The Rostov Ripper

Andrei Chikatilo admitted to 56 killings between 1978 and 1990 when he was taken into custody.

The wicked murderer preyed on toddlers and young vagrants, eating their private organs.

On December 22, 1978, Chikatilo led 9-year-old Lena Zakotnova into an abandoned shed, attempting to rape her. Chikatilo stabbed the struggling infant with a knife while ejaculating, establishing a psychological connection between violent death and sexual satisfaction that would come to define all such attacks.

Chikatilo was seen with the victim soon before she vanished, but his wife gave him a strong alibi, helping him dodge more police investigations. Alexsandr Kravchenko, a 25-year-old man with a prior rape conviction, was apprehended and confessed to the crime under duress, most likely due to prolonged and violent interrogation. In 1984, he was prosecuted and convicted of murdering Lena Zakotnova.

There were no more reported victims for the next three years, presumably due to his close contact with the authorities. When he was let go from his mining school job in early 1981, he was still facing child abuse accusations and had difficulty finding another teaching employment. He worked as a clerk for a raw materials plant in Rostov for the following nine years, where the travel necessary for the job gave him free access to a broad spectrum of young victims.

On September 3, 1981, Larisa Tkachenko, 17, was strangled, stabbed, and gagged with dirt and leaves to prevent her from calling out. As a result of the brutal force, Chikatilo developed a pattern of luring young runaway females at train stations and bus stops toward nearby forest areas. He would threaten and attack them and use a knife as a penis substitute. Some of the victims had their genital organs eaten while others had other body parts removed, such as the tips of their noses or tongues. Initially, the pattern was to inflict harm to the eye area, slicing across the sockets and, in many cases, removing the eyeballs, an act subsequently attributed to Chikatilo's conviction that his victims maintained an impression of his face in their eyes long after death.

Serial killers were practically unknown in the Soviet Union at the time, whether due to information suppression or more significant cultural divides between Soviet and Western society. State-controlled media routinely concealed evidence of serial homicides or child abuse in the interest of keeping the public peace. When the Soviet authorities eventually recognized that they were dealing with a serial murderer, they discovered that eye mutilation constituted a particular method of operation that allowed for the linking of further instances. As the body count increased, suspicions of foreign-inspired conspiracies and werewolf attacks circulated, heightening widespread anxiety and curiosity despite the media's lack of attention.

Major Mikhail Fetisov, a Moscow detective, was assigned to the inquiry in 1983. He saw the prospect of a serial murderer on the loose and sent Victor Burakov, a forensic analyst with specialized training, to oversee the investigation in the Shakhty area. Although the inquiry concentrated on known sexual offenders and the mentally ill, Burakov was suspicious of the bulk of these "confessions" owing to the local police's questioning tactics, which frequently encouraged false confessions from convicts. Progress was slow, exacerbated by the fact that not all of the victims' remains had been recovered at that point, leaving the authorities unaware of the full death count. With each death discovered, the forensic evidence got more robust. Investigators were confident that the perpetrator was of blood type AB, as indicated by sperm samples recovered from various crime locations. Additionally, Forensic teams acquired identical grey hair samples.

When Chikatilo added 15 victims throughout 1984, Authorities significantly increased police efforts, and massive surveillance operations took place that covered most local transportation hubs. Chikatilo would be arrested and taken into custody for acting suspiciously at a bus stop at the time. Yet, the police cleared him of murder accusations due to his blood type not matching the suspect profile. Although he had various minor outstanding violations, he received a three-month jail sentence.

Chikatilo's proper blood type, A, is different from the type detected in his other body fluids (AB) because he belongs to a minority group called "non-secretors," whose blood type can only be identified by taking a blood sample. Chikatilo avoided being charged with murder because police only obtained sperm samples from the crime scenes, not blood. Modern DNA methods are not susceptible to the same problems.

Chikatilo obtained employment as a traveling buyer for a Novocherkassk-based railway business upon his release and maintained a low profile until August 1985, when he murdered two women in separate instances.

Burakov sought the assistance of psychiatrist Alexandr Bukhanovsky, who refined the killer's profile, characterizing him as a "necro-sadist," or someone who receives sexual satisfaction from the pain and death of others, around the time of these killings. Additionally, Bukhanovsky assessed the killer's age to be between 45 and 50, far older than previously believed. In an attempt to find out more about his enigmatic serial killer, Burakov interviewed a serial killer, Anatoly Slivko, shortly before his execution.

Parallel to this effort to comprehend the killer's thinking, assaults ceased, and police assumed that their target had stopped murdering, been arrested for other crimes, or died. Chikatilo began his killings in early 1988, the bulk of which happened outside the Rostov area. It was no longer possible for him to kidnap people on public transit, where police monitoring still existed. The death count increased by 19 additional victims over the following two years. It looked as though the killer was taking increasing risks, mainly targeting young boys and usually killing in public locations where the danger of detection was much more significant.

The newly liberated media in Gorbachev's Glasnost society intensified public pressure on police forces to apprehend the killer. General police patrols were boosted, with Burakov targeting potential locations with undercover police officers to flush out the culprit. Chikatilo nearly evaded arrest many times, but on November 6, 1990, following the murder of his final victim, Sveta Korostik, his strange conduct was noted by patrolling police officers at a neighboring station who obtained his information. He was linked to a prior arrest in 1984, so he was placed under surveillance.

Chikatilo was arrested on November 20, 1990, following more suspicious conduct but initially refused to admit to the killings. Burakov decided to enable Bukhanovski, the psychiatrist who created the initial profile, to talk with Chikatilo under the pretext of understanding a killer's mentality scientifically. Chikatilo, apparently taken aback by this approach, opened up to the psychiatrist, divulging detailed information about all of his killings and even directing police to previously unknown remains.

He claimed to have murdered 56 individuals, but only 53 could be verified independently. This number was far higher than the 36 cases first ascribed to the serial murderer by authorities.

Chikatilo alleged that the mental examination used to determine his fitness to stand trial was biased in his appeal. Still, his request was denied, and he was killed 16 months later by a gunshot to the back of the head.