R.J. Parker - The Serial Killer Compendium

On January 14, 1990, Chikatilo killed an eleven-year-old boy in Shakhty. On March 7, he killed a ten-year old boy named Yaroslav Makarov in Rostov Botanical Gardens. The eviscerated body was found the following day. On March 11, the leaders of the investigation, headed by Mikhail Fetisov, held a meeting to discuss progress made in the hunt for the killer. Fetisov was under intense pressure from the public, the press, and the Ministry of the Interior in Moscow, to solve the case. The intensity of the manhunt in the years up to 1984 had receded a degree between 1985 and 1987, when only two victims had been conclusively linked to the killer, both of them in 1985.

But by March 1990, six further victims had been linked to the serial killer. Fetisov had noted laxity in some areas of the investigation, and warned that people would be fired if the killer was not caught soon. Chikatilo killed three further victims by August. On April 4, he killed a thirty-one year old woman in woodland near Donleskhoz station; on July 28, he lured a thirteen year old boy away from a Rostov train station and killed him in Rostov Botanical Gardens; and on August 14, he killed an eleven year old boy in the reeds near Novocherkassk beach.

Police deployed a very visible 360 men at all the stations in the Rostov Oblast, and positioned undercover officers at the three smallest stations: Kirpichnaya, Donleskhoz, and Lesoste. These were the routes through the Oblast where the killer had struck most frequently. Police hoped to force the killer to strike at one of these three stations. The operation was implemented on October 27, 1990, but, on October 30, police found the body of a sixteen-year-old boy named Vadim Gromov at Donleskhoz Station. Gromov, however, had been killed on October 17, ten days before the start of the initiative. The same day Gromov's body was found, Chikatilo lured another sixteen year-old boy, Viktor Tishchenko, off a train at Kirpichnaya Station, a different station under surveillance from undercover police, and killed him in a nearby forest.

Just six days later, Chikatilo killed and mutilated a twenty-two year-old woman named Svetlana Korostik in a woodland near Donleskhoz Station. While leaving the crime scene, an undercover officer spotted him approach a well and wash his hands and face. When Chikatilo approached the station, the undercover officer noted that his coat had grass and soil stains on the elbows, and Chikatilo had a small red smear on his cheek. To the officer, he looked suspicious. The only reason people entered woodland near the station at that time of year was to gather wild mushrooms, a popular pastime in Russia. Chikatilo, however, was not dressed like a typical forest hiker. He was wearing more formal attire. Moreover, he had a nylon sports bag, which was not suitable for carrying mushrooms.

The undercover police officer stopped Chikatilo and checked his papers, but had no formal reason to arrest him. When the police officer returned to his office, he filed a routine report, containing the name of the person he had stopped at the train station. On November 13, Korostik's body was found. Police summoned the officer in charge of surveillance at Donleskhoz Station and examined the reports of all men stopped and questioned in the previous week. Chikatilo's name was among those reports, and his name was familiar to several officers involved in the case, as he had been questioned in 1984 and placed upon a 1987 suspect list that had been compiled and distributed throughout the Soviet Union. Upon checking with Chikatilo's present and previous employers, investigators were able to place Chikatilo in various towns and cities at times when several victims linked to the investigation had been killed.

Arrest

Former colleagues from Chikatilo's teaching days informed investigators that Chikatilo had been forced to resign from his teaching position due to complaints of sexual assault from several pupils. Police placed Chikatilo under surveillance on November 14. In several instances, particularly on trains or buses, he was observed approaching lone young women or children and engaging them in conversation. If the woman or child broke off the conversation, Chikatilo would wait a few minutes and then seek another conversation partner. On November 20, after six days of surveillance, Chikatilo left his house with a one-gallon flask of beer and wandered around Novocherkassk attempting to make contact with children. Upon exiting a cafe, Chikatilo was arrested by four plainclothes police officers.

After being arrested, Chikatilo gave a statement claiming that the police were mistaken, and complained that he had also been arrested in 1984 for the same series of murders. A strip search revealed that one of Chikatilo's fingers had a flesh wound, and medical examiners concluded the wound was, in fact, from a human bite. Chikatilo's second to last victim was a physically strong sixteen year-old youth. At the crime scene, the police had found numerous signs of a ferocious physical struggle between the victim and his murderer. Although a finger bone was found to be broken and his fingernail had been bitten off, Chikatilo had never sought medical treatment for the wound. A search of Chikatilo's belongings revealed that he had been in possession of a folding knife at the time of his arrest. Chikatilo was placed in a cell inside the KGB headquarters in Rostov with a police informant who was instructed to engage Chikatilo in conversation and obtain any information he could from him.

The next day, the 21 of November, formal questioning of Chikatilo was begun by Issa Kostoyev. The police’s strategy to elicit a confession from Chikatilo was to lead him to believe that he was a very sick man in need of medical help. This was done in order to give Chikatilo hope that, if he confessed, he would not be prosecuted by reason of insanity. Police knew their case against Chikatilo was largely circumstantial, and under Soviet law they had ten days in which they could legally hold a suspect before they either had to charge him or release him. Throughout the questioning, Chikatilo repeatedly denied that he had committed the murders, although he did confess to molesting his pupils during his career as a teacher.

Confession

On November 29, at the request of Burakov and Fetisov, Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, the psychiatrist who had written the 1985 psychological profile of the then-unknown killer for the investigators, was invited to assist in the questioning of the suspect. Bukhanovsky read extracts from his sixty-five page psychological profile to Chikatilo. Within two hours, Chikatilo confessed to the thirty-six murders that police had linked to the killer. On November 30, he was formally charged with each of these thirty-six murders, all of which had been committed between June of 1982 and November of 1990.

Chikatilo also confessed to a further twenty killings which had not been connected to him as the murders had been committed outside the Rostov Oblast, and the bodies had not been found. Chikatilo then led police to the body of Aleksey Khobotov, a boy he had confessed to killing in 1989, and who he had buried in woodland near a Shakhty cemetery, proving unequivocally that he was the killer. He later led investigators to the bodies of two other victims he had confessed to killing. Three of the fifty-six victims Chikatilo confessed to killing could not be found or identified, hence Chikatilo was charged with killing fifty-three women and children between 1978 and 1990.

Trial

Chikatilo stood trial in Rostov on April 14, 1992. It was necessary to keep him in an iron cage in a corner of the courtroom to protect him from attack by the many hysterical and enraged relatives of his victims. Relatives of victims regularly shouted threats and insults to Chikatilo throughout the trial, demanding that authorities release him so that they could kill him themselves. Each murder was discussed individually and, on several occasions, relatives broke down in tears when details of their relatives' murder were revealed; some even fainted.