Biography and escalation
Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936 in the village of Yabluchne in the Sumy Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR to collective farm laborers who lived in a one room hut. As a child, Chikatilo was constantly berated by his mother, and although she was a harsh and unforgiving, his father was a kind, hard working man.
When the Soviet Union entered World War II, Chikatilo's father was drafted into the Red Army and subsequently taken prisoner after being wounded in combat. Between 1941 and 1944, Chikatilo witnessed some of the effects of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, which he described as "horrors", adding he witnessed bombings, fires, and shootings from which he and his mother would hide in cellars and ditches. On one occasion, Chikatilo and his mother were forced to watch their own hut burn to the ground. With his father at war, Chikatilo and his mother slept alone on a single bed. He was a chronic bed wetter and was berated and beaten by his mother for each offense.
In 1943, Chikatilo's mother gave birth to a baby girl, Tatyana. Chikatilo's father had been conscripted in 1941 and as such, could not have fathered the child. It has been speculated the child was conceived as a result of rape committed by a German soldier.
In September 1944, Chikatilo began his schooling. Shy and studious as a child, he developed a passion for reading and memorizing data and often studied at home, both to increase his sense of self-worth and to compensate for his short-sightedness, which often prevented him from reading the classroom blackboard. Chikatilo became an ardent student although throughout his childhood and adolescence, he was consistently targeted by bullies
Adolescence and puberty
At the onset of puberty, Chikatilo discovered that he suffered from chronic impotence, worsening his social awkwardness and self-hatred. He was shy in the company of females; his first crush, at age 17, had been on a girl named Lilya Barysheva, with whom he had become acquainted through his school newspaper, yet he was chronically nervous in her company and never asked her for a date. The same year, Chikatilo jumped upon an 11-year-old friend of his younger sister and wrestled her to the ground, ejaculating as the girl struggled in his grasp.Following his graduation, Chikatilo applied for a scholarship at Moscow State University; although he passed the entrance examination with good-to-excellent grades, his grades were not deemed good enough for acceptance. Chikatilo speculated his father's tainted war record was the reason his scholarship application was rejected (his father had been branded a traitor for being taken prisoner in 1943), but the truth was that other students had performed better in a highly competitive exam. Chikatilo did not attempt to enroll at another university, instead travelling to the city of Kursk, where he worked as a labourer for three months, before enrolling in a vocational school, where he studied to become a communications technician. The same year—1955—Chikatilo formed his first serious relationship with a local girl two years his junior. On three separate occasions, the couple attempted intercourse, although on each occasion, Chikatilo was unable to sustain an erection. After 18 months, the girl broke off their relationship.
Sexual assaults
In May 1973, Chikatilo committed his first known sexual assault upon one of his pupils. In this incident, he swam towards a 15-year-old girl and groped her breasts and genitals; he was not disciplined for this incident. Months later, he sexually assaulted another teenage girl in his classroom. In response to the complaints lodged against him by his pupils, the director of the school summoned Chikatilo to a formal meeting and informed him he should resign voluntarily or be fired. Chikatilo left his employment discreetly and found another job as a teacher at another school in Novoshakhtinsk. He lost this job as a result of cutbacks in 1978, before finding another teaching position in Shakhty.Chikatilo's 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.
First series of murders
In September 1978, Chikatilo moved to Shakhty, a 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 stabbing 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.
Following Zakotnova's murder, Chikatilo was able to achieve 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 although he did later claim that, initially, he had struggled to resist these urges.
On 3 September 1981, Chikatilo encountered a 17-year-old boarding school student named Larisa Tkachenko standing at a bus stop as he exited a public library in Rostov city centre. According to his subsequent confession, Chikatilo lured Tkachenko to a forest near the Don River with the pretext of drinking vodka and "relaxing." When they reached a secluded area, he threw the girl to the ground before tearing off her clothes and attempting intercourse as Tkachenko remonstrated against his actions. When Chikatilo failed to achieve an erection, he forced mud inside her mouth to stifle her screams before battering and strangling her to death. As he had no knife, Chikatilo mutilated the body with his teeth and a stick; he also tore one nipple from Tkachenko's body with his teeth.
Nine months after the murder of Tkachenko, on 12 June 1982, Chikatilo travelled by bus to the Bagayevsky District of Rostov to purchase vegetables. Having to change buses in the village of Donskoi, he decided to continue his journey on foot.
Walking away from the bus station, he encountered a 13-year-old girl
named Lyubov Biryuk who was herself walking home from a shopping trip.
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 undergrowth, tore off her dress and killed her by stabbing and slashing her to death. When her body was found on 27 June, the medical examiner discovered evidence of 22 knife wounds inflicted to the head, neck, chest, and pelvic region. In addition, several striations were discovered upon Biryuk's eye sockets.
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 prostitutes or homeless women whom he would lure 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; this 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, often tying their hands behind their backs with a length of rope before stuffing mud or loam into the victims' mouth to silence their screams, and then proceed to kill them. After the killing, Chikatilo would make rudimentary—though seldom serious—efforts to conceal the body before leaving the crime scene.
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 uterus.
Chikatilo did not kill again until June 1983, when he murdered a 15-year-old Armenian girl named Laura Sarkisyan; her body was found close to an unmarked platform near Shakhty. 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.
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.
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 saliva samples on the victim's clothing. The semen samples were sent for analysis, revealing the killer's blood type to be type AB.
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.
On 2 August, Chikatilo killed a 16-year-old girl, Natalya Golosovskaya, in Aviators' Park. On 7 August, he lured a 17-year-old girl named Lyudmila Alekseyeva to the banks of the Don River on the pretense of showing her a shortcut to a bus terminal. Alekseyeva suffered 39 slash wounds to her body before being mutilated and disemboweled. The following day, Chikatilo flew to the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent on a business trip. By the time he had returned to Rostov on 15 August, he had killed an unidentified 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.
Crime scene photos
First arrest and release
On 13 September 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 prior to the boy's murder. A sample of Chikatilo's blood was taken; the results of which revealed his blood group to be type A, whereas semen samples found upon a total of six victims murdered by the unknown killer throughout the spring and summer of 1984[73] had been classified by medical examiners to be type AB. Chikatilo's name was added to the card index file used by investigators; however, the results of his blood type analysis largely discounted him as being the unknown killer. (By Chikatilo's arrest, the index file had expanded to include over 25,000 individuals investigated in connection with the murders.)Chikatilo was found guilty of theft of property from his previous employer and sentenced to one year in prison, but was freed on 12 December 1984 after serving three months.
On 8 October 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 6 September murder of Irina Luchinskaya, no further bodies were found bearing the trademark mutilation of Chikatilo's murders; investigators in Rostov theorized that the unknown killer might have moved to another part of the Soviet Union and continued killing there. The Rostov police sent bulletins to all forces throughout the Soviet Union, describing the pattern 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. (Uzbekistan investigators did not link the two murders committed by Chikatilo in Tashkent to the series because in one instance, the victim had been beheaded and in the second instance, the mutilations upon the victim had been so extensive police had concluded the body had been caught in a harvesting machine.)
Later murders and resurfacing
pon his release from jail in December 1984, Chikatilo found new work in Novocherkassk and kept a low profile. He did not kill again until 31 July 1985, when he murdered a young woman named Natalia Pokhlistova in a thicket of woods close to Moscow's Domodedovo Airport. Based upon the hypothesis the killer had travelled from the Rostov Oblast to Moscow via air, investigators checked all Aeroflot flight records of passengers who had commuted between Moscow and the Rostov Oblast between late July and early August.
On this occasion, however, Chikatilo had travelled to Moscow by train and as such, no documentation existed for investigators to research. One month later, on 27 August, Chikatilo killed another young woman, Irina Gulyaeva, in Shakhty. As had been the case with Natalia Pokhlistova, the wounds inflicted upon the victim linked her murder to the hunt for the serial killer.
In 1987, Chikatilo killed three times. On each occasion the murder took place while he was 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 the Urals town of Revda. In July, he killed another boy in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia 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 named Aleksey Voronko in Ilovaisk, Ukraine. The boy's wounds left no doubt the killer had struck again, and this murder was linked to the manhunt.
Chikatilo did not kill again until 8 March 1989, when he killed a
16-year-old girl in his daughter's vacant apartment. He dismembered her
body and hid the remains in a sewer. As the victim had been dismembered,
police did not link her murder to the investigation. Between May and
August, Chikatilo killed a further four victims, three of whom were
killed in Rostov and Shakhty, although only two of the victims were linked to the killer.
On 14 January 1990, Chikatilo encountered an 11-year-old boy named
Andrei Kravchenko standing outside a Shakhty theater. Kravchenko was
lured to a secluded section of woodland; his emasculated body was found
the following month.
Seven weeks after Kravchenko's murder, on 7 March, Chikatilo lured a
10-year-old boy named Yaroslav Makarov from a Rostov train station to
Rostov's Botanical Gardens. The eviscerated body was found the following
day.
On 11 March, the leaders of the investigation, headed by Mikhail
Fetisov, held a meeting to discuss progress made in the hunt for the
killer.
Chikatilo had killed three further victims by August 1990: on 4 April, he lured a 31-year-old woman named Lyubov Zuyeva off a train and killed her in woodland near Donleskhoz station; on 28 July, he lured a 13-year-old boy named Viktor Petrov away from a Rostov railway station and killed him in Rostov's Botanical Gardens, and on 14 August, he killed an 11-year-old boy named Ivan Fomin in the reeds near Novocherkassk beach.
Investigation and suspicion
The discovery of more victims sparked a massive operation by the police. Because 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 January 1983 — suggested a plan to saturate all larger stations in the Rostov Oblast with an obvious uniformed police presence which the killer could not fail to notice. The intention was to discourage the killer from attempting to strike at any of these locations, and to have undercover agents patrol smaller and less busy stations, where the murderer's 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 his name and passport number. Police deployed a total of 360 men at all the stations in the Rostov Oblast, but only undercover officers were posted at the three smallest stations on the route through the oblast where the killer had struck most frequently — Kirpichnaya, Donleskhoz and Lesostep — in an effort to force the killer to strike at one of those three stations. The operation was implemented on 27 October 1990.
On 30 October, police found the body of a 16-year-old boy named Vadim Gromov at Donleskhoz station. Gromov had been killed on 17 October, 10 days before the start 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.
Final murder and surveillance of Chikatilo
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 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 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. On 13 November, Korostik's body was found; she was the thirty-sixth known victim linked to the manhunt. 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. Not only was Chikatilo's name among those reports, but it was familiar to several officers involved in the case, because he had been questioned in 1984, and had been placed upon a 1987 suspect list compiled and distributed throughout the Soviet Union. After checking with Chikatilo's present and previous employers, investigators were able to place him 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 that 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 14 November. 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 and then seek another conversation partner. On 20 November, after six days of surveillance, Chikatilo left his house with a large jar, which he had filled with beer at a small kiosk in a local park, before he 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.
Arrest and execution
Upon his arrest, Chikatilo gave a statement claiming that the police were mistaken, and complained that he had also been arrested in 1984 for the same series of murders. A strip-search of the suspect revealed a further piece of evidence: one of Chikatilo's fingers had a flesh wound. Medical examiners concluded the wound was from a human bite. Chikatilo's penultimate victim was a physically strong 16-year-old.At the crime scene, the police had found numerous signs of a ferocious physical struggle between the victim and his murderer. Although a finger bone was later found to be broken and his fingernail had been bitten off, Chikatilo had never sought medical treatment for the wound.
A search of Chikatilo's belongings revealed he had been in possession of a folding knife and two lengths of rope. A sample of Chikatilo's blood was taken and he 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 was performed by Issa Kostoyev. The strategy chosen by the police to elicit a confession was to lead Chikatilo to believe that he was a very sick man in need of medical help. The intention 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 circumstantial, and under Soviet law, they had ten days in which they could legally hold a suspect before either charging or releasing him.
Andrei Chikatilo was brought to trial in Rostov on 14 April 1992, charged with 53 counts of murder in addition to five charges of sexual assault against minors committed when he had been a teacher.[138] He was tried in Courtroom Number 5 of the Rostov Provincial Court, before Judge Leonid Akubzhanov.
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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