ANDREI CHIKATILO THE SERIAL KILLER

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (October 16, 1936 - February 14, 1994) was a Russian serial killer, nicknamed the Rostov Ripper. He was convicted of the murder of 52 women and children between 1978 and 1990.

Early life of Andrei Chikatilo

Chikatilo was born in the village of Yablochnoye in 1936. His childhood was quite traumatic, particularly as the USSR was soon at war with Germany and Stalin's plans of agricultural collectivisation had recently caused a devastating famine. Chikatilo later heard rumours that he had an older brother who died in the famine and whose corpse had been cannibalised by starving neighbors. Although it is not known if this story was true, there certainly were some alleged instances of cannibalism during the famine. In World War II, Chikatilo witnessed some of the devastating and horrific effects of German bombing raids. Chikatilo had many fantasies of leading German captives into the woods and executing them, a fantasy that - although common of Soviet children at the time - had parallels with his murders.

With his father at war, the young Chikatilo had to share a bed with his mother. He frequently wet the bed, for which his mother brutally beat and humiliated him. He did well at school, but failed the entrance exam for Moscow State University. After finishing national service in 1960, he moved to Rodionovo-Nesvetayevsky and worked as a telephone engineer. Chikatilo's only sexual experience in adolescence was when, aged 15, he leapt on a young girl and wrestled her to the ground, ejaculating as the girl struggled in his grasp. This incident helped to foster in him a lifelong association between sex and violent aggression.

Chikatilo married in 1963, the marriage virtually arranged by his younger sister, who set him up with one of her friends when she took pity on her brother's inability to obtain a girlfriend. Although he suffered from impotence and had a barely existent sex life, Chikatilo did father a son and daughter. It is said that he fathered the children by ejaculating and inserting the semen into his wife's vagina manually. In 1971, he completed a degree in Russian literature by a correspondence course and tried a career as a teacher in Novoshakhtinsk. He was a poor teacher, unable to command any respect from his pupils, but he remained in that profession, moving from school to school as complaints of indecent assaults dogged him. He eventually took a job as a clerk for a factory, and he used the many business trips around the Soviet Union to carry out his crimes.

Murder Spree of Andrei Chikatilo

In 1978, Chikatilo moved to Shakhty and committed his first documented murder. On December 22, he lured a nine-year-old girl to an old shed and attempted to rape her. When the girl struggled, he stabbed her to death. He ejaculated in the process of knifing the child, and from then on he was only able to achieve sexual arousal and orgasm through stabbing and slashing women and children to death. Despite evidence linking Chikatilo to this first killing, a young man, Alexsandr Kravchenko, was arrested and later tried and executed for the crime. Chikatilo lost his teaching job in 1981 and became a clerk at a local firm.

He did not murder again until 1982, but in that year he killed seven times. He established a pattern of approaching runaways and young vagrants at bus or railway stations and enticing them to leave. A quick trip into a nearby forest was the scene for the victim's death. In 1983, he did not kill until June, but then he murdered four victims before September. The victims were all women and children. The adult females were often prostitutes or homeless tramps who could be lured with promises of alcohol or money. Chikatilo would usually attempt (consensual) intercourse with these victims, but would usually be unable to get an erection, which would send him into a murderous fury, especially if the woman mocked his inability to perform. He would achieve orgasm only when he stabbed the victim to death. The child victims were of both sexes, and Chikatilo would lure them away with his friendly, talkative manner by promising them toys or candy. In the USSR at the time, reports of crimes like child rape and serial murder were often suppressed by the state-controlled media, as such crimes were regarded as being common only in "hedonistic capitalist nations." Consequently, with little knowledge of the growing body count, parents did not know to warn their children to be wary of strangers. As news of the savage killings leaked out during the 1980s, albeit with little official information about the details, wild rumours spread through the communities in Ukraine, such as the idea that foreigners were killing Soviet boys in preparation for an invasion, and even talk of werewolves.

Six bodies (out of 14) had been uncovered. This brought a response from the Moscow police. A team headed by Major Mikhail Fetisov was sent to Rostov-on-Don to direct the investigation. Fetisov centred the investigations around Shakhty and assigned a specialist forensic analyst, Victor Burakov, to head the investigation in that area. The investigation concentrated on the mentally ill and known 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. At least one suspect hanged himself in his cell while under arrest.

When boys began to make up a majority of the later victims, a frequent (and ineffective) ploy was to round up and interrogate homosexuals, the gay community being particularly clandestine in the USSR, where sodomy was illegal at the time. The police spread their search wider and wider. Over 150,000 people were interviewed and filed before this approach was abandoned. In 1984, another 15 murders took place. The police took to additional patrols and posted plainclothesmen at many public transport stops.

First arrest of Andrei Chikatilo

Chikatilo was identified behaving suspiciously at a Rostov bus station. He was arrested and held. It was found he was under suspicion for other crimes, which gave the investigators the legal right to hold him indefinitely. Chikatilo's dubious background was uncovered but provided insufficient evidence to convict him of the murders. He was found guilty on other matters and sentenced to one year in prison. He was freed in December 1984 after serving three months.

It was later revealed that Chikatilo had been originally ruled out as a suspect in the murders because his blood type was tested as different from semen samples left by the killer. The forensic scientists later claimed that Chikatilo must be a unique individual whose blood type differed between a blood sample and a semen sample. No other scientists at that time took this theory seriously and it was generally regarded that the samples had been mixed up or the tests simply botched.

Unfortunately, this theory of non-secretors proved true some time later after his final arrest when it was found out that "a secretor status refers to blood protein antigen/antibody markers, which were used in the "classical" serological methods of blood identification in the days before the advent of DNA analysis. "Secretors" secrete these bloodmarkers into their other body fluids (saliva, tears, sweat, milk, etc.) while "non-secretors" do not. Therefore, the blood type of a "secretor" can be determined by testing body fluids other than blood, but would need actual blood to confirm the blood type of a non-secretor. About 80% of the population are secretors, and about 20% are non-secretors. Secretor status is of rapidly diminishing relevance today. Few labs (in the USA at least) do antigen/antibody analysis anymore, because DNA methods are so much more definitive. Secretor status is irrelevant in DNA analysis."

As reported contemporaneously, the Soviet authorities involved were ignored and dis-assessed as to the theory of differing blood versus seminal fluid typing; and when later caught, tried, and convicted, these tests were not in fact done, as sufficient alternative evidence was regarded as complete, testing being expensive for these or DNA sequencing as of that date. Sadly, no biological samples were taken or kept.

Chikatilo found new work in Novocherkassk and kept a low profile. He did not kill again until August 1985, when he murdered two women in separate incidents. He is not known to have killed again until May 1987 when, on a business trip to Revda in Ukraine, he killed a young boy. He killed again in Zaporozhye in July and in Leningrad in September.

The moribund police investigation was revived in mid-1985 when Issa Kostoyev was appointed to take over the case. The known murders around Rostov were carefully re-investigated and there was another round of questioning of known sex offenders. In December 1985, the police renewed the patrolling of railway stations around Rostov. Chikatilo followed the investigation carefully, and for over two years he kept his desires under control. The police also took the step of consulting a psychiatrist, the first such consultation in a serial killer investigation in that country.

In 1988 Chikatilo resumed killing, generally keeping his activities far from the Rostov area. He murdered a woman in Krasny-Sulin in April and went on to kill another eight people that year, including two victims in Shakhty. Again there was a long lapse before Chikatilo resumed killing, murdering seven boys and two women between January and November of 1990.

Capture and trial of Andrei Chikatilo

The discovery of one of the bodies near Leskhoz station led to increased police patrols. On November 6 Chikatilo killed and mutilated Sveta Korostik. He was stopped by police returning from the woodland scene of the crime but allowed to go. However, a report on this suspicious encounter returned Chikatilo's name to the investigation. On November 20, 1990, after police again observed his suspicious behaviour, he was arrested and interrogated. Between November 30 and December 5, Chikatilo confessed to and described 56 murders. Three of the victims had been buried and could not be found or identified, so Chikatilo was not charged with these crimes. The number of crimes Chikatilo confessed to shocked the police, who had listed only 36 killings in their investigation. A number of victims had not been linked to others because they were murdered far from Chikatilo's other hunting grounds, whilst others were not linked because they were buried and not found until Chikatilo led the police to their shallow graves.

He went to trial on April 14, 1992. Despite his odd and disruptive behaviour in court, where he was famously kept in a cage in the center of the courtroom, he was judged fit to stand trial. The trial ended in July and sentencing was postponed until October 15 when he was found guilty of 52 of the 53 murders and sentenced to death for each offence. Chikatilo defended himself by pointing to his childhood experiences in the notorious famine which took place in Ukraine in the 1930s. (However, it should be noted that Chikatilo's birth in 1936 occurred after the Ukrainian famine, which occurred in 1932-1933.)

He was executed by shooting to the back of the head on February 14, 1994.

Andrei Chikatilo in popular culture

• The childhood story of Andrei Chikatilo bears striking similarities with that of Hannibal Lecter from the Thomas Harris novels, in that both experience a sibling being cannibalised during a famine.

• The events served as a loose inspiration for an episode of CSI:Crime Scene Investigation, where a serial rapist/killer initially is set free because his blood didn't match his semen.

• A movie, Citizen X, was made in 1995 about the investigation of the "Rostov Ripper" (as Chikatilo was nicknamed in the press) murders. It starred Jeffrey DeMunn as Chikatilo, with Stephen Rea as Viktor Burakov and Donald Sutherland as Mikhail Fetisov. The film followed the true story very closely, but came under scrutiny in Russia, where the portrayal of the Russian police as arrogant and incompetent proved to be more than a little controversial.

• The 2004 film Evilenko (starring Malcolm McDowell and Marton Csokas) was loosely based on Chikatilo's murder spree.

• The 2004 song Ripper von Rostow by German Black Metal band Eisregen describes Chikatilo's murder of Sveta Korostik.