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Serial killer Chikatilo is awoken to be excorted to his execution. 1994

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Andrei Chikatilo (1936-1994) PART ONE

Andrei Chikatilo, also known as the Butcher of Rostov, the Forest Strip Killer, the Red Ripper, and the Rostov Ripper, was a Soviet serial killer who sexually assaulted, murdered and mutilated at least 52 women and children in the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Uzbek SSR in a 12 year period between 1978 and 1990. He confessed to 56 murders and was tried for 53 in April 1992 and was sentenced to death for 52 murders in October 1992. Chikatilo was executed in February 1994. The majority of his murders occurred in the Rostov Oblast of the Russian SFSR.

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born in Yabluchne, Ukrainian SSR, on 16 October 1936. At this time, Ukraine was in the middle of a massive famine which was the result of Joseph Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture. Both of Chikatilo’s parents were collective farm labourers and the family lived in a single room hut. They received no wages for their hard work but were given the right to cultivate a plot of land behind the hut. The Chikatilo family starved often, Chikatilo later claiming not to have eaten bread until he was 12, also stating that he and his family would sometimes resort to eating grass and leaves in order to stave off hunger. Through his childhood years, Chikatilo was told more than once by his mother Anna that before he was born, his older brother Stepan, 4 at the time, had been kidnapped and eaten by starving neighbours, but this story was never confirmed, nor was it confirmed whether a Stepan Chikatilo ever existed. Despite this, Chikatilo often spoke of his childhood being plagued with poverty, ridicule, hunger and war. When the Soviet Union entered WWII, Chikatilo’s father was drafted into the Red Army and ended up becoming a Prisoner of War after he was wounded in combat. Between the ages of 5 and 9, Chikatilo witnessed the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, describing the horrors he had seen, including bombs, fires, and shootings that he and his mother would hide from in cellars and ditches. Once, Andrei and his mother were forced to watch their own hut burn to the ground. When his father was away at war, Chikatilo and his mother had to sleep together in a single bed – but Chikatilo was a chronic bed wetter who was berated and beaten by his mother for it. In 1943, when Chikatilo was 7 years old, his mother gave birth to Tatyana, a little girl. However, because his father had been at war since 1941, he couldn’t be Tatyana’s father. Many Ukrainian women were raped and sexually assaulted by German soldiers in WWII so it was possible that one of these soldiers raped Anna Chikatilo. As Chikatilo was sharing a bed with his mother at the time, it’s possible he witnessed this rape.

In September of 1944 Chikatilo began school. He was shy and studious but was physically weak and often went to school in homemade clothes, his stomach distended from the hunger he suffered due to the post-war famine that plagued the Soviet Union. More than once Chikatilo fainted at home and school, and was often a target for bullying, being mocked for his stature and timidity. When he was at home, he and his sister were “bullied” by their mother. Tatyana later recalled that despite their family’s hardships, their father, Roman, was a kind man, and their mother, Anna, was harsh and unforgiving, especially toward her children. Chikatilo had a passion for reading and memorising data, often studying at home, which both increased his sense of self-worth and compensated for his myopia, which would prevent him for reading the blackboard in the classroom. Chikatilo’s teachers saw him as an excellent student that regularly received praise and commendation. By the time he was a teenager Chikatilo was a model student and a committed Communist. He was made editor of his school newspaper at 14 and was chairman of the pupils’ Communist committee. He read a lot of Communist literature and was given the task of organising street marches. Chikatilo later claimed that learning wasn’t easy for him, but he was the only student from his collective farm to complete his final year of studying – he graduated with impressive grades in 1954.

As Chikatilo hit puberty, he discovered that he was chronically impotent, which only served to make his social awkwardness and self-loathing more intense. Chikatilo was shy with women – his first crush at 17 was classmate Lilya Barysheva, who worked on the newspaper with him, but became extremely nervous in her company and could never ask her out. The same year Chikatilo pounced on an 11-year-old girl, a friend of Tatyana’s, and wrestled her to the floor – he ejaculated as the girl struggled underneath him. After graduating from school Chikatilo applied for a scholarship at Moscow State University, but although he passed the entrance exam with very good scores, his grades weren’t considered high enough to be accepted. Chikatilo, however, believed that his scholarship application was denied because of his father’s tainted war record (his father was considered a traitor due to being taken prison in 1943) – the truth was that other students had completed the exam with better scores. Chikatilo decided not to try and join another university, but travelled to Kursk, where he worked in manual labour for 3 months before enrolling in a vocational school in 1955, where he studied to become a communications technician. Whilst studying there, Chikatilo began his first serious relationship with a girl 2 years younger than him. On 3 different occasions, the couple tried to have sex, but each time Chikatilo was unable to maintain an erection. 18 months in, the girl broke off the relationship.

After finishing his vocational training, Chikatilo moved to Nizhny Tagil, a city in the Urals, where he began to work on a long-term construction project. Whilst there, he began correspondence courses in engineering with the Moscow Electrotechnical Institute of Communication. Chikatilo worked in the Urals for 2 years before being drafted into the Soviet Army in 1957, performing compulsory military service until 1960. He was first assigned to serve with border guards in Central Asia, and then worked with a KGB communications unit in Berlin. Chikatilo’s work record during this period was perfect, and he joined the Communist Party in 1960, just before his military service came to an end. After being discharged from the Soviet Army, Chikatilo returned to his native city to live with his parents, soon meeting a young divorcee. The pair began a 3 month relationship, which ended after the woman asked her friends how Chikatilo might overcome his impotence – leading to most of Chikatilo’s peers knowing his problem. He said, regarding this incident, in an interview in 1993: “Girls were going behind my back, whispering that I was impotent. I was so ashamed. I tried to hang myself. My mother and some young neighbours pulled me out of the noose. Well, I thought no one would want such a shamed man. So I had to run away from there, away from my homeland.”

Chikatilo found a job as a communications engineer in a town near Rostov-on-Don and relocated to Russia in 1961, where he lived in a small rented apartment near his place of work. That year his sister, Tatyana, finished school and moved into Andrei’s apartment, with his parents moving to the region soon after. Tatyana lived there for 6 months before she married a local boy and moved into the home he shared with his parents. Tatyana later said she saw nothing untoward about her brother’s lifestyle, except how shy he was around women, and decided it was her job to help her brother find a wife and start a family. In 1963, Chikatilo married Feodosia Odnacheva, to whom he was introduced by Tatyana. Chikatilo later said that although he was attracted to Feodosia, the marriage was basically arranged and was mainly orchestrated by his sister and her husband. He said that his marital sex life was minimal and that after Feodosia understood he couldn’t maintain an erection, they agreed to conceive a child by him ejaculating into his hand and pushing his semen inside her vagina with his fingers. In 1965, Feodosia gave birth to a daughter named Lyudmila and 4 years later, son Yuri was born.

In 1970 Chikatilo came to the end of a 5 year correspondence course in Russian literature and got his degree from Rostov University in the same subject. Shortly before getting his degree Chikatilo began working as a manager for regional sports activities, keeping this job for almost a year before starting his career as a Russian language and literature teacher in Novoshakhtinsk. He was a pretty ineffective teacher – he knew a lot about the subjects he taught, but couldn’t control or discipline his class and was regularly mocked by his students, later claiming they took advantage of his modest nature. In May 1973 Chikatilo committed his first known sexual assault. The victim was a 15-year-old pupil whom Chikatilo swam towards and groped her breasts and genitals, ejaculating as the girl struggled. Months later, Chikatilo sexually assaulted another girl, one he had locked in his classroom. He wasn’t disciplined for either incident, or the incidents where fellow teachers actually witnessed Chikatilo fondling himself in front of students. One of Chikatilo’s duties at the school was ensuring that the boarding students were safely in the dorms in the evenings – more than once he was known to enter the girls’ dorm in an attempt to view them undressing. Because of the growing number of complaints against him by students, the director of the school informed Chikatilo that he should resign or he would be fired – he discreetly left the school and found a job teaching at a different school in Novoshakhtinsk in January 1974. He lost this job due to staff cutbacks 4 years later before finding a 3rd teaching position in Shakhty. Chikatilo’s teaching career ended in March 1981 after several complaints of child molestation against both male and female pupils. That same month he began working as a supply clerk for a Rostov-based factory that produced construction materials. This job meant that Chikatilo could travel across most of the Soviet Union to either physically buy the materials needed to fulfil production quotes, or to negotiate supply contracts.

In September 1978 Chikatilo moved to Shakhty, where he committed his first known murder. On December 22 Chikatilo lured 9-year-old Yelena Zakotnova to an old house he had recently bought. Chikatilo attempted to rape Zakotnova but could not achieve an erection. When the girl began to struggle, he choked her and stabbed her 3 times in the chest, ejaculating while stabbing her. In a later interview, Chikatilo recalled that after he had stabbed Yelena, she had “said something very hoarsely” – he then strangled her before throwing her unconscious body into the Grushevka River, where it was discovered 2 days later. There was plenty of evidence linking Chikatilo to Zakotnova’s murder – spots of blood were found in the snow near the house Chikatilo had bought; neighbours saw Chikatilo there on the evening of the December 22; Zakotnova’s schoolbag was found on the opposite bank of the river and the end of the street; and a witness had been able to provide police with a detailed description of a man that resembled Chikatilo, that she had seen talking with Zakotnova at the bus stop where the victim was last seen alive. Despite all of this, 25-year-old labourer Aleksandr Kravchenko (who had previously served time for the rape and murder of a teenage girl) was arrested for the murder. A search of Kravchenko’s home found blood spots on his wife’s jumper – the blood type matched both Zakotnova and Kravchenko’s wife. Kravchenko had a strong alibi for the afternoon of December 22 – he was at home with his wife and a friend all afternoon and neighbours confirmed this – but the police threatened Kravchenko’s wife with being an accomplice to murder and her friend with perjury, so the women gave new statements claiming Kravchenko didn’t come home until late on the day of the murder. After being confronted with these new statements Kravchenko confessed and was tried for the killing in 1979. At trial, Kravchenko retracted his confession and claimed he was innocent, saying his confession was obtained under duress. Despite this, he was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to 15 years’ imprisonment (the maximum possible at the time) by the Supreme Court in December, 1980. Under pressure from Zakotnova’s family, Kravchenko was retried and executed for her murder in July 1983. Following the murder of Yelena Zakotnova, Andrei Chikatilo could only achieve sexual arousal and orgasm through stabbing and slashing women and children to death, later claiming that the urge to relive the experience had overwhelmed him, but he said he had initially struggled to resist these urges. He just couldn’t...

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Andrei Chikatilo (1936-1994) PART FOUR

The discovery of even more victims linked to the same unknown killer sparked a massive police operation in response. Due to the fact that several victims were found at trail stations on the same rail route through the Rostov Oblast, Viktor Burakov suggested flooding all the larger stations in the Rostov Oblast with an obvious uniformed police presence that the killer couldn’t fail to notice. The intention of this was to discourage the killer from attacking in any of these locations. There would be undercover officers patrolling smaller and less busy stations, where the killer’s activities were more likely to be noticed. The plan was approved and both the uniformed and undercover officers were told to question any adult males in the company of young women or children, and to write down their name and passport number. Police sent 360 men to all of the stations in the Rostov Oblast but only undercover officers were sent to the 3 smallest stations on the route where the killer had struck the most frequently – Kirpichnaya, Donleskhoz, and Lesostep – in an attempt to strike at one of those 3 stations. This operation began on October 27 1990. 3 days later, police discovered the body of 16-year-old Vadim Gromov at Donleskhoz station. The wounds on Gromov’s body instantly linked this murder to the manhunt – the boy had been strangled, stabbed 27 times, castrated, the tip of his tongue severed and his left eye stabbed. He had been killed 10 days before the start of the operation to catch Chikatilo. The same day that the body was discovered, October 30, Chikatilo lured 16-year-old Viktor Tishchenko off a train at Kirpichnaya station – a station under surveillance by undercover police – and killed him in a nearby forest. Tishchenko’s body, with over 40 separate knife wounds, was discovered on November 3, 1990. 3 days later, Chikatilo killed and mutilated 22-year-old Svetlana Korostik in woodland near Donleskhoz station. He was seen leaving the crime scene by an undercover officer, who saw Chikatilo wash his hands and face in a well. When Chikatilo got closer to the station, the officer noticed that his coat had grass and soil stains on the elbows, and Chikatilo had a suspicious red smear on his cheek. This aroused the suspicions of the undercover officer, as the only reason people would enter those woodlands at that time of year was to pick wild mushrooms, but Chikatilo wasn’t dressed like a typical scavenger and was carrying a nylon bag, which wasn’t suitable for mushrooms. The policeman stopped Chikatilo and checked his papers, but had no probable cause to arrest him. When the office returned to the station he filed a routine report containing the name of the person he had stopped. On November 13, Korostik’s body was found – the 36th known victim to be linked to the manhunt. Police summoned the officer in charge of surveillance at Donleskhoz station and examined all the reports of men stopped and questioned in the last week. Chikatilo’s name was among those reports, and it was a name familiar to several officers involved in the case. Chikatilo had been questioned in 1984 and was placed on a suspect list in 1987 which was distributed throughout the Soviet Union. After talking to Chikatilo’s past and present employers, investigators could place him in different towns and cities at the same time certain victims were killed. Questioning his former colleagues from his teaching days revealed that he had been forced to resign from 2 different teaching jobs due to repeated complaints of lewd behaviour and sexual assault against pupils. Police put Chikatilo under surveillance on November 14, 1990. More than once, particularly on trains or buses, he was seen approaching lone young women or children and trying to start a conversation. If the woman or child broke off this conversation, Chikatilo would wait a few minutes before trying to talk to someone else. On November 20, after being under surveillance for 6 days, Chikatilo left his house carrying a large jar, which he had filled with beer at a kiosk in a local park. He then wandered around Novocherkassk trying to strike up conversations with children he met along the way. After leaving a cafe, Chikatilo was arrested by 4 plainclothes police officers.

When he was arrested, Chikatilo told police that they were mistaken, and complained that he had also been arrested in 1984 for the same series of murders. Chikatilo was strip-searched and a human bite mark was discovered on his finger. A search of his belongings turned up a folding knife and 2 lengths of rope. Officers took a blood sample from Chikatilo and he was then placed in a cell inside KGB headquarters in Rostov along with a police informer who was told to engage Chikatilo in conversation and get any information he could. The following day, on November 21, formal questioning began (the interrogation was performed by Issa Kostoyev). The strategy was to lead Chikatilo to believe that he was sick and in need of medical help, possibly letting Chikatilo hope that if he confessed, he wouldn’t be prosecuted by reason of insanity. Police knew the case was mostly circumstantial, and under Soviet law, they only had 10 days to legally hold him before either charging or releasing him. The results of Chikatilo’s blood test again showed his blood to be type “A” and not type “AB”. Because of the amount of physical and circumstantial evidence against Chikatilo as well as the fact that investigators had discovered the blood type of the killer through semen found on the bodies and clothing of 14 victims, not actual blood samples, investigators decided to test Chikatilo’s semen for his blood type instead. This test showed that Chikatilo’s semen was type “AB”, but his blood and saliva were type “A”. Throughout the questioning, Chikatilo continued denying any involvement in the murders, but did confess to molesting some of his pupils during his time as a teacher. He also wrote several essays for Issa Kostoyev, which were vague in regards to the actual murders, but did show psychological symptoms that matched those predicted by Dr. Bukhanovsky’s profile in 1985. The interrogation tactics Kostoyev used caused Chikatilo to become defensive – he told the informer he shared a KGB cell with that Kostoyev had kept asking him direct questions about the mutilations suffered by the victims.

On November 29 Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky was invited to assist in the questioning of the suspect. Bukhanovsky read parts of his 65-page psychological profile to Chikatilo – within less than 2 hours, Chikatilo burst into tears and confessed that he was guilty of the crimes that he had been arrested for. After talking late into the night, Bukhanovsky told Burakov and Fetisov that Chikatilo was ready to confess. Using the handwritten notes Bukhanovsky had compiled, Issa Kostoyev prepared a formal accusation of murder and the following morning resumed his interrogation of Chikatilo. According to official protocol, Chikatilo confessed to 34 of the 36 murders police had managed to link to him, but he denied 2 other murders in 1986 that the police initially believed he had committed (Lyubov Golovakha and Irina Pogoryelova). Chikatilo later admitted killing Irina Pogoryelova during his trial in a loud outburst, referring to her by name. Chikatilo gave detailed descriptions of each murder on the charge list, all of which were consistent with the known facts. When asked, Chikatilo was able to draw rough sketches of crime scenes, indicating the position of the victims’ bodies and landmarks in the area. He admitted that he would bind the victims’ hands behind their back with a length of rope before killing them. He would often inflict a large amount of knife wounds on the victim, starting with shallow wounds in the chest area, before progressing to deeper stab/slash wounds (usually 30-50 in all), before finally eviscerating the victim. Chikatilo stated that he had become adept at avoid the blood spatter from his victims’ bodies and would often sit or squat next to them until their hearts stopped beating, adding that the victims’ “cries, the blood and the agony gave me relaxation and a certain pleasure.” When he was asked why most of his later victims’ eyes had been stabbed but not removed as with earlier victims, Chikatilo replied that he originally believed in an old superstition that the image of a murderer is left imprinted on the eyes of the victim. He said that in “later years”, he had become convinced that this was just an old wives’ tale and so he had stopped gouging out the eyes of his victims.

Chikatilo told Kostoyev that he had often tasted the blood of his victims, saying that he “felt chills,” and “shook all over.” He also confessed to biting victims’ genitalia, lips, nipples and tongues. More than once, Chikatilo would cut/bite off the tongue of victims as he eviscerated them, then as the victim was dying, would run around the body as he held the tongue in the air. He admitted to chewing on the excised uteri of female victims and the testes of male victims, he said he had later discarded these body parts. Nonetheless, Chikatilo confessed to swallowing the nipples of some victims. On November 30 Chikatilo was formally charged with the 34 murders he had confessed to, all of which were committed between June 1982 and November 1990. Over the following few days, Chikatilo confessed to 22 more murders that hadn’t been connected with the case either because they were committed outside of the Rostov Oblast, or because the bodies hadn’t been found, or, like in the case of Yelena Zakotnova, because an innocent man had been convicted and executed for the murder. As with the victims compiled on the original charge list, Chikatilo was able to give details of these additional murders that only the killer could have known – such as the fact that Lyubov Volobuyeva had lived in south-western Siberia and was killed in a sorghum field near Krasnodar Airport. In December 1990, Chikatilo led police to the body of Aleksey Khobotov, a boy he confessed to killing in August 1989 and who was buried in woodland near a Shakhty cemetery. He later took investigators to the sites of 2 other bodies he had dumped. 3 of the 56 victims Chikatilo confessed to killing couldn’t be found or identified, but Chikatilo was charged with killing 53 women and children between 1978 and 1990. He was held in the same cell in Rostov-on-Don where he was detained on 20 November, to await trial.

On August 20, 1991, after police had finished interrogating Chikatilo (compete with re-enactments of the murders at each crime scene), he was transferred to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow to undergo a 60-day psychiatric evaluation to see if he was mentally competent to stand trial. Chikatilo’s analysis was performed by Dr. Andrei Tkachenko, who noted that Chikatilo suffered from various psychological problems that he believed was due to prenatal brain damage. However, on October 18, Tkachenko concluded that although Chikatilo suffered from borderline personality disorder with sadistic features, he was fit to stand trial. In December 1991 details of the arrest of Andrei Chikatilo and a brief summary of his crimes were released to the newly liberated Russian media by police. He was brought to trial in Rostov on April 14, 1992 and was charged with 53 counts of murder as well as 5 charges of sexual assault against minors committed during his teaching career. He was tried in Courtroom Number 5 of the Rostov Provincial Court, before Judge Leonid Akubzhanov. The trial was the first major media event since Soviet Russia was liberalised. After his psychiatric evaluation at the Serbsky Institute investigators performed a press conference where they released a full list of Chikatilo’s crimes along with a 1984 identikit of the individual charged, but not the full name or a photograph of the accused. Chikatilo’s first media appearance was on day 1 of the trial when he entered a specifically-built iron cage in the corner of the courtroom to protect the accused from the angry and often hysterical relatives of his victims.

In the opening weeks of the trial the Russian press would publish exaggerated and sensationalised headlines regarding the murders, calling Chikatilo a “cannibal” or a “maniac”. The first 2 days of the trial were filled by Judge Akubzhanov reading the long list of indictments against Chikatilo. Each murder was discussed separately, and on more than one occasion, relatives in the courtroom broke down when details of their loved ones’ murders were revealed. After reading the full indictment Judge Akubzhanov told the journalists present in the courtroom that he was going to conduct an open trial, saying: “Let this trial at least tell us something, so that this will never happen anytime or anywhere again.” The judge then asked Chikatilo to stand, identify himself and state his date and location of birth. Chikatilo complied, but this would turn out to be one of the only civil exchanges between Chikatilo and Judge Akubzhanov. On October 15, Chikatilo was formally sentenced to death plus 86 years for the 52 murders and 5 counts of sexual assault that he was found guilty for. Chikatilo kicked his bench across his cage on hearing the verdict, and began to shout abuse, but when he was given an opportunity to make a speech in response to the verdict, he remained silent. On passing the final sentence, Judge Leonid Akubzhanov made the following speech: “Taking into consideration the horrible misdeeds of which he is guilty, this court has no alternative but to impose the only sentence that he deserves. I therefore sentence him to death.” Chikatilo was taken to his cell at Novocherkassk prison to await execution. He lodged an appeal against his conviction to the Russian Supreme Court but this was rejected in summer 1993. He then filed an appeal for clemency with President Boris Yeltsin – this was rejected on January 4 1994. On February 1994 Chikatilo was taken from his death row cell to a soundproofed room in Novocherkassk prison and executed with a single gunshot behind the right ear.

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Andrei Chikatilo (1936-1994) PART TWO

On September 3 1981 Chikatilo met 17-year-old Larisa Tkachenko, a boarding school student, stood at a bus stop as he left a public library in Rostov’s city center. In his later confession, Chikatilo said he lured Tkachenko to a forest near the Don River on the pretext of drinking vodka and relaxing. When they got to a secluded area, he threw her to the ground, tore off her clothes and attempted to have sex with her, as she struggled. When Chikatilo couldn’t achieve an erection, he forced mud into Tkachenko’s mouth to stop her screaming before battering and strangling her to death. Chikatilo didn’t have a knife, so mutilated her body with his teeth and a stick, also tearing off one of Tkachenko’s nipples with his teeth. He covered the body with leaves, branches and torn newspaper. The body of Larisa Tkachenko was discovered the following day.9 months later, on 12 June 1982, Chikatilo travelled to the Bagayevsky District of Rostov on the bus, to buy vegetables. After changing buses in Donskoi, he decided to continue on foot, and as he walked away from the bus station, he met 13-year-old Lyubov Biryuk, who was also walking home from shopping. When the path that Chikatilo and Biryuk were using became shaded by bushes, Chikatilo pounced on her, dragged her into the undergrowth, tore off her clothes and killed her by stabbing and slashing. When her body was discovered on 27 June, the medical examiner found 22 knife wounds inflicted to the head, neck, chest and pelvis. More wounds on the skull suggested that the killer attacked Biryuk from behind with the handle and blade of his knife. As well as this, several cuts were discovered on Biryuk’s eye sockets. After Biryuk’s murder, Chikatilo gave up on trying to resist his homicidal urges, and between July and September 1982 he killed 5 victims between the ages of 9 and 18. He would approach children, runaways, or the homeless at bus/railway stations, entice them to a forest or other secluded area, then kill them – usually by stabbing, slashing and eviscerating the victim with a knife – but some victims were also strangled or battered to death.

Many victims’ bodies showed signs of mutilation to the eye sockets, which pathologists concluded were caused by a knife. This led investigators to the conclusion that the killer had gouged out the eyes of his victims. Chikatilo’s adult female victims were mostly prostitutes or homeless women that he would lure to secluded areas with promises of alcohol or money. Chikatilo would often attempt to have sexual intercourse with these victims, but would be unable to achieve/maintain an erection, which would send him into a murderous fury, especially if the woman mocked him. He was only able to achieve orgasm when he stabbed and slashed the victim to death. Chikatilo’s child and adolescent victims were of both sexes – he would lure the victims to secluded areas using a variety of ruses, such as promising company, offering to show them a shortcut, or his stamp collection, or offering them food/candy. He would overpower the victims once they were alone, tying their hands behind their backs with rope before stuffing mud or loam into their mouths to silence their screams. He would then kill them. After the murder, Chikatilo would make rudimentary but serious efforts to hide the body before leaving the crime scene. On December 11 1982 Chikatilo met 10-year-old Olga Stalmachenok on a bus to her parents’ home in Novoshakhtinsk. He persuaded the child to get off the bus with him. She was last seen by a fellow passenger, who said that the girl was being led by the hand by a middle-aged man. Stalmachenok was lured into a cornfield outside Novoshakhtinsk before she was killed by being stabbed over 50 times around the head and body. Her chest was ripped open and her lower bowel and uterus was excised.

By January of 1983 4 victims had been linked to the same killer and a Moscow police team, headed by Major Mikhail Fetisov, was sent to Rostov-on-Don to head up the investigation. The team consisted of 10 investigators who were charged with solving all 4 murders. In March, Fetisov assigned specialist forensic analyst, Viktor Burakov, to lead the investigation. The next month, the body of Olga Stalmachenok was discovered. Burakov went to the crime scene, and he examined the knife wounds and eviscerations on the child, and the cuts on her eye sockets. Burakov later stated that when he saw the striation marks on Stalmachenok’s eye sockets, he knew that there was a serial killer at large. Chikatilo didn’t kill again until June 1983, when he killed 15-year-old Armenian girl Laura Sarkisyan. The body was discovered near an unmarked railway platform near Shakhty. By September of that year, Chikatilo had killed 5 more victims. The amount of victims and the similarities in the murders led Soviet authorities to acknowledge that there was in fact a serial killer on the loose. On September 6 1983 the public prosecutor of the USSR linked 6 of the murders committed by the same killer. Because of the sheer brutality of the murders and how precise the eviscerations were, police believed that the killings were either the work of a satanic cult, someone mentally ill, or a group harvesting organs to sell for transplant. Most of the police work focused on the theory that the killer was either mentally ill, homosexual or a paedophile. All of the alibis of people who had either spent time in psychiatric facilities or had been convicted of homosexuality of paedophilia were checked and logged in a card filing system. Registered sex offenders were investigated and if their alibi held up, they were eliminated from the investigation.

Starting in September 1983, several young men confessed to being the killer, but these people were often intellectually disabled youths who only confessed under duress during long, brutal interrogations. 3 known homosexuals and a convicted sex offender committed suicide due to the heavy-handed tactics of the investigators. Because of the extent of this investigation, more than 1000 unrelated crimes, including 95 murders and 245 rapes, were solved. However, even as police were obtaining confessions from suspects, more bodies were being discovered, proving that suspects that had confessed thus far must be innocent of these particular murders. On October 30 1983 the eviscerated body of 19-year-old prostitute Vera Shevkun was discovered in Shakhty – she had been killed 3 days earlier. The mutilations on her body matched those of previous victims but her eyes had not been gouged out or otherwise injured. 2 months later, on 27 December, 14-year-old Gukovo schoolboy Sergey Markov was lured off a train and killed at a rural station near Novocherkassk. He was emasculated and stabbed over 70 times to the neck and upper torso before being eviscerated. In January and February of 1984 Chikatilo killed 2 women in Rostov’s Aviators’ Park. On 24 March 10-year-old Dmitry Ptashnikov was lured away from a stamp kiosk in Novoshakhtinsk and was witnessed walking with Chikatilo – these witnesses were later able to give excellent descriptions of the killer. Ptashnikov’s body was found 3 days later (Chikatilo had left a footprint, semen and saliva on his clothing). On May 25 Chikatilo killed Tatyana Petrosyan, whom he had known for a few years, and her 10-year-old daughter Svetlana in woods outside Shakhty. By the end of July Chikatilo had killed 3 more young women between the ages of 19 and 21, as well as a 13-year-old boy. In the summer of 1984 Chikatilo got fired from his job as a supply clerk for theft of property. The accusation was filed against him the previous year and he had been asked to resign discreetly but had refused, denying the charges. Chikatilo found another job as a supply clerk in Rostov on 1 August. The following day, he killed 16-year-old Natalya Golosovskaya in Aviators’ Park. The same week, he lured 17-year-old Lyudmila Alekseyeva to the banks of the Don River under the pretense of showing her a shortcut to the bus terminal. Alekseyeva suffered 39 slash wounds to her body before Chikatilo mutilated and disembowelled her, intentionally inflicting wounds he knew would not be immediately fatal. Alekseyeva’s body was discovered the next morning, her upper lip removed and left inside her mouth. Hours after her murder, Chikatilo flew to Tashkent, Uzbekistan on a business trip. By the time he came back to Rostov on 15 August he had killed an unknown young woman and a 10-year-old girl. Within 2 weeks an 11-year-old boy had been strangled and castrated, his eyes gouged out, in Rostov, before librarian Irina Luchinskaya was killed on September 6 in Aviators’ Park.

On September 13 1984 an undercover detective saw Chikatilo attempting to lure young women away from a Rostov bus station, and was arrested. A search of his belongings revealed a knife and a rope, and was discovered to be under investigation for minor theft by a former employer – this gave investigators the legal right to hold him for longer than usual. Chikatilo’s background was uncovered and his description matched the description of the man seen with Dmitry Ptashnikov in March prior to the boy’s murder. A blood sample from Chikatilo was taken and the results revealed that his blood type was “A”, and semen samples found on 6 different victims murdered by the unknown serial killer throughout the spring and summer if 1984 had been classified by medical examiners as type “AB”. Chikatilo’s name was added to the index file used by investigators, but the results of his blood type analysis largely discounted him as being the unknown killer. Chikatilo was, however, found guilty of theft of property from his previous employer and was sentenced to 1 year in prison – he was freed on December 12 1984 after serving just 3 months. On October 8 1984 the head of the Russian Public Prosecutor’s Office formally linked 23 murders into 1 case and dropped all charges against the mentally handicapped youths that had previously confessed.

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Andrei Chikatilo (1936-1994) PART THREE

After being released from prison in 1984 Chikatilo found work at a locomotive factory in Novocherkassk and kept a low profile, not killing again until August 1, 1985 when he met 18-year-old Natalia Pokhlistova on a business trip to Moscow. Chikatilo lured her from a railway platform near Domodedovo Airport into a thicket of woods where he tied her up, stabbed her 38 times and strangled her to death. Police believed that the killer had travelled from the Rostov Oblast to Moscow by plane, so checked all Aeroflot flight records of passengers who commuted between Moscow and Rostov Oblast between late July and early August. However, this time Chikatilo had reached Moscow by train and so no documentation existed for investigators to find. 4 weeks later, Chikatilo killed another young woman in Shakhty, Irina Gulyaeva. Like in the case of Natalia Pokhlistova, the injuries linked her murder to the serial killer everybody was hunting for. In November 1985 a special procurator named Issa Kostoyev was hired to supervise the investigation, an investigation that by this stage included 15 procurators and 29 detectives that were working exclusively on the manhunt. The murders that had been linked to the manhunt were reinvestigated and police began a 2nd round of questioning of known sex offenders and homosexuals. The next month, the militsiya (Soviet police force) continued patrolling railway stations around Rostov, and plain-clothed female officers were assigned to hang around bus and train stations. Viktor Burakov advised police to consult psychiatrist Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky, and this was the first such consultation in a serial killer investigation in the Soviet Union. All of the medical examiner and crime scene reports were opened up to Bukhanovsky on the understanding that he would come up with a psychological profile of the unknown murderer for investigators. The 65-page psychological profile that Bukhanovsky produced described the killer as male, reclusive, was between 45 and 50, had endured a painful and isolated childhood and was incapable of flirting or courting women. This individual was of average intelligence, likely to be married with children, but was also an impotent sadist that could only achieve sexual arousal by seeing his victims suffer. The murders were a kind of “foreplay” for the intercourse that this killer was incapable of and his knife was a substitute for the penis that wouldn’t function normally. Because so many of the killings had been committed on weekdays near mass transport sites and across the whole Rostov Oblast, Bukhanovsky believed that the killer’s job required him to travel a lot, and because of the days of the week when the killings occurred, he was probably tied to a production schedule.

Chikatilo was following the investigation as closely as he could, reading newspaper articles about the manhunt and trying his best to keep his murderous impulses under control. For nearly a year following the August 1985 murder of Irina Gulyaeva, no more victims were found in either Rostov or Moscow whose bodies showed similar marks to those of the victims of the unknown murderer. Investigators did link the murder of 33-year-old Lyubov Golovakha, who was found stabbed to death in the Myasnikovsky District of Rostov on 23 July 1986, to the investigation, based on the fact that the killer’s semen type matched that of the unknown killer they were hunting, that she had been stabbed more than 20 times, and that she had been stripped naked before she was murdered. The victim had not been dismembered or mutilated, nor was she seen near any mass transportation sites. Because of these differences in MO, many investigators showed doubts as to whether Golovakha’s murder was committed by the killer they were looking for. On August 18 1986 a victim was discovered in a shallow grave on a collective farm in the city of Bataysk. The injuries on the victim matched those of victims linked to the manhunt killed between 1982 and 1985. The victim was 18-year-old Irina Pogoryelova. Her body was slit open from the neck to the genitals, with 1 breast removed and her eyes cut out. By the autumn of 1986, investigators in Rostov had come to believe that the unknown killer might have moved to another area of the Soviet Union and continued to kill there. Because the 3 victims killed in the Rostov Oblast in 1985 and 1986 had died in August, some believed that the perpetrator only came back to Rostov in the summer. The Rostov police composed bulletins that were sent to all forces throughout the Soviet Union. The bulletins described the wounds the killer inflicted on his victims and requesting feedback from any police forces that had found murder victims with similar wounds to those found in the Rostov Oblast. The response was negative. Chikatilo killed 3 times in 1987. Each of the 3 murders occurred while he was on a business trip far from the Rostov Oblast and none of the murders were linked to the Rostov manhunt. The first murder Chikatilo committed in 1987 was on May 16, when he met 12-year-old Oleg Makarenkov at a train station in the Urals town of Revda. Makarenkov was lured from the station with the promise of a meal, and was murdered in woodland near the station. Revda’s remains weren’t discovered until 1991. In July Chikatilo killed 12-year-old Ivan Bilovetsky in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia and on September 15 he killed 16-year-old student Yuri Tereshonok in woodland outside Leningrad.

In 1988 Chikatilo killed 3 times – an unidentified woman in Krasny Sulin in April, and 2 boys in May and July. The unidentified woman was lured off a train before Chikatilo tied her hands behind her back and forced dirt into her mouth before cutting off her nose and inflicting numerous stab wounds to her neck. Chikatilo then bludgeoned her to death with a concrete slab. Her body was discovered on April 6. Investigators noted the similarities between the wounds on this victim and the wounds inflicted on the victims of the unknown serial killer, but because the woman had been killed with a concrete slab and hadn’t been eviscerated, they weren’t sure whether or not to link this murder to the investigation. In May Chikatilo killed 9-year-old Aleksey Voronko in Ilovaisk, Ukraine. The boy’s wounds were identical to previous victims and this murder was linked to the manhunt. On July 14, Chikatilo murdered 15-year-old Yevgeny Muratov at the Donleskhoz station near Shakhty. This murder was also eventually linked to the investigation, but his body wasn’t discovered until April 1989. His remains were largely skeletonised but his autopsy revealed that he was emasculated and had suffered at least 30 knife wounds. Chikatilo didn’t kill again for 8 months, and on March 1 1989 he killed a 16-year-old girl in his own daughter’s vacant apartment. His dismembered the girl’s body and hid her remains in a sewer. Because of this dismemberment, police didn’t link her murder to the investigation. Between May and August 1989 Chikatilo killed 4 more victims, 3 of whom were killed in Rostov and Shakhty, but only 2 of these were linked to the killer. With the appearance of more victims that were definitely linked to the manhunt and the fact that most of these victims’ bodies were found near railway stations, investigators assigned plainclothes officers to film and photograph train passengers on trains in the Rostov Oblast. Several trains were fitted with hidden cameras with the intention of filming/photographing a victim in the company of their murderer. On January 14, 1990, Chikatilo met 11-year-old Andrei Kravchenko outside a Shakhty theatre, and lured him away on the pretense of showing him imported Western films that Chikatilo claimed to have at his home. Kravchenko’s massively stabbed, emasculated body was discovered in a secluded area of woodland a month later. 7 weeks after this murder, on March 7, Chikatilo lured 10-year-old Yaroslav Makarov from a Rostov train station to Rostov’s Botanical Gardens. His eviscerated body was discovered the next day. On March 11 the leaders of the investigation, which was headed by Mikhail Fetisov, had a meeting to talk about the progress of the manhunt. Fetisov was under immense pressure to solve this case, from the public, the press, and the Ministry of the Interior in Moscow. The manhunt had wound down slightly between 1985 and 1987 but by March 1990, 6 more victims had been linked to the killer, and in response the investigation was ramped back up again, with a renewed interest from the media, who devoted extensive publicity to the case. By August 1990 Chikatilo had killed 3 more victims – 31-year-old Lyubov Zuyeva was lured off a train and killed in woodland near Donleskhoz station on 4 April, 13-year-old Viktor Petrov was lured away from a Rostov railway station and killed in Rostov’s Botanical Gardens on July 28, and 11-year-old Ivan Fomin was killed in the reeds near Novocherkassk beach on August 14.