Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (Russian: Андрей Романович Чикатило)- October 16th, 1936- February 14th, 1994 Was, at the time of his capture, credited with being the most prolific serial killer in history.
His crimes began near the town of Rostov, when he lured 9 year-old Yelena Zakotnova into a small house that he had recently secretly purchased.
Once the little girl was inside, Chikatilo attempted to rape her, but couldn't achieve an erection. When she began to struggle, Chikatilo choked her and stabbed her three times in the abdomen. It was when knifing the child that he finally achieved ejaculation. . . . The Rostov Ripper was born.
Andrei Chikatilo was raised in the Ukraine just after the Stalin-produced famine of the German-Russian war. Due to this famine, reports of cannibalism were rampant at the time, and Andrei was told at a young age, that his older brother had been taken away and devoured by starving villagers.
It is unknown whether this was fact, or perhaps his mother's way of keeping the young Andrei in check, but this account undoubtedly had an influence on his development during his formative years. In early adolescence, Chikatilo, who was awkward with females and humiliated throughout school, came to the painful realization that he was impotent. He would later be married, in 1963, to a woman introduced to him by his sister. However, upon her discovering that Chikatilo could not get an erection, it was decided that in order for her to conceive, he would ejaculate into his hands and insert the semen into her vagina with his fingers. In 1965 she conceived, and their their daughter Lyudmila was born, followed by a son, Yuri, in 1969.
Chikatilo's first career was as a school teacher, where he was ridiculed by students who showed him no respect, and referred to him as 'the Goose', which is akin to calling someone a jackass in Russian. Eventually his teaching came to a halt in 1981 however, after several complaints surfaced of improper touching of students both male and female. He then took a job as a supply clerk at a factory. Here too he was the target of ridicule and bullying, as he was throughout his school years. The combined factors that summed up the life of Andrei Chikatilo read like a textbook recipe for pathological disaster, which would manifest itself for some 12 years on the women and children of Communist-era Russia before the Rostov Ripper was caught, aided not the least of which by the fact that Soviet authorities, at that time, considered serial murder to be strictly an American "disease".
After the murder of Yelena, there were several pieces of evidence that tied Chikatilo to the crime, but another man, 25 year-old Aleksandr Kravchenko, who had done time previously for the rape and murder of another teenage girl while he himself was a teen, was arrested and charged for the crime, to which he confessed. But during trial he stated that his confession was coerced. He was convicted anyway and sentenced to 15 years, but due to pressure from Yelena's family, Kravchenko was re-tried and sentenced to death.
Chikatilo's next murder occurred when he attempted to have sex in the woods with a 17 year old girl that he had picked up at a nearby railway station. Failing to acheive an erection, Chikatilo beat and strangled the girl to death, then mutilated her genitals with his teeth. On June 12th, 1982, he encountered Lyubov Biryuk, age 13, walking home from the village of Donskoi. Once their path was shielded from view, Chikatilo pounced on the girl, dragging her into the brush, where he slashed and stabbed her to death.
In fact, Chikatilo found that he could only reach orgasm while he was stabbing his victims, and subsequently decided that the urge had become to great to resist. His M.O. was to approach wandering children and vagrant women or prostitutes along the railway system, and somehow entice them into the woods with him, where he would stab, bludgeon, or strangle them to death. Between July and September, 1982, The Rostov Ripper claimed 5 more victims between the ages of nine and nineteen. Of his female victims, Chikatilo attempted sexual intercourse, and again, failing to achieve an erection, and more especially when mocked for it, he would fly into a murderous rage, and again, achieve release as he was stabbing them to death. Often he engaged in the mutilation of his victims, particularly the genitals, where he began to experiment with cannibalism; many of his victims had their eyes gouged out as well.
By September, 1983, The Rostov Ripper had claimed another six victims, and the Soviet Authorities, faced with irrefutable evidence, now finally conceded that they had a serial killer on the loose.
Previously to this, investigators clung to notions that the killings were the work of either a black-market organ harvesting gang, a Satanic cult, mentally-ill citizens, or homosexuals and/or sex offenders. Several young men falsely confessed to the crimes, aided by Soviet interrogation and coercion. Three other men, all of which were homosexuals, as well as a fourth who was a previous sex offender, committed suicide after being blamed for the crimes.
Chikatilo continued to kill, unhindered, and had by this time murdered some 31 people, when on September 13th, 1984, one week since Chikatilo had killed his 15th victim for that year, he was spotted by a policeman trying to lure young women away from a Rostov bus station. He was arrested and found in possession of a knife and rope, and matched the description of a man seen with one of the earlier victims, but there wasn't enough evidence to connect Chikatilo to the killings. Instead, because he had already been under investigation for stealing from his former employer, he was convicted of that crime and sentenced to a year in jail.
After he was released from jail, Chikatilo found new employment and kept a low profile. He would not kill again until July 31st, 1985, murdering a young woman in a thicket of woods near Domodedovo airport in Moscow. He would kill yet again before investigators decided to enlist the aid of psychiatrist Alexandr Bukhanovsky, who produced a 65 page psychological profile of the killer based on his theories, stating that the subject was "likely a man aged between 45 and 50 years old who was of average intelligence, likely to be married or previously married, but also a sadist who could achieve sexual arousal only by seeing his victims suffer". He also argued that, due to time and locations of the killings, the killer's work required him to travel regularly, and based upon the actual days of the week when the killings had occurred, the killer was most likely tied to a production schedule. By now Chikatilo had been following the investigation closely, and at this point decided to quell his urges, and it is believed that he did not murder anyone throughout the year of 1986. In 1987 Chikatilo resurfaced and killed three times, each time while he was traveling for work.
In 1988 he killed three times as well, and then not again until March, 1989, murdering a 16 year-old girl inside of his own daughter's vacant apartment. He dismembered her body and discarded the pieces in the sewer, but because this crime differed from his previous M.O.(i.e., dismemberment), investigators failed to make the connection.
In January, 1990, Chikatilo killed an 11 year-old boy in the town of Shakhty, and in March of that year, a 10 year-old boy named Yaroslav Makarov in Rostov's Botanical Gardens. Investigators were now under intense pressure from the public, the media, and the Ministry of The Interior to solve the case, during which time the Rostov Ripper struck an additional three times before August 1990.
Viktor Burakov, who had been on the hunt for the killer since 1982, devised a plan whereby officers would saturate most of the railway stations, and undercover plainclothes detectives would stake out the smaller stations, and question Any man who was in the presence of a young woman or child. On October 30th, police found the body of a 16-year-old boy named Vadim Gromov at the Donleskhoz Station. He had been killed on October 17th, 10 days before the new initiative was put into effect. The same day Gromov's body was found, Chikatilo lured another 16-year-old boy, named Viktor Tishchenko, from a train at Kirpichnaya, which was under police surveillance at the time, and killed him in a nearby forest.
Eight days later, the psychiatrist Alexandr Bukhanovsky, who had written his profile of the killer back in 1985, was brought in. He presented his findings to Chikatilo, and within two hours, he broke down crying and confessed, , , , ,Twelve years and 52 innocent victims later, and the hunt for the Rostov Ripper came to an end.
While on trial, Chikatilo said that he suffered from a lifetime of impotence and sexual frustration, and throughout the proceedings he would feign insanity with his courtroom antics. Yet on October 15th, citizen Andrei Chikatilo was found guilty, all in all, of 52 of the 53 murders he was charged with and sentenced to death for each offense. He was also found guilty of five counts of sexual assault committed during the years he worked as a teacher in the 1970s.
On February 14th, 1994, he was taken from his cell to a small room and executed by a single bullet to the back of the head.
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