Men Of Flesh And Blood (5 page)

Chikatilo's parents were
both farm labourers who lived in a one-room hut and 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, his
mother gave birth to a baby girl, Tatyana. In 1949, Chikatilo's
father, who had been freed by the Americans, returned home. Instead
of being rewarded for his war service, he was branded a traitor for
surrendering to the Germans.

Chikatilo was shy as a
child and developed a passion for reading, by his teens, he was an
avid reader of Communist literature and was appointed chairman of
the pupils' Communist committee at his school. Throughout his
childhood and adolescence, he was consistently a target for
bullying by other students. During adolescence, he discovered that
he suffered from chronic impotence, aggravating his social
awkwardness and self-hatred. Chikatilo was shy in the company of
females, his only sexual experience as a teenager was when he was
17, he jumped on an 11-year-old friend of his younger sister and
wrestled her to the ground, ejaculating as the girl struggled in
his grasp.

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. In 1963,
Chikatilo married a woman to whom he was introduced by his younger
sister. The couple had a son and daughter. Chikatilo later claimed
that his marital sex life was minimal and that, after his wife
understood that he was unable to maintain an erection, he and his
wife agreed that in order that she could conceive, he would
ejaculate externally and push his semen inside her vagina with his
fingers. In 1965, their daughter Ludmila was born, followed by son
Yuri in 1969. In 1971, Chikatilo completed a correspondence course
in Russian literature and obtained his degree in the subject from
Rostov University.

In September 1978,
Chikatilo moved to Shakhty, a small coal-mining town near
Rostov-on-Don, where he committed his first documented murder. On
December 22, he lured a 9-year-old girl named Yelena Zakotnova to
an old house, which he had secretly purchased and tried to rape
her, but failed to achieve an erection. When the girl struggled, he
choked her to death and stabbed her body, ejaculating in the
process of knifing the child. Chikatilo then dumped Zakotnova's
body in a nearby river. Despite evidence linking Chikatilo to the
girl's death, spots of the girl's blood were found in the snow near
Chikatilo's house. In addition, a witness had given police a
detailed description of a man closely resembling Chikatilo whom she
had seen talking with Zakotnova at the bus stop where the girl had
last been 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 year’s in prison.
Under pressure from the victim's relatives, Kravchenko was retried
and eventually executed for the murder of Yelena Zakotnova in July
1983. 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.

Chikatilo began his career
as a teacher of Russian language and literature in Novoshakhtinsk.
However, 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.

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

Then again, on June 12,
1982, Chikatilo encountered a 13 year-old girl named Lyubov Biryuk
walking home from a shopping trip in the village of Donskoi. 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 blue floral
dress, and killed her by stabbing and slashing her to death.
Following Biryuk's murder, Chikatilo no longer attempted to resist
his homicidal urges and 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. He usually killed them by
stabbing, slashing, and disemboweling the victim with a knife,
although some victims, in addition to receiving a multitude of
knife wounds, were also strangled, had their eyes gouged out or
battered to death. Chikatilo's adult female victims were often
prostitutes or homeless women who could be lured to secluded areas
with promises of alcohol or money. Chikatilo would typically
attempt intercourse with these victims, but he would usually be
unable to get an erection, which would again send him into a
murderous fury, especially if the woman mocked his impotence. He
would achieve orgasm only when he stabbed the victim to
death.

Chikatilo did not kill
again until June 1983, but he had killed five more times by
September of that year. The accumulation of bodies and the
similarities between the patterns of wounds inflicted on the
victims forced the Soviet authorities to acknowledge that a serial
killer was on the loose and 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 on
the Shakhty area 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, homosexuals, 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 admitted
to the crimes only under prolonged and often brutal interrogation.
Three known homosexuals and a convicted sex offender committed
suicide as a result of the investigators' stern tactics. However,
as police obtained confessions from suspects, bodies continued to
be discovered, proving that the suspects who had 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.

In January and February
1984, Chikatilo killed two women in Rostov's Aviators' Park and 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 semen 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 July19,
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 Chikatilo 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 and in early August,
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 in mid-August, he had killed another young woman
and a 12-year-old girl. Within two weeks, an 11 year-old boy had
been found strangled, castrated and his eyes gouged out in Rostov
before a young librarian, Irina Luchinskaya, was killed in Rostov's
Aviators' Park in early September. 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 did not
provide enough evidence to convict him of the murders. He was
however, found guilty of theft of property from his previous
employer and sentenced to one year in prison, but was freed on
December 12, 1984 after serving only three months.

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 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 requested feedback from any police
force that had discovered murder victims with wounds matching those
upon the victims found in the Rostov Oblast. The response was
negative.

Upon his release from
jail, Chikatilo found new work in Novocherkassk and kept a low
profile. He did not kill again seven months after getting out of
jail, when he murdered a young woman near Domodedovo Airport, near
Moscow. One month later, in August, Chikatilo killed another woman
in Shakhty. Both victims were linked to the hunt for the killer as
the same modus operandi was used in the killings.

In November of 1985, a
special procurator named Issa Kostoyev was appointed to supervise
the investigation of the serial killer. The known murders around
Rostov were carefully re-investigated and police began another
round of questioning of known sex offenders. The following month,
the militia 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, likely
to be married or had previously been married, but also a sadist who
could achieve sexual arousal only by seeing his victims suffer.
Bukhanovsky also argued, 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. That didn’t last long.

In 1987, Chikatilo killed
three more times, on each occasion, he killed while on a business
trip far away from the Rostov Oblast and none of these murders was
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 of the same year, 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.