Andrei Chikatilo

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 20th of November 1990, four plainclothes police officers stepped up to a man leaving a cafe in Novocherkassk. He was carrying a large jar of beer and offered no resistance as they handcuffed him. The man was Andrei Chikatilo, a Ukrainian-born Soviet citizen whom the press would call the Butcher of Rostov, the Rostov Ripper and the Red Ripper. Between 1978 and 1990 he killed women and children in three Soviet republics: Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Most of the killings took place in the Rostov Oblast, which explains two of those nicknames. Why did it take so long to stop him? How did a man with a family and a respectable job move unnoticed through the lives of so many victims? What did investigators miss for years, even when he was almost in their hands? And who else was made to answer for his crimes?

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• 2. Hunger and Ambition

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  Yabluchne, a village in the Sumy Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR, is where Andrei Chikatilo was born on the 16th of October 1936. Ukraine was still recovering from a severe famine caused by Joseph Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture. His parents were collective farm labourers who received no wages. They lived in a one-room hut and were allowed to cultivate a small plot behind it. Food ran short. Chikatilo later claimed he ate no bread until he was twelve, and that the family ate grass and leaves to stave off hunger.

  A brother named Stepan haunted his childhood. His mother, Anna, told him again and again that Stepan, aged four, had been kidnapped and cannibalized by starving neighbours before Andrei was born. No one has established whether this happened, or whether a Stepan Chikatilo ever existed.

  In 1941, Chikatilo's father, Roman, was conscripted into the Red Army. He was later wounded in combat and taken prisoner. Between 1941 and 1944 the boy saw the Nazi occupation of Ukraine at close range, and he called what he saw "horrors". He and his mother hid in cellars and ditches from bombings, fires and shootings. On one occasion they were forced to watch their own hut burn to the ground.

  With Roman gone, mother and son shared a single bed. Chikatilo wet the bed chronically, and his mother beat and berated him for every offence. In 1943 she gave birth to a girl, Tatyana. Roman had been conscripted in 1941 and could not have been the father. It has been speculated that Tatyana was conceived in a wartime rape by a German soldier.

  In September 1944 Chikatilo started school, shy, physically weak and dressed in homespun clothes. His stomach was often swollen from hunger, and he fainted at home and in class. Bullies mocked his size and timid manner. Tatyana later remembered their father as kind and their mother as harsh and unforgiving. Chikatilo took refuge in reading and memorizing data, partly to feel worthy and partly because myopia kept him from seeing the blackboard. His teachers praised him often.

  At fourteen, Chikatilo was made editor of his school newspaper, and two years later chairman of the pupils' Communist Party committee. He was an ardent communist and organized street marches. In 1954 he graduated with excellent grades, the only student from his collective farm to finish the final year.

  Lilya Barysheva, a girl he knew through the school newspaper, was his first crush at seventeen. He was too nervous around her to ask for a date. Puberty had already shown him that he was chronically impotent, which worsened his awkwardness and self-hatred. That same year he assaulted an 11-year-old friend of his younger sister.

  Moscow State University rejected his scholarship application after graduation. He had passed the entrance examination with good-to-excellent scores, but other students had done better. Chikatilo suspected his father's war record, since Roman had been branded a traitor for being taken prisoner in 1943. He tried no other university. Instead he laboured for three months in Kursk, then in 1955 enrolled in a vocational school to become a communications technician. His first serious relationship began that year with a local girl two years younger. After three failed attempts at intimacy and eighteen months, she ended it.

  Nizhny Tagil, a city in the Urals, was his next posting, working on a long-term construction project. He also took correspondence courses in engineering with the Moscow Electrotechnical Institute of Communication. In 1957 he was drafted. Until 1960 he served first with border guards in Central Asia, then with a KGB communications unit in East Berlin, where his record was unblemished. Shortly before his service ended in 1960, he joined the Communist Party.

  Back in his native village in 1960, Chikatilo worked briefly on the collective farm and began a three-month relationship with a young divorcée. It ended when she innocently asked her friends how he might overcome his impotence, and most of his peers soon knew. In a 1993 interview he recalled: "Girls were going behind my back, whispering that I was impotent. I was so ashamed. I tried to hang myself." He said his mother and some young neighbours pulled him out of the noose, and that he then had to run away from his homeland.

  Rodionovo-Nesvetayskaya, a town twenty miles north of Rostov-on-Don, offered him a job as a communications engineer in 1961. He moved to the Russian SFSR and rented a small apartment near work. Tatyana joined him for six months before marrying. She noticed nothing untoward beyond his shyness around women, and she resolved to help him find a wife. In 1963 he married Feodosia Odnacheva, whom his sister introduced barely two weeks before the wedding. A daughter, Lyudmila, was born in 1965, and a son, Yuri, in 1969.

  Rostov University had accepted him in 1964 as a correspondence student of Russian literature and philology. The degree he earned there in 1970 would qualify him for the classroom.

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• 3. The Teacher

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  Vocational School No. 32 in Novoshakhtinsk is where Chikatilo began teaching Russian language and literature, after a year managing regional sports activities. He knew his subjects well but could rarely keep order. Students mocked him, and he claimed they took advantage of his modest nature.

  One of his duties was making sure boarding students were in their dormitories each evening. On several occasions he entered the girls' dormitory hoping to see them undressed. He also found adolescent pupils having sex. He later said the sight disturbed him, because he was seeing "children doing what I hadn't done even when I was thirty years old."

  In May 1973, Chikatilo committed his first known sexual assault on a pupil, swimming up to a 15-year-old girl and groping her as she struggled. Months later he assaulted and beat another teenage girl whom he had locked in his classroom. He was disciplined for neither incident, nor for the times colleagues saw him fondling himself in front of students. As complaints mounted, the school director summoned him and said he must resign or be fired. Chikatilo left quietly and started at another Novoshakhtinsk school in January 1974.

  Staff cutbacks cost him that post in September 1978. He found work at Technical School No. 33 in Shakhty, a coal-mining town forty-seven miles north of Rostov. By his own admission, from the mid-1970s his wish to see naked children drove him to loiter around public toilets and spy on young girls. He bought chewing gum to give to girls he met, hoping to win their trust, and he assaulted at least three girls this way.

  March 1981 ended his teaching career, after several complaints of child molestation from pupils of both sexes. That month he became a supply clerk at a Rostov factory that made construction materials. The job sent him across much of the Soviet Union to buy raw materials and negotiate contracts, which meant long journeys by rail and air to towns where no one knew him.

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• 4. An Innocent Man

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  The 22nd of December 1978 was a winter evening in Shakhty, where Chikatilo had recently moved. He lured a 9-year-old girl, Yelena Zakotnova, to a dilapidated hut he had secretly bought that year. He killed her there and threw her body into the Grushevka River. It was found beneath a nearby bridge two days later.

  Blood in the snow beside a fence facing his house pointed toward Chikatilo. Neighbours had seen him in the house that evening, and the girl's school backpack lay on the opposite bank of the river at the end of his street. A witness gave police a detailed description of a man closely resembling him, talking with Yelena at the bus stop where she was last seen alive.

  Police arrested someone else. Aleksandr Kravchenko, a 25-year-old labourer, had already served a sentence for the rape and murder of a young girl in 1970. Blood on his wife's jumper matched both Yelena and Mrs. Kravchenko. He had a strong alibi, since he had been at home all afternoon with his wife and her friend, and neighbours confirmed it.

  Police threatened the wife with being an accomplice to murder and her friend with perjury. Both women then gave new statements saying Kravchenko came home late. Confronted with them, he confessed. At his trial in 1979 he retracted the confession and said it was obtained under extreme duress. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

  In December 1980 the Supreme Court commuted the sentence to fifteen years, then the maximum prison term. Under pressure from the victim's relatives, he was retried and again wrongly convicted. Kravchenko was executed by firing squad in July 1983.

  Chikatilo said that after Yelena's death he could reach arousal only through stabbing and slashing women and children, and that the urge to relive it overwhelmed him. At first, he insisted, he fought it, often cutting business trips short to avoid the temptation of finding a victim. Kravchenko was still alive in prison when Chikatilo's next victim, a 17-year-old named Larisa Tkachenko, died on the 3rd of September 1981.

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• 5. The Manhunt

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  Lyubov Biryuk, a 13-year-old walking home from shopping in the Bagayevsky District on the 12th of June 1982, was the victim after whom Chikatilo stopped resisting. Between July and September he killed five more people aged 9 to 18. His pattern was fixed. He approached children, runaways and young vagrants at bus or railway stations, coaxed them to a nearby forest or other secluded place, and killed them, usually with a knife. His ruses included offering a shortcut, food, candy, or a look at rare stamps, films or coins. Adult women were often prostitutes or homeless, lured with promises of alcohol or money.

  By January 1983 four killings had been tentatively linked. A Moscow police team headed by Major Mikhail Fetisov arrived in Rostov and organized ten investigators. Investigators came to call the effort Operation Forest Path. In March Fetisov put a newly appointed forensic analyst, Viktor Burakov, in charge. When the body of 10-year-old Olga Stalmachenok was found the following month, Burakov studied the wounds and the striations on her eye sockets. Any doubt about a serial killer, he later said, evaporated.

  On the 6th of September 1983 the public prosecutor of the Soviet Union formally linked six murders. Police floated several theories: a group harvesting organs for transplant, a Satanic cult, or a mentally ill individual. Most effort went into the last idea. Anyone who had been in a psychiatric ward or convicted of homosexuality or paedophilia was checked and logged in a card filing system.

  From September 1983, several young men confessed to the killings. Most were intellectually disabled youths who admitted guilt after prolonged and often brutal interrogation. Three known homosexuals and a convicted sex offender killed themselves because of the investigators' heavy-handed tactics. The inquiry solved more than 1,000 unrelated crimes, including ninety-five murders, 140 aggravated assaults and 245 rapes. Yet bodies kept turning up, proving that the confessing suspects were not the killer.

  The 13th of September 1984 brought the closest call. Two undercover detectives watched Chikatilo at a Rostov bus station as he tried to talk to young women. They followed him to the central market and arrested him. In his belongings were a knife with a 20 cm blade, several lengths of rope and a jar of Vaseline. His physical description matched the man seen walking beside a 10-year-old boy named Dmitry Ptashnikov before that boy's murder.

  His blood was type A. The semen found on six victims from the spring and summer of 1984 had been classed as type AB. The analysis largely cleared him. He was convicted of stealing property from a former employer, expelled from the Communist Party and sentenced to a year in prison. He walked free on the 12th of December 1984 after serving three months. Earlier, on the 8th of October 1984, the head of the Russian Public Prosecutors Office had linked twenty-three murders into one case and dropped all charges against the disabled youths.

  Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky was consulted in 1985 at Burakov's request, the first such psychiatric consultation in a Soviet serial killer inquiry. His 65-page profile described a reclusive man between 45 and 50 with a painful, isolated childhood. The man would be well educated, probably married to a wife who expected little intimacy, and unable to court women. Because killings clustered on weekdays near transport hubs, Bukhanovsky argued the killer's job required regular travel tied to a production schedule.

  Issa Kostoyev was appointed special procurator in November 1985, overseeing fifteen procurators and twenty-nine detectives. Chikatilo read newspaper coverage of the hunt and held his urges in check. Almost a year passed with no new victims bearing the killer's signature. He struck again on the 1st of August 1985, near Domodedovo Airport outside Moscow. Investigators checked Aeroflot records for passengers flying between Moscow and the Rostov region. Chikatilo had travelled by train, so no record existed.

  In 1987 he killed three times in places far from Rostov, in Revda, Zaporizhia and the outskirts of Leningrad. None of those murders was connected to the hunt. Bulletins sent to police forces across the Soviet Union brought no matching cases. When glasnost loosened press restrictions, the media devoted extensive coverage to the case. On the 11th of March 1990, Fetisov, under pressure from the public, the press and the Interior Ministry, warned that people would be fired if the killer was not caught soon.

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• 6. The Railway Net

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  Burakov's plan in the autumn of 1990 relied on a pattern in the maps. Several bodies had been found at stations along one rail route through the Rostov Oblast. He proposed saturating the larger stations with obvious uniformed police, so the killer would be discouraged from striking there. Undercover officers would watch the smaller, quieter stops. The plan was approved, and officers were told to question any adult man seen with a young woman or child and record his name and passport number.

  Police deployed 360 men across the stations of the oblast. Only undercover officers were posted at the three smallest stations on the most frequently targeted route: Kundryucha, Donleskhoz and Lesostep. The aim was to push the killer toward one of those three. The operation began on the 27th of October 1990.

  On the 30th of October, the body of a 16-year-old boy, Vadim Gromov, was found at Donleskhoz station. He had been killed on the 17th of October, ten days before the operation began. The same day, Chikatilo lured another 16-year-old, Viktor Tishchenko, off a train at Kirpichnaya station. Tishchenko was physically strong, and the police found signs of a ferocious struggle at the scene.

  On the 6th of November 1990 Chikatilo killed a 22-year-old woman, Svetlana Korostik, in woodland near Donleskhoz station. Returning to the platform, he was noticed by an undercover officer, Igor Rybakov, as he washed his hands and face at a well. His coat had grass and soil stains on the elbows, there was a red smear on his cheek, and a finger looked badly cut. He wore formal clothes, not those of a mushroom gatherer, and carried a nylon sports bag unsuited to mushrooms. Rybakov checked his papers but had no formal grounds to detain him. He filed a routine report with the man's name.

  Korostik's body was found on the 13th of November, and she became the thirty-eighth victim linked to the hunt. Police went through all reports from the previous week, and Chikatilo's name stood out. Several officers recognized it because he had been questioned in 1984 and was on a 1987 suspect list circulated across the Soviet Union. Checks with his employers placed him in towns and cities at the times of several killings. Former colleagues from his teaching days described the complaints that forced him out of two schools.

  Surveillance began on the 14th of November. Police watched him on trains and buses approach lone young women or children and start conversations. If they broke off, he waited a few minutes and tried someone else. A search after his arrest found a folding knife, two lengths of rope and a deep wound on the middle finger of his right hand, which he had treated with iodine. Medical examiners concluded it was a human bite. He was placed in a cell at the KGB headquarters in Rostov, alongside a police informer told to draw him into conversation.

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• 7. Confession

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  The 21st of November 1990 began the formal questioning, led by Issa Kostoyev. The police strategy was to convince Chikatilo that he was a very sick man needing medical help, giving him hope that confessing would lead to a finding of insanity instead of prosecution. They knew their case was largely circumstantial. Soviet law allowed them to hold a suspect for only ten days before charging or releasing him.

  The blood puzzle was solved that same day. Chikatilo's blood again tested as type A, not AB. Investigators then pointed out that they had deduced the killer's type from semen samples on the clothing and bodies of fourteen victims, not from blood. They obtained a semen sample from Chikatilo. It was type AB, while his blood and saliva were type A.

  Chikatilo spent the early days denying the murders, though he confessed to molesting several pupils during his years as a teacher. He wrote several essays for Kostoyev. They were evasive about the killings but revealed psychological symptoms matching Bukhanovsky's 1985 prediction. The informer in his cell reported that Kostoyev had repeatedly asked direct questions about the mutilations, which may have made Chikatilo defensive.

  Bukhanovsky was invited to the questioning on the 29th of November, at the request of Burakov and Fetisov. He read extracts from his own 65-page profile aloud to the suspect. Within two hours, Chikatilo burst into tears and admitted his guilt. Armed with Bukhanovsky's handwritten notes, Kostoyev drew up a formal accusation dated that same day, the eve of the expiry of the ten-day limit.

  The next morning, according to the official protocol, Chikatilo confessed to thirty-six of the thirty-eight murders police had linked to him. He denied two killings from 1986. One was Lyubov Golovakha, whose link to the hunt many investigators had doubted. The other was Irina Pogoryelova, found in Bataysk, whose wounds closely matched the other victims. He described each murder in detail consistent with the known facts, and could sketch crime scenes, marking the position of the body and nearby landmarks.

  Anna Lemesheva, a 19-year-old student killed near Shakhty station on the 19th of July 1984, supplied one proof. Chikatilo recalled that as she fought him, she warned that a man called "Bars", meaning "Leopard", would take revenge. Her fiancé had the nickname "Bars" tattooed on his hand.

  Asked why the eyes of his later victims were stabbed or slashed but not gouged out like those of earlier victims, Chikatilo cited an old Russian superstition. It held that a murderer's image is imprinted on the eyes of the victim. In "later years", he said, he came to see it as an old wives' tale and stopped.

  On the 30th of November, he was formally charged with the thirty-six murders, committed between June 1982 and November 1990. Over the following days he confessed to twenty more killings that had never been tied to the case. Some happened outside the Rostov Oblast, some of the bodies had not been found, and one was Yelena Zakotnova, because an innocent man had already been convicted. One victim was Lyubov Volobuyeva, aged 14, whom he killed near Krasnodar Airport on the 25th of July 1982. She had told him she lived in the Siberian city of Novokuznetsk and was waiting for a connecting flight.

  In December 1990, Chikatilo led police to the body of Aleksey Khobotov, a boy he said he killed in August 1989 and buried on the outskirts of a Shakhty cemetery. He later led investigators to two other bodies. Three of the fifty-six victims he confessed to could not be found or identified.

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• 8. Trial and Verdict

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  The Serbsky Institute in Moscow received Chikatilo on the 20th of August 1991 for a 60-day psychiatric evaluation. The senior psychiatrist, Andrei Tkachenko, noted physiological problems that he attributed to prenatal brain damage. Tkachenko described a "steady but gradual descent into perversion", shaped by biological and environmental factors, with violence committed to relieve internal tension. On the 18th of October he concluded that Chikatilo had a borderline personality disorder with sadistic features but was fit to stand trial. In December 1991 police released details of the arrest to the newly privatized Russian media.

  Courtroom Number 5 of the Rostov Provincial Court, with Judge Leonid Akubzhanov presiding, opened Chikatilo's trial on the 14th of April 1992. Besides the murders, he faced five charges of sexual assault against minors from his teaching years. It was the first major media event of post-Soviet Russia. The press had been given a list of his crimes and a 1984 identikit but no photograph or full name, so reporters first saw him as he entered an iron cage built in a corner of the courtroom to protect him from the victims' relatives. Headlines called him a "cannibal" and a "maniac".

  Akubzhanov spent the first two days reading the indictments aloud, and relatives wept or fainted as the details of each death were read. He then announced an open trial, saying: "Let this trial at least teach us something, so that this will never happen anytime or anywhere again."

  Questioned about the charges, Chikatilo often gave dismissive answers. He grew indignant only when accused of stealing from victims or of keeping organs taken from the scenes. Asked why he seemed indifferent to the lifestyle and gender of those he killed, he replied: "I did not need to look for them. Every step I took, they were there." The judge repeatedly berated him, ordering him to "shut your mouth" and adding, "You're not crazy!" Defence lawyer Marat Khabibulin protested the accusatory tone. When uncooperative, Chikatilo shouted over the judge, called the court a farce, and sang socialist anthems, so he was sometimes returned to his cell while the trial continued.

  On the 21st of April, the court refused to let Bukhanovsky testify on his 1985 profile and his talks with Chikatilo. The same day, Chikatilo stopped answering any questions for three consecutive days, saying the judge had violated his presumption of innocence. Proceedings were then adjourned for two weeks. On the 13th of May, he withdrew his confessions to six killings and claimed four more that were not in the indictment.

  Khabibulin asked again for a second psychiatric evaluation, and the judge dismissed the request as groundless. Khabibulin rose to condemn the composition of the court and called the judge unfit to preside. Prosecutor Nikolai Gerasimenko supported him, saying the judge had made too many remarks and committed numerous procedural violations. Akubzhanov instead ruled that the prosecutor be replaced. The trial ran briefly with no prosecutor until Anatoly Zadorozhny was found.

  Bukhanovsky was finally allowed to testify on the 3rd of July, but only as a witness. For three hours he described his profile and the conversations that led to the confession. Four Serbsky psychiatrists testified that Chikatilo's behaviour in court was strikingly unlike his behaviour in his cell. They called it a calculated attempt to win acquittal on grounds of insanity.

  Khabibulin delivered a 90-minute closing argument on the 9th of August. He said he had no confidence his voice would be heard above the general outcry for retribution, and he called areas of the confessions "baseless". He asked for a verdict of not guilty. The next day Zadorozhny argued that Chikatilo understood the criminality of his acts, could resist his impulses, and took conscious steps to avoid detection. In nineteen charges, he noted, Chikatilo himself had led investigators to the material evidence. He requested the death penalty. Offered a chance to speak last, Chikatilo sat mute.

  In October 1992, the court convicted him and sentenced him to death for fifty-two of the murders. In 1993, the Supreme Court of Russia ruled that the evidence was insufficient to prove his guilt in nine of them. Chikatilo was executed by gunshot, and he died on the 14th of February 1994. In law, nine of the killings remained unproven against him.

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