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thekillerblogofkillers · 7 years

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Andrei Chikatilo (1936-1994) PART FOUR

The discovery of even more victims linked to the same unknown killer sparked a massive police operation in response. Due to the fact that several victims were found at trail stations on the same rail route through the Rostov Oblast, Viktor Burakov suggested flooding all the larger stations in the Rostov Oblast with an obvious uniformed police presence that the killer couldn’t fail to notice. The intention of this was to discourage the killer from attacking in any of these locations. There would be undercover officers patrolling smaller and less busy stations, where the killer’s activities were more likely to be noticed. The plan was approved and both the uniformed and undercover officers were told to question any adult males in the company of young women or children, and to write down their name and passport number. Police sent 360 men to all of the stations in the Rostov Oblast but only undercover officers were sent to the 3 smallest stations on the route where the killer had struck the most frequently – Kirpichnaya, Donleskhoz, and Lesostep – in an attempt to strike at one of those 3 stations. This operation began on October 27 1990. 3 days later, police discovered the body of 16-year-old Vadim Gromov at Donleskhoz station. The wounds on Gromov’s body instantly linked this murder to the manhunt – the boy had been strangled, stabbed 27 times, castrated, the tip of his tongue severed and his left eye stabbed. He had been killed 10 days before the start of the operation to catch Chikatilo. The same day that the body was discovered, October 30, Chikatilo lured 16-year-old Viktor Tishchenko off a train at Kirpichnaya station – a station under surveillance by undercover police – and killed him in a nearby forest. Tishchenko’s body, with over 40 separate knife wounds, was discovered on November 3, 1990. 3 days later, Chikatilo killed and mutilated 22-year-old Svetlana Korostik in woodland near Donleskhoz station. He was seen leaving the crime scene by an undercover officer, who saw Chikatilo wash his hands and face in a well. When Chikatilo got closer to the station, the officer noticed that his coat had grass and soil stains on the elbows, and Chikatilo had a suspicious red smear on his cheek. This aroused the suspicions of the undercover officer, as the only reason people would enter those woodlands at that time of year was to pick wild mushrooms, but Chikatilo wasn’t dressed like a typical scavenger and was carrying a nylon bag, which wasn’t suitable for mushrooms. The policeman stopped Chikatilo and checked his papers, but had no probable cause to arrest him. When the office returned to the station he filed a routine report containing the name of the person he had stopped. On November 13, Korostik’s body was found – the 36th known victim to be linked to the manhunt. Police summoned the officer in charge of surveillance at Donleskhoz station and examined all the reports of men stopped and questioned in the last week. Chikatilo’s name was among those reports, and it was a name familiar to several officers involved in the case. Chikatilo had been questioned in 1984 and was placed on a suspect list in 1987 which was distributed throughout the Soviet Union. After talking to Chikatilo’s past and present employers, investigators could place him in different towns and cities at the same time certain victims were killed. Questioning his former colleagues from his teaching days revealed that he had been forced to resign from 2 different teaching jobs due to repeated complaints of lewd behaviour and sexual assault against pupils. Police put Chikatilo under surveillance on November 14, 1990. More than once, particularly on trains or buses, he was seen approaching lone young women or children and trying to start a conversation. If the woman or child broke off this conversation, Chikatilo would wait a few minutes before trying to talk to someone else. On November 20, after being under surveillance for 6 days, Chikatilo left his house carrying a large jar, which he had filled with beer at a kiosk in a local park. He then wandered around Novocherkassk trying to strike up conversations with children he met along the way. After leaving a cafe, Chikatilo was arrested by 4 plainclothes police officers.

When he was arrested, Chikatilo told police that they were mistaken, and complained that he had also been arrested in 1984 for the same series of murders. Chikatilo was strip-searched and a human bite mark was discovered on his finger. A search of his belongings turned up a folding knife and 2 lengths of rope. Officers took a blood sample from Chikatilo and he was then placed in a cell inside KGB headquarters in Rostov along with a police informer who was told to engage Chikatilo in conversation and get any information he could. The following day, on November 21, formal questioning began (the interrogation was performed by Issa Kostoyev). The strategy was to lead Chikatilo to believe that he was sick and in need of medical help, possibly letting Chikatilo hope that if he confessed, he wouldn’t be prosecuted by reason of insanity. Police knew the case was mostly circumstantial, and under Soviet law, they only had 10 days to legally hold him before either charging or releasing him. The results of Chikatilo’s blood test again showed his blood to be type “A” and not type “AB”. Because of the amount of physical and circumstantial evidence against Chikatilo as well as the fact that investigators had discovered the blood type of the killer through semen found on the bodies and clothing of 14 victims, not actual blood samples, investigators decided to test Chikatilo’s semen for his blood type instead. This test showed that Chikatilo’s semen was type “AB”, but his blood and saliva were type “A”. Throughout the questioning, Chikatilo continued denying any involvement in the murders, but did confess to molesting some of his pupils during his time as a teacher. He also wrote several essays for Issa Kostoyev, which were vague in regards to the actual murders, but did show psychological symptoms that matched those predicted by Dr. Bukhanovsky’s profile in 1985. The interrogation tactics Kostoyev used caused Chikatilo to become defensive – he told the informer he shared a KGB cell with that Kostoyev had kept asking him direct questions about the mutilations suffered by the victims.

On November 29 Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky was invited to assist in the questioning of the suspect. Bukhanovsky read parts of his 65-page psychological profile to Chikatilo – within less than 2 hours, Chikatilo burst into tears and confessed that he was guilty of the crimes that he had been arrested for. After talking late into the night, Bukhanovsky told Burakov and Fetisov that Chikatilo was ready to confess. Using the handwritten notes Bukhanovsky had compiled, Issa Kostoyev prepared a formal accusation of murder and the following morning resumed his interrogation of Chikatilo. According to official protocol, Chikatilo confessed to 34 of the 36 murders police had managed to link to him, but he denied 2 other murders in 1986 that the police initially believed he had committed (Lyubov Golovakha and Irina Pogoryelova). Chikatilo later admitted killing Irina Pogoryelova during his trial in a loud outburst, referring to her by name. Chikatilo gave detailed descriptions of each murder on the charge list, all of which were consistent with the known facts. When asked, Chikatilo was able to draw rough sketches of crime scenes, indicating the position of the victims’ bodies and landmarks in the area. He admitted that he would bind the victims’ hands behind their back with a length of rope before killing them. He would often inflict a large amount of knife wounds on the victim, starting with shallow wounds in the chest area, before progressing to deeper stab/slash wounds (usually 30-50 in all), before finally eviscerating the victim. Chikatilo stated that he had become adept at avoid the blood spatter from his victims’ bodies and would often sit or squat next to them until their hearts stopped beating, adding that the victims’ “cries, the blood and the agony gave me relaxation and a certain pleasure.” When he was asked why most of his later victims’ eyes had been stabbed but not removed as with earlier victims, Chikatilo replied that he originally believed in an old superstition that the image of a murderer is left imprinted on the eyes of the victim. He said that in “later years”, he had become convinced that this was just an old wives’ tale and so he had stopped gouging out the eyes of his victims.

Chikatilo told Kostoyev that he had often tasted the blood of his victims, saying that he “felt chills,” and “shook all over.” He also confessed to biting victims’ genitalia, lips, nipples and tongues. More than once, Chikatilo would cut/bite off the tongue of victims as he eviscerated them, then as the victim was dying, would run around the body as he held the tongue in the air. He admitted to chewing on the excised uteri of female victims and the testes of male victims, he said he had later discarded these body parts. Nonetheless, Chikatilo confessed to swallowing the nipples of some victims. On November 30 Chikatilo was formally charged with the 34 murders he had confessed to, all of which were committed between June 1982 and November 1990. Over the following few days, Chikatilo confessed to 22 more murders that hadn’t been connected with the case either because they were committed outside of the Rostov Oblast, or because the bodies hadn’t been found, or, like in the case of Yelena Zakotnova, because an innocent man had been convicted and executed for the murder. As with the victims compiled on the original charge list, Chikatilo was able to give details of these additional murders that only the killer could have known – such as the fact that Lyubov Volobuyeva had lived in south-western Siberia and was killed in a sorghum field near Krasnodar Airport. In December 1990, Chikatilo led police to the body of Aleksey Khobotov, a boy he confessed to killing in August 1989 and who was buried in woodland near a Shakhty cemetery. He later took investigators to the sites of 2 other bodies he had dumped. 3 of the 56 victims Chikatilo confessed to killing couldn’t be found or identified, but Chikatilo was charged with killing 53 women and children between 1978 and 1990. He was held in the same cell in Rostov-on-Don where he was detained on 20 November, to await trial.

On August 20, 1991, after police had finished interrogating Chikatilo (compete with re-enactments of the murders at each crime scene), he was transferred to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow to undergo a 60-day psychiatric evaluation to see if he was mentally competent to stand trial. Chikatilo’s analysis was performed by Dr. Andrei Tkachenko, who noted that Chikatilo suffered from various psychological problems that he believed was due to prenatal brain damage. However, on October 18, Tkachenko concluded that although Chikatilo suffered from borderline personality disorder with sadistic features, he was fit to stand trial. In December 1991 details of the arrest of Andrei Chikatilo and a brief summary of his crimes were released to the newly liberated Russian media by police. He was brought to trial in Rostov on April 14, 1992 and was charged with 53 counts of murder as well as 5 charges of sexual assault against minors committed during his teaching career. He was tried in Courtroom Number 5 of the Rostov Provincial Court, before Judge Leonid Akubzhanov. The trial was the first major media event since Soviet Russia was liberalised. After his psychiatric evaluation at the Serbsky Institute investigators performed a press conference where they released a full list of Chikatilo’s crimes along with a 1984 identikit of the individual charged, but not the full name or a photograph of the accused. Chikatilo’s first media appearance was on day 1 of the trial when he entered a specifically-built iron cage in the corner of the courtroom to protect the accused from the angry and often hysterical relatives of his victims.

In the opening weeks of the trial the Russian press would publish exaggerated and sensationalised headlines regarding the murders, calling Chikatilo a “cannibal” or a “maniac”. The first 2 days of the trial were filled by Judge Akubzhanov reading the long list of indictments against Chikatilo. Each murder was discussed separately, and on more than one occasion, relatives in the courtroom broke down when details of their loved ones’ murders were revealed. After reading the full indictment Judge Akubzhanov told the journalists present in the courtroom that he was going to conduct an open trial, saying: “Let this trial at least tell us something, so that this will never happen anytime or anywhere again.” The judge then asked Chikatilo to stand, identify himself and state his date and location of birth. Chikatilo complied, but this would turn out to be one of the only civil exchanges between Chikatilo and Judge Akubzhanov. On October 15, Chikatilo was formally sentenced to death plus 86 years for the 52 murders and 5 counts of sexual assault that he was found guilty for. Chikatilo kicked his bench across his cage on hearing the verdict, and began to shout abuse, but when he was given an opportunity to make a speech in response to the verdict, he remained silent. On passing the final sentence, Judge Leonid Akubzhanov made the following speech: “Taking into consideration the horrible misdeeds of which he is guilty, this court has no alternative but to impose the only sentence that he deserves. I therefore sentence him to death.” Chikatilo was taken to his cell at Novocherkassk prison to await execution. He lodged an appeal against his conviction to the Russian Supreme Court but this was rejected in summer 1993. He then filed an appeal for clemency with President Boris Yeltsin – this was rejected on January 4 1994. On February 1994 Chikatilo was taken from his death row cell to a soundproofed room in Novocherkassk prison and executed with a single gunshot behind the right ear.

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