‘Something flickered across his face’ A decade ago, a woman’s disappearance rocked the Russian city of Tomsk. A spelling error pointed to the culprit.
When Anna Apatchenko, a 19-year-old from the Russian city of Tomsk, stopped answering her phone one day in 2014, her mother suspected the worst. Her fear intensified after she received a strange text message from her daughter’s number. Alarmed, she contacted law enforcement, and before long, volunteers organized search parties. Holod Media recently recounted Anna’s story, with new details from her classmates and family members. Below is a lightly abridged translation of the outlet’s report.
Content warning: The following story contains graphic descriptions of violence. Please proceed with caution.
On May 3, 2013, 19-year-old Anna Apatchenko, a student at Tomsk State University, planned to spend the day at home working on her thesis. At least, that’s what she told her mother, 38-year-old Alexandra Apatchenko, in a morning phone call.
In the early afternoon, Alexandra gave her daughter another call, but she didn’t answer. A bit later, calls started going straight to voicemail.
Alexandra started to worry: she and her daughter were usually always in touch, and Anna always informed her before going out somewhere. About an hour later, she got a text message from Anna’s number: “My phone died dont worry mom I’m goin out for abit.” This only made Alexandra more concerned: Anna would never send a message with so many spelling errors. Clearly, it had been written by someone else.
‘Things were looking up’
According to a friend of the Apatchenko family, Anna was a “sociable girl” from the time she was a child: “She always got along with all the kids in her class.” She was a diligent student and highly involved in school events.
One of Anna’s friends from school said she also had a serious side. “Anna wasn’t somebody to joke around with. She wasn’t someone who would tolerate it if you offended her,” she told Holod. “She was a strong person: if someone did her wrong, she wouldn’t stay silent.”
Anna was very close to her mother, whom her friends describe as kind and caring. Nor was there “much friction” between Anna and her younger sister. However, things were different with her father: “He would drink, and he would act inappropriately while doing so. He’d kick the family out of the house and threaten to burn it down,” one of Anna’s friends said. In 2013, Anna’s parents separated; the daughters remained with their mother.
After graduating from high school, Anna got a scholarship to the city’s best university, Tomsk State, where she found a new group of friends. When she wasn’t studying, she worked as a cleaner in a cardiology center, making her own money for the first time in her life. “Things were looking up,” one of her friends recalls.
On May 3, 2013, Alexandra Apatchenko left home before her daughter woke up. Later that day, when Anna stopped responding, she grew concerned and started sounding the alarm.
The first call Alexandra made was to Anna’s boyfriend, 19-year-old Nikolai Kovalevich. He told her that Anna had come over to his house, but that at around 3:00 p.m., he’d walked her to the bus stop, and she’d gotten on a bus back to her neighborhood.
Alexandra then started calling the hospitals in the area, but none of them had any information about her daughter. At about 1:30 a.m., she went to the police station and filed a missing persons report. She then headed to the building where Nikolai lived.
‘It’s 3:00 a.m. and you’re doing laundry’
Anna had started dating Nikolai three years earlier, when they were both 16. According to one of her friends, Nikolai would walk Anna home from school, give her flowers, and arrange surprises for her. He would also come to pick her up when her father had had too much to drink and started threatening the family. “It seemed sincere to me,” recalls Vyacheslav Korobeinikov, one of Nikolai’s classmates at the time. “They clearly weren’t just going through the motions.”
On the night following Anna’s disappearance, Nikolai met her mother in the hallway. “He was wearing workout clothes. I noticed his washing machine was on. I said, ‘That’s odd — it’s three in the morning, and you’re doing laundry,” she later recalled. “And he just looked me in the eyes, hugged me, and said, ‘We’ll find Anna. Don’t worry, Mrs. Apatchenko, everything will be okay. She’s got to be somewhere.”
In addition to police and family friends, more than 100 volunteers took part in the search for Anna. Her 14-year-old sister, Tatyana, had an especially hard time coping with Anna’s disappearance: she became closed off and stopped speaking to her mother almost completely. “She also gathered her friends and went [searching]. She checked basements and manholes,” Alexandra said. “She would say, ‘Mom, we need to look over in such-and-such place — nobody’s looked there yet.’”
Nikolai also took part in the search for Anna: he printed flyers with his own phone number on them and posted them around the city. He even spoke to the national media about her disappearance.
In search of clues that might lead them to Anna, her family figured out how to access her computer and read her messages. “I want to break up with Nikolai — he’s driving me crazy with his jealousy,” she’d written to one of her friends.
It wasn’t the only time Anna’s friends had heard about problems in the couple’s relationship. “Nikolai was shy when he spoke to me. He was always trying to please,” one of Anna’s friends told Holod. “But Anna told me that was all an act for other people.”
‘Look what I’m capable of’
“He was a timid kid. He got along fine with everyone in his class, but the upperclassmen would sometimes bully him,” one of Nikolai’s classmates, Vyacheslav Korobeinikov, said. “He was a little strange. He might say something completely ridiculous and then start laughing at his own joke.”
Ivan Kharitonov (name changed), another one of Nikolai’s classmates, told Holod that it wasn’t rare for Nikolai to behave cruelly towards those weaker than him. One time, he recalled, they were playing soccer with some other boys after school. When Nikolai’s team won, he chased a member of the other team down and “all but smeared his face on the pavement.”
Nikolai was fairly independent from the time he became a teenager — his mother lived outside of the city and went on frequent business trips, so he moved into a “dormitory-style building” with shared hallway bathrooms. His private living space was a room of about 15 square meters (160 square feet).
Nikolai’s neighbors were “not so pleasant,” one of Anna’s friends recalls her saying. Nonetheless, in August 2012, after yet another upsetting confrontation with her father, Anna temporarily moved in with Nikolai. Their relationship took a turn for the worse.
One friend recalled Anna complaining during this time that Nikolai had become physically aggressive towards her. “When he’s playing on his computer, I have to be very careful, or else he gets really angry,” Anna told her. According to the friend, during one of their fights, Nikolai held a knife up to Anna’s throat and said, “Look at what I’m capable of.”
It was around this time that Anna enrolled at Tomsk State University as an economics major. According to her mother, Anna aspired to get multiple degrees. Nikolai, meanwhile, was a “guy without any goals”: whenever he would get home from work, Alexandra said, he would immediately “get immersed in his computer.” According to Ivan Kharitonov, Nikolai would stay up all night playing computer games — and Anna would complain that he wasn’t devoting any attention to their relationship.
One evening in January 2013, Anna called her mother late at night and asked her to pick her up from Nikolai’s. She had planned to go to her aunt’s house that day to wish her a happy birthday, but Nikolai had ended up hitting her. Her mother, who had stopped living with Anna’s father by then, came and got her.
At that point, Anna cut off contact with Nikolai — but he was determined get her back. “He would follow me around everywhere, asking my forgiveness and asking me to let him speak to my daughter again,” Alexandra said. Three weeks later, Nikolai and Anna made up.
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‘You didn’t do it, did you?’
Nikolai’s violence against Anna soon resumed. Anna wrote about it to Ivan, who told Nikolai that “hitting a girl isn’t manly”; Nikolai responded by blocking his number. Soon after, Anna blocked him as well, telling him she had spoken to him in confidence and that he “shouldn’t have butted in and called [Nikolai] out.”
Another one of Anna’s friends said she never thought Nikolai was good for her: “They were just so different. I always saw it as a phase — she could hang out with this ordinary guy for a bit, but she was a girl with bigger ambitions,” she told Holod. But Nikolai had no intention of letting Anna go.
“He just clung to her. What drew her to him, I can’t say. I never liked him. There was just something shady about him, and that weird smile,” Anna’s mother said. She described Nikolai as very possessive: “On his social media, he wrote, ‘Anechka, my love.’ He even had a tattoo on his back with her name.”
When Anna went missing, participants in her search party also started to notice strange things in Nikolai’s behavior. For example, almost immediately after her disappearance, he wrote on social media: “People who’ve seen or hung out today with Anna !?!?! me and her mom are worried !!!!”
The urgent tone of his post alarmed Alexandra, because the search for her daughter had just barely begun.
The next day, Nikolai was spotted on a bus “laughing and joking” with a “grin from ear to ear.” One of Anna’s friends recounted a suspicious moment to Holod:
One of our mutual friends jokingly asked him, ‘You didn’t do it, did you?’ And something flickered across [Nikolai’s] face. There was an indescribable air about him.
On May 4, another friend of Anna’s messaged Nikolai, offering to help with the search since her father worked in Tomsk’s search-and-rescue service. His replies were riddled with spelling errors — including one of the same ones that appeared in the text Anna’s mother had received from her phone the night before.
The search team became increasingly convinced that Nikolai might be connected to Anna’s disappearance. However, he remained calm to the very end. “I saw [Nikolai] after [the day she disappeared]. He said hello, I said hello back. [He seemed] normal, not nervous. He just said ‘Hi,’ and that was it,” recalled Olga Simarbina, one of Nikolai’s neighbors.
On the run
The police also had questions for Nikolai: among other things, he was the last person who had seen Anna, and her phone had last been active in the area where he lived.
They searched his room. “We didn’t find anything suspicious in the young man’s apartment — no traces [of violence], no blood-stained clothing,” said Sergey Telegin, the deputy head of the Russian Investigative Committee’s local office. “During his conversation with investigators, the guy kept insisting on his version of events: that he had walked Anna to the bus, saw her off, and hadn’t heard from her since.”
On May 6, police called Nikolai and asked him to come to the station for a polygraph test. He said he “couldn’t come right away” but promised to arrive by 4:00 p.m. However, when they called him at 3:30, he didn’t answer — and by 4:00, his phone was off.
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Officers then went to Nikolai’s address, forced entry into his apartment, and seized his computer. The last time his phone was active, it pinged from a location outside the city. Police suspected he was on the run.
For several days, Nikolai wandered through the forest. Unprepared for such conditions, he returned to Tomsk on May 9, hitching rides — hungry and covered in tick bites. He took a taxi to his grandmother’s house, where his parents joined him the next morning. There, Nikolai confessed to them that during an argument, he had “accidentally” killed Anna. In a panic, he said, he had dismembered her body to cover up the crime.
The police had been searching for Nikolai for three days when they learned he was staying with relatives. On May 10, officers arrived at the address, in a village called Novomikhailovka. When they got there, Nikolai was just getting into a car with his mother. “He said, ‘I’m heading to the police station to turn myself in,’” recalled senior police officer Yevgeny Svirsky. “He even had a piece of paper in his pocket with a brief account of the situation written on it.”
Nikolai was taken into custody. According to Svirsky, he didn’t seem afraid but rather “stunned” and “unsure of what to do.” He quickly confessed to killing Anna. During his initial interrogation, Nikolai claimed that Anna had come to his place and admitted to cheating on him. In a fit of anger, he said, he had pushed her, causing her to fall and hit her head on the corner of a table. He then panicked and checked her pulse. When he found that there was none, he went to a neighbor to borrow a hacksaw and began dismembering her body.
However, a later interrogation revealed that this had been a lie. In reality, Nikolai hadn’t just pushed Anna — he had stabbed her in the stomach with a screwdriver and strangled her after she said she wanted to break up. He still claimed that she had confessed to cheating on him, though her friends later suggested that she might have told him she was seeing someone else just to end the relationship more quickly.
“He was possessive and didn’t want to let her go. I think he didn’t plan to commit a crime, but he had an emotional outburst,” Ivan Kharitonov said. “He realized Anna was really about to leave him for good, so he tried to surprise her — he made dinner, lit candles, and bought flowers. When she came by to pick up her things one last time, he wanted to reconcile. But Anna had already decided to leave.”
‘I don’t know where I’ll go to mourn’
Nikolai demonstrated to investigators how he had dismembered Anna’s body. “I put it on a blanket and started poking at it. Poked and poked. Then there was just the bone, so I scraped at it with a knife. Then I took the hacksaw and cut it,” he said. He found a method for disposing of bodies on the Internet.
Nikolai finished dismembering the body in about an hour, then returned the hacksaw to his neighbor. Afterward, he packed the remains into potato sacks and garbage bags and scattered them across trash bins in different parts of the city. He also threw one of the bags into the Ushayka River. Disposing of the entire body took him several trips: first, he got rid of the torso, then the arms and legs, and then the head.
On one of the trips, Nikolai took a taxi. When the car arrived, he put a large bag in the trunk. The driver jokingly asked, “Is there a body in there?” Nikolai replied, “No, just some rotten meat.”
He also took some of the bags to his grandfather’s house, telling him it was “rotten meat left over from the winter.” However, his grandfather refused to take them.
“After I got rid of everything, threw it all out, I wiped the floor with a rag,” Nikolai recalled. The apartment was almost completely free of blood because he had laid the body on a blanket. When blood started to leak out, Nikolai placed rags down to soak it up. He immediately wiped all traces of it from the linoleum so that it wouldn’t have time to congeal.
After Nikolai’s arrest, the search for Anna’s remains continued. Volunteers combed the banks of the Ushayka River and the local landfill from dawn until dusk, despite bad weather. One person even brought an inflatable boat to search the riverbank from the water.
Anna’s mother held on to hope that her daughter was somehow still alive. “I won’t accept condolences until I see my child, whether alive or dead. I can’t find a single piece of my daughter,” Alexandra said. “I don’t know where I’ll go to mourn — this [landfill]? Will I go to the river for the rest of my life?”
On May 12, a woman walking her dog found Anna Apatchenko’s student ID by a drainage ditch. She showed the spot to other volunteers, and they soon spotted a sports bag in the mud. Inside were Anna’s passport and two grinding discs.
On June 6, one of the volunteers spotted a black bag hanging from a branch on the riverbank, where it had been left after the water level dropped. When she partially opened the bag, she found a human head inside. The bag was handed over to the police. Relatives identified Anna, and the search for her remains was officially concluded.
Investigators also tracked down the taxi driver who had driven Nikolai on the day of the murder. In the car, they found reddish stains. In July, genetic testing confirmed that the blood belonged to Anna Apatchenko.
‘This sentence is nothing’
On June 10, Nikolai Kovalevich gave a written confession. In July, he was deemed mentally fit to stand trial and charged with murder.
In early March 2014, state prosecutors sent the case to court. At the first hearing on March 28, Nikolai pleaded guilty but refused to testify.
At the second hearing on April 22, the judge asked Nikolai if he wanted to address Anna Apatchenko’s mother directly. He agreed, and made his first apology since the murder, saying, “Mrs. Apatchenko, please forgive me. I don’t know how this happened. I regret what I’ve done, and I’m sorry, if you can forgive me.”
On May 6, Nikolai was sentenced to 10 years in a high-security prison, and an additional year and a half of “restricted freedom” — the maximum penalty the court could impose.
“For a crime like this, this sentence is nothing, because in 10 years, he’ll be out and continue living. But my child is gone forever,” Alexandra Apatchenko told reporters after the trial.
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Original story by Darya Voloshina for Holod