Chikatilo was a Russian serial killer who frequently dismembered or ate parts of his victims who ranged in age from 7-45. His victims largely consisted of runaways who weren’t being reported missing and that no one was looking for and this (among other things) helped him evade capture for years.
For Part one click here!
Released
Being released from jail did not mean that Andrei had changed his ways. It simply meant that he was going to pick up where he left off. A vacay of sorts for the sadistic murderer. In December after he was released, Chikatilo found employment at a locomotive factory where he was once again free to travel for business and find new victims. 1985 brought in some changes to the way this unknown serial killer was being hunted by the police. The director of Moscow’s Department of Violent Crime (aka “The Killer Department”) took over the case and reorganized the investigation.
It was now decided that the officers would be sent out in teams to cover the major train stations. One team to Shakhty, one to Rostov, and one to Novoshakhtinsk. Uniformed officers would patrol these stations and stop anyone they found suspicious. On top of that, undercover officers were sent to the smaller stations to observe and report.
On August 1st, Chikatilo went on a business trip where he would kill 18-year-old Natalya Pokhilstova. On August 27th, he killed an 18-year-old girl named Irina Gulyayeva. However, by December of 85, there was a significant police presence at his favorite hunting grounds and Army helicopters had been assigned to fly along the railway lines and the forest to keep watch from the ski.
Chikatilo was spooked and smart. He stopped killing. Instead, like any good serial killer, he inserted himself into the investigation. He assisted the militia in patrolling the trains looking for the serial killer that was haunting the people of the area. At the time he was considered a “freelance employee of the Department of Internal Affairs” and he knew where they were investigating so he knew he couldn’t kill…at least not here.
Whether he killed people during 1986, we don’t know. There are no recorded victims throughout the year. He could have stopped altogether knowing that the police were everywhere or he could have killed in surrounding areas and those victims haven’t been found. But as far as we know, in 1986 Andrei Chikatilo celebrated his 50th birthday by not murdering.
Police thought that someone like this who then stopped killing was either incarcerated, moved to another place, or dead. He couldn’t just stop killing, right? Unfortunately, 1987 would not be as quiet as 1986. By May, Chikatilo was killing again. On May 16, 1987, Chikatilo killed a 13-year-old boy named Oleg Makarenkov. His 35th known victim.
On July 29th, his next victim was 12-year-old Ivan Bilovetsky. His attack on Ivan was so brutal and so forceful that the blade of the knife broke off inside Ivan and was later found by police.
Andrei Chikaltilo kept killing and was now focusing more on boys…
- September 15, 1987, 16-year-old boy, Yuri Tereshonok.
- April 1988, an unknown girl between 18-25 years old.
- May 14, 1988, 9-year-old boy, Alexey Voronko.
- July 14, 1988, 15-year-old boy, Yevgeniy Muratov.
In March 1989, he lured 16-year-old, Tatyana Ryzhova back to his daughter’s old apartment. His daughter was going through a divorce and had moved back home with her parents. Chikatilo utilized her empty apartment frequently. So, he promised young Tatyana alcohol and attempted to seduce her. When he couldn’t perform, he stabbed her, but once she was dead he realized, well I can’t just leave her body here. So he used a kitchen knife to decapitate her and saw off her arms and legs. He wrapped the body parts in rags and clothes, tied the bundles to the sled of a neighbor and just pulled it through the streets until he found a place to dump Tatyana’s remains.
- May 11, 1989, 8-year-old boy, Alexander Dyakonov would become victim number 42.
- June 20th, Alexey Moiseyev, 10-year-old boy.
On August 19th, 19-year-old Helena Varga was unfortunate enough to be on Chikatilo’s route while he was on his way to his father’s birthday party. He saw her at a bus stop and offered to walk her home. Instead, he lured her to the woods where he stabbed her and cut out her uterus and sliced off part of her face. He never admitted to eating the uterus, but referred to it as “pink and springy.” It was thought that he “nibbled” it. Then Chikatilo wrapped her body in clothes and headed off to his dad’s party.
His last victim of 1989 was 10-year-old Alexey Khobotov. This young boy would bring his total up to 45 known victims by the end of 1989.
It was noted that in 1989 was when the police began to see more mutilation. Body parts missing, females often missing their uteruses and nipples, which he bit off, and the males’ genitals and tongues would be bitten off as well.
The police were desperately trying to catch this monster and brought in psychologist Aleksander Bukhanovski who created a profile on the suspect they would be looking for. Bukhanovski’s profile went in the opposite direction from the previous police assumptions. Instead of a young perpetrator, he said their guy was most likely older – between 45-50, unsociable, sexually perverted. He said that this guy either lived alone or with his wife, but he wouldn’t have a sexual relationship with her. Bukhanovski called the unknown man a “necro-sadist” – someone who achieves sexual gratification from the suffering and death of others.
But they still didn’t have him and Chikatilo continued to kill…
- January 14, 1990, 11-year-old boy, Andrei Kravchenko.
- March 7th, 10-year-old boy, Yaroslav Makarov.
- April, 31-year-old woman, Lubov Zuyeva.
- July 28th, 13-year-old boy, Victor Petrov.
On August 14th, an 11-year-old boy named Ivan Fomin became Chikatilo’s 50th known victim. On October 17th, 1990, 16-year-old Vadim Gromov was lured from a railway station that was under heavy surveillance for months, but this night there was a shortage of manpower so it wasn’t patrolled. Chikatilo took advantage of the weakness. Vadim’s body was found on November 3rd.
On October 30, 1990, Chikatilo killed 16-year-old Viktor Tishchenko. Then on November 6, 1990, Chikatilo met 22-year-old, Svetlana “Sveta” Korostik. His final victim. After he beat, stabbed, and mutilated her and returned to the train station looking suspicious, the officer that took Chikatilo’s information filed a report. That report was brought back out when Sveta’s body was found and on November 13th, Andrei Chikatilo was put under surveillance. 7 days later, he was arrested while he was out looking for his next victim.
Boom. Arrested.
Once he was in custody at the KGB headquarters, Chikatilo was quiet. He didn’t confess right away and brag about his crimes. That is, until Aleksander Bukhanovski asked to interview him. Bukhanovski basically strokes Chikatilo’s fragile little ego until Chikatilo was sufficiently flattered and started talking. Eventually, not only would Chikatilo demonstrate on dummies in the KGB gym how he tied up and murdered his victims, but he would also lead the officers to crime scenes and led them to shallow graves with bodies they didn’t even know about until then.
In November, Chikatilo’s apartment was searched. They found 23 knives, a hammer, and a pair of shoes that matched the footprint from the crime scene back in March of 84. Chikatilo wasn’t arguing that he had murdered all these people and confessed to at least 56 murders (only 53 could be verified and until he started talking, the police only knew of 36). He was going to argue that he was sane when he did it.
This didn’t work though because after spending 60 days getting a psychiatric evaluation, he was declared sane and fit to stand trial. He was diagnosed with Bipolar Personality Disorder with sadistic features, but he was sane. Chikatilo was charged with 52 counts of murder and 5 counts of assault.
His trial would start on April 14, 1992. The Soviet Union had recently collapsed and this trial was the first big thing to happen in this post-Soviet era.
Chikatilo, unlike most defendants, didn’t sit at the defense table with his lawyers. Due to the grieving families wanting blood and the very powerful emotions that were seen, it was thought that Andrei Chikatilo might be safer locked in an iron cage during the proceedings. So Chikatilo sat in a little jail cell in the courtroom and made a spectacle of himself throughout.
He had had his head shaved following procedure to protect against lice and he was wearing clothes that had been lent to him by the jail. It was reported that he sang songs, talked gibberish, acted bored, or was completely manic. Most people thought it was all an act to make his insanity seem real.
The case was massive. There were 222 casebooks used in the trial (basically a textbook for lawyers that references cases so they can refer to precedents) and it took 2 days just to read off the list of indictments. The trial lasted for 6 months and during that there was no shortage of places for Chikatilo and his lawyers to put the blame. They claimed that because of Stalin’s agricultural collectivism, he’d grown up poor and starving. There was cannibalism in the town, and his own mother had told him that his older brother had been snatched by neighbors and eaten.
They, of course, blamed his parents. His mother was called bitter and belittling, and she beat him when he wet the bed. The family lived in a one-room shack and he shared a bed with her. One claim was that Chikatilo had witnessed something that left him damaged. According to rumors, Chikatilo, his defense, etc., while his father was a prisoner of war, Chikatilo’s mom had been raped by a German soldier and gotten pregnant. This was backed up by the timeline of his baby sister’s birth as his father would have still been a prisoner of war when his mom got pregnant. Since Chikatilo and his mother shared a bed, and their shack was only one room anyway, young Andrei would have witnessed this.
Then they blamed the fact that his dad was a disgraced veteran which had caused further hardship on the family, and their hut was even burned down once. They even blamed the fact that Chikatilo claimed he couldn’t see while he was in school, and it wasn’t until he was 30 that he got glasses.
The blame was placed on everyone and everything except Chikatilo himself.
But none of his blame game nonsense worked. On October 15, 1992, the judge read the verdict of guilty on 52 out of 53 counts of murder. Andrei Chikatilo was sentenced to death.
During the time he got to speak to the court where a normal person would apologize for their actions or some such, Andrei Chikatilo went on a 2-hour rambling rant where he kicked the bench and screamed. Then in a dramatic attempt to…..gain sympathy?…..Get attention?…..Just to do it?…Andrei Chikatilo dropped his pants right in the middle of court and said that he had been robbed of his genitals and driven to murder. He said, “Look at this useless thing!”
He did attempt an appeal that claimed that the evaluation that stated he was fit to stand trial was biased, but this didn’t work.
In the papers, he had become known as “The Maniac,” “The Red Ripper,” or “The Rostov Ripper,” but whatever you called him, 16-months after he was sentenced, on February 14, 1994, Andrei Chikatilo was taken to an empty, soundproof cell and shot once in the back of the head behind his right ear as was the execution procedure at the time.
To this day there are only really theories on why Chikatilo did this. Some say that he used the knife since he couldn’t use his penis. There’s also the idea that the rage of his life of being bullied and impotent and disrespected just made him kill (not crazy, but calculated). None of Chikatilo’s own explanations really tracked or made sense, but one thing he did say/write that made sense was a journal entry while he was in prison…
“And now my brain shall be taken apart piece by piece and examined so that there won’t be any others like me.”
sources for this episode
Andrei Chikatilo – Quotes, Childhood & Death
Andrei Chikatilo | Soviet serial killer
Andrei Chikatilo – Butcher of Rostov | SERIAL KILLER FILES #29 — Video
Pure Evil: Andrei Chikatilo – The Red Ripper of Rostov (Serial Killer Documentary) — Video
Murderous Minds: Andrei Chikatilo “The Rostov Ripper” | Serial Killer Documentary — Video
