R.J. Parker - The Serial Killer Compendium

Chikatilo did not kill again until June 1983, but he had killed five more times by September of that year. The accumulation of bodies and the similarities between the patterns of wounds inflicted on the victims forced the Soviet authorities to acknowledge that a serial killer was on the loose, and on September 6, 1983, the public prosecutor of the USSR formally linked six of the murders thus far committed to the same killer.

A Moscow investigative team of police officers, headed by Major Mikhail Fetisov, was sent to Rostov-on-Don to direct the investigation. Major Fetisov centered the investigations on the Shakhty area and assigned a specialist forensic analyst, Victor Burakov, to lead the investigation. Due to the absolute savagery of the murders, much of the police effort concentrated on homosexuals, known pedophiles, mentally ill citizens, and sex offenders, slowly working through all that were known and eliminating them from the investigation. Three known homosexuals and a convicted sex offender committed suicide because of the investigator’s unsympathetic tactics. But as police obtained confessions from suspects, bodies continued to be discovered, proving that the suspects who had confessed could not be the killer the police were seeking.

In October of 1983, Chikatilo killed a nineteen-year-old prostitute and in December a fourteen-year-old pupil named Sergey Markov. In January and February of 1984, Chikatilo killed two women in Rostov's Aviators Park and on March 24, lured Dmitry Ptashnikov, ten years old, 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 the boy’s body was found three days later, police also discovered a footprint of the killer, as well as semen and saliva samples on the victim's clothes.

On May 25, Chikatilo killed a young woman, Tatyana Petrosyan, and her eleven-year-old daughter, Svetlana, in a wooded area outside Shakhty. Tatyana had known Chikatilo for several years prior to her murder. By July 19, he had killed three more young women between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two, and a boy of only thirteen.

Chikatilo was fired in 1984 from his work as a supply clerk for theft. The allegation had been filed against Chikatilo the previous February and he had been asked to leave quietly, but had refused to do so as he had disapproved of the charges. Chikatilo found another job as a supply clerk in Rostov and in early August he killed Natalya Golosovskaya, sixteen, in Aviators Park, and the next day another girl only seventeen, dumping her body on the banks of the Don River before flying to the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent on a business trip.

By the time Chikatilo returned to Rostov in mid-August, he had killed another young woman and a twelve-year-old girl. Within two weeks, an eleven year-old boy had been found strangled and castrated with his eyes gouged out in Rostov before a young librarian, Irina Luchinskaya, was killed in Rostov's Aviators Park in early September. Exactly one week after his fifteenth killing of the year, Chikatilo was observed by an undercover detective attempting to lure young women away from a Rostov bus station. He was arrested and held. A search of his belongings revealed a knife and rope. He was also discovered to be under investigation for minor theft at one of his former employers, which gave the investigators the legal right to hold him for a prolonged period. Chikatilo's dubious background was uncovered, and his physical description matched the description of the man seen with Dmitry Ptashnikov in March. These factors alone did not provide enough evidence to convict him of the murders. He was, however, found guilty of theft of property from his previous employer and sentenced to one year in prison, but was freed on December 12, 1984 after serving only three months.

Following the September 6 murder of Irina Luchinskaya, no further bodies were found bearing the trademark mutilation of Chikatilo's murders. Investigators in Rostov theorized that the unknown killer might have moved to another part of the Soviet Union and continued killing there. The Rostov police sent bulletins to all forces throughout the Soviet Union, describing the pattern of wounds their unknown killer inflicted upon his victims, and requested feedback from any police force that had discovered victims with wounds matching those upon the victims found in the Rostov Oblast. The response was negative.

Upon his release from jail, Chikatilo found new work in Novocherkassk and kept a low profile. He did not kill again until seven months after getting out of jail when he murdered a young woman close to Domodedovo Airport, near Moscow. One month later, in August, Chikatilo killed another woman in Shakhty. Both victims were linked to the hunt for the killer as the same modus operandi was used in the killings.

In November of 1985, a special procurator named Issa Kostoyev was appointed to supervise the investigation of the serial killer. The known murders around Rostov were carefully re-investigated and police began questioning known sex offenders again. The following month, the militia and Voluntary People's Druzhina renewed the patrolling of railway stations around Rostov. The police also took the step of consulting a psychiatrist, Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky, the first such consultation in a serial killer investigation in the Soviet Union. Bukhanovsky produced a sixty-five page psychological profile of the unknown killer for the investigators, describing the killer as a man between forty-five and fifty years old who was of average intelligence, likely to be married or had previously been married, but also a sadist who could achieve sexual arousal only by seeing his victims suffer. Bukhanovsky also argued that because many of the killings had occurred on weekdays near mass transportation and across the entire Rostov Oblast, 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.

Chikatilo followed the investigation carefully, reading newspaper reports about the manhunt for the killer, and kept his homicidal urges under control. Throughout 1986 he is not known to have committed any murders. That did not last long.

In 1987, Chikatilo killed three more times. On each occasion he killed while on a business trip far away from the Rostov Oblast, and none of those murders were linked to the manhunt in Rostov. Chikatilo's committed his first murder of 1987 in May when he killed a thirteen-year-old boy named Oleg Makarenkov in Revda. In July, he killed another boy in Zaporozhye, and a third in Leningrad in September. In 1988, Chikatilo killed three times, murdering an unidentified woman in Krasny-Sulin in April, and two boys in May and July. His first killing bore wounds similar to those inflicted on the victims linked to the manhunt killed between 1982 and 1985, but as the woman had been killed with a slab of concrete, investigators were unsure whether or not to link the murder to the investigation. In May of the same year, Chikatilo killed a nine-year-old boy in Ilovaisk, Ukraine. The boy's wounds left no doubt that the killer had struck again; this murder was linked to the manhunt. On July 14, Chikatilo killed a fifteen-year old boy named Yevgeny Muratov at Donleskhoz station near Shakhty. Muratov's murder was also linked to the investigation, although his body was not found until April, 1989.

Chikatilo did not kill again for another year, not until March 8, 1989, when he killed a sixteen-year-old girl in his daughter's vacant apartment. He dismembered her body and hid the remains in a sewer. As the victim had been dismembered, police did not link her murder to the investigation. Between May and August, Chikatilo killed a further four victims, three of whom were killed in Rostov and Shakhty, although only two of the victims were linked to the killer.