Andrei Chikatilo significant event homicide
Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (Russian: Андре́й Рома́нович Чикати́ло, romanized: Andréy Románovich Chikatílo; Ukrainian: Андрій Романович Чикатило, romanized: Andriy Romanovych Chykatylo; 16 October 1936 – 14 February 1994) was a Soviet serial killer nicknamed The Butcher of Rostov, The Rostov Ripper, and The Red Ripper who sexually assaulted, murdered, and mutilated at least fifty-two women and children between 1978 and 1990 in the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, and the Uzbek SSR. Chikatilo confessed to fifty-six murders and was tried for fifty-three of them in April 1992. He was convicted and sentenced to death for fifty-two of these murders in October 1992, although the Supreme Court of Russia ruled in 1993 that insufficient evidence existed to prove his guilt in nine of those killings. Chikatilo was executed by gunshot in February 1994.
Chikatilo was known as the "Rostov Ripper" and the "Butcher of Rostov" because he committed most of his murders in the Rostov Oblast of the Russian SFSR.Initial murders
Murder of Yelena Zakotnova
In September 1978, Chikatilo moved to Shakhty, where he committed his first documented murder. On the evening of 22 December, he lured a 9-year-old girl named Yelena Zakotnova to an old, dilapidated hut which he had secretly purchased; he attempted to rape her, but failed to achieve an erection. When the girl struggled, he choked her and stabbed her three times in the abdomen, ejaculating while stabbing the child. In an interview after his 1990 arrest, Chikatilo later recalled that immediately after he stabbed Zakotnova, the girl had "said something very hoarsely", whereupon he strangled her into unconsciousness before throwing her body into the nearby Grushevka River. Her body was found beneath a nearby bridge two days later.Numerous pieces of evidence linked Chikatilo to Zakotnova's murder: spots of blood had been found in the snow close to a fence facing the house Chikatilo had purchased; neighbours had noted that Chikatilo had been present in the house on the evening of 22 December; Zakotnova's school backpack had been found upon the opposite bank of the river at the end of the street (indicating the girl had been thrown into the river at this location); and a witness had given police a detailed description of a man closely resembling Chikatilo, whom she had seen talking with Zakotnova at the bus stop where the girl had last been seen alive. Despite these facts, a 25-year-old labourer named Aleksandr Kravchenko, who had previously served a prison sentence for the rape and murder of a teenage girl, was arrested for the crime. A search of Kravchenko's home revealed spots of blood on his wife's jumper: the blood type was determined to match both Zakotnova and Kravchenko's wife.
Kravchenko had a very strong alibi for the afternoon of 22 December 1978: he had been at home with his wife and a friend of hers the entire afternoon, and neighbours of the couple were able to verify this. Nonetheless, the police, having threatened Kravchenko's wife with being an accomplice to murder and her friend with perjury, obtained new statements in which the women claimed Kravchenko had not returned home until late in the evening on the day of the murder. Confronted with these altered testimonies, Kravchenko confessed to the killing. He was tried for the murder in 1979. At his trial, Kravchenko retracted his confession and maintained his innocence, stating his confession had been obtained under extreme duress. Despite his retraction, Kravchenko was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. This sentence was commuted to fifteen years' imprisonment (the maximum possible length of imprisonment at the time) by the Supreme Court in December 1980. Under pressure from the victim's relatives, Kravchenko was retried, erroneously convicted, and eventually executed by firing squad for Zakotnova's murder in July 1983.Following Zakotnova's murder, Chikatilo was able to achieve sexual arousal and orgasm only through stabbing and slashing women and children to death, and he later claimed that the urge to relive the experience had overwhelmed him. Nonetheless, Chikatilo did stress that, initially, he had struggled to resist these urges, often cutting short business trips to return home rather than face the temptation to search for a victim.Investigation
By January 1983, four victims thus far killed had been tentatively linked to the same killer. A Moscow police team, headed by Major Mikhail Fetisov, was sent to Rostov-on-Don to direct the investigation, which gradually became known among investigators as Operation Forest Path. Fetisov established a team of ten investigators based in Rostov, charged with solving all four cases. In March, Fetisov assigned a newly appointed specialist forensic analyst, Viktor Burakov, to head the investigation. The following month, Stalmachenok's body was found. Burakov was summoned to the crime scene, where he examined the numerous knife wounds and eviscerations conducted upon the child and the striations on her eye sockets. Burakov later stated that, as he noted the striations upon Stalmachenok's eye sockets, any doubts about the presence of a serial killer evaporated.Chikatilo did not kill again until June 1983, when he murdered a 15-year-old Armenian girl named Laura Sarkisyan; her body was found close to an unmarked railway platform near Shakhty. By September, he had killed a further five victims. The accumulation of bodies found and the similarities between the pattern of wounds inflicted on the victims forced the Soviet authorities to acknowledge that a serial killer was on the loose. On 6 September 1983 the public prosecutor of the Soviet Union formally linked six of the murders thus far attributed to the same killer.Due to the sheer savagery of the murders and the precision of the eviscerations upon the victims' bodies, police theorized that the killings had been conducted by either a group harvesting organs to sell for transplant, the work of a Satanic cult, or a mentally ill individual. Much of the police effort concentrated upon the theory that the killer must be mentally ill, homosexual, or a paedophile, and the alibis of all individuals who had either spent time in psychiatric wards or had been convicted of homosexuality or paedophilia were checked and logged in a card filing system. Registered sex offenders were also investigated and, if their alibi was corroborated, eliminated from the inquiry.Beginning in September 1983, several young men confessed to the murders, although these individuals were often intellectually disabled youths who admitted to the crimes only under prolonged and often brutal interrogation. Three known homosexuals and a convicted sex offender committed suicide as a result of the investigators' heavy-handed tactics. As a result of the investigation, more than 1,000 unrelated crimes, including ninety-five murders, 140 aggravated assaults, and 245 rapes, were solved.However, as police obtained confessions from suspects, bodies continued to be discovered, proving that the suspects who had confessed could not be the killer they were seeking. On 30 October 1983 the eviscerated body of a 19-year-old prostitute, Vera Shevkun, was found in Shakhty. Shevkun had been killed on 27 October. Although the mutilations inflicted upon Shevkun's body were otherwise characteristic of those found upon other victims linked to the unknown murderer, the victim's eyes had not been enucleated or otherwise wounded. Two months later, on 27 December, a 14-year-old Gukovo schoolboy, Sergey Markov, was lured off a train and murdered at a rural station near Novocherkassk. Markov was emasculated and suffered over seventy knife wounds to his neck and upper torso before being eviscerated.1984
In January and February 1984, Chikatilo killed two women in Rostov's Park of Aviators. On 24 March, he lured a 10-year-old boy, Dmitry Ptashnikov, away from a stamp kiosk in Novoshakhtinsk. While walking with the boy, Chikatilo was seen by several witnesses who were able to give investigators a detailed description of the killer. When Ptashnikov's body was found three days later, police also found a footprint of the killer and both semen and saliva samples on the victim's clothing. On 25 May, Chikatilo killed a young woman named Tatyana Petrosyan and her 10-year-old daughter, Svetlana, in a wooded area outside Shakhty; Petrosyan had known Chikatilo for several years prior to her murder. By the end of July, he had killed three additional young women between the ages of 19 and 21, and a 13-year-old boy.In the summer of 1984, Chikatilo was fired from his work as a supply clerk for the theft of two rolls of linoleum. The accusation had been filed against him the previous February, and he had been asked to resign quietly but had refused to do so, as he had denied the charges. Chikatilo found another job as a supply clerk in Rostov on 1 August.On 2 August, Chikatilo killed a 16-year-old girl, Natalya Golosovskaya, in the Park of Aviators. On 7 August, he lured a 17-year-old girl, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, to the banks of the Don River on the pretense of showing her a shortcut to a bus terminal. Alekseyeva suffered thirty-nine slash wounds to her body before Chikatilo mutilated and disemboweled her, intentionally inflicting wounds he knew would not be immediately fatal. Her body was found the following morning; her excised upper lip inside her mouth.Hours after Alekseyeva's murder, Chikatilo flew to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent on a business trip. By the time he returned to Rostov on 15 August, he had killed an unidentified young woman and a 10-year-old girl, Akmaral Seydaliyeva. Within two weeks, the nude body of an 11-year-old boy named Aleksandr Chepel was discovered on the banks of the Don River, strangled and castrated, with his eyes gouged out, just yards from where Alexeyeva's body had earlier been found and on 6 September, Chikatilo killed a young librarian, 24-year-old Irina Luchinskaya, in the Park of Aviators.1987
In 1987 Chikatilo killed three times. On each occasion the murder took place while he was on a business trip far away from the Rostov Oblast, and none of these murders were linked to the manhunt in Rostov. Chikatilo's first murder in 1987 was committed on 16 May, when he encountered a 12-year-old boy, Oleg Makarenkov, at a train station in the Urals town of Revda. Makarenkov was lured from the station with the promise of sharing a meal with Chikatilo at his dacha; he was murdered in woodland close to the station, although his body would remain undiscovered until 1991. In July, he killed a 12-year-old boy, Ivan Bilovetsky, in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia, and on 15 September, he killed a 16-year-old vocational school student, Yuri Tereshonok, in woodland on the outskirts of Leningrad.Snare
The discovery of more victims sparked a massive police operation. Because several victims' bodies had been discovered at railway stations on one rail route through the Rostov Oblast, Burakov suggested a plan to saturate all larger stations in the region with an obvious uniformed police presence which the killer could not fail to notice. The intention was to discourage the killer from attempting to strike at any of these locations, and to have undercover agents patrol smaller and less busy stations, where the murderer's activities would be more likely to be noticed. The plan was approved, and both the uniformed and undercover officers were instructed to question any adult man in the company of a young woman or child, and note his name and passport number. Police deployed 360 men at all the stations in the Rostov Oblast, but only undercover officers were posted at the three smallest stations on the route through the oblast where the killer had struck most frequently—Kundryucha, Donleskhoz, and Lesostep—in an effort to force the killer to strike at one of those three stations. The operation was implemented on 27 October 1990.On 30 October, police found the body of a 16-year-old boy, Vadim Gromov, at Donleskhoz station. The wounds upon Gromov's body immediately linked his murder to the manhunt: the youth had been strangled, stabbed twenty-seven times and castrated, with the tip of his tongue severed and his left eye stabbed. Gromov had been killed on 17 October, ten days before the start of the initiative. The same day Gromov's body was found, Chikatilo lured another 16-year-old boy, Viktor Tishchenko, off a train at Kirpichnaya station and killed him in a nearby forest. Tishchenko's body—bearing forty separate knife wounds—was found on 3 November.Trial
Chikatilo was brought to trial in Rostov on 14 April 1992, charged with fifty-three counts of murder in addition to five charges of sexual assault against minors committed when he had been a teacher. He was tried in Courtroom Number 5 of the Rostov Provincial Court, before Judge Leonid Akubzhanov.Chikatilo's trial was the first major media event of post-Soviet Russia. Shortly after his psychiatric evaluation at the Serbsky Institute, investigators had conducted a press conference in which a full list of Chikatilo's crimes was released to the press, alongside a 1984 identikit of the individual charged, but not the full name or a photograph of the accused. The media first saw Chikatilo on the first day of his trial, as he entered an iron cage specifically constructed in a corner of the courtroom to protect him from attack by the enraged and hysterical relatives of his victims. In the opening weeks of Chikatilo's trial, the Russian press regularly published exaggerated and often sensationalistic headlines about the murders, referring to Chikatilo being a "cannibal" or a "maniac" and to his physically resembling a shaven-skulled, demonic individual.The first two days of the trial were devoted to Akubzhanov reading the long lists of indictments against Chikatilo. Each murder was discussed individually, and on several occasions, relatives present in the courtroom broke down in tears or fainted when details of their relatives' murder were revealed. After reading the indictment, Akubzhanov announced to the journalists present in the courtroom his intention to conduct an open trial, stating: "Let this trial at least teach us something, so that this will never happen anytime or anywhere again." Akubzhanov then asked Chikatilo to stand, identify himself and provide his date and location of birth. Chikatilo complied, although this would prove to be one of the few civil exchanges between the judge and Chikatilo.Chikatilo was initially questioned in detail about each charge upon the indictment. Responding to specific questions regarding the murders, he often gave dismissive replies to questions, particularly when questioned as to the specific nature of the wounds he had inflicted upon his victims and the ruses he had used to entice his victims to the locations where he had killed them. He would become indignant only when accused of stealing personal possessions from the victims, or to his retaining organs excised from the victims missing from the crime scenes. On one occasion, when asked as to his seeming indifference as to the lifestyle and gender of those whom he had killed, Chikatilo replied: "I did not need to look for them. Every step I took, they were there."In what became a regular (though not continuous) occurrence throughout the trial, Akubzhanov berated Chikatilo as he questioned him in detail as to the charges; ordering him to "shut your mouth", before adding, "You're not crazy!" as Chikatilo's responses to questions deviated into his discussing issues such as the repression his family had endured throughout his childhood, and his claiming that the charges filed against him were false. These verbal exchanges would occur whether Chikatilo was cooperative or uncooperative throughout proceedings, and the manner in which the judge questioned Chikatilo repeatedly led his defence lawyer Marat Khabibulin to protest against the accusatory nature of the court proceedings. In the instances in which Chikatilo was uncooperative throughout questioning, he would simply shout over the judge, denounce the court as a farce, and launch into rambling, disjointed speeches. On occasion, Chikatilo would also expose himself to the court or sing socialist movement anthems throughout proceedings. These antics regularly resulted in his being returned to his cell as court proceedings continued in his absence.On 21 April, Chikatilo's defence lawyer requested that Bukhanovsky be allowed to testify as to the contents of the 1985 psychological profile he had written, and his subsequent consultations with Chikatilo following his arrest, adding that Bukhanovsky could exert influence over Chikatilo and, by extension, might influence the court proceedings. This request was denied. The same day, Chikatilo began to refuse to answer any questions from the judge, the prosecutor or his own defence lawyer. He refused to answer any questions for three consecutive days before stating his presumption of innocence had been irredeemably violated by the judge and that he intended to give no further testimony. The following day, proceedings were adjourned for two weeks.
Chikatilo withdrew his confessions to six of the killings for which he had been charged on 13 May, and also claimed he had killed four further victims who were not included upon the indictment. The same day, his defence lawyer again submitted a request that his client be subjected to a second psychiatric evaluation. This motion was dismissed by the judge as being groundless. In response, Khabibulin rose from his seat, condemning the composition of the court, and arguing that the judge was unfit to continue presiding over the case. Chikatilo himself repeated his earlier remarks as to the judge making numerous rash remarks prejudging his guilt. The prosecutor, Nikolai Gerasimenko, vocally supported the defence's claim, stating that the judge had indeed made too many such comments and had committed numerous procedural violations in his lecturing and insulting the defendant. Gerasimenko further contended that in his conducting an open trial, Chikatilo had already been effectively prejudged as being guilty by the press, before also requesting that the judge be replaced.On 3 July, Bukhanovsky was permitted to testify as to his analysis of Chikatilo, although solely in the capacity as a witness. For three hours, Bukhanovsky testified as to his 1985 psychological profile of Chikatilo, and of the conversations he had held with Chikatilo following his arrest, which had culminated in Chikatilo's confession. Four psychiatric experts from the Serbsky Institute also testified as to the results of a behavioral analysis they had conducted on Chikatilo in May, following the initial adjournment of the trial. All testified as to his behaviour in the courtroom being strikingly at contrast to his behaviour in his cell, and that they considered his antics to be a calculated attempt to obtain acquittal on the grounds of insanity.Victims
Footnote
Judge Leonid Akubzhanov cleared Chikatilo of the murder of 15-year-old Laura Sarkisyan at his trial due to insufficient evidence. Sarkisyan, a runaway from Armenia, was last seen by her family on 18 June. In his confessions to police, Chikatilo had stated he had killed an Armenian girl in the early summer of 1983 and that she had been killed in a stretch of woodland located near Kirpichnaya station. Although Chikatilo had been unable to identify Sarkisyan's picture when presented to him, the timing of Sarkisyan's disappearance and Chikatilo's physical description of the victim, her clothing, and where he had killed her did match scattered, partial skeletal remains and personal effects which, although determined as being those of a female in her early- to mid-teens, could not be precisely identified.Although he had at one stage denied having committed six of the murders for which he had been brought to trial, Chikatilo never specifically disputed Sarkisyan as being a victim of his.
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