Andrei Chikatilo - Soviet Serial Killer

Captain Fetisov of the Soviet police stood in a quiet corner of a park in Rostov-on-Don and watched as his men worked at the crime scene. They still had not taken away the victim, a girl aged thirteen. She had been beaten and stabbed and her internal organs had been pulled out. There was semen on her; and her eyes had been stabbed so hard that even the bone around them had deep cuts.

Fetisov was tired. He had almost lost count of the victims, young women and children of both sexes. It had begun in 1982 with the discovery of the first body. Even before then, the killer had started leaving dozens of mutilated bodies across the Soviet Union. In such a large country, victims were easy for him to find: prostitutes, alcoholics and runaways or just innocent young people who would trust a stranger. The immense forests, with their old trains running from unmanned stops to unstaffed stations, made perfect locations for the murderer to commit his terrible crimes. Or, in the city there were often large parks with woods.

Fetisov thought back to '82 when they had begun to discover the victims, begun to realise that many, if not all, were the work of one killer, one man. But who was he? How much closer were they now than five years (and dozens of victims) ago? It had to be a man. The semen left no doubt. It also told them that he was blood type AB+. The mad, repeated stabbing of his victims' eyes suggested that this was a man of peasant background from the Ukraine or Western Russia. In those areas, there is a belief that, if a person is murdered, an image of the killer will stay on the victim's eyeball, like a photo.

However, this was a maniac and any guesses about the reasons for his actions were, after all, only guesses. What Fetisov knew for certain was what would happen to him if he did not catch the murderer and catch him very soon: his boss would fire him. He had told him so quite clearly; but, still they continued to discover more bodies - now, in a wood out by the airport; now, on the banks of the River Don. Fetisov returned again and again to that key question: who was this mad man and what made him do these truly awful things to children and young people?

For twenty years from the late 1920s, Ukraine was a place of terror and death. The Soviet leader, Stalin, did not like or trust the Ukrainians and so he transported all the food from the region. Perhaps as many as eleven million Ukrainians died of starvation or were killed and eaten by their desperately hungry neighbours. Ukraine was only just recovering from this dreadful time when, in 1941, the Germans invaded and there followed four years of bombing, guerrilla war, mass executions and the burning down of whole villages and towns.

Between these two disasters, the starvation and the war, Andrei Chikatilo was born on 16 October, 1936. He was told that his older brother had been murdered and eaten by neighbours during one of the famines. On one occasion, he had to stand and watch as German soldiers burnt down the family house. His younger sister was the child of rape by German soldiers. He had to watch too as they took turns raping his mother. He became a chronic bed-wetter, like so many children traumatised by war. His mother decided the best treatment was to beat him and, above all, repeatedly to laugh at him about it in front of neighbours, school friends, anyone.

His father had been wounded and taken prisoner by the Germans during the war and had lived more than three years in a Nazi concentration camp. However, in the mad world of Stalin's paranoia, he and his family were treated as 'traitors': to surrender, even when wounded, was to become an enemy.

The psychological effect of his childhood, the war and the horror, was deep. Chikatilo was left impotent, although he could pass semen. His teenage attempts at sex with local girls just led to humiliation and quickly became known around the village. Once again, everyone was laughing at him and his sad failures - especially the young women and children. And because they laughed at him, he came to hate them.

When he was an adult, Andrei Chikatilo worked at various, rather ordinary jobs but, in his thirties, he got a degree in Russian literature and became a secondary school teacher. He often taught in homes for orphans and street children. These youngsters slept in large dormitories and, in the nights, there was a lot of sexual activity. In the morning, Chikatilo would have to listen to his young students talking about their easy, casual sexual adventures. Their gossip was not directed at him but still reminded him how easy it was for these teenagers to do, again and again, what he found impossible.

At some time in the early 1970s, Chikatilo began to work as a buyer for state factories. In the centrally planned Soviet economy of the time, supply was a great problem. Often, factories stopped production for weeks because an essential piece of equipment had not come from a distant corner of the Soviet Union. If production stopped, there would be problems from Moscow. Managers might lose their jobs or even go to prison. Only fifteen years earlier, managers could be shot for such a 'failure'. The buyer's job was to travel personally all over the Soviet Union to get what was needed and see that it came as quickly as possible. Three days in Uzbekistan; a quick trip to Moscow; a week in Leningrad - this was the typical life of the buyer. This was also the ideal job for a cold, calculating serial killer leaving dead youth behind him as he travelled for his job.

It took the Soviet police some time to realise they had a sick killer loose in society. When they did begin to see, they arrested known sex offenders and homosexuals and beat them until they confessed. Some of the suspects were given long prison terms; others committed suicide; and one suspect was tried, found guilty and shot. But, always, another body would be discovered, leaving no doubt that the police had failed to catch the right man. On the positive side, the investigation solved around a thousand other serious crimes. This included 95 murders unconnected with Andrei Chikatilo.

As the number of bodies grew and the public outcry increased, the police began to get a clearer picture of the man they were looking for. The geographic distribution of victims told them that the killer lived in or near Rostov-on-Don in Western Russia. An expert psychiatrist put together a 'profile' of the murderer. It was surprisingly accurate. The killer, it said, would be aged 45 to 50, he would be of average intelligence and, given the days of the week and the times of the year or month when he killed, he was professionally tied to a factory production schedule.

With all this, Chikatilo would naturally be on any list of suspects. He was. In fact he was arrested quite early but, when they tested his blood, he proved to be type A+ and not AB+ like the killer's semen found on many of the victims. This surprised the arresting officers because of the large amount of circumstantial evidence against him. But, if he was the wrong blood type, the police accepted that they must be wrong - blood groups can't lie. They released him. What else could they do?

By 1989, things had reached a crisis. It was time for the police to set a trap. At the suggestion of a detective who had been on the case from the beginning, uniformed police were posted at all but three quiet little stations in the Rostov region. It worked. Chikatilo, seeing the hundreds of officers at other stations, went to one of the stations the police had left empty (although there were, of course, dozens of disguised detectives present). Chikatilo was seen 'chatting up' people of the kind the killer usually chose. He was arrested and found to have a knife.

He still said he was innocent and mentioned the other time he had been 'wrongly' arrested. This time the police had absolutely no doubt this was their man. They took semen as well as blood samples. The blood was still A+ but the semen was AB+. Andrei Chikatilo was a very rare example of a man whose blood and semen were of different types. This very unusual condition had allowed him to murder for a decade. He had killed more than 50 boys, girls and young women.

At first, Chikatilo would admit nothing but, after speaking to the psychiatrist who had put together the psychological profile for the police, he confessed to almost all the murders. He showed the police where they could find many of the hidden bodies. He gave details of crimes that no-one but the murderer and the police could know. He also insisted that a couple of the victims were not his. These cases were re-opened for investigation.

Chikatilo was found guilty, in 1992, of 52 murders. On 14 February, 1994, he was taken to a sound-proof room in the prison and shot once behind the right ear. With one shot, a cycle of horrific violence, begun in the Ukrainian famines of the 'twenties and 'thirties, came to an end.