate depended on this verdict. A long sentence in a general regime penal colony or a ward in a closed special hospital for the rest of her days. The case of Vera Krevtsova became a puzzle not so much for investigators as for forensic psychiatrists.
The question of sanity was key. She was transferred to a regional closed-type psychiatric hospital, where a commission of experts spent several weeks trying to break through the wall of her insanity. The findings they presented to the court were shocking but comprehensive. An examination established that at the time of the murder on that very January day in 1993, Vera Krevtsova was in a state of severe alcohol intoxication and affect.
However, she was aware of the actual nature of her actions. She understood that she was beating her daughter. She understood that kicks from a boot could cause death. At that moment she was sane, although limited in her actions by rage and alcohol, but what happened afterward, in those few hours that she sat in silence next to the cooling body, went beyond the scope of jurisprudence, realizing that her daughter was dead and that she herself was the killer, her consciousness could not withstand this monstrous burden. It
broke. To protect faith from immediate suicide or complete personality disintegration, a primitive but powerful defense mechanism—an acute reactive psychotic state—was activated. Her brain literally rewrote reality. He erased the fact of death. In her new world, Marina did not die, but simply fell asleep and became ill.
She didn’t pretend in front of her neighbors, her niece, or the utility workers. She believed. Her denial was absolute. A year of living with a mummy, talking to her, treating the room with bleach and vinegar. All this was not an attempt to hide a crime, but a desperate, insane ritual of caring for the sick.
It was her only way to continue to exist without going completely crazy . Although she had long since crossed that line, Vera Krevtsova’s trial, which took place in the spring of 1994 , was quiet, quick and closed. The public outcry was enormous, but reporters were not allowed into the courtroom, and there was nothing to see there.
In the dock sat not a cruel murderer, but a withered shadow, a small, empty man. She did not respond to the judge, to the prosecutor, or to the testimony of her neighbors. When Zenaida Pavlovna, crying, told about the screams and beatings, Vera only looked out the window with detachment. Once during the entire meeting, she turned to the guard and quietly asked if they had forgotten to give Marinochka the warm socks she had been knitting to the hospital.
The court took into account the expert opinion. The verdict was complex, but legally precise. Vera Krevtsova was found guilty of premeditated murder committed in a state of passion. But the court also found that after committing the crime, she fell into a severe chronic psychotic state, which deprived her of the ability to understand her further actions, such as concealment, and bear responsibility for them.
She was found to be of limited sanity. This did not mean prison. She could not serve her sentence in a general regime penal colony. Vera Krevtsova was sent for compulsory treatment to a closed-type hospital, a special psychiatric hospital for those who have committed particularly serious crimes. She was taken away from Ozerny on the same day.
No one ever saw her in the village again . Rumor has it that she died a few years later. at the beginning of the two-day period in the ward, without ever coming out of his state. Until the last day, she believed that her daughter was simply fast asleep in the next room. Neighbors who lived with faith in the same corridor moved away or died.
The barracks gradually emptied, but those who remained and their children avoided that door for decades. They claimed that even through the boarded-up boards, the apartment continued to emanate cold and the same smell of vinegar and decay. Niece Lena, who became an unwitting witness and accomplice to this madness, suffered severe psychological trauma for the rest of her life.
She changed her last name and left the Ryazan region, trying to erase that year from her memory forever. But this story is not only about one woman’s personal madness. This is a sentence for an entire society, an entire barracks, an entire village. The history of Zaozerny has revealed that what is more terrible than any psychosis is collective.
Deaf indifference. Hundreds of times neighbors heard screams. They saw bruises on Marina’s face dozens of times. They smelled the terrible smell for a whole year, but no one ever broke down the door. The fear of the strange, evil, alcoholic neighbor turned out to be stronger than the basic one. Compassion.
In that terrible reality of the nineties, in an atmosphere of decay and indifference, a living girl begging for help was as much a ghost as a dead one. It’s just that no one wanted to pay attention to it. until they came to turn off the electricity.
