“The smell of a dead mouse.” The mummified corpses of two families lay forgotten for months.

An ordinary panel high-rise building on Shokalsky Proezd in the north-west of Moscow instantly turned into the epicenter of news. In just a few days, the corpses of four people were found in two apartments. All dehydrated. Moreover, people died a long time ago, at least a month ago.

It all started with the fact that the niece could not get through to her 66-year-old aunt for a long time, who lived in the third entrance of the house with her 34-year-old son. As a result, the woman decided to visit her relatives. Arriving to visit and opening the door, which was not locked, the woman saw a terrible picture: her aunt and cousin were dead. Later, information would appear in the media that he committed suicide.

It is known that the deceased was seriously ill and was bedridden. Her son looked after her. As some media wrote, the man suffered from a mental disorder since adolescence.

However, the neighbors did not confirm this information to the Aif.ru correspondent, who visited the strange house.

We lived like hermits

“They led a secluded life. We saw our mother extremely rarely and for a long time; she was seriously ill. I only remember that she was very full. Their father died five years ago. But I saw my son about a month ago. By the way, that’s when we talked a little for the first time. We went up in the elevator together, I returned for my bag, left it in the apartment, he, apparently, also forgot something, and then went down together. They looked at each other, smiled, and said something, like, it’s a funny situation. And then I find out about this tragedy, it’s a nightmare,” says a neighbor of the deceased family. The woman’s apartment is on the same floor as theirs.

I’m wondering if you’ve had an unpleasant odor lately? “Yes, there was something, but we thought maybe the mouse died somewhere,” she answers. “We felt a real stench when they started taking furniture out of this apartment. The smell was sickening. My son and I were on our way from his birthday party, we got into the elevator, and I felt bad. As a result, they returned to their friends and sat out. Then we asked them for masks, and so we went home.”

“Yes, we also smelled a dead mouse, but we didn’t pay any attention,” a neighbor from the ninth floor joins our conversation, distracted from her work. She is tidying up the front garden of the house after the winter.

Crutch and pasta

While we are talking, a man with packages walks from the entrance and back every now and then. Pots, cereals, and packages of pasta are visible through the polyethylene. Apparently, he takes everything to the container site. On one of the “flights” he brought a crutch and a cane. I’m trying to communicate with him. Replying that he is not local, he leaves.

After talking with the neighbors at the entrance, I go up to the seventh floor. There is a cloying, sweetish corpse smell in the stairwell. The door to the apartment is open. A woman is bustling around in the corridor, packing things into bags. My already familiar stranger is waiting for the garbage to accumulate for the next trip. Both refuse to comment, hastily closing the door. Most likely this is the same niece who discovered her relatives dead.

Misfortune helped

From the third entrance I go to the fifth. Here on April 1, two days after the discovery of the deceased mother and son, on the sixth floor in a three-room apartment are our bodies of an 87-year-old father and his 54-year-old daughter. Probably, if not for the first incident, no one would have known about the second for a long time.

“When the ambulances, the Ministry of Emergency Situations, and the police arrived at the third entrance, where they found the corpses, I went up to them and asked them to check the apartment of my neighbors, whom I had not seen since January,” a resident of the “crypt house” tells me. Tamara Vasilievna. “They listened to everything and wrote down my contact information. And on the evening of April 1, their apartment was opened. We live on the sixth floor, just on opposite sides of the staircase. Neighbors from the upper and lower floors gathered to watch the doors being broken, and there were two of them – metal and wood. But as soon as the doors were broken down, it was as if everyone was blown away by the wind. Such a disgusting, corpse-like smell came from the apartment. Of course, I also went home. Then I looked through the peephole. Guys, I don’t know, probably the Ministry of Emergency Situations, have been fiddling around here for several hours. I didn’t see how the corpses were taken out.”

I went up to the sixth floor. Now the door is sealed, the lock is cut off. It is clear that the leatherette door trim is old. And looking at the windows from the street before, I pay attention to the shabby wooden frames with dusty glass. The old house and its residents are almost entirely elderly people.

History as a carbon copy

Continuing the conversation with Tamara Vasilievna, I learn that the deceased father and daughter, like the family from the third entrance, were not particularly sociable.

“Our house was built in 1967. My family and I have lived here since 1987. As soon as we moved in, we quickly became acquainted with all the neighbors on the landing, with the exception of these. Their mother was still alive then. Everyone learned about her death only several years later. Can you imagine how closed they are? What is the name of the man who died? Genaand his late daughter Lena“I only heard from the local police officer who was here when the door was broken,” says my interlocutor. “Once there was a flood in the house, everyone went from house to house to find out where it was flowing from. I called them, knocked, and when I started beating on the door with my fist, after a couple of minutes they opened it. Very secretive people.”

It is known that before his retirement, the man worked as an electrician at a ball bearing factory, but no one knows what his wife and daughter did. “My daughter was overweight and walked with shortness of breath. The old man, on the contrary, is thin. I often saw him going to the store with a bag on wheels. And in the summer they went to the dacha. I only talked to Lena once, when I saw an unusual plant in a bag along with tomato seedlings. She said that she was drawn to the exotic, and decided to plant an azalea at the dacha,” says Tamara Vasilyevna.

The neighbors haven’t seen Elena for a long time, and the last time they met Gennady was in January. And at the end of February they noticed that a receipt with arrears of utility bills for February was stuck on their door.

“And so no one took it, this paper. I began to worry, I tried the door just in case, but it was closed. When I returned home, I looked at their windows. In the evenings there was always a dim light on in one of the rooms. And during the day I saw how a large flower was withering on the window: first the leaves withered, then the stem bent. This means there is no one to water,” recalls Tamara Vasilievna.

The first person to notice the unpleasant smell was a neighbor from the apartment nearby, already in March. “I also started sniffing, but the smell coming from the door was like that of this Gennady himself – an unkempt old man. Then another neighbor, Nellie from the seventh floor, began to complain. Well, I’ve already told you how it all ended,” the woman ends the story.

A series of deaths

In the conversation, by the way, Tamara Vasilievna mentioned that a few years ago a neighbor also died in their house. He died in his apartment, and the body was discovered a couple of months later when it was opened. “So now we don’t communicate with each other much. Everyone sits in their apartment and does not take an interest, does not ask how their neighbor is doing. We don’t even know each other’s names,” the woman notes sadly.

The news wrote that all four corpses found the other day in a house located on Shokalsky Passage were dehydrated. aif.ru spoke about what is hidden behind the definition of “dehydrated” pathologist, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences Lev Kaktursky. “This is the so-called mummification of bodies after death. It occurs quite often. The conditions are tightness and dryness of the room, thin structure (thinness) of the body. Overweight people could be dehydrated due to long-term intestinal disorders. Externally, dehydration followed by mummification is characterized by pronounced wrinkling of the skin,” the expert clarifies.