Translated material
"I'll take a little walk"
When 19-year-old Anna Apatchenko from Tomsk stopped answering her calls, her mother suspected something was wrong. She was even more worried when she received a strange SMS from her daughter’s number. Anna didn’t get in touch again, and police and volunteers started looking for her. Read about what happened to her in the new material of the weekly true-crime column “Cold.”
The mother received a strange message with spelling errors from her child’s number and realized that her daughter was in trouble
On May 3, 2013, 19-year-old Anna Apatchenko, a student at Tomsk State University, stayed at home and planned to write her coursework all day. At least that’s what she said in the morning, calling her mother, 38-year-old Alexandra Apatchenko.
Help Kholod tell human stories
We put people at the center of our journalism and talk about people who face injustice, but do not lose spirit and continue to fight for their rights and freedoms. To continue covering people's stories, we need the support of readers - thanks to your donations, we continue to work, despite government pressure.
- Foreign card
- Map of the Russian Federation ↘︎
- Patreon ↘︎
- Translation
- Crypt
Monthly
One-time
5 €
- 10 €
- 20 €
30 €
5 €
- 10 €
- 20 €
- Other
- Bank of the Russian Federation
- Foreign bank
Card number:
5536 9138 6472 8742
Copied!
Recipient:
Taisiya Bekbulatova
Copied!
Recipient:
Projektas Šaltis
Copied!
Account number:
LT613500010016198323
Copied!
SWIFT BIC:
EVIULT2VXXX
Copied!
Bank:
Lietuvos Bankas (Bank of Lithuania)
Copied!
Comment - purpose of payment:
Parama įstatymų numatytais tikslais (be konkretaus tikslo)
Copied!
We ask you to provide a comment so that we can accurately determine the receipt of funds. The phrase is translated as follows: “Support for statutory purposes (without a specific purpose).”
Amount: €
Donate
By making a donation, you accept the privacy policy
Closer to lunch, around two o'clock, Alexandra called her daughter, but she did not answer the phone. The phone was later switched off.
Alexandra became worried: before, her daughter always warned when she was going somewhere and was in touch. An hour later, she received a message from the contact “Anyuta’s daughter”: “The phone is dead, don’t worry, mom, I’ll take a little walk” (spelling and punctuation preserved) . However, Alexandra’s anxiety only intensified: her daughter graduated from a humanitarian lyceum and could not have made so many mistakes. She clearly didn't write the message.
“You shouldn’t joke with her”
According to a family friend, Anna was a “sociable girl” from childhood - “she always got along with the kids in the class.” She studied diligently at school and participated in all activities.
“Anya gave me the impression of a serious girl - there’s no need to joke with her. She is not one of those who can be offended and who will endure it,” Anna’s school friend told Kholod. “She was a morally strong person: if something was done wrong to her, she would give an answer.”
Anna was close to her mother - she, according to the girl’s friend, was a caring parent. She also “didn’t have much friction” with her younger sister. But communication with his father, on the contrary, did not work out: “He drank and behaved inappropriately under this occupation. He kicked the family out into the street and threatened to set the house on fire,” recalled Anna’s friend. As a result, in 2013, Alexandra Apatchenko and her two daughters began to live separately.
I earn up to a million rubles a month. My husband and I don’t count money and put everything into action. If I wasn't happy with my income, I would do something about it Society 12 min read
After graduating from school, Anna joined the budget of the best university in the city, TSU, and there she started a new company. At the same time, Anna began working part-time as a cleaner at a cardiology center, and for the first time she had her own money. “Her life was getting better,” recalls one of Anna’s friends.
On May 3, 2013, Alexandra Apatchenko left home in the morning while her daughter was still sleeping. And when my daughter stopped communicating, she sounded the alarm.
Apatchenko called her daughter’s boyfriend, 19-year-old Nikolai Kovalevich, who said that Anna was visiting him, and at about 15:00 he put her on bus No. 53, which went to Akademgorodok, where the girl lived.
Then Alexandra began calling hospitals, but to no avail - no one had heard anything about her daughter. At half past one in the morning she went to the police and wrote a statement about the missing child, and after that she went to Kovalevich’s hostel.
"Not just like that"
Anna started dating Kovalevich at the age of 16. According to her friend, he met Anna after school and walked her home, gave flowers and arranged surprises. He came for her, and when Anna’s father got drunk and began to threaten the family. “We walked hand in hand and kissed. It seems to me that it was sincere,” recalled Vyacheslav Korobeinikov, Kovalevich’s classmate. “It was clear that this was not just the case.”
And people liked Nikolai himself. “A normal kid,” said Olga Simarbina, his neighbor, about him. “As a child, he was good-looking, calm, and never did any mischief. And I didn’t see him drunk as an adult either.”
Kovalevich met Anna's mother in the corridor. “He was wearing sportswear. I noticed that he was doing laundry. I say: “It’s kind of strange, it’s three o’clock in the morning, and your car is washing,” she recalled . “And he looked me in the eyes, hugged me and said : “Anya will be found.” Don’t worry , Alexandra Nikolaevna, everything will be fine, where can Anya go?”
More than 100 volunteers, police and friends took part in the search for Anna. Her 14-year-old sister Tatyana took what was happening very hard: she closed herself off and practically stopped talking to her mother. “She also collects the children and goes [looking]. Someone will tell her something, and she will check the basements, look through some hatches,” Alexandra recalled . “He says: ‘Mom, we need to look over there, maybe they haven’t looked there yet.’”
Kovalevich was also actively looking for Anna: he printed leaflets, traveled around the city and posted them - his contacts were indicated on the orientation. He even spoke with federal media.
To find clues, relatives hacked Anna's computer and looked at her correspondence. “I want to break up with Kolya, because he has already tortured me with his jealousy,” Anna wrote to one of her friends.
Anna's friends had heard about the problems in their relationship before. “Kolya was timid and shy when he talked to me. “He tried to please,” Anna’s friend recalled in a conversation with Kholod. “But Anya told me that it was all for other people.”
Those who knew Kovalevich better had long noticed oddities in his behavior.
“Almost smeared it on the asphalt”
“He was downtrodden. Everyone in the class communicated well with him, but high school students used to mock him,” said Kovalevich’s classmate Vyacheslav Korobeinikov. - He was a little strange. He could say some nonsense and laugh at it himself.”
Ivan Kharitonov (name and surname have been changed), another classmate who studied with Nikolai from elementary school, in a conversation with Kholod, recalls that he showed cruelty to those who were weaker. One day Kovalevich and the boys went to play football after school, and one of the boys beat him. Then Kovalevich ran after him, caught up with him and “almost smeared him on the asphalt. It was a very serious violation."
From adolescence, Kovalevich was independent - his mother lived in the Tomsk region and often went on business trips, and he, according to his friend Anna, moved to a “corridor-type house” with a toilet on the floor. Nikolai settled in a room with an area of 15 square meters - there was an old sofa, a TV, a microwave and a refrigerator hung with magnets.
The “contingent” in the hostel “was not entirely pleasant,” her friend retells Anna’s impressions. Despite this, in August 2012, after another scandal with her father, Anna temporarily moved in with Nikolai - and their relationship went wrong.
Set it on fire and watched. In Yekaterinburg, a man kidnapped and tortured his ex-girlfriend, and then took her to a cemetery. She miraculously managed to escape Crime 21 minute read
Anna complained to a friend that Kovalevich was showing physical aggression. “When he plays on the computer, you have to be very careful with him, otherwise he will be very angry,” said Anna. According to a friend, during another quarrel, Kovalevich, saying “you see what I’m capable of,” put a kitchen knife to Anna’s throat - she stood with her back to the wall and could not do anything.
During their life together, Anna entered the Faculty of Economics at TSU. According to her mother, Anna made plans for her life - she wanted to get a second degree. Kovalevich, on the other hand, was “a person with absolutely no goal”: when he came home, he immediately “got bogged down in the computer.” Kharitonov recalls that Kovalevich could play the computer all night - Anna complained that she received almost no attention in the relationship.
In January 2013, Anna called her mother late at night and asked to pick her up from Kovalevich. That day she was going to go to his aunt's birthday party and bought a gift with her salary. Kovalevich did not give anything to his aunt and hit Anna. That same evening, her mother took her, especially since by that time she and her youngest daughter had moved out from her husband.
Anna stopped communicating with Nikolai, but he tried to win her back. “He just followed me around and asked me for forgiveness, asked me to allow him to communicate with my daughter,” said Anna’s mother. Three weeks later they finally made peace.
I just didn't want to let go
After some time, violence resumed. Anna wrote to Kharitonov about this - then he told Kovalevich that “it’s not like a man to hit a girl,” for which he blocked him. Soon Anna herself blocked him, according to him, noting that she “shared” it with him personally, so “there was no need to bother with comments” to Nikolai.
Anna’s friend believed that Kovalevich was not a match for her: “They are very different people. It seemed to me that this was some kind of life stage: I talked to an ordinary guy, and then you are a girl of a different plane,” she tells Kholod. However, Kovalevich had no intention of letting Anna go. “He just stuck to her. What drew her to him, I don’t know. I never liked him. He’s just kind of cloudy and smiles strangely,” said Anna’s mother. According to her , Kovalevich was an “owner”: “On his website [on social networks] it is written: “Anechka, my beloved.” He has a tattoo on his spine - “Anyuta.”
When Anna disappeared, the search participants also began to notice oddities in Kovalevich’s behavior. He almost immediately wrote in his status on VKontakte (spelling and punctuation preserved) : “People who saw or walked with Anya today!?!?! me and mom are worried!!!!”
Such a rush alarmed Anna's mother, because the search had not yet really begun.
The next day, Kovalevich was noticed on the bus with a “smile on half his face” - he was “laughing and joking.” “Our mutual friend once jokingly asked: “Did you happen to do this?” Ha-ha-ha,” Apatchenko’s friend told Kholod. “Something appeared on his [Nikolai’s] face. There was something elusive about him.”
On May 4, another friend of Anna wrote to Kovalevich and offered help because her father worked in the search service of Tomsk. He answered with many errors: “overnight”, “there was a walk”, “this has never happened before”, “delay” and “Soviet district”. He also wrote the word “a little bit” - exactly the same as in the SMS the day before Anna’s mother came from her daughter’s number.
The search participants believed even more that Kovalevich was somehow connected with the girl’s disappearance. However, he himself behaved calmly until the last: “I saw [Kovalevich] after [the day he went missing]. He said hello, I said hello. [Looked] fine, not nervous. He said “Hello,” and that’s it,” recalled Olga Simarbina, Kovalevich’s neighbor.
Ran away
The police also had questions for Kovalevich: He was the last person to see Anna. In addition, the girl’s phone was last contacted in the area where Kovalevich lived.
His room was searched. “Nothing suspicious was found in the young man’s apartment: no traces, no bloody clothes,”said Sergei Telegin, deputy head of the city department of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation for the Tomsk Region. “In a conversation with the investigator, the guy continued to insist on the version that he saw Anna off, put her on the bus and has not known anything about her since then.”
On May 6, police officers invited Kovalevich to the department by telephone to undergo a polygraph test. He said that “he couldn’t come right away,” but promised to be there by 16:00. However, when they called him at 15:30, he no longer picked up the phone - and at 16:00 his phone became completely unreachable .
Then the operatives arrived at Kovalevich’s address, opened the door and seized the computer. The last time Kovalevich’s phone went on air was outside the city. The police assumed he was running away.
For several days Kovalevich wandered through the forest. However, he was not ready for such a test, so on May 9 he hitched a ride back to Tomsk - hungry and bitten by ticks. Kovalevich took a taxi to his grandmother, and on the morning of May 10, his parents arrived there. Nikolai told them that during a quarrel he accidentally killed Anna, was afraid of punishment and dismembered the body to hide the crime.
Police officers searched for Kovalevich for three days until they received information that the fugitive was staying with relatives. On May 10, the police arrived at the right address, in the village of Novomikhailovka, Tomsk region. When the operatives arrived at the scene, Kovalevich was just getting into his mother’s car. “He said: “I’m going to go to the police department, I have to confess,” recalled Evgeny Svirsky, senior detective of the police department No. 1 of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs for the city of Tomsk. “He actually had a piece of paper in his pocket that briefly outlined the situation.”
“Daddy, everything is fine, just don’t cry.” Maria was raped by her father from the age of 11. At 23 she sent him to prison. Here's her story Crime 8 minute read
Kovalevich was detained . According to Svirsky, he was not afraid , rather, he was “discouraged” and “didn’t know what to do.” He admitted that he killed Anna Apatchenko. During interrogation, Kovalevich claimed that the girl allegedly came to him and confessed to treason. Then he pushed her. She fell, hit her head on the corner of the table and died. After that, Kovalevich checked the pulse - there was none; he got scared, ran to his neighbor for a hacksaw and began to dismember the body.
However, during another interrogation, it turned out that Kovalevich lied: in fact, he did not push Anna, but hit her in the stomach with a screwdriver, and then strangled her. He committed the murder after Anna said she wanted to break up . According to Kovalevich himself, Anna also admitted that she had cheated on him, but her friends and acquaintances think she could have told him that she had someone in order to break up with him faster.
“He was jealous and didn’t want to let her go. It seems to me that he did not want to commit a crime, but there was an explosion of emotions,” Kharitonov later told Kholod. “He realized that Anya was about to leave him, so he decided to make a surprise - he prepared dinner, candles, flowers. When she once again came to pick up things, he wanted to make peace. But Anya decided to leave.” “They were in a relationship for a long time. He is an abandoned and lonely child, very vulnerable. It affected him in some absolutely terrible way,” Anna’s friend tells Kholod.
“Is there a corpse there?”
During the investigative experiment, Kovalevich showed on a mannequin how he dismembered the body. “He put it on the blanket and started piercing it. Pierced, pierced. Then there was a bone left, I chopped it with a knife. Then he took a hacksaw and sawed it,” he said . Nikolai read about how to get rid of a body on the Internet.
Kovalevich finished it in an hour, after which he returned the hacksaw to his neighbor. He then placed the remains in potato sacks and garbage bags. Kovalevich scattered them in trash cans located in different parts of the city. He threw one of the bags into the Ushaika River. I did it in several approaches: I started with the torso, followed by the arms and legs, and came back last for the head.
Kovalevich decided to take some of the packages away in a taxi, which he called by phone. When the car arrived, he put a large bag in the trunk. The driver asked jokingly: “Is there a corpse there?” Kovalevich replied: “No, the meat is rotten.” The taxi driver took him to the right address and left.
Nikolai brought some of the packages to his grandfather, who lived in a private house. Kovalevich told him that inside was “rotten meat left over from the winter.” However, the grandfather refused to accept the packages.
“Then, when I cleaned it all up, threw it away, I wiped the floor with a rag,” Kovalevich said . There were practically no traces of blood left in the apartment because he first laid the body on a blanket. When the blood began to flow, Kovalevich placed rags, which absorbed everything. He immediately wiped away the marks on the linoleum, and the blood did not have time to bake.
The search for the remains continued. Investigators, criminologists, Emergency Situations Ministry employees, divers and military personnel took part in them every day. Volunteers also combed the shores of Ushaika and the landfill from morning to evening - despite the bad weather . One of the locals brought an inflatable boat to explore the shore from the water. There were problems with organization and communication between groups, so some sections were passed several times.
Volunteers could not get to the small island in the middle of Ushayka. It was possible to cross only two days later, when enough branches and tree trunks were thrown in for the crossing. However, volunteers found only garbage on the island.
Divers examined the bottom of the river, and workers drained the neighboring swamp - but this did not yield any results.
Anna's mother hoped to the last that her daughter was alive. “Until I see my child, neither alive nor dead, I will not accept condolences. I can’t find a single piece from my daughter at all, ” said Alexandra. - I don’t know where I will go [remember], on this [garbage] landfill? I will go to the river all my life? " She assured that Anna “would immediately make itself felt” - “If no one keeps her anywhere.” “Let him give me my daughter,” she said .
From despair, the relatives of Anna turned to psychics. They all said that the girl was alive , but the versions contradicted to each other. “The soul is torn to a person [mother]. Someone writes "She is naked, under your bushes, is tied to a tree." We are looking for these trees, ” said Tatyana Marsh, a friend of Alexandra Apatchenko.
On May 12, the woman walking with the dog found Anna Apatchenko’s test book at the waste ditch. She showed the place to other volunteers, after which Kovalevich’s sports bag was also seen in the mud - inside there were Anna’s passport and two disks from a grinder.
My daughter is growing up without gadgets and has never seen cartoons. This is difficult to organize, but it helps me build close relationships with her Society 10 minute read
A few days later, other documents of Apatchenko - a student ID, fluorography results, insurance certificate and cover for a passport were found .
Most of the packages were supposed to be at the garbage training ground. However, it was almost impossible to find them: according to the operative, 40 tons of garbage were taken to the landfill daily. “It is very difficult to use a dog at the training ground. When we were there, we found a bag with the bones of the cow, pork skin, a bag of chicken neck, ”said Svirsky. “Everything rots there, so the dog simply does not feel.”
On June 6, the coordinator of the volunteers noticed a black bag hanging on a branch on the shore - he ended up there after the water level dropped in the river. The girl opened the bag and found a human head in it. The package was handed over to the police. Relatives identified Anna, after which the search for the remains ended .
Investigators also found a taxi driver who transported Kovalevich on the day of the murder. Brown tracks were found in the car. In July, the genetic examination confirmed that the blood belonged to Anna Apatchenko.
"I received everything that can"
On June 10, Kovalevich wrote a confession. In July, he was recognized as sane and accused under Part 1 of Art. 105 of the Criminal Code (murder).
In early March 2014, the prosecutor's office sent the case to court. On March 28, the first meeting was held at which Kovalevich pleaded guilty , but refused to testify.
April 22, at the second meeting, the judge asked him: does he want to turn to Apatchenko's mother? After that, Kovalevich apologized - for the first time in the past time: “Alexandra Nikolaevna, excuse me, please. I don't know how it happened. I repent of the deed, sorry if you can, ”he said .
On May 6, Kovalevich was sentenced to 10 years in a maximum security colony with restriction of freedom for a period of 1 year 6 months. This is the maximum punishment that the court could impose: he took into account the lack of aggravating circumstances and a confession. Apatchenko’s mother insisted that the crime should be qualified as “murder committed with particular cruelty” - then Kovalevich could receive up to 20 years in prison or lifelong imprisonment. However, the examination confirmed that he dismembered the body after Apatchenko’s death to hide the crime - therefore, his actions cannot be considered a murder with particular cruelty.
“For such a crime, such an article is nothing, because in 10 years he will come out and will continue to live, and my child can’t be returned,” Alexander Apatchenko told reporters.
In order not to miss the main materials of “Cold”, subscribe to our social networks!
Kholod needs your help to continue working
We continue to work, resisting bans and repression, to preserve independent journalism for the Russia of the future. How do we do this? Thanks to the support of thousands of caring people.
What do we dream about?
About the simple and at the same time complex - the opportunity to work further. Life will change beyond recognition many times, but we, the editors of Kholod, want to stay close to you, our readers.
Support Kholod today so we can continue to do what we do best - be independent media. Thank you!
Author: Daria Voloshina