Andrei Chikatilo

[cruororism]

The Forest Strip Killer.

The Soviet Union did not have serial killers. They were a product of the decadent and corrupt West. That was the party line.

But one man did more than anyone else to disprove this theory and he kept killing for years, partly because of the flaws in the Soviet system.

Andrei Chikatilo killed 53 people, possibly more, between 1978 and 1990.

Many of his victims were young women and boys in and around the city of Rostov, near the Black Sea.

But his job as a travelling purchaser of raw materials for a Rostov factory meant he claimed victims as far afield as Leningrad and Tashkent. His preferred method was to engage young people in conversation at bus or train stations and lure them to strips of woodland, where he murdered them. This gave him the name of the Forest Strip Killer or Lesopolosa.

Towards the end of his reign of terror he was subject of a huge manhunt that brought to bear the full weight of the Soviet establishment, which was ironically in the process of collapsing as a result of Mikhail Gorbachev's twin policies of glasnost and perestroika. By the time he was executed in 1994 the Soviet Union had disappeared and communism had been discredited.

Like so many serial killers in the West, the seeds of his degenerate and violent behaviour can be found in his childhood. His crimes were also intrinsically linked to sexual problems, as was correctly deduced by Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, a psychiatrist brought in to draw up an "offender profile" while Chikatilo was on the loose.

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born on 16 October 1936 in Yablochnoye, a village deep in the heart of rural Ukraine. The 1930s were a period of great upheaval in the Soviet Union, and in the Ukraine in particular. Ukraine was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union but collectivisation was brought in by Stalin with such disastrous effects that millions of Ukrainians died of famine.

In 1931 Andrei's older brother, Stefan, vanished and his parents believed he might have been kidnapped and eaten by starving and desperate neighbours. The thought of what might have happened to his brother had a terrible psychologist effect on young Andrei.

When he was only five Germany invaded the Soviet Union and the Red Army fled in disarray. It is thought that, as a child, Andrei witnessed or at least heard about Nazi atrocities when his village was overrun by German troops. Worse was to follow after the war. His father, Roman, had been captured by the Germans and was only released a prisoner of war camp in 1945.

He returned to Yablochnoye a broken man and was immediately accused by the Soviet authorities, as were so many other POWs, of treachery for "allowing himself to be caught" in the first place. Andrei, already a committed communist, denounced his father's "betrayal" of the motherland but was still teased and taunted at school because of it.

Quiet and slightly effeminate, he was frequently picked on in the schoolyard and became painfully shy. Although seriously short-sighted, he declined to wear his spectacles for fear of being further ridiculed and spent much of his childhood in a myopic cocoon. Andrei also went to great lengths to cover up the fact that, even in his early teenage years, he had a chronic bedwetting problem. His adolescence was an even more painful experience than for most boys of his age.

His shyness and lack of social skills prevented him interacting with girls and when he did eventually persuade one to go to bed with him he was unable to perform and was ridiculed.

Turned on by violence
He realised that violence was more of a turn-on to him than sex itself. After leaving school - he failed the entrance exam to Moscow University - and doing his national service Chikatilo obtained a job as a telephone engineer in the Russian town of Rodionovo-Nesvatayevsky, near Rostov. In 1963 his sister, who had moved in with him, introduced him to a local girl called Fayina and they soon married.

Andrei was painfully shy sexually and Fayina realised he had no real interest in conventional sex. But she managed to coax him into providing her with two children, Lyudmila and Yuri. In 1971 Chikatilo completed a correspondence course and obtained degrees in Engineering, Russian Literature and Marxism-Leninism.

His new qualifications enable him to get a job as a teacher. Shy and weak, he was unable to command the respect of his pupils and was considered "odd" by his colleagues. But Chikatilo enjoyed being surrounded by young boys and girls and began to commit indecent acts on children of both genders.

When complaints were made he was forced to resign and get a job at another school but criminal charges were never brought. On one occasion he was caught trying to perform oral sex on a sleeping boy and was severely beaten by a group of older boys. From that night on Chikatilo would always carry a knife.


Despite that incident he was never arrested partly because, under the Soviet system, his indiscretions would reflect badly on the whole school and no principal wanted to besmirch the reputation of his institution. In 1978 Chikatilo moved to the town of Shakhty, not far from Rostov and got a job at a mining school.

On 22 December 1978 he claimed his first victim, nine-year-old Lena Zakotnova, who he befriended as she waited for a tram. Tempting her with the promise of coveted American chewing gum, he tricked her into coming with him to a shack beside the Grushevka River, which he owned.

As soon as they got inside he turned nasty, pushing the terrified youngster to the floor. Gagging her with his forearm, he blindfolded her and tried to rape her. But he was only able to become sexually aroused when the girl became distressed and started gasping for breath.

Knowing she would report the attack if he let her go, Chikatilo stabbed Lena three times in the stomach and then dragged her body to the waterside before throwing her in. Lena was still alive when she hit the water but died from a combination of stab wounds, hypothermia and drowning. Astonishingly Chikatilo could have been brought to justice within days, and the lives of his 52 other victims, could have been spared.

Another girl, Svetana Gurenkova, told police she had seen Lena with a tall, thin, middle-aged man who wore glasses and a dark coat. Her artist's impression was shown to the principal of a local mining school who noticed the similarity with one of his teachers, Chikatilo. Police discovered splashes of blood on the steps of Chikatilo's shack and brought him in for questioning.

[cruororism]

Alibi
But Fayina gave him an alibi - why is not clear - and the police turned instead to another suspect. Aleksandr Kravchenko had a previous conviction for rape but, at 25, he was too young to fit Svetlana's description and he had never worn glasses. Nevertheless the police questioned him mercilessly and eventually forced a confession out of him, although the details were hazy. He was eventually sentenced to death, and was duly executed in 1984.

It was only later realised that Lena Zakotnova's killer was still at large and the tightly controlled Soviet media was hardly likely to highlight this horrendous miscarriage of justice. Chikatilo managed to restrain his violent urges for three years. In 1981 he was made redundant from his teaching job and, unable to get another teaching post because of his lewd reputation, he was forced to work as a supply clerk at the huge Rostovnerud factory.


Six months later he approached 17-year-old Larisa Tkachenko, a girl with "loose morals" who was well known locally for exchanging sexual favours for food and drink. Chikatilo led her to a deserted stretch of woodland and attacked her, stripped her of her clothes, punching her, strangling her and piling dirt into her mouth to muffle her screams.

This time - unlike his first killing, which left him frustrated and confused - he felt elated and "danced with joy" around the body. In June 1982 he killed Lyuba Biryuk, 13, while on as business trip and over the next year he added another six victims, two of them young men. The police assumed that the killer of the men was not the same man who was murdering young girls.

In December 1982 Chikatilo killed Laura Sarkisyan, 15, but then went quiet for six months. In the summer of 1983 he killed three times, including seven-year-old Igor Gudkov, whose body was savagely mutilated. The central Moscow militia sent an experienced detective, Major Mikhail Fetisov, to Rostov in September 1983 to take over the investigation.

He criticised the ineptitude of the local police and convinced his superiors all 14 murders were the work of a single sex-crazed killer, although stopped short of using the phrase "serial killer" which was still seen as a western concept alien to an ideologically pure state such as the Soviet Union. Fetisov's team began to trawl the criminal and mental health records, hoping to find anyone who might fit the profile of the killer.

Chikatilo was arrested at one point but his blood sample did not match the AB group of the killer.

Blood type
It was only later realised that the AB sample came from semen and Chikatilo was type AB but the B antigens did not show up in his blood sample. One man who did seem to fit the profile was Alexei Shaburov, a mentally retarded car thief who confessed to killing several children along with four other men.

All of them had met at a school for the mentally retarded but none of them were able to give details about the murders and, after several days of brutal interrogation, the police realised the gang were wasting their time. They were released and the manhunt resumed. Chikatilo's killing spree was almost brought to an end forever in 1984.

The Rostov police had increased patrols at train and bus stations, realising that was where the killer was picking up most of his victims. One day Inspector Aleksandr Zanosovsky noticed a middle-aged man in glasses who seemed to be paying special interest to young girls. Zanosovsky approached him and asked for his papers.

The man produced documents identifying him as Andrei Chikatilo, a freelance employee of the Department of Internal Affairs, a wing of the KGB. He was allowed to go on his way. But a few weeks later Zanosovsky spotted Chikatilo again.

This time he kept up surveillance on him for several hours as he caught bus after bus around the local district. Chikatilo did not appear to be going anywhere but he was approaching young women and trying to engage them in conversation. After numerous rejections he finally found a girl, who was drunk, who put her head in his lap and let him fondle her.

Zanosovsky seized the moment and approached Chikatilo, who began sweating heavily. The officer demanded he open his briefcase and inside was a jar of lubricant, a length of rope and a long-bladed knife. When they got him back to the police station they learned he was under investigation for stealing a car battery from the factory where he worked.

This was sufficient to keep him in custody while they checked to see if he could be the Forest Strip Killer. Unfortunately his blood type did not appear to match and to make matters worse a policeman later sent the contents of the suitcase back to Chikatilo's home, where they were swiftly disposed of. With no evidence, they could only prosecute him for the theft and he served only three months in prison.

Chikatilo had lost his job as a result of his incarceration but in January 1985 he obtained a new one, working again as a travelling buyer for a locomotive factory in Novocherkassk. For six months he resisted his internal desires but in August 1985 he stabbed to death an 18-year-old girl in Rostov. His killings stopped again until May 1987 when he murdered a 13-year-old boy in Revda in the Ural Mountains.

Spiral of violence
Chikatilo's killing spree now spiralled out of control. In 1988 he claimed eight lives and in his last year of freedom, in 1990, he killed nine people, many of whom were boys. By this time a new man, Issa Kostoyev, director of the central Department for Violent Crime, had taken over the case and he began going over each case with a fine toothcomb.

After the body of Vadim Tishchenko, 16, was found near Rostov's Leskhoz railway station on 3 November 1990 Kostoyev decided to flood the area with undercover patrols, many of them equipped with night vision goggles. But the detectives were unable to prevent Chikatilo claiming his last victim, 22-year-old Svetlana Korostik, who he lured away from Leskhoz station and then murdered in nearby woods.

He cut off parts of her body and ate them at the scene before covering the body in branches and walking back to the station. Plain-clothes officer Sergeant Igor Rybakov noticed Chikatilo perspiring heavily and saw he had spots of blood on his cheek and earlobe. He checked Chikatilo's papers but, unaware of Svetlana's murder, had no real reason for holding him and allowed him to go on his way.


Later Kostoyev came across Sgt Rybakov's report of the incident and decided to look further into Chikatilo. After discovering that his work records showed him in the vicinity of many of the murders, Kostoyev deployed a team of undercover officers to follow Chikatilo.

On 20 November 1990 he left work to get treatment for a broken finger - which, unbeknown to the doctors, had been bitten by one of his victims - and then picked up his briefcase and went out to find young boys. At one point he was chatting to a boy in the street when the youngster's mother called him away.

Chikatilo, foiled again, carried on down the street and was then approached by three men who identified themselves as police officers and arrested him. His briefcase was searched and, once again, contained a knife, a length of rope and a jar of lubricant. A search of his home found another 23 knives, a hammer and a pair of shoes that matched a footprint found beside one of the victims.

Chikatilo eventually confessed to all his crimes but he still had to face a trial in April 1992.

Locked inside a cage - designed to protect him from victims' relatives - he spent much of his time ranting and raving and acting outlandishly. It is not clear whether he was simply trying to persuade the judge that he was insane, or whether his mental condition had just deteriorated since his arrest. At one point he stripped off, waved his penis at the public gallery and shouted: "Look at this useless thing, what do you think I could do with that?"

Chikatilo's lawyer, Marat Khabibulin, tried to argue that there was no evidence against his client other than his confessions. But the judge was convinced and was cheered as he passed 52 death sentences - one of the charges had been dropped due to insufficient evidence.

Chikatilo was led away shouting: "Fraud! I'm not going to listen to your lies!"

Sixteen months later the man known as the Forest Strip Killer, or the Rostov Ripper, was executed by a single bullet to the back of the head.