Mummy found

Dwellers of an apartment building in the city of Tula, central Russia, were horrified to learn of a discovery made in one of the apartments. The mummified body of a tenant was found in a sitting position in the kitchen of his apartment. The tenant had been dead for six years.

One hazy morning a telephone started ringing in an office of Mark Ignashin, an investigator with the prosecutor’s office of Tula’s central district. “This is a duty officer of a district police station. We’ve received a report on a mummified body found in apartment building No 142 on Lenin Street. We’re sending a vehicle to pick you up, Mr. Ignashin,” said the officer and hung up.

No sooner had Ignashin stepped into a typical Khrushchev-era tiny apartment than he became aware of a pungent putrid smell. A mummified body in a plaid shirt was seated at a kitchen table. The brownish parchment-like skin covered the mummy’s dried-up bones. An empty vodka bottle and a glass sat on a dusty table. One of the policemen brought a bunch of newspapers from a living room. All the newspapers dated back to February of 2000.

Valentina Muradova was brought in as a witness to the official search. The woman peered at the mummy for some minutes until she finally recognized her neighbor called Vladimir Ledenev, 68, who vanished without a trace six years ago. According to police records, Ledevev had earlier spent four years in prison for battery. His neighbors told the police that the man had started drinking heavily after his mother passed away ten years ago. Ledenev was frequently seen collecting empty bottles for a living because his pension was pretty small. Eventually, Ledenev disappeared at the beginning of 2000.

“We reckoned that he’d moved somewhere else or checked himself into a hospital, he had TB,” said Irina Borodina, one of the neighbors. “Then we thought he’d ended up in prison again though our local policeman knew nothing about Ledenev’s new brushes with the law,” added the neighbor.

“A man just vanished from your house. Has anybody felt anything strange and tried to raise the alarm?” Ivanshin asked the neighbors.

“He was a standoffish kind of man, he rarely talked to us. He kept away from the neighbors most of the time. He was always short on money. People from a real estate agency tried to talk him into swapping his two-room apartment for a smaller place, promising him a handsome bonus for the deal. He just told them to get lost,” said Borodina.