Andrei Chikatilo

 

Andrei Chikatilo was one of the most prolific serial killers of all time. Known as ‘the Rostov Ripper’, he murdered over fifty men, women and children during a reign of terror that lasted for years. Like Joachim Kroll, the ‘Ruhr Hunter’, he was the product of a period of extreme social disturbance, his spate of killings coming at a time when his country, the Soviet Union, was beginning to collapse into disorder. In the early years of his crimes, the extent of what was going on was covered up by the corrupt Soviet government of the time, whose official line was that serial killing was a product of the decadent West, particularly the United States, and did not occur in the Soviet Union. However, because of the ultimate collapse of the Soviet system, Chikatilo’s crimes came to international attention when he was arrested in 1990, and shocked the world.

 

Difficult start

 

This most fearsome of modern serial killers was born on October 19, 1936 in the small village of Yablochnoye, which lies in the rural area of the Ukraine. The baby was born with water on the brain and a rather large, misshapen head. Later on, it was found that he had also undergone a certain amount of brain damage. In this respect, he was like many other serial killers, who have often sustained some kind of brain damage, for example through receiving a blow on the head.

This difficult start in life was compounded by the fact that Chikatilo’s family were victims of famine, as a result of the forced collectivisation imposed by Stalin. Chikatilo’s mother told how her oldest son, Stepan, was kidnapped, killed and eaten by starving neighbours. Whether this was true or not, her tale had the effect of completely traumatising the young Andrei, as well it might.

 

Starvation and misery

 

Chikatilo’s early childhood was spent during World War II, when the region’s misery grew even worse as privations of all kind were visited upon its people. His father was taken prisoner during the war, then sent to a Russian prison camp on his return. Meanwhile, Andrei was growing up without a father, and with a mother who seemed to take a perverse delight in terrifying her young son. On leaving school, Chikatilo joined the army. He also joined the Communist Party, which was an important step for any ambitious young person who wanted to succeed in Soviet Russia.

When he left the army, Chikatilo worked as a telephone engineer and studied in his spare time to gain a university degree, which eventually allowed him to become a schoolteacher near his home in Rostov-on-Don. His sister introduced him to a young woman named Fayina, whom he married. As it emerged later, Chikatilo’s marriage was not happy, and he had lifelong problems with impotence, but he did manage to have two children by Fayina, and for a while the family lived quietly enough together.

 

Rape and murder

 

However, this period of stability was not to last. At the age of forty-two, Chikatilo’s past began to catch up with him. In this, he was different from most serial killers, whose impulse to kill usually shows itself in early adulthood, if not before. Chikatilo murdered his first victim in 1979, a nine-year-old girl called Lenochka Zakotnova. He took her to a vacant house in the town of Shakhty, attempted to rape her, failed because of his impotence, and impaled her with a knife instead, stabbing her to death and dumping her body into the Grushovka River. Her corpse was found there on Christmas Eve. Chikatilo was questioned by police, and persuaded his wife to give him a false alibi. Eventually, local rapist Alexander Kravchenko was beaten into confessing to the crime and put to death, while Chikatilo got off the charges – only to murder again.

Despite his attempts to cover his tracks, Chikatilo’s perverted behaviour was noticed by his fellow teachers, and he was accused of molesting boys in the dormitory at the school where he worked. He confessed and was dismissed from his job. However, because he was a member of the Communist Party, he managed to get another job as a recruiting officer for a factory. This meant that he travelled a great deal, and therefore had a lot of opportunity to continue his killing career without being observed. His method of luring his victims to their death was to approach them at a train or bus station and take them into nearby woodland to muder them. In this way, he committed the murder of seventeen-year-old Larisa Tkachenko in 1982. Tkachenko was a poverty-stricken runaway, known locally for her habit of exchanging sexual favours for food and drink. Chikatilo strangled her and piled dirt into her mouth to muffle her screams. He later commented that although his first killing had upset him, this second one had been thrilling for him.

 

Eye gouging

 

In the same year, Chikatilo killed his next victim, thirteen-year-old Lyuba Biryuk. At this point he committed the act that was to become his trademark as a killer, which was to cut out her eyes. The following year he killed six more times, and this time his murders changed their pattern: two of the victims were young men, which initially confused the police. What the killings had in common was their increasing savagery and the way that certain body parts were always removed. One of the features of Chikatilo’s killings was that the genitals of his victims were often missing. It is generally believed that Chikatilo ate the parts he removed; however, he himself only confessed to ‘nibbling on them’. Some believe that, in his madness, he was acting out the fate that befell his older brother, to be killed and eaten in the most violent, vicious way imaginable.

Chikatilo’s series of gruesome murders attracted a great deal of police attention, but at the time the Soviet media had its hands tied. Journalists were not permitted to publicise the existence of a serial killer in the Soviet Union, as this reflected badly on the political situation there, or so the apparatchiks felt. Thus, the public were not warned to be on their guard and to keep their children safe from harm. For this reason, Chikatilo’s crimes became easier, and he continued to kill his victims, in increasingly savage ways. In just one month, August 1984, he did away with eight victims. Despite the increasing death toll, the only clue the police were able to find was that the killer’s blood group was AB. This was determined by analysing the semen found on the bodies of some of his more recent victims.

 

Brought to justice

 

However, it was in late 1984, just as his murders had reached a peak, that Chikatilo was arrested at a railway station where he was trying to seduce some young girls. He was arrested and found to have a knife and a length of rope in his bag but, because his blood group was A, not AB, he was eventually released. This evident mistake by police has never been explained, and it had tragic consequences. Once he was released, Chikatilo redoubled his killings, so that dozens more innocent people lost their lives. In 1988, he murdered eight more times, and in his last year of freedom, 1990, he killed nine people, several of them boys. By then, a new detective, Issa Kostoyev, had taken over the case and was determined to bring him to justice. Kostoyev ordered an army of detectives to wait at train and bus stations in the area and her plan worked.

A detective waiting at a station saw Chikatilo sweating profusely and breathing heavily, with bloodstains on his clothes, took his name and checked with his superiors to see if there was any information about him. When news came back that he had been a suspect, he was arrested. As it turned out, Chikatilo had just murdered twenty-year-old Svetlana Korostik. After ten days in custody he finally confessed to around fifty-two more murders, many more than the police had been aware of.

 

Monster in a cage

 

Chikatilo was brought to trial in April 1992. By this time, he was mentally ill and was locked inside a cage. The cage was designed as much to keep him safe from his victims’ relatives as to stop him from lashing out. At his trial, it became clear that Chikatilo had completely lost his mind: he was no longer the neat, sober-looking individual he had been when he was arrested, but had become a shaven-headed monster who ranted and raved at the judge and jury.

After a high profile trial that drew many shocked spectators, and that was reported in the media internationally, Chikatilo was convicted of all the murders he was charged with, and received a total of fifty-two death sentences. On February 15, 1994, he was executed by a single bullet to the back of the head. The reign of terror of the cannibal serial killer had finally come to an end.