SIX

In the film Citizen X, a psychiatrist named Alexandr Bukhanovsky asks Andrei Chikatilo, recently arrested for numerous murders, to help him on some aspects of the profile about which he is not quite certain. In a quiet voice, he reads the relevant pages. Chikatilo listens, sometimes nodding, as if alert to the only person who seems to have understood him. He’s transfixed as the reading continues.

Outside, impatient police officials are aware that without a confession, they must release this alleged offender. They’ve held him for nearly the maximum number of days, without cracking him, and the psychiatrist’s profile is their last resort. The lead investigator, Viktor Burakov, has studied the FBI’s criminal profiling program and he’s convinced of its viability. Yet he, too, cannot be sure that Chikatilo will acknowledge any guilt.

Bukhanovsky’s description delves into the nature of Chikatilo’s mental illness and sexual perversions, suggesting reasons for it. As Chikatilo hears his secret life described so clearly, he begins to tremble. Tears come to his eyes. Finally he confirms what the psychiatrist is saying, breaks down, and admits that it’s all true. He has done these horrible things.

Chikatilo reads the statement of charges for thirty-six murders and admits his guilt. He offers to tell the truth about his life and these crimes. As investigators listen, they’re astonished to learn that their estimate of the number of his victims was far too low.

First Hints

A man looking for wood in the lesopolosa, a forested strip of land planted to prevent erosion, found some skeletal remains of a corpse. He reported them to the militsia, the local authorities. They discovered that the corpse had had no identifying clothing and had been left on its back, its head turned to the left. The ears were still sufficiently intact to see tiny holes for earrings, which, along with the length of hair remnants, suggested that the victim had been female. It appeared that two ribs had been broken and closer inspection indicated numerous stab wounds into the bone. A knife had apparently cut into the eye sockets, too, as if to remove the eyes, and similar gouges were viewed in the pelvic region. Whoever had committed this crime, the police thought, had been a frenzied beast. They found a report about a missing thirteen-year-old girl, Lyubov Biryuk, from Novocherkassk, a village nearby. A few items of clothing in the area linked the remains to this girl.

Major Mikhail Fetisov arrived from militsia headquarters in Rostov-on-Don. He was the leading detective, or syshchik, for the entire region. He asked for a search for any other records of people reported missing and ordered military cadets to scrutinize the entire area. Despite a thorough search, no evidence was produced that could help to identify the killer.

The autopsy report showed that Lyubov had been attacked from behind and hit hard in the head with both the handle and the blade of a knife. She had been stabbed at least twenty-two separate times. As a result, the police looked for people in the region with a history of mental illness, juvenile delinquents, or offenders with a history of sex crimes. They tried to find out whom Lyubov had known and how she might have encountered this killer.

One man, convicted in another rape, learned that he was a suspect and promptly hanged himself. That seemed to put an end to the investigation, as there were no other viable suspects, but two months later another victim was discovered.

The Division of Especially Serious Crimes

A railroad worker walking near the train station in Shakhty, a small industrial town twenty miles away, came across another set of skeletal remains, several weeks old, adult, and female. The body had been stripped, left facedown, with the legs pulled apart. Investigators spotted a key similarity with the murder of Lyubov: multiple stab wounds and lacerated eye sockets.

Only a month later, a soldier gathering wood about ten miles south of that spot came across more remains, also of a woman lying facedown. She had been covered with branches, but close inspection showed a pattern of knife wounds and damage to the eye sockets.

The link among the victims was obvious. They had a serial killer in the area, but the police were not admitting this, especially to the press. Police in the Soviet Union were careful about acknowledging the existence of serial killers, believing this was a symptom of the decadent Western cultures like that of the United States. Officially, they had three separate unsolved murders.

Major Fetisov organized a task force of ten men to start an investigation. Among them was a second lieutenant from the criminology laboratory, Viktor Burakov, age thirty-seven. He was the best man they had for the analysis of such physical evidence as fingerprints, footprints, and trace evidence, and he was an expert in both police science and martial arts. In January 1983, he was invited to join what was known as the Division of Especially Serious Crimes.

Around this time, a fourth victim was found. She appeared to have been killed six months earlier and her body was near the area where the second set of remains was discovered. It bore the familiar knife-wound patterns.

At this point police knew that the killer—the “Maniac,” as he was called—did not smoke (or he’d have taken the cigarettes found near Lyubov) and that he was male. He had an issue with eyes, and his gouging of them indicated that he spent time with the victims after they were dead, even in high-risk areas.

With no definite leads, the unit decided to look at older unsolved cases, but Burakov’s primary task was to head an investigation in Novoshakhtinsk, a farming and mining town in the general area. There, a ten-year-old girl had just been reported missing. Olga Stalmachenok had gone to a local conservancy for a piano lesson on December 10, 1982, and that was the last time anyone saw her. Burakov questioned her parents and learned that she got along with them and had no cause to run away. However, the parents had received a strange postcard that was signed “Sadist-Black Cat” telling them their daughter was in the woods and warning that there would be ten more victims that coming year.

On April 14, 1983, four months later, Olga was found in a field, along with some of her things buried apart from her body. Since she was killed during the winter, cold and snow had preserved her, so the pattern of knife wounds on her skull and chest was clearly visible on her bluish-white skin. The knife had been inserted dozens of times, as if in a frenzy, especially to the heart, lungs, and sexual organs.

Burakov knew he was looking for a vicious, sexually motivated serial killer who was attacking victims at an escalating rate, drawing no attention and leaving no evidence. But given the attitude of the regime in power, Burakov had few resources to help him find the killer. Men who killed in this manner were few and only top-ranking Soviet officials knew the details of the investigations of their crimes. It was like an unpleasant family secret known only to select relatives.

Burakov followed the three-mile route from the conservancy to the place where Olga’s body was left, deducing that the killer had a car. He was also certain the man did not frighten people when he approached. That would make him harder to find, though Burakov was sure the man had some kind of mental disorder that someone had noticed.

He and his team decided to focus on known sex offenders in the area, specifically on their whereabouts on December 11. Then they looked at released mental patients, as well as men who lived or worked around the conservancy who owned or used a car. Handwriting experts examined the Black Cat card against samples from the entire population of that town, but nothing of interest turned up.

Then in another wooded lesopolosa near Rostov-on-Don, a group of boys found bones in a gully. An examination of them linked this crime with the others. The next discovery was an eight-year-old male in a wooded area near Rostov’s airport, two miles from the sixth victim. Missing since August 9, the boy had been stabbed, like the others, including his eyes.

This new development puzzled everyone. Serial sex killers, it was assumed, always attacked the same type of victim, but this offender had killed grown women and young children, girls and boys. The investigators wondered if they might have more than one killer doing the same kind of perverse ritual. It seemed impossible, but so did the idea that so many victim types could trigger the same sexual violence from one person.

Through a tip, the police interrogated Yuri Kalenik, nineteen, who lived in a home for retarded children. At first he denied everything, but interrogators kept him for several days, believing that a guilty man would inevitably confess. They beat him, so he finally told them what they wanted to hear. He confessed to all seven murders, and added four more to his list. Yuri seemed a viable suspect, because he had a mental disorder and he used public transportation, as did many of the victims. At the time, there was little understanding of the psychology of false confessions. People of lower intelligence tend to be more susceptible to suggestion or coercion, especially when fatigued, and they may tell interrogators whatever pleases them—usually supplying items they hear from the interrogator.

When Burakov asked the boy to take them to a murder site, he saw that Kalenik did not go straight to the place, even when he was close, but appeared to wander around until he picked up clues from the police about where they expected him to go. Burakov did not consider this to be a good test. Upon examining the written confession, he was even less convinced. It was clear to him that Kalenik, intimidated, had been given most of the information he finally provided. He was soon cleared.

Operation Lesopolosa

In another wooded area, the mutilated remains of a young woman were found. Her nipples had been removed—possibly with teeth—her abdomen was slashed open, and one eye socket was damaged. She had been there for months and her clothing was missing. Another victim found on October 20 bore wounds similar to those of the other victims, but though her eyes remained intact, this victim was entirely disemboweled and the missing organs were nowhere to be found. Perhaps the killer had changed his method.

Just after the start of 1984, a dead boy turned up near the railroad tracks—Sergei Markov, a fourteen-year-old, missing since December 27. For the first time, thanks to winter’s preservative effects, the detectives were able to see just what the killer did to these young people. He had stabbed the boy in the neck dozens of times—the final count would be seventy—and he had then cut into the boy’s genitals and removed everything from the pubic area. In addition, he had violated the victim anally. Then it appeared that he had gone to a spot nearby to have a bowel movement.

Fetisov decided to retrace the boy’s steps on the day he had disappeared. Beginning in a town called Gukovo, he’d boarded the elechtrichka, or local train. In the same town was a home for the mentally retarded and the teachers there reported that a former student had left around the same time as the boy and had taken the train. Once again, the police got a confession. Once again, they made a mistake.

Finally, though, they had their first piece of good evidence. The medical examiner found semen in Markov’s anus. When they did apprehend the killer, a secretor, they could compare the blood antigens. This would not afford a precise match, but could at least eliminate suspects. In fact, it eliminated all of the young men who had confessed thus far. (As yet, there was no DNA analysis available, but even when there was, the Soviet Union’s political instability during the late 1980s would preclude such analysis.)

In 1984, numerous victims were discovered in wooded areas, some of them quite close to where previous bodies had lain. Investigators acquired one more piece of evidence: a shoe print left in the mud, size thirteen. On the victim’s clothing were traces of semen and blood.

The killer struck that March in Novoshakhtinsk, grabbing ten-year-old Dmitri Ptashnikov, who was later found mutilated and stabbed. The tip of his tongue and his penis were missing. The semen on his shirt linked him to the previous two crimes, and this time, there were witnesses. The boy was seen following a tall, hollow-cheeked man with stiff knees and large feet, wearing glasses. No one had recognized him.

By the end of the summer of 1984, police counted twenty-four victims probably murdered by the same man. Whenever semen was left behind, it proved to have the same AB antigen. There was also a single gray hair on one victim, and some scraps of clothing. The killer had also shifted his pattern again. He now removed the upper lip, and sometimes the nose, and these he would leave in the victim’s mouth or ripped-open stomach. He had stepped up his pace from five victims the first year (they believed) to one nearly every two weeks. Investigators had no way of knowing that they had not yet found the earliest victims.

Given the escalation in victims, the Soviet minister of the interior appointed a dozen new detectives to the case, and with Burakov heading it, a task force of some two hundred men and women was assigned to the investigation. Officers worked undercover at bus and train stations, looking for a man between twenty-five and thirty years of age, tall, well built, with type AB blood. They believed he was cautious, of average intelligence, and verbally persuasive. He traveled on public transportation and probably lived with either his mother or a wife. He might be a former psychiatric patient, or a substance abuser, and he might have some knowledge of anatomy and skill with a knife.

One undercover officer spotted an older man in the Rostov bus station, speaking with a female adolescent, and when she got on her bus, noticed him sit next to another young woman. Under questioning, officials learned his name: Andrei Chikatilo. He managed a machinery supply company and was on a business trip, but he lived in Shakhty. He said he had once been a teacher and he missed talking to young people, so the officer let him go. But another agent followed him and watched him accost various women. When he solicited a prostitute, Chikatilo was arrested for indecent behavior. A search of his briefcase turned up a jar of Vaseline, a long kitchen knife, a piece of rope, and a dirty towel—nothing needed for the alleged business trip. Yet he had type A blood, not AB. He was also a member of the Communist Party, with a good character reference. Since there was nothing in his background to raise suspicion, he was released.

At his wit’s end, Burakov decided to breach protocol and consult with psychiatric experts in Moscow. Most were either uninterested in making an analysis or refused to say much, but Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky agreed to study the few known details. He also read everything he could find on sexual pathologies and schizophrenia and wrote a seven-page report. The killer, he said, was a sexual deviate, twenty-five to fifty years old, around five feet ten inches tall. He thought the man suffered from feelings of sexual inadequacy and he blinded his victims to prevent them from looking at him or from retaining his image on their eyeballs. He also brutalized their corpses, partially out of frustration and partially to enhance his arousal. He was a sadist and had difficulty achieving release without cruelty. He was also compulsive, following the goading of his need, and would be depressed until he could kill. He might even have headaches that urged him to act out for relief. A loner, he was not retarded or schizophrenic. He could work out a plan and follow it.

None of this helped to identify a specific person, so Burakov looked up records of men convicted of homosexual crimes and came across Valery Ivanenko, who had committed several acts of “perversion.” He also had a charismatic personality and once had been a teacher. At age forty-six, he was tall and wore glasses. In short, he sounded too good to be true. He was the perfect suspect.

Staking out the apartment where the man’s invalid mother resided, Burakov caught and arrested him. Yet his blood type was A. In a deal, Burakov enlisted his assistance in investigating the gay population of the area in return for allowing him to function as a homosexual without fear of reprisals. Ivanenko proved quite good at getting secret information, which in turn led to others providing even more information under pressure. Burakov soon knew quite a bit about Rostov’s underworld of perversion and violence, but he was no closer to catching the killer. This frustrated him.

Killer X

Over the next ten months only one body turned up—that of a young woman—but she was killed near Moscow. Burakov went there to study the photos of this victim. The treatment of the corpse was so similar that he was convinced that the Maniac had traveled to the city. He checked flight rosters and had officers go painstakingly through all the handwritten tickets, but nothing was found. In fact, there was a significant clue, but they failed to see it. Meanwhile, three young boys were raped and killed in the area.

But the Rostov crew was quickly drawn back to Shakhty. In a grove of trees near the bus depot, a homeless, eighteen-year-old girl lay dead, her mouth stuffed with leaves. This was the same signature that was found on the girl in Moscow some weeks earlier. A red and a blue thread were found under her fingernails, and the sweat near her wounds typed as AB—different from her own type O blood. Between her fingers was a single strand of gray hair. This was the most evidence left thus far at a crime scene linked to the killer.

A special procurator, Issa Kostoyev, was appointed to look into the lesopolosa murders. By this time, they had fifteen procurators and twenty-nine detectives involved. Kostoyev looked over the investigative work done thus far and dismissed it. He believed they’d already come across the man they were after and just hadn’t known it. To try to learn more about the type of killer who would be so raw and brutal, Kostoyev had the classic nineteenth-century work on sexual predators by Richard von Krafft-Ebing translated into Russian. He also discovered a rare edition of Crimes and Criminals in Western Culture, by B. Utevsky, which included a chapter detailing cases of dismemberment and disfiguring of victims. He saw that some killers were driven merely by arrogance and the idea that their victims were objects that belonged to them to do with as they pleased. Kostoyev used this information to inform the team.

Burakov turned again to Dr. Bukhanovsky, allowing him to see all the crime-scene reports so he could write a more detailed profile. This, he thought, might help detectives to narrow the leads, as per the FBI’s profiling protocol. Bukhanovsky spent months on the task, this time turning out sixty-five pages. He labeled the unknown suspect “Killer X.”

The details, briefly, were as follows: X was not psychotic, because he was in control of what he did; he was narcissistic and considered himself gifted, but was not unduly intelligent. He was heterosexual, so boys were merely a “vicarious surrogate.” He was a “necrosadist,” needing to watch people die in order to achieve sexual gratification. The multiple stabbing was a way to “enter” them sexually, and he either sat astride them or squatted next to them. The deepest cuts were made at the height of his pleasure, and he might masturbate. There were many reasons why he might cut out the eyes: he could be excited by eyes or might believe his image was left on them, a superstition of unenlightened people. Cutting into the sexual organs was a display of power over women. He might keep the missing organs or eat them.

An interesting twist in the profile was the hypothesis that X responded to changes in weather patterns. Before most of the murders, the barometer had dropped. That might be his trigger, especially if it coincided with other stressors at home or work. Most of the killings were also done midweek, from Tuesday to Thursday.

While the psychiatrist was vague about height and occupation, he now thought X’s age was between forty-five and fifty, the age at which sexual perversions are most developed. It was likely that the suspect had had a difficult childhood. He was conflicted and probably kept to himself. He had a rich fantasy life, but an abnormal response to sexuality, to put it mildly. Bukhanovsky could not say if the man was married or had fathered children, but if he was married, his wife let him keep his own hours and did not ask much of him. His killing was compulsive and might stop temporarily if he sensed he was in danger of discovery, but would not stop altogether until he died or was caught.

Despite the length and detail of this psychological report, Burakov still found nothing of practical use for the investigation. Having learned about the way FBI profilers conducted prison interviews to acquire a database about behaviors and sexual fantasies of killers, he decided to try another method.

Burakov talked with Anatoly Slivko, a man who faced execution for the sex murders of seven boys. Slivko was willing to talk and he attributed such acts to an inability to engage in normal sexual arousal and satisfaction. Sexual murderers have endless fantasies in which they go through the murder scenario step-by-step, and feel the urge for action, and the act of planning their crimes has its own satisfaction. Slivko, too, offered nothing of practical use for the investigation, but his answers to questions revealed the paradoxically compartmentalized mind of a man who could kill boys, on the one hand, and feel morally indignant about using alcohol in front of children, on the other. That meant he could live in society in a way that hid his true propensities. Only hours after this interview, Slivko was executed.

The investigators believed that “X” was similar in psychological makeup to Slivko, and that meant he would be next to impossible to catch. At this time, the killing seemed to stop.

Frustration

Only one dead woman turned up in 1985 in Rostov, and nothing happened that winter or the next spring. Then on July 23, 1986, the body of a thirty-three-year-old female was found, but it bore none of the markings of the serial killer, except that the victim had been repeatedly stabbed. Burakov had doubts about her being part of the series, but this was not so with the young woman found on August 18. All of the disturbing wounds were present, but she had been mostly buried, save for a hand sticking out of the dirt—a new twist. Now police had to wonder whether there were others not yet found because they, too, were buried.

At the end of 1986, Viktor Burakov finally had a nervous breakdown. He was weak and exhausted, and could not sleep, so he went to a hospital for a month, then rested for another month. Four years of intense work had brought him to this. But he would not give up. In fact, his ordeal had given him some perspective.

The winter of 1988 had melted into spring before a railroad worker found a woman’s nude body in a weedy area near the tracks on April 6. Her hands were bound behind her, she had been stabbed multiple times, the tip of her nose was gone, and her skull had been bashed in. A large footprint was found nearby. Then, only a month later, on May 17, the body of a nine-year-old boy was discovered in the woods not far from a train station. He’d been sodomized and then his orifices were stuffed with dirt. He also bore numerous knife wounds and a blow to the skull, and his penis had been removed. He was identified as Aleksei Voronko, and a classmate had seen him with a middle-aged man with gold teeth, a mustache, and a sports bag. They had gone together to the woods.

This was a strong lead, one that could be followed up among local dentists. Few adults in the area could afford gold crowns for their teeth. Yet by the end of that year, after visiting many dentists, investigators had turned up nothing. To their astonishment, the Ministry of Health issued a statement about a mistake that had been made in typing blood in other biological secretions. There were rare “paradoxical” cases, the lab report stated, in which the results did not match the actual blood type. In other words, any of the suspects that had supposedly been eliminated based on blood type could have been the killer.

While this was frustrating news and made the investigation more difficult in many ways, it also reopened a few doors from the past. However, to fully undo the mistakes of the past, semen samples, not blood, would have to be obtained, and this had to be done voluntarily. Four years’ worth of work would have to be redone. The idea was overwhelming. The only method of investigation that seemed viable now was to post more men to watch the public transportation stations. But Procurator Kostoyev insisted on better accountability and efficiency. He did not like wasting all the manpower at the train stations. Another hurdle.

Still, it was April 1989 before investigators came across another victim who could be added to the lesopolosa series—a sixteen-year-old boy, stabbed repeatedly and genitally mutilated. This crime was followed by the murders of five more boys and a woman. Since Mikhail Gorbachev had made changes in party leadership, decreased government censorship of information, and instituted the policy of glasnost, which allowed greater access to information, journalists were at last writing openly about the murders. They knew a serial killer was operating and they pressured officials to put an end to the murders. Few reporters realized that there were now thirty-two victims.

Desperate, Burakov decided on a new plan. He would select the most likely train stations for undercover efforts, and make surveillance overt in the others, so that only those stations where plain-clothes officers were patrolling would seem safe to the killer. In other words, the police would try to lure the killer toward places where he’d be likely to pick up another victim. In those places, they would record the names of every man who came and went. They would also place people in the forests nearby, dressed as farmers. It was a major effort, involving over 350 officers, but it was their last hope.

The train station in Donleskhoz was considered a good place to set up a post, since two of the victims had been found near there. Mushroom pickers generally used the station during the summer, but otherwise it was relatively uncrowded. Two other stations were selected as well. But even before the plan was put into effect, the killer chose a victim at the Donleskhoz station, a sixteen-year-old retarded boy. Part of his tongue was missing, as were his testicles, and one eye had been stabbed. When his identity was established, officers learned that he’d spent most of his travel time on the electrichka, the slow-moving train, but no one had seen him exit with anyone.

Burakov was in despair. They’d formed a good plan, and had it been in place, they might have caught the Maniac!

When another missing boy was found dead near the Shakhty railroad station, Burakov got moving. He set the snare, with everyone in place, but, undetected, the killer grabbed a young woman—number thirty-six. Burakov was beginning to think they were chasing the devil himself.

Yet there were reports of men who had been at the train station near this crime scene. One name stood out. In fact, the very sight of it chilled Burakov to the bone. Over half a million people had been investigated by this time, but this particular man had been interrogated and released only because his blood type had not matched that of the semen samples. This man had to be the killer. Burakov was sure of it. The man fit the descriptions, he had gray hair, and he’d been carrying a knife and a rope in his briefcase.

Endgame

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo, fifty-four, had been at the Donleskhoz train station on November 6. A witness said he’d emerged from the woods, a red smear on his face, and washed his hands at a pump.

Burakov placed him under surveillance and did a thorough background review. He was married with two children, and had been accused of molesting a student, which forced him to resign from a teaching post. So he had sexual problems. He had then worked for a company at a job that allowed him to travel, but was fired when he failed to return from business trips with the supplies he was sent to get. He had spent three months in jail for a petty offense, and during that time, there had been no murders. In addition, records showed that his trips coincided with other murders—including the one in Moscow. He had once been a member in good standing in the Communist Party, but had ultimately been expelled.

Yet even with all this documentation, Burakov knew his case was weak. They would need to catch Chikatilo in the act or get him to confess, but allowing him to freely roam risked letting him kill someone else. Kostoyev ordered his arrest, believing he could get a confession out of him.

On November 20, 1990, three officers dressed in street clothes surrounded Chikatilo and brought him in for interrogation. They noticed that he did not have a mouth full of gold teeth, as one witness had stated, but in his satchel was a pocket-knife. Chikatilo was put into a cell where a gifted informant had been placed, but this strategy failed. A search of Chikatilo’s home produced no items that had belonged to any of the victims, but did yield no fewer than twenty-three knives. A medical examination indicated that Chikatilo’s semen supposedly had a weak B antibody, making it appear that his blood type was AB. The lab personnel called him the “paradoxical” rare case. More likely, the lab had screwed up in the first place and then tried to cover up the mistake.

Kostoyev decided to handle the interrogation himself, in the presence of Chikatilo’s court-appointed lawyer. He wanted the room to be spartan, with only a table, chairs, and a safe that would hint of the presence of incriminating evidence. Kostoyev had failed to obtain a confession in only three out of the hundreds of interrogations he had conducted. He reputedly had a knack for getting inside a suspect’s head, figuring out how he thought, and getting him to talk. All guilty men eventually confessed, he believed: they had to. In any event, he knew he had a full ten days, and in addition, he had some bait.

When Chikatilo was brought in, Kostoyev could see that he was a tall, older man with a long neck, sloping shoulders, oversize glasses, and gray hair. He walked with a shuffling gait, like a weary elderly person, but Kostoyev was not fooled. He believed Chikatilo was a calculating killer with plenty of energy available when he needed it.

Chikatilo insisted that his arrest had been a mistake. He denied that he had been at a train station on November 6 and did not know why this had been reported. He said little else, but the next day, he waived his right to legal counsel. He wrote a three-page document in which he confessed to “sexual weakness”—the words he had used before. He hinted at “perverse sexual activity,” but did not specify what this meant, and said that he was out of control. Then he wrote another, longer essay in which he said that he had moved around in train stations and had seen how young people there fell victim to homeless beggars. He also admitted that he was impotent.

Kostoyev told him that his only hope would be to confess everything in a way that showed he had mental problems, so that an examination could affirm that he was, in fact, legally insane. Otherwise the evidence would surely convict him without a confession. That was Kostoyev’s bait.

Chikatilo asked for a few days to collect himself and said he would submit to an interrogation. Everyone expected him to confess, but when the day arrived, he insisted that he was guilty of no crimes. For each crucial time period involving a murder, he claimed that he was at home with his wife.

The next day, he revised his statements. In 1977, he had fondled some female students who had aroused him. He had difficulty controlling himself around children, but there were only two instances in which he had lost control.

Nine days elapsed and Kostoyev had gotten no closer to his goal. Clearly, he had met his match. He could think of no other approach to take to pressure this man to finally open up. He brought in photographers and said they had witnesses to whom they were going to show these photographs. Still, Chikatilo did not yield.

It was looking as if they might have to let him go, which would be disastrous. Burakov thought they should try another interrogator—Dr. Bukhanovsky. Kostoyev initially resisted, but finally had to admit he was getting nowhere. He agreed to let the psychiatrist see what he could do.

The Psychiatrist and the Murderer

Bukhanovsky agreed to question Chikatilo, but only out of professional interest. He was soon alone in a closed room with the likeliest suspect in the lesopolosa murders. The psychiatrist saw right away that Chikatilo was the type of man he had described in his profile: ordinary, solitary, ostensibly nonthreatening. He introduced himself and then showed Chikatilo the profile. He sensed that the offender wanted to talk about his rage and his humiliation, so it was best to show sympathy. He listened for a while before he discussed the crimes. Discussing his report, he spoke for some time, in rich detail, and as Chikatilo listened, he seemed affected by the psychiatrist’s analysis and finally surrendered, saying he would tell everything. His story was even more perverse than anyone had realized.

Among his admissions was that his first murder had occurred in 1978, before the police had begun to keep track of them. He had killed a little girl. This was alarming, since a man had already been arrested, tried, and executed for that murder. But Chikatilo said that he had moved to Shakhty that year to teach. He spent time watching children and feeling a strong desire to see them naked. To maintain his privacy, he purchased a hut on a dark, dirty street. When he went to it one day, he encountered the girl, so he took her inside and attacked her. When he could not achieve an erection, he used his knife as a substitute for his penis. After she died, he tossed her body into a nearby river.

Kostoyev asked him to explain the blindfolds he had used, and just as investigators had suspected, Chikatilo admitted that he had heard that the image of a killer remains in the eyes of a victim. That was why he had stabbed so many of his victims in the eyes. Then he had decided it was not true, so he stopped doing it (explaining the change in pattern).

Chikatilo had grown obsessed with reliving the crime, and this was compounded by anger over an injustice he believed he had suffered. His fantasies became more violent. In 1981, he attacked a girl who was begging for money, and used his teeth to bite off one of her nipples and swallow it. This, he found, made him ejaculate. He covered the body with newspaper and took her sexual organs away with him.

The killer went on and on. He remembered the details of each of the thirty-six lesopolosa murders. Sometimes he acted as a predator, learning someone’s routes and habits. Others were victims of opportunity. The stabbing almost always was a substitute for sexual intercourse, and he had learned how to squat beside victims in such a way as to avoid getting their blood on his clothing. His impotence generally triggered his rage, especially if a woman ridiculed him. He soon understood that he could not get aroused without violence and blood.

With the boys, Chikatilo would fantasize that they were his captives and that he was some kind of hero for torturing them. He could not give a reason for cutting off their tongues and penises, although at one point he said he was getting revenge against life. With grown women, Chikatilo would place his semen inside a uterus that he had removed, and as he walked along, he would chew on it—“the truffle of sexual murder.” He said it gave him an “animal satisfaction” to chew or swallow nipples or testicles.

To corroborate what he was saying, he drew sketches of the crime scenes, and what he said fit the known facts. Then he confirmed what everyone had feared—he added more victims to the list. Many more. One boy he had killed in a cemetery and placed in a shallow grave. He took the interrogators there and they recovered the body. Another was killed in a field, and she was located. On and on it went, murders here and there, and the bodies were always left right where they were killed, except for one. Chikatilo described a murder in an empty apartment; in order to get the body out, he’d had to dismember it and dump the parts down a sewer.

In the end, he confessed to fifty-six murders, although there was corroboration for only fifty-three: thirty-one females and twenty-two males. The police now had sufficient evidence to take this man to court.

The Roots of Perversity

Chikatilo was born in 1936 in a small Ukrainian village; his head was misshapen as a result of water on the brain. His father was a POW in World War II and had been sent to a prison camp in Russia, so his mother raised him and his younger sister on her own.

During the early part of the twentieth century, citizens of the former Soviet Union were often subjected to famines, especially in the Ukraine, after Stalin crushed independent farmers and sent many citizens to the Siberian gulag. Some six million people died of starvation, and desperate people were known to strip meat from corpses in order to survive. Sometimes they went to a cemetery, where corpses were stacked for burial, and sometimes (legend has it) they grabbed someone on the street. Human flesh was bought and sold, or just hoarded.

Children saw disfigured corpses and heard terrible tales of hardship. Chikatilo had grown up during several of these famines; according to his mother, he had once had an older brother, Stepan, who had been killed. In a prison interview, he said, “Many people went crazy, attacked people, ate people. So they caught my brother, who was ten, and ate him.” He might simply have died and been consumed, if he even existed (which could not be corroborated in any records), but Chikatilo’s mother used to warn him to stay in the yard or he might get eaten as well.

Most of his childhood was spent alone, living in his fantasies. Other children mocked him for his awkwardness, so to entertain and empower himself, he dreamed up images of torture, which remained a feature of his killings later in life. He had his first sexual experience as an adolescent when he struggled with a ten-year-old friend of his sister’s and ejaculated. That impressed itself on him, especially as he grew older and realized he was unable to get an erection but able to ejaculate.

When he returned from the army ready to settle down with a wife, he found he was still unable to perform sexually. A girl spread this information around, humiliating him, and he dreamed about catching her and tearing her to pieces. His sister arranged a marriage for him with a woman who belittled him, but he could only impregnate her by ejaculating outside her and pushing his semen in by hand. He became a teacher and soon found himself attracted to young girls. Molesting them gave him satisfaction, but when such incidents were reported, they were covered up and denied instead of leading to prosecution.

For true satisfaction, Chikatilo needed violence, so he started to commit murder. Since he was on the road quite often as a parts supply liaison, it was easy to find vulnerable strangers. Chikatilo believed he suffered from an illness that caused his uncontrollable transgressions. He asked to see specialists in sexual deviance, so he was sent to Moscow’s Serbsky Institute for two months. Neurologists there determined that his brain had been damaged at birth, and this had affected his ability to control his bladder and emissions of semen. However, he was found to be sane: he knew what he was doing and he could have controlled it. That was good enough for the prosecutor.

Brought back to Rostov, Chikatilo went to trial on April 14, 1992, placed inside a large iron cage. The judge sat at a dais and two citizens on either side acted as jurors. There were 225 volumes of information against him. Since the press spread the word about the Maniac’s trial, the courtroom was filled with relatives of his victims. When he entered, they screamed at him. Now bald and without his glasses, he looked slightly psychotic, especially when he drooled and rolled his eyes or dropped his trousers.

That he would be found guilty of murder was a foregone conclusion, but there was a chance that his psychological problems could save him from execution. However, his lawyer, Marat Khabibulin, was not allowed to call psychiatric experts; he could only cross-examine those experts that the prosecution put on the stand, and since he had not been appointed until after Chikatilo had fully confessed, he was at a serious disadvantage.

Judge Leonid Akubzhanov asked sharp questions and tossed off demeaning comments at the prisoner. Chikatilo challenged him, claiming to be a victim of the former Soviet system and calling himself a “mad beast.” He also stated that he had murdered seventy people, not fifty-three.

The trial dragged on into August. The defense summed up its case by saying that the evidence and psychiatric analyses were flawed and the confessions had been coerced. Chikatilo’s lawyer pleaded for a not-guilty verdict. The next day, Chikatilo broke into song from his cage and then muttered a string of nonsense, with accusations that he was being “radiated.” He was taken out of the courtroom before the prosecutor began his final argument, in which he asked for the death penalty. On October 14, Andrei Chikatilo was found guilty of five counts of molestation and fifty-two counts of murder. Chikatilo cried out incoherently, shouting, “Swindlers!” and throwing his bench while demanding to see the corpses. The judge sentenced him to be executed. He appealed, but it was denied, so on February 15, 1994, Andrei Chikatilo, the Lesopolosa Maniac, was taken to a soundproof room and shot behind the right ear, ending his life. For Burakov, it was the resolution of a long and difficult investigation, but like other good detectives, he had stayed the course, devised inventive methods, educated himself beyond what was expected, and finally saw results.

Criminal profiling played an important role in many serial-killer investigations during the 1990s, but it has often been disparaged as “mere” psychology. In fact, profiling from crime scenes is only one aspect of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Analysis, which offers other types of behavioral analysis. One of them was instrumental in our next story.

Sources

Cannibal: The Real Hannibal Lecters. HBO, February 2003.

Conti, Richard P. “The Psychology of False Confessions.” Journal of Credibility Assessment and Witness Psychology 2 : 1 (1999), 14 -36.

Cullen, Robert. The Killer Department: Detective Viktor Burakov’s Eight-Year Hunt for the Most Savage Serial Killer in Russian History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

Krivich, Mikhail, and Ol’gert Ol’gin. Comrade Chikatilo: The Psychopathology of Russia’s Notorious Serial Killer. Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books, 1993.

Lourie, Richard. Hunting the Devil: The Pursuit, Capture and Confession of the Most Savage Serial Killer in History. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.

Matthews, Owen. “A Crime-Fighting MD and the Twisted Citizens of the Capital of Serial Crime: City of the Dead.” Newsweek, January 25, 1999.