Men Of Flesh And Blood (6 page)

Chikatilo did not kill
again for another year, not until March 8, 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 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 serial killer. Fetisov had noted
laxity in some areas of the investigation, and warned that people
would be fired if the killer were not caught soon.

Chikatilo had killed three
further victims by August, 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.

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.

Nevertheless, on October
30, police found the body of a 16-year-old boy named Vadim Gromov
at Donleskhoz Station. However, Gromov had been killed on October
17, 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.

Just six days later,
Chikatilo killed and mutilated a 22 year-old woman named Svetlana
Korostik in woodland near Donleskhoz Station. While leaving the
crime scene, he was seen 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
his 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. Chikatilo, however, was not dressed like
a typical forest hiker, he was wearing attire that is more formal.
Moreover, he had a nylon sports bag, which was not suitable for
carrying mushrooms.

The undercover 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 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, as he had been questioned in 1984
and placed upon a 1987 suspect list compiled and distributed
throughout the Soviet Union. 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 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 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 and then seek another conversation partner. This was
all observed by the police. On November 20, after six days of
surveillance, Chikatilo left his house with a one-gallon flask of
beer, than 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.

After being arrested,
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, in fact, from a human
bite. Chikatilo's second to last victim was a physically strong
16-year-old youth. 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 at
the time of his arrest.

Chikatilo was placed in a
cell inside the KGB headquarters in Rostov with a police informant,
who was instructed to engage Chikatilo in conversation and obtain
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 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 circumstantial, 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 that he had committed the murders,
although he did confess to molesting his pupils during his career
as a teacher.

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.
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 also confessed
to a further 20 killings which had not been connected to him
because the murders had been committed outside the Rostov Oblast,
and the bodies had not been found. Therefore, the Chikatilo led
police to the body of Aleksey Khobotov, a boy he had confessed to
killing in 1989 and who he had buried in woodland near a Shakhty
cemetery, proving unequivocally that he was the killer. He later
led investigators to the bodies of two other victims he had
confessed to killing. Three of the 56 victims Chikatilo confessed
to killing could not be found or identified, but Chikatilo was
charged with killing 53 women and children between 1978 and
1990.

Chikatilo stood trial in
Rostov on April 14, 1992, and 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. 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.

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 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 final appeal for clemency
and ten days later, Chikatilo was taken to a soundproofed room in a
Novocherkassk prison and executed by a single gunshot behind the
right ear.

CHAPTER 5: DANIEL AND
MANUELA RUDA

Daniel was a 26-year-old
man who worked as a car parts salesman. His wife Manuela was a
23-year-old woman who worked as a part time hotel worker and a part
time baker's assistant. Daniel and Manuela met when she responded
to his forum post "Vampire seeks princess of Darkness that hates
everyone and everything". They met sometime after Halloween in
1999, and ended up getting married eight months later on June 6th,
2000.

Daniel and Manuela were
married on the sixth day of the sixth month. The final six of the
devil's number would be added a month later on July sixth. The
significance of this day would come in the form of
murder.

Six six six is the
biblical symbol for the devil. On July 6th, Daniel and Manuela
invited a close friend named Frank Hackerts to a party. Daniel said
he would come and pick up Frank and also bring him back home after
the party. Daniel brought him back to his house where they hung out
listened to music and talked. They selected Hackerts apparently,
because he was a lover of the Beatles. A little while later, Daniel
took a hammer and struck Frank in the back of the head, killing him
instantly. Once they knew for sure Frank was dead, they stabbed him
66 times in the head. They then carved a Pentagram in his chest
with a scalpel.

Daniel and Manuela then
drank Frank's blood. Once they were done drinking Frank's blood,
they picked up the body and put it in a coffin that they had in
their bedroom. Once Frank was in there, Manuela climbed in after
him and they both slept in the coffin for the night.

After Daniel and Manuela
killed Frank Hackerts, they left their home in West Germany. Police
broke into their apartment three days later, and found and saw some
very gruesome stuff. They found a black and white poster of a woman
being hung in the bathroom, a collection of human skulls in their
living room, and the coffin in the bedroom where Manuela slept.
They also found bloody scalpels scattered all around the apartment.
After further investigation of the scene, police found the body of
Frank Hackerts. Along side of the body was a list of names that the
Rudas were possibly targeting next. Daniel and Manuela ended up
being found on July 12, 2001 in East Germany, in a city called
Jena.