Andrei Chikatilo | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers (2024)

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Chikatilo was known by such titles as The Rostov Ripper and the Butcher of Rostov because the majority of his murders were committed in the Rostov Oblast of the Russian SFSR.

Biography

Earley life

Andrei Chikatilo was born in the village of Yablochnoye (Yabluchne) in modern Sumy Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR. He was born soon after the famine in Ukraine caused by Joseph Stalin's forced collectivisation of agriculture. Ukrainian farmers were forced to hand in their entire crop for statewide distribution. Mass starvation ran rampant throughout Ukraine, and reports of cannibalism soared. Chikatilo's mother, Anna, told him that his older brother Stepan had been kidnapped and cannibalized by starving neighbors, although it has never been independently established whether this actually happened.

Chikatilo's parents were both farm labourers who lived in a one-room hut. As a child, Chikatilo slept on a single bed with his parents. He was a chronic bed wetter and was berated and beaten by his mother for each offense.

When the Soviet Union entered World War II, his father, Roman, was drafted into the Red Army and subsequently taken prisoner after being wounded in combat. During the war, Chikatilo witnessed some of the effects of Blitzkrieg, which both frightened and excited him. On one occasion, Chikatilo and his mother were forced to watch their hut burn to the ground. In 1943, while Chikatilo's father was at the front, Chikatilo's mother gave birth to a baby girl. In 1949, Chikatilo's father, who had been liberated by the Americans, returned home. Instead of being rewarded for his war service, he was branded a traitor for surrendering to the Germans.

In 1953, Chikatilo finished school and applied for a scholarship at the Moscow State University; although he passed the entrance examination, his grades were not good enough for acceptance. Between 1957 and 1960, Chikatilo performed his compulsory military service.

Chikatilo began his career as a teacher of Russian language and literature in Novoshakhtinsk. His career as a teacher ended in March 1981 after several complaints of child molestation against pupils of both sexes. Chikatilo eventually took a job as a supply clerk for a factory.

Despite evidence linking Chikatilo to the girl's death (spots of the girl's blood were found in the snow near Chikatilo's house and a witness had given police a detailed description of a man closely resembling Chikatilo who she had seen talking with Zakotnova at the bus stop where the girl was last seen alive), a 25-year-old named Alexsandr Kravchenko who, as a teenager, had served a jail 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 Lena Zakotnova in July, 1983.

Following Zakotnova's murder, Chikatilo was only able to achieve sexual arousal and org*sm through stabbing and slashing women and children to death, and he later stated the urge to relive the experience overwhelmed him.

Chikatilo committed his next murder in September 1981, when he tried to have sex with a 17-year-old boarding school student named Larisa Tkachenko in a forest near the 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 mutilated her body with his teeth and a stick.

Following Biryuk's murder, Chikatilo no longer attempted to resist his homicidal urges: between July and December, 1982, he killed a further six 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 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 bodies found bore striations of 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.

Investigation

Chikatilo did not kill again until June 1983, but he had killed five more times before September. The accumulation of bodies and the similarities between the pattern of wounds inflicted on the victims forced the Soviet authorities to acknowledge a serial killer was on the loose: on September 6, 1983, the Public Prosecutor of the USSR formally linked six of the murders thus far committed to the same killer.

A 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 specialist forensic analyst, Victor Burakov, to head the investigation. Due to the sheer savagery of the murders, much of the police effort concentrated on mentally ill citizens, hom*osexuals, known pedophiles and 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 mentally handicapped youths who had admitted to the crimes only under prolonged and often brutal interrogation. Three known hom*osexuals and a convicted sex offender committed suicide as a result of the investigators' heavy-handed tactics, but as police obtained confessions from suspects, bodies continued to be discovered proving the suspects who had previously confessed could not be the killer the police were seeking: in October 1983, Chikatilo killed a 19-year-old prostitute, and in December a 14-year-old schoolboy named Sergey Markov.

The killings continue

In January and February 1984, Chikatilo killed two women in Rostov's Aviators' Park. On March 24, 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 sem*n and saliva samples on the victim's clothing.

On May 25, Chikatilo killed a young woman, Tatyana Petrosyan and her 11-year-old daughter, Svetlana, in woodland outside Shakhty. Petrosyan had known Chikatilo for several years prior to her murder. By July 19, he had killed three further young women between the ages of 19 and 22 and a 13-year-old boy.

On August 2, Chikatilo killed a 16-year-old girl, Natalya Golosovskaya, in Aviators' Park and on August 7, he killed a 17-year-old girl on the banks of the Don River before flying to the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent on a business trip. By the time Chikatilo returned to Rostov on August 15, he had killed a 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 September 6.

Arrest and release

On September 13, 1984, exactly one week after his fifteenth killing of the year, Chikatilo was observed by an undercover detective attempting to lure young women away from a Rostov bus station. He was arrested and held. A search of his belongings revealed a knife and rope. He was also discovered to be under investigation for minor theft at one of his former employers, which gave the investigators the legal right to hold him for a prolonged period of time. Chikatilo's dubious background was uncovered, and his physical description matched the description of the man seen with Dmitry Ptashnikov in March. These factors provided insufficient evidence to convict him of the murders, however. He was found guilty of the theft of the property from his previous employer and sentenced to one year in prison. He was freed on December 12, 1984, after serving three months.

On October 8, 1984, the head of the Russian Public Prosecutors Office formally linked 23 of Chikatilo's murders into one case, and dropped all charges against the mentally handicapped youths who had previously confessed to the murders.

Following the September 6 murder of Irina Luchinskaya, no further bodies were found bearing the trademark mutilation of Chikatilo's murders and investigators in Rostov theorized that the unknown killer may have moved to another part of the Soviet Union and had continued killing there. The Rostov police sent bulletins to all forces throughout the Soviet Union, describing the network of wounds their unknown killer inflicted upon his victims and requesting feedback from any police force who had discovered murder victims with wounds matching those upon the victims found in the Rostov Oblast. The response was negative: no other police force had found murder victims with wounds matching those upon the description within the bulletin.

In November 1985, a special procurator named Issa Kostoyev was appointed to supervise the investigation. The known murders around Rostov were carefully re-investigated and police began another round of questioning of known sex offenders. The following month, the militsiya and Voluntary People's Druzhina renewed the patrolling of railway stations around Rostov. The police also took the step of consulting a psychiatrist, Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky, the first such consultation in a serial killer investigation in the Soviet Union.

Bukhanovsky produced a 65-page psychological profile of the unknown killer for the investigators, describing the killer as a man aged between 45 and 50 years old who was of average intelligence, was likely to be married or had previously been married, but who was also a sad*st who could only achieve sexual arousal by seeing his victims suffer. Bukhanovsky also argued that because many of the killings had occurred on weekdays near mass transportation and across the entire Rostov Oblast, that the killer's work required him to travel regularly, and based upon the actual days of the week when the killings had occurred, the killer was most likely tied to a production schedule.

Chikatilo followed the investigation carefully, reading newspaper reports about the manhunt for the killer and keeping his homicidal urges under control; throughout 1986 he is not known to have committed any murders. In 1987 Chikatilo killed three times; on each occasion he killed while on a business trip far away from the Rostov Oblast and none of these murders were linked to the manhunt in Rostov. Chikatilo's first murder in 1987 was committed in May, when he killed a 13-year-old boy named Oleg Makarenkov in Revda. In July, he killed another boy in Zaporozhye and a third in Leningrad in September.

In 1988, Chikatilo killed three times, murdering an unidentified woman in Krasny-Sulin in April and two boys in May and July. His first killing bore wounds similar to those inflicted on the victims linked to the manhunt killed between 1982 and 1985, but as the woman had been killed with a slab of concrete, investigators were unsure whether to link the murder to the investigation.

In May Chikatilo killed a 9-year-old boy in Ilovaisk, Ukraine. The boy's wounds left no doubt the killer had struck again, and this murder was linked to the manhunt. On July 14, Chikatilo killed a 15-year-old boy named Yevgeny Muratov at Donleskhoz station near Shakhty. Muratov's murder was also linked to the investigation, although his body was not found until April 1989.

On January 14, 1990, Chikatilo killed an 11-year-old boy in Shakhty. On March 7, he killed a 10-year-old boy named Yaroslav Makarov in Rostov Botanical Gardens. The eviscerated body was found the following day.

On March 11, the leaders of the investigation, headed by Mikhail Fetisov, held a meeting to discuss progress made in the hunt for the killer. Fetisov was under intense pressure from the public, the press and the Ministry of the Interior in Moscow to solve the case: the intensity of the manhunt in the years up to 1984 had receded to a degree between 1985 and 1987, when Chikatilo had killed only two victims conclusively linked to the killer — both of them in 1985. By March 1990, six further victims had been linked to the killer. Fetisov had noted laxity in some areas of the investigation, and warned people would be fired if the killer was not caught soon.

Chikatilo had killed three further victims by August 1990: On April 4, he killed a 31-year-old woman in woodland near Donleskhoz station, on July 28, he lured a 13-year-old boy away from a Rostov train station and killed him in Rostov Botanical Gardens and on August 14, he killed an 11-year-old boy in the reeds near Novocherkassk beach.

The snare

The discovery of more victims sparked a massive operation by the police; as several victims had been found at stations on one rail route through the Rostov Oblast, Viktor Burakov — who had been involved in the hunt for the killer since 1982 — suggested a plan to saturate all larger stations in the Rostov Oblast with an obvious uniformed police presence the killer could not fail to notice, with the intention to discourage the killer from attempting to strike at any of these locations, and with smaller and less busy stations patrolled by undercover agents, where his activities would be more likely to be noticed. The plan was approved, and both the uniformed and undercover officers were instructed to question any adult man in the company of a young woman or child and note their name and passport number. Police deployed 360 men at all the stations in the Rostov Oblast, and only undercover officers at the three smallest stations — Kirpichnaya, Donleskhoz and Lesostep — on the route through the oblast where the killer had struck most frequently, in an effort to force the killer to strike at one of these three stations. The operation was implemented on October 27, 1990.

On October 30, police found the body of a 16-year-old boy named Vadim Gromov at Donleskhoz Station. Gromov had been killed on October 17, 10 days prior to the implementation of the initiative. The same day Gromov's body was found, Chikatilo lured another 16-year-old boy, Viktor Tishchenko, off a train at Kirpichnaya Station, another station under surveillance from undercover police and killed him in a nearby forest.

The policeman stopped Chikatilo and checked his papers. Having no formal reason for arrest, Chikatilo was not held. When the policeman came back to his office, he filed a formal routine report, indicating the name of the person he stopped at the train station.

On November 13, Korostik's body was found. Police summoned the officer in charge of surveillance at Donleskhoz Station and examined the reports of all men stopped and questioned in the previous week. Chikatilo's name was among those reports and his name was familiar to several officers involved in the case, having been questioned in 1984 and placed on the 1987 suspect list.

Upon checking with Chikatilo's present and previous employers, investigators were able to place Chikatilo in various towns and cities at times when several victims linked to the investigation had been killed. Former colleagues from Chikatilo's teaching days informed investigators Chikatilo had been forced to resign from his teaching position due to complaints of sexual assault from several pupils.

Police placed Chikatilo under surveillance on November 14. In several instances, particularly on trains or buses, he was observed to approach lone young women or children and engage them in conversation; if the woman or child broke off the conversation, Chikatilo would wait a few minutes then seek another conversation partner. On November 20, after six days of surveillance, Chikatilo left his house with a one gallon flask for beer, then wandered around Novocherkassk, attempting to make contact with children he met on his way. Upon exiting a cafe, Chikatilo was arrested by four plainclothes police officers.

Chikatilo was placed in a cell inside the KGB headquarters in Rostov with a police informer, who was instructed to engage Chikatilo in conversation and elicit any information he could from him.

The next day, 21 November, formal questioning of Chikatilo began. The interrogation of Chikatilo was performed by Issa Kostoyev. The strategy chosen by the police to elicit a confession was to lead Chikatilo to believe he was a very sick man in need of medical help. The intention of this strategy was to give Chikatilo hope that if he confessed, he would not be prosecuted by reason of insanity. Police knew their case against Chikatilo was largely circ*mstantial, and under Soviet law, they had ten days in which they could legally hold a suspect before either charging or releasing him.

Throughout the questioning, Chikatilo repeatedly denied he had committed the murders, although he did confess to molesting his pupils during his career as a teacher. He also produced several written essays for Kostoyev which, although evasive regarding the actual murders, did reveal psychological symptoms consistent with those written by Dr. Bukhanovsky in 1985. The interrogation tactics used by Kostoyev may also have caused Chikatilo to become defensive: the informer sharing a KGB cell with Chikatilo reported to police that Chikatilo had informed him Kostoyev repeatedly asked him direct questions regarding the mutilations inflicted upon the victims.

Chikatilo's confession

On November 29, at the request of Burakov and Fetisov, Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, the psychiatrist who had written the 1985 psychological profile of the then-unknown killer for the investigators, was invited to assist in the questioning of the suspect. Bukhanovsky read extracts from his 65-page psychological profile to Chikatilo. Within two hours, Chikatilo confessed to 36 murders police had linked to the killer: although he denied two additional murders the police had initially linked to him. On November 30, he was formally charged with each of these 36 murders, all of which had been committed between June 1982 and November, 1990.

Chikatilo confessed to a further 20 killings which had not been connected to the case, either because the murders had been committed outside the Rostov Oblast, because the bodies had not been found or, in the case of Yelena Zakotnova, because an innocent man had been convicted and executed for the murder.

Psychiatric evaluation

On August 20, 1991, after completing the interrogation of Chikatilo and having completed a re-enactment of all the murders at each crime scene, Chikatilo was transferred to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow for a six-day psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he was mentally competent to stand trial. Chikatilo was analysed by a senior psychiatrist, Dr. Andrei Tkachenko, who declared him legally sane on October 18. In December 1991, details of Chikatilo's arrest and a brief summary of his crimes was released to the newly-liberated media by police.

Trial and execution

The trial of Andrei Chikatilo was the first major event of post-Soviet Russia. Chikatilo stood trial in Rostov on April 14, 1992. During the trial, he was kept in an iron cage in a corner of the courtroom to protect him from attack by the many hysterical and enraged relatives of his victims. Chikatilo's head had been shaven — a standard prison precaution against lice. Relatives of victims regularly shouted threats and insults to 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 regularly 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 May 13, Chikatilo withdrew his confessions to six of the killings to which he had previously confessed.

In July 1992, Chikatilo demanded that the judge be replaced for making too many rash remarks about his guilt. His defense counsel backed the claim. The judge looked to the prosecutor and even the prosecutor backed the defense's judgment, stating the judge had indeed made too many such remarks. The judge ruled the prosecutor be replaced instead.

On October 14, the court reconvened and the judge read the list of murders again, not finishing until the following day. On October 15, Chikatilo was found guilty of 52 of the 53 murders and sentenced to death for each offense. Chikatilo kicked his bench across his cage when he heard the verdict, and began shouting abuse. He was offered a final chance to make a speech in response to the verdict, but remained silent. Upon passing final sentence, Judge Leonid Akhobzyanov made the following speech:

"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".

On January 4, 1994, Russian President Boris Yeltsin refused a last-ditch appeal for clemency. On February 14, Chikatilo was taken to a soundproofed room in Novocherkassk prison and executed by a single gunshot behind the right ear.