Andrei Chikatilo

Citizen X

 

Only bones remained. A few pieces of skin clung here and there and patches of matted black hair hung from the skull. It lay amidst the spindly trees of a lesopolosa, a forested strip of land, not far from the village of Novocherkassk in the Rostov-on-Don area of the USSR. The corpse lay on its back, the head turned to one side. The victim was a female. She had been stabbed many times in an apparently frenzied attack, and had been gouged with a knife in the pelvic area. Disturbingly, she had also been stabbed in the eyes.

Major Mikhail Fetisov, the region’s chief detective, determined that the victim was a missing thirteen-year-old girl, Lyubov Biryuk. Unfortunately, that was about as much as could be gleaned from the scene. It looked like that most difficult of cases – a random attack.

The police started to look for suspects amongst the usual groupings; people suffering from mental illness and known sex offenders. One man, learning that he was a suspect, promptly hung himself and the police breathed a sigh of relief, believing they had their man.

Two months later, however, another pile of bones was discovered.

It was near the railway station at Shakhty. The victim, a woman, had received multiple stab wounds and once again, the killer had attacked the eyes.

A month passed before a soldier, gathering firewood, stumbled across the body of yet another woman. She had been mutilated in the same way.

There was little doubt that a serial killer was on the loose. But this was the Soviet Union and such things did not happen there. Serial killers were a manifestation of western decadence, after all. Consequently, the press were not briefed and no warning was given to people to take precautions. Instead, a special task force was assembled. It included a second lieutenant from the criminology lab, thirty-seven-year-old Viktor Burakov, an expert in the analysis of crime scenes and physical evidence. This case would consume him for the next few years.

Victim number four turned up that same month, although she had been killed about six months previously. The body, a woman again, bore the same wounds as the others.

What was the issue with the eyes, Burakov and the team wondered? What it did suggest is that the Maniac, as they had started to call him, did not just kill and run; he spent time with the victims after they were dead. He was sexually-motivated and his hunger for the kill seemed to be increasing. Still only a very few in the police force and high-ranking officials were aware of what was really happening.

Ten-year-old Olga Stalmachenok had gone missing in the town of Novoshakhtinsk, on her way to piano lessons. Now when someone went missing, everyone feared the worst and sure enough it happened. It took four months for her body to turn up. This attack had been particularly frenetic, the knife having been pushed into the girl’s body countless times, to the extent that it moved her internal organs around inside the body. The heart, lungs and sexual organs had received particular attention and, as usual, the eyes were gouged. Olga’s parents had been sent a card while she was missing, signed ‘the Black Cat Sadist’ and police began to check the handwriting against everyone in the town, a thankless, and, ultimately, pointless task. They looked yet again at sex offenders and the mentally ill.

Nothing happened for four months, but a group of boys playing in a lesopolosa close to Rostov, found the remains of a thirteen-year-old girl who had suffered from Down’s Syndrome, in a gully. As if things had not been bad enough; to harm a child with such a condition seemed to take this killer’s cruelty to a new level of degradation.

Suddenly, however, someone was arrested. Nineteen-year-old Yuri Kalenik had spent years in a home for children with special needs, but now worked in the construction industry. He was arrested on the basis of an accusation by an inhabitant of the home, and everyone was convinced they had the Maniac. Kalenik, at first, denied the charges. Then, in order to stop the beating he was taking, he confessed to all the murders, even adding some others that had been carried out locally.

Burakov interrogated Kalenik. He seemed a likely candidate. After all, he had a history of mental problems and also used public transport, just like the Maniac. He also led the team to the sites of several of the murders, but as far as Burakov could make out he was almost being guided to them by a team of policemen willing him to be their murderer. Burakov was convinced Kalenik was responding to coercion.

In the meantime, the body of another young woman was discovered. The mutilation of the body and the eyes were similar, but this time, her nipples had been bitten off. She had been there for several months. So, Kalenik could have murdered this girl, but, unfortunately for the police, not the one found on 20 October. She had been killed three days earlier, while the boy had been in custody. This woman had been disembowelled, but, strangely, the organs were nowhere to be found. He had taken them away with him. Unusually the eyes had not been attacked. Was it the same killer?

A few weeks later another body was found, she had been killed months before and the killing bore the hallmarks of the Maniac. Number ten was a fourteen-year-old boy, found near railway lines. He had been stabbed no fewer than seventy times and he had been castrated and raped. During it all, the killer had gone to a place nearby and had a bowel movement. Kalenik was in the clear.

Another boy, another former pupil of a home for children with special needs, had apparently taken the same train as the dead boy. Mikhail Tyapin was a big and powerful young man who could barely speak. Nonetheless, the police got him to talk and obtained yet another confession. Tyapin, like Kalenik, had a violent fantasy life and, like him, claimed responsibility for other murders in the area. What he failed to mention, though, was the damage to the eyes.

Semen found in the murdered boy’s anus provided them with a break. They could find the killer’s blood type from it. Now they were able to eliminate all the suspects they had had so far; their blood did not match. The lab, however, announced that it had mixed up the sample and that it did, indeed, match Mikhail Tyapin. Now they were convinced they had their killer.

Or at least, they would have, if the killer had not carried on killing.

Throughout 1984, woods in the region disgorged bodies, lots of them. And they all bore similar wounds.

One of them was an eighteen-year-old and on her clothing were semen and blood, left, presumably by the killer who, it seems had masturbated over her dead body. A forensics expert from Moscow confirmed that two semen specimens found on different bodies were type AB and that immediately eliminated every suspect to date. He was still out there.

And, in March, he struck again, killing ten-year-old Dmitri Ptashnikov. He cut off the tip of his tongue and his penis. Close to the body was a large footprint, the same size thirteen that had been found at an earlier scene. For the first time, however, he was seen. A tall, hollow-cheeked man with a stiff-kneed gait and wearing glasses had followed the boy.

Victims followed in quick succession, one killed by a hammer blow, another stabbed thirty-nine times with a kitchen knife; a mother and daughter killed at the same time; the eyes were stabbed and now sometimes the upper lip and nose were cut off and deposited in the corpse’s mouth or stomach. The death toll rose to at least twenty-four.

The police were lost and confused. They split into factions and Burakov argued with his superiors. Two hundred officers were by this time working on the case. They worked undercover at bus and train stations, they walked the streets and parks on the lookout for the tall, hollow-cheeked man.

At Rostov bus station an older man was spotted taking an interest in a young girl. The undercover officer became suspicious and brought him in for questioning. It was a man called Andrei Chikatilo, the manager of a Shakhty machinery supply company. When questioned about his behaviour, he told police that he had once been a teacher and missed the company of the young. They let him go.

He was followed however, and when he continued to act suspiciously, accosting women and even receiving oral sex from a prostitute in the street, he was picked up. In his briefcase were a jar of Vaseline, a long knife, a length of rope and a grimy towel. Hardly the accoutrements of a businessman.

But his blood type was A and not AB. They held him for a few days, but he persisted in his denials. There was nothing untoward in his background and he was a member of the Party. He was released again.

Burakov, in the meantime, asked a psychiatrist, Dr Bukhanovsky, to create a profile of the killer. He was a sexual deviant, the psychiatrist said, twenty-five to fifty years old and around five feet ten in height. He was sexually inadequate to the extent that he had to mutilate the corpses to achieve arousal. He was a sadist. He damaged the victims’ eyes to stop them looking at him. He was a loner and he definitely worked alone. Bukhanovsky named him ‘Citizen X’.

The pressure was on the officers, but all went quiet. Only one body in ten months, a woman killed near Moscow. Had the Maniac moved there?

Then, in August 1985, a dead woman, bearing the usual marks, was found near an airport. Officers checked flights and tickets, but found nothing. Checking other murders in the capital, however, they found three murders of young boys that seemed in all likelihood to have been committed by the man they were looking for – all had been raped and one had been decapitated.

But soon they were back at Shakhty where another young woman was found near the bus station, her mouth stuffed with leaves in the same way as one of the dead women in Moscow.

Officers continued to work the train and bus stations, but without success.

Another profile of the killer provided some stark facts. Stabbing his victims was for him a way to enter them sexually. He might masturbate, either spontaneously or with his hand. He might damage the eyes because he believed the old superstition that the image of a killer is left on his victims’ eyes. He cut women’s sexual organs as a means of establishing control over them. Organs were often missing; he might have eaten them. He cut boys’ sexual organs off to make them appear feminine. He would have had a difficult childhood and had a vibrant fantasy life and a perverse response to sexuality.

Nothing happened until July and August 1986, when a couple of women’s bodies turned up, the second buried with only a hand pointing up out of the earth.

Burakov cracked under the pressure towards the end of 1986 and spent time in hospital. The killer, too, took a rest and no bodies were found until April 1988. A woman was discovered, the tip of her nose sliced off and her skull smashed. Her eyes had not been touched, however. Then a nineteen-year-old boy was found in May with his penis cut off. He had been seen entering the woods with a middle-aged man with gold teeth and a sports bag. Even with that lead, they turned up nothing and in April 1989 another boy’s body was found and in July an eight-year-old boy. Elena Varga was killed in August and that same week, ten-year-old Aleksei Khobotov went missing, his body showing up four months later. A ten-year-old boy was found with his tongue bitten off; in July 1990, a thirteen-year-old was discovered mutilated in the Botanical gardens.

Thirty-two victims in eight years.

The fall of Communism meant newspapers were now free to report on the case and there was a feeding frenzy with officials threatening each other and people becoming desperate for the case to be solved and the killing to stop. When an eleven-year-old was stabbed forty-two times and castrated, the public were outraged.

Another couple of sixteen-year-old boys were murdered before Burakov’s work at the stations, checking the names of passengers began to bear fruit. Over half a million people had been investigated up to this point, but one name stood out.

Andrei Chikatilo had been at the station the day one of the recent murders had been carried out nearby. He had been seen emerging from the woods and washing his hands. On his cheek had been a red smear, his finger had been cut and his coat was covered in twigs.

When checked out, it turned out he had resigned from a teaching job after molesting students. His travel records coincided with several murders and there had been no deaths while he had spent time in prison in 1984.

Chikatilo was arrested and a search of his house revealed twenty-three knives, but nothing linking him with his victims. At first, Chikatilo denied everything, but then he began to admit to ‘sexual weakness’ and ‘perverse sexual activity’. He admitted he was impotent.

He was persuaded that it would be best for him to admit everything but claim insanity. Days passed while Chikatilo considered this, still denying he was the killer. Finally, however, he confessed, going through each of the thirty-six murders in detail. He explained that he was clearing the world of undesirables – vagrants, runaways and prostitutes. These were the people he killed. He told how he could not achieve an erection and used the knife as a penis substitute. He had also believed the story of the killer’s image being imprinted on the victim’s eyes, but had stopped believing it which explains why he stopped damaging the eyes at one point. He told how he could only get gratification if he committed violence. ‘I had to see blood and wound the victims.’ He talked about placing his semen inside a uterus that he had just removed and as he walked back through the woods, he would chew on it; ‘the truffle of sexual murder,’ as he described it. He would tear at his victims’ mouths with his teeth. He said it gave him an ‘animal satisfaction’ to chew or swallow nipples or testicles.

In all, he confessed to fifty-six murders and said that being caught was a relief. Why had he done it? Perhaps because of his chilling childhood; father a POW during World War II and desperate famine in Russia, a famine so bad that there were reported instances of cannibalism. Human flesh was bought and sold and Chikatilo was told by his mother that his ten-year-old brother had been taken and killed and eaten.

He was examined and found to be sane before being brought to a court in Rostov where he was kept in a large iron cage. The court was full, some 250 people screaming at him when he was brought in. The trial was a fiasco and there was little doubt from day one that Chikatilo would be found guilty. His efforts at pretending to be mad, drooling and rolling his eyes, singing, speaking nonsense and claiming that he was being ‘radiated’ were to no avail.

He was found guilty on fifty-two counts of murder and five of molestation. The people in the courtroom cried out for him to be handed over to them so that they could do to him what he did to his victims and it is reported that the Japanese offered a million dollars for his brain so that they could study it.

However, on 15 February, he was taken to a sound­proofed room, told to face the wall and not turn round. He was then executed with a shot behind the right ear.