Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (October 16, 1936 - February 14, 1994) was a Soviet serial killer nicknamed '''The Butcher of Rostov, The Red Ripper, The Forest Strip Killer '''and '''The Rostov Ripper '''who commited the murder of women and children between 1978 and 1990
{{Villain_Infobox
|Image = Andrei Chikatilo.jpg
|fullname = Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo
|alias = The Butcher of Rostov<br>The Forest Strip Killer<br>The Red Ripper<br>The Rostov Ripper
|origin =Yabluchne, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union
|occupation = School teacher<br>Communications engineer
}}{{Quote|I was a mistake of nature, a mad beast.|Andrei Chikatilo}}
'''Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo''' (Russian/Ukrainian: Андрей Романович Чикатило, October 16<sup>th</sup>, 1936 - February 14<sup>th</sup>, 1994) was a Soviet serial killer nicknamed '''The Butcher of Rostov''', '''The Red Ripper''', '''The Forest Strip Killer''' and '''The Rostov Ripper''' who committed the murder of at least 52 women and children between 1978 and 1990.
==The Murders==
==Early Life==
In September 1978, Chikatilo moved to Shakhty, a small coal mining town near Rostov-on-Don, where he committed his first documented murder. On 22 December, Chikatilo lured a 9-year-old girl named Yelena Zakotnova to an old house which he had secretly purchased; he attempted to rape her, but failed to achieve an erection. When the girl struggled, he choked her and stabbed her three times in the abdomen, ejaculating in the process of knifing the child. In an interview after his arrest, Chikatilo later recalled that after stabbing Yelena, the girl had "said something very hoarsely", whereupon he strangled her into unconsciousness before throwing her body into a nearby river. Her body was found two days later.
Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born on October 16<sup>th</sup>, 1936; in Yablochnoye, a village in the heart of rural Ukraine in the USSR. During the 1930s, Ukraine was known as the "Breadbasket" of the Soviet Union. [[Stalin]]'s policies of agricultural collectivization caused widespread hardship and famine ([[the Holodomor]]) that decimated the population. At the time of Chikatilo's birth, the effects of the famine were still widely felt, and his early childhood was influenced by deprivation. The situation was made worse still when the USSR entered [[World War II]] against Germany, bringing sustained bombing raids on Ukraine.
Numerous pieces of evidence linked Chikatilo to the murder of Yelena Zakotnova: Spots of blood had been found in the snow near the house Chikatilo had purchased; neighbours had noted that Chikatilo had been present in the house on the evening of 22 December; Zakotnova's school rucksack had been found upon the opposite bank of the river at the end of the street (indicating the girl had been thrown into the river at this location) and a witness had given police a detailed description of a man closely resembling Chikatilo whom she had seen talking with Zakotnova at the bus stop where the girl had last been seen alive.Despite these facts, a 25-year-old named Aleksandr Kravchenko, who as a teenager, had served a prison sentence for the rape and murder of a teenage girl, was arrested for the crime and subsequently confessed to the killing. He was tried for the murder in 1979. At his trial, Kravchenko retracted his confession and maintained his innocence, stating his confession had been obtained under extreme duress. Despite his retraction, he was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment (the maximum possible length of imprisonment at that time). Under pressure from the victim's relatives, Kravchenko was retried and eventually executed for the murder of Yelena Zakotnova in July 1983. Following Zakotnova's murder, Chikatilo was able to achieve [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_arousal sexual arousal] and orgasm only through stabbing and slashing women and children to death, and he later claimed that the urge to relive the experience had overwhelmed him.
In addition to the external hardships, Chikatilo is believed to have suffered from hydrocephalus (water on the brain) at birth, which caused him genital-urinary tract problems later in life, including bed-wetting into his late adolescence and, later, the inability to sustain an erection, although he was able to ejaculate. His home life was disrupted by his father's conscription into the war against Germany, where he was captured, held prisoner, and then vilified by his countrymen for allowing himself to be captured when he finally returned home. Chikatilo suffered the consequences of his father's "cowardice", making him the focus of school [[bullying]].
Chikatilo committed his next murder in September 1981, when he tried to have sex with a 17-year-old [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_school boarding school] student named Larisa Tkachenko in a forest near the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_River_%28Russia%29 Don River]. When Chikatilo failed to achieve an erection, he became furious and battered and strangled her to death.As he had no knife, he [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutilation mutilated] her body with his teeth and a stick.On 12 June 1982, Chikatilo encountered a 13-year-old girl named Lyubov Biryuk walking home from a shopping trip in the village of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donskoi Donskoi]. Once the path both were taking together was shielded from the view of potential witnesses by bushes, Chikatilo pounced upon Biryuk, dragged her into nearby [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undergrowth undergrowth], tore off her dress and killed her by stabbing and slashing her to death.
==The Murders==
Lyubov Biryuk, aged 13. Murdered 12 June 1982.Following Biryuk's murder, Chikatilo no longer attempted to resist his homicidal urges: between July and September 1982, he killed a further five victims between the ages of nine and nineteen. He established a pattern of approaching children, runaways and young vagrants at bus or railway stations, enticing them to a nearby forest or other secluded area and killing them, usually by stabbing, slashing and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evisceration eviscerating] the victim with a knife; although some victims, in addition to receiving a multitude of knife wounds, were also strangled or battered to death.Many of the victims' bodies bore evidence of mutilation to the eye sockets. Pathologists concluded the injuries were caused by a knife, leading investigators to the conclusion the killer had gouged out the eyes of his victims.Chikatilo's adult female victims were often [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitute prostitutes] or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness homeless] women who could be lured to secluded areas with promises of alcohol or money. Chikatilo would typically attempt intercourse with these victims, but he would usually be unable to achieve or maintain an erection which would send him into a murderous fury, particularly if the woman mocked his impotence. He would achieve orgasm only when he stabbed the victim to death. His child victims were of both sexes; Chikatilo would lure these victims to secluded areas using a variety of ruses, usually formed in the initial conversation with the victim,such as promising them assistance or company, the offer to show the victim a shortcut,a chance to view rare stamps, films or coins or with an offer of food or candy. He would usually overpower these victims once they were alone, tie their hands behind their backs with a length of rope, and then proceed to kill them.
On 11 December 1982, Chikatilo encountered a 10-year-old girl named Olga Stalmachenok riding a bus to her parents' home in Novoshakhtinsk and persuaded the child to leave the bus with him. She was last seen by a fellow passenger being led firmly by the hand by a middle-aged man.Stalmachenok was lured to a cornfield on the outskirts of Novoshakhtinsk before she was killed. Chikatilo stabbed the girl in excess of 50 times around the head and body, ripped open her chest and excised her lower bowel and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uterus uterus].
By January 1983, a total of four victims thus far killed had been tentatively linked to the same killer. A [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow Moscow] police team, headed by Major Mikhail Fetisov, was sent to Rostov-on-Don to direct the investigation. Fetisov centered the investigations around Shakhty and assigned a newly appointed specialist [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_science forensic analyst], Viktor Burakov, to head the investigation. In April, Olga Stalmachenok's body was found. Burakov was summoned to the crime scene, where he noted the eviscerations conducted upon the child and that her eye sockets bore striations. Burakov later stated that, as he noted the striations upon Stalmachenok's eye sockets, any doubts about the presence of a serial killer evaporated.
Chikatilo did not kill again until June 1983, when he murdered a 15-year-old [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenians Armenian] girl named Laura Sarkisyan, although her body was never found. By September, he had killed a further five victims. The accumulation of bodies found and the similarities between the pattern of wounds inflicted on the victims forced the Soviet authorities to acknowledge that a serial killer was on the loose. On 6 September 1983, the public prosecutor of the USSR formally linked six of the murders thus far committed to the same killer.
An eyewitness had seen Chikatilo with the victim, shortly before her disappearance, but his wife provided him with an iron-clad alibi that enabled him to evade any further police attention.
Alexsandr Kravchenko, a 25-year-old with a previous rape conviction, was arrested and confessed to the crime under duress, probably as a result of extensive and brutal interrogation. He was tried for the killing of Lena Zakotnova and executed in 1984.
Due to the sheer savagery of the murders and the precision of the eviscerations upon the victims' bodies, police theorized that the killings may have been conducted by either a group harvesting organs to sell for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_transplant transplant] or the work of a Satanic cult. However, much of the police effort concentrated upon [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_illness mentally ill] citizens, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual homosexuals], known [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paedophile paedophiles] and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_offender sex offenders], slowly working through all that were known and eliminating them from the inquiry. A number of young men confessed to the murders, although they were usually [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_retardation mentally handicapped] youths who admitted to the crimes only under prolonged and often brutal interrogation. Three known homosexuals and a convicted sex offender committed suicide as a result of the investigators' heavy-handed tactics.As a result of the investigation into the killings, a total of 1000 unrelated crimes, including 95 murders,were solved. However, as police obtained confessions from suspects, bodies continued to be discovered, proving that the suspects who had confessed could not be the killer the police were seeking; in October 1983, Chikatilo killed a 19-year-old prostitute named Vera Shevkun, and in December, a 14-year-old [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gukovo Gukovo] schoolboy named Sergey Markov was lured off a train and murdered in Kazachi Lagerya.
Perhaps as a result of his close brush with the law, there were no more documented victims for the next three years. Still dogged by claims of [[Child Abuse|child abuse]], Chikatilo found it impossible to find another teaching post, when he was made redundant from his mining school post, in early 1981. He took a job as a clerk for a raw materials factory in Rostov, where the travel involved with the position gave him unlimited access to a wide range of young victims over the next nine years.
[[File:5 jpeg05d5411fcbeac3aaf28040bc54992433.jpeg.jpg|thumb|220x220px|'''Chikatilo In Court'''|link=Special:FilePath/5_jpeg05d5411fcbeac3aaf28040bc54992433.jpeg.jpg]]
Larisa Tkachenko, 17, became his next victim. On September 3, 1981, Chikatilo strangled, stabbed and gagged her with earth and leaves to prevent her crying out. The brutal force afforded Chikatilo his sexual release, and he began to develop a pattern of attack that saw him focusing on young runaways of both sexes. He befriended them at train stations and bus stops, before luring them into nearby forest areas, where he would attack them, attempt rape and use his knife, to mutilate them. In a number of cases, he ate the sexual organs or removed other body parts such as the tips of their noses or tongues. In the earliest cases, the common pattern was to inflict damage to the eye area, slashing across the sockets and removing the eyeballs in many cases, an act which Chikatilo later attributed to a belief that his victims kept an imprint of his face in their eyes, even after death.
In January and February 1984, Chikatilo killed two women in Rostov's Aviators' Park. On 24 March, he lured a 10-year-old boy named Dmitry Ptashnikov, away from a stamp kiosk in Novoshakhtinsk. While walking with the boy, Chikatilo was seen by several witnesses who were able to give investigators a detailed description of the killer. When Ptashnikov's body was found three days later, police also found a footprint of the killer and both semen and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saliva saliva] samples on the victim's clothing. The semen samples were sent for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_analysis analysis], revealing the killer's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_type blood type] to be [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABO_blood_group_system type AB].
At this time serial killers were a virtually unknown phenomenon in the Soviet Union. Evidence of serial killing, or child abuse, was sometimes suppressed by state-controlled media, in the interests of public order. The eye mutilation was a ''modus operandi'' distinct enough to allow for other cases to be linked when the Soviet authorities finally admitted that they had a serial killer to contend with. As the body count mounted, rumors of foreign-inspired plots, and werewolf attacks became more prevalent, and public fear and interest grew, despite the lack of any media coverage.
On 25 May, Chikatilo killed a young woman named Tatyana Petrosyan and her 11-year-old daughter, Svetlana, in a wooded area outside Shakhty. Petrosyan had known Chikatilo for several years prior to her murder.By 19 July, he had killed three further young women between the ages of 19 and 22 and a 13-year-old boy. In the summer of 1984, Chikatilo was fired from his work as a supply clerk for theft of property. The accusation had been filed against him the previous February and he had been asked to resign quietly, but had refused to do so as he had denied the charges. Chikatilo found another job as a supply clerk in Rostov on 1 August.
In 1983 Moscow detective Major Mikhail Fetisov assumed control of the investigation. He recognized that a serial killer might be on the loose, and assigned a specialist forensic analyst, Victor Burakov, to head the investigation in the Shakhty area. The investigation centered on known sex offenders, and the mentally ill, but such were the interrogation methods of the local police that they regularly solicited false confessions from prisoners, leaving Burakov skeptical of the majority of these "confessions". Progress was slow, especially as, at that stage, not all of the victim's bodies had been discovered, so the true body count was unknown to the police. With each body, the forensic evidence mounted, and police were convinced that the killer had the blood type AB, as evidenced by the semen samples collected from a number of crime scenes. Samples of identical grey hair were also retrieved.
When a further 15 victims were added during the course of 1984, police efforts were increased drastically, and they mounted massive surveillance operations that canvassed most local transport hubs. Chikatilo was arrested for behaving suspiciously at a bus station at this time, but again avoided suspicion on the [[murder]] charges, as his blood type did not match the suspect profile, but he was imprisoned for three months for a number of minor outstanding offenses.
On 2 August, Chikatilo killed a 16-year-old girl, Natalya Golosovskaya, in Aviators' Park. On 7 August, he killed a 17-year-old girl on the banks of the Don River before flying to the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbekistan Uzbekistan] capital of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tashkent Tashkent] on a business trip. By the time Chikatilo returned to Rostov on 15 August, he had killed another young woman and a 12-year-old girl. Within two weeks an 11-year-old boy had been found strangled, castrated and with his eyes gouged out in Rostov before a young librarian, Irina Luchinskaya, was killed in Rostov's Aviators' Park on 6 September.
What was not realized at the time was that Chikatilo's actual blood type, type A, was different to the type found in his other bodily fluids (type AB), as he was a member of a minority group known as "non-secretors", whose blood type cannot be inferred by anything other than a blood sample. As police only had a sample of semen, and not blood, from the crime scenes, Chikatilo was able to escape suspicion of murder. Today's sophisticated DNA techniques are not subject to the same fallibility.
Until 31 July 1985 he murdered a young woman named Natalia Pokhlistova in a thicket of woods close to Moscow's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domodedovo_Airport Domodedovo Airport].
Following his release, Chikatilo found work as a traveling buyer for a train company, based in Novocherkassk, and managed to keep a low profile until August 1985, when he murdered two women in separate incidents.
On 6 November 1990, Chikatilo killed and mutilated a 22-year-old woman named Svetlana Korostik in woodland near Donleskhoz Station. While leaving the crime scene, he was observed by an undercover officer. The policeman observed Chikatilo approach a well and wash his hands and face. When he approached the station, the undercover officer noted that Chikatilo's coat had grass and soil stains on the elbows. Chikatilo also had a small red smear on his cheek.To the officer, he looked suspicious. The only reason people entered woodland near the station at that time of year was to gather wild [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom mushrooms] (a popular pastime in Russia), but Chikatilo was not dressed like a typical forest scavenger; he was wearing more formal attire. Moreover, he had a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon nylon] sports bag, which was not suitable for carrying mushrooms. The policeman stopped Chikatilo and checked his papers, but had no formal reason to arrest him. When the policeman returned to his office, he filed a routine report, containing the name of the person he had stopped at the station.
At around the same time as these murders, Burakov, frustrated at the lack of positive progress, engaged the help of a psychiatrist, Alexandr Bukhanovsky, who refined the profile of the killer. Bukhanovsky described the killer as a "necro-sadist", or someone who achieves sexual gratification from the suffering and death of others. Bukhanovsky also placed the killer's age as between 45 and 50, significantly older than had been believed up to that point. Desperate to catch the killer, Burakov even interviewed a serial killer, Anatoly Slivko, shortly before his execution, in an attempt to gain some insight into his elusive serial killer.
==Trial and Conviction==
Coinciding with this attempt to understand the mind of the killer, attacks seemed to dry up, and police suspected that their target might have stopped killing, been incarcerated for other crimes, or died. However, early in 1988, Chikatilo again resumed his killing, the majority occurring away from the Rostov area, and victims were no longer taken from local public transport outlets, as police surveillance of these areas continued. Over the next two years, the body count increased by a further 19 victims, and it appeared that the killer was taking increasing risks, focusing primarily on young boys, and often killing in public places where the risk of detection was far higher.
[[File:Andrei_Romanovich_Chikatilo_Trial_1992.jpg|thumb|Chikatilo, pictured at his trial in April 1992.]]
==Trial and Execution==
The recently unfettered media of Gorbachev's glasnost society placed enormous public pressure on police forces to catch the killer, and general police patrols were stepped up, with Burakov targeting likely areas with undercover police in an attempt to flush out the killer. Chikatilo evaded capture narrowly, on a couple of occasions, but on November 6, 1990, fresh from killing his final victim, Sveta Korostik, his suspicious behavior was noted by patrolling policemen at the station nearby, and his details were taken. His name was linked to his previous arrest in 1984, and he was placed under surveillance.
Chikatilo's trial was the first major media event of liberalized post-Soviet Russia. Proceedings commenced in Rostov on 14 April 1992. During the trial, Chikatilo was kept in an iron cage in a corner of the courtroom to protect him from attack by the many enraged and, often, hysterical relatives of his victims. Chikatilo's head had been shaved — a standard prison procedure, officially to prevent the spread of lice. Relatives of victims regularly shouted threats and insults at Chikatilo throughout the trial, demanding that authorities release him so that they could kill him themselves. Each murder was discussed individually and, on several occasions, relatives broke down in tears when details of their relatives' murder were revealed; some even fainted.
Chikatilo was arrested on November 20<sup>th</sup>, 1990; following more suspicious behavior, but he refused at first to confess to any of the killings. Burakov decided to allow the psychiatrist, Bukhanovski, who had prepared the original profile, to talk to Chikatilo, under the guise of trying to understand the mind of a killer from a scientific context. Chikatilo, clearly flattered by this approach, opened up to the psychiatrist, providing extensive details of all of his killings, and even leading police to the site of bodies previously undiscovered.
Chikatilo repeatedly interrupted the trial, exposing himself, singing, and refusing to answer questions put to him by the judge. He was regularly removed from the courtroom for interrupting the proceedings. On 13 May, Chikatilo withdrew his confessions to six of the killings,and in July 1992, he demanded that the judge be replaced for making too many rash remarks which assumed his guilt. His defense counsel backed the claim. Even the prosecutor supported the defense's claim, stating the judge had indeed made too many such comments. The judge ruled that the prosecutor be replaced instead.
He claimed to have taken the lives of 56 victims, although only 53 of these could be independently verified. This figure was far in excess of the 36 cases that the police had initially attributed to their serial killer.
On 9 August, both prosecution and defense delivered their final arguments before the judge. Chikatilo again attempted to interrupt the proceedings and had to be removed from the courtroom. Final sentence was postponed until 14 October. As the final deliberations began, the brother of Lyudmila Alekseyeva, a 17-year-old girl killed by Chikatilo in August 1984, threw a heavy chunk of metal at Chikatilo, hitting him in the chest. When security tried to arrest the young man, other victims' relatives shielded him.
Having been declared sane and fit to stand trial, Chikatilo went to court on April 14 <sup>th</sup>,1992, and throughout the trial he was held in an iron cage designed to keep him apart from the relatives of his many victims. Referred to in the media as "The Maniac", his behavior in court ranged from bored to manic, singing and talking gibberish; at one point he was even reported as having dropped his trousers, waving his genitals at the assembled crowd.
On 14 October, the court reconvened and the judge read the list of murders again, not finishing until the following day. On 15 October, Chikatilo was found guilty of 52 of the 53 murders and sentenced to death for each offense. He was also found guilty of five counts of sexual assault committed during the years he worked as a teacher in the 1970s. Chikatilo kicked his bench across his cage when he heard the verdict, and then began shouting abuse. However, when given an opportunity to make a speech in response to the verdict, he remained silent.Upon passing final sentence, Judge Leonid Akhobzyanov made the following speech:
The judge appeared less than impartial, often overruling Chikatilo's defense lawyer, and it was clear that Chikatilo's guilt was a foregone conclusion. The trial lasted until August and, surprisingly, given the judge's bias, the verdict was not announced until two months later, on October 15<sup>th</sup>, 1992, when Chikatilo was found guilty on 52 of the 53 murder charges, and sentenced to death for each of the murders.
| style="border: none; padding: 4px 10px;" valign="top"|Taking into consideration the monstrous crimes he committed, this court has no alternative but to impose the only sentence that he deserves. I therefore sentence him to death.
Chikatilo was taken from the courtroom to his cell at Novocherkassk prison to await execution. He did file an appeal against his conviction with the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Supreme_Court Russian Supreme Court], but it was rejected in 1993.
Chikatilo was diagnosed with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_depressive_disorder major depression] and a psychopath with co-morbid [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder antisocial] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorder borderline personality disorders] along with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_sadism sexual sadism] and severe [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadistic_personality_disorder sadistic personality] features.
Chikatilo's appeal centered around the claim that the psychiatric evaluation which had found him fit to stand trial was biased, but this process was unsuccessful and, 16 months later, he was executed by a shot to the back of the head, on February 14<sup>th</sup>, 1994.
==Execution==
The psychiatrist who had been instrumental in his capture, Aleksandr Bukhanovski, went on to become a celebrated expert on sexual disorders and serial killers.
On 14 February, 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
Full Name:
Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo
Alias:
The Butcher of Rostov The Forest Strip Killer The Red Ripper The Rostov Ripper
Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (Russian/Ukrainian: Андрей Романович Чикатило, October 16th, 1936 - February 14th, 1994) was a Soviet serial killer nicknamed The Butcher of Rostov, The Red Ripper, The Forest Strip Killer and The Rostov Ripper who committed the murder of at least 52 women and children between 1978 and 1990.
Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born on October 16th, 1936; in Yablochnoye, a village in the heart of rural Ukraine in the USSR. During the 1930s, Ukraine was known as the "Breadbasket" of the Soviet Union. Stalin's policies of agricultural collectivization caused widespread hardship and famine (the Holodomor) that decimated the population. At the time of Chikatilo's birth, the effects of the famine were still widely felt, and his early childhood was influenced by deprivation. The situation was made worse still when the USSR entered World War II against Germany, bringing sustained bombing raids on Ukraine.
In addition to the external hardships, Chikatilo is believed to have suffered from hydrocephalus (water on the brain) at birth, which caused him genital-urinary tract problems later in life, including bed-wetting into his late adolescence and, later, the inability to sustain an erection, although he was able to ejaculate. His home life was disrupted by his father's conscription into the war against Germany, where he was captured, held prisoner, and then vilified by his countrymen for allowing himself to be captured when he finally returned home. Chikatilo suffered the consequences of his father's "cowardice", making him the focus of school bullying.
An eyewitness had seen Chikatilo with the victim, shortly before her disappearance, but his wife provided him with an iron-clad alibi that enabled him to evade any further police attention.
Alexsandr Kravchenko, a 25-year-old with a previous rape conviction, was arrested and confessed to the crime under duress, probably as a result of extensive and brutal interrogation. He was tried for the killing of Lena Zakotnova and executed in 1984.
Perhaps as a result of his close brush with the law, there were no more documented victims for the next three years. Still dogged by claims of child abuse, Chikatilo found it impossible to find another teaching post, when he was made redundant from his mining school post, in early 1981. He took a job as a clerk for a raw materials factory in Rostov, where the travel involved with the position gave him unlimited access to a wide range of young victims over the next nine years.
Larisa Tkachenko, 17, became his next victim. On September 3, 1981, Chikatilo strangled, stabbed and gagged her with earth and leaves to prevent her crying out. The brutal force afforded Chikatilo his sexual release, and he began to develop a pattern of attack that saw him focusing on young runaways of both sexes. He befriended them at train stations and bus stops, before luring them into nearby forest areas, where he would attack them, attempt rape and use his knife, to mutilate them. In a number of cases, he ate the sexual organs or removed other body parts such as the tips of their noses or tongues. In the earliest cases, the common pattern was to inflict damage to the eye area, slashing across the sockets and removing the eyeballs in many cases, an act which Chikatilo later attributed to a belief that his victims kept an imprint of his face in their eyes, even after death.
At this time serial killers were a virtually unknown phenomenon in the Soviet Union. Evidence of serial killing, or child abuse, was sometimes suppressed by state-controlled media, in the interests of public order. The eye mutilation was a modus operandi distinct enough to allow for other cases to be linked when the Soviet authorities finally admitted that they had a serial killer to contend with. As the body count mounted, rumors of foreign-inspired plots, and werewolf attacks became more prevalent, and public fear and interest grew, despite the lack of any media coverage.
In 1983 Moscow detective Major Mikhail Fetisov assumed control of the investigation. He recognized that a serial killer might be on the loose, and assigned a specialist forensic analyst, Victor Burakov, to head the investigation in the Shakhty area. The investigation centered on known sex offenders, and the mentally ill, but such were the interrogation methods of the local police that they regularly solicited false confessions from prisoners, leaving Burakov skeptical of the majority of these "confessions". Progress was slow, especially as, at that stage, not all of the victim's bodies had been discovered, so the true body count was unknown to the police. With each body, the forensic evidence mounted, and police were convinced that the killer had the blood type AB, as evidenced by the semen samples collected from a number of crime scenes. Samples of identical grey hair were also retrieved.
When a further 15 victims were added during the course of 1984, police efforts were increased drastically, and they mounted massive surveillance operations that canvassed most local transport hubs. Chikatilo was arrested for behaving suspiciously at a bus station at this time, but again avoided suspicion on the murder charges, as his blood type did not match the suspect profile, but he was imprisoned for three months for a number of minor outstanding offenses.
What was not realized at the time was that Chikatilo's actual blood type, type A, was different to the type found in his other bodily fluids (type AB), as he was a member of a minority group known as "non-secretors", whose blood type cannot be inferred by anything other than a blood sample. As police only had a sample of semen, and not blood, from the crime scenes, Chikatilo was able to escape suspicion of murder. Today's sophisticated DNA techniques are not subject to the same fallibility.
Following his release, Chikatilo found work as a traveling buyer for a train company, based in Novocherkassk, and managed to keep a low profile until August 1985, when he murdered two women in separate incidents.
At around the same time as these murders, Burakov, frustrated at the lack of positive progress, engaged the help of a psychiatrist, Alexandr Bukhanovsky, who refined the profile of the killer. Bukhanovsky described the killer as a "necro-sadist", or someone who achieves sexual gratification from the suffering and death of others. Bukhanovsky also placed the killer's age as between 45 and 50, significantly older than had been believed up to that point. Desperate to catch the killer, Burakov even interviewed a serial killer, Anatoly Slivko, shortly before his execution, in an attempt to gain some insight into his elusive serial killer.
Coinciding with this attempt to understand the mind of the killer, attacks seemed to dry up, and police suspected that their target might have stopped killing, been incarcerated for other crimes, or died. However, early in 1988, Chikatilo again resumed his killing, the majority occurring away from the Rostov area, and victims were no longer taken from local public transport outlets, as police surveillance of these areas continued. Over the next two years, the body count increased by a further 19 victims, and it appeared that the killer was taking increasing risks, focusing primarily on young boys, and often killing in public places where the risk of detection was far higher.
The recently unfettered media of Gorbachev's glasnost society placed enormous public pressure on police forces to catch the killer, and general police patrols were stepped up, with Burakov targeting likely areas with undercover police in an attempt to flush out the killer. Chikatilo evaded capture narrowly, on a couple of occasions, but on November 6, 1990, fresh from killing his final victim, Sveta Korostik, his suspicious behavior was noted by patrolling policemen at the station nearby, and his details were taken. His name was linked to his previous arrest in 1984, and he was placed under surveillance.
Chikatilo was arrested on November 20th, 1990; following more suspicious behavior, but he refused at first to confess to any of the killings. Burakov decided to allow the psychiatrist, Bukhanovski, who had prepared the original profile, to talk to Chikatilo, under the guise of trying to understand the mind of a killer from a scientific context. Chikatilo, clearly flattered by this approach, opened up to the psychiatrist, providing extensive details of all of his killings, and even leading police to the site of bodies previously undiscovered.
He claimed to have taken the lives of 56 victims, although only 53 of these could be independently verified. This figure was far in excess of the 36 cases that the police had initially attributed to their serial killer.
Having been declared sane and fit to stand trial, Chikatilo went to court on April 14 th,1992, and throughout the trial he was held in an iron cage designed to keep him apart from the relatives of his many victims. Referred to in the media as "The Maniac", his behavior in court ranged from bored to manic, singing and talking gibberish; at one point he was even reported as having dropped his trousers, waving his genitals at the assembled crowd.
The judge appeared less than impartial, often overruling Chikatilo's defense lawyer, and it was clear that Chikatilo's guilt was a foregone conclusion. The trial lasted until August and, surprisingly, given the judge's bias, the verdict was not announced until two months later, on October 15th, 1992, when Chikatilo was found guilty on 52 of the 53 murder charges, and sentenced to death for each of the murders.
Chikatilo's appeal centered around the claim that the psychiatric evaluation which had found him fit to stand trial was biased, but this process was unsuccessful and, 16 months later, he was executed by a shot to the back of the head, on February 14th, 1994.
The psychiatrist who had been instrumental in his capture, Aleksandr Bukhanovski, went on to become a celebrated expert on sexual disorders and serial killers.
