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Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (; ; 16 October 1936 – 14 February 1994) was a Ukrainian-born Soviet serial killer nicknamed " the Butcher of Rostov", " the Rostov Ripper", and " the Red Ripper" who sexual assault, 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; he was tried for fifty-three murders 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.
The family rarely had sufficient food; Chikatilo himself later claimed not to have eaten bread until the age of 12, adding that he and his family often had to eat grass and leaves in an effort to stave off hunger. Throughout his childhood, Chikatilo was repeatedly told by his mother Anna that prior to his birth, an older brother of his named Stepan had, at the age of four, been kidnapped and cannibalized by starving neighbours. However, it has never been established whether this incident actually occurred, or if a Stepan Chikatilo even existed. Nonetheless, Chikatilo recalled his childhood as being blighted by poverty, ridicule, hunger, and war.
When the Soviet Union entered the Second World War, Chikatilo's father, Roman, was conscription into the Red Army. He would later be taken prisoner after being wounded in combat. Between 1941 and 1944, Chikatilo witnessed some of the effects of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, which he described as "horrors", adding he witnessed bombings, fires, and shootings from which he and his mother would hide in cellars and ditches. On one occasion, Chikatilo and his mother were forced to watch their own hut burn to the ground. With his father at war, mother and son shared a single bed. Chikatilo was a chronic bed wetter, and his mother berated and beat him for each offence.
In 1943, Chikatilo's mother gave birth to a baby girl, Tatyana. Because Chikatilo's father had been conscripted in 1941, he could not have fathered this child. As many Ukrainian women were raped by German soldiers during the war, it has been speculated Tatyana was conceived as a result of such a rape. As Chikatilo and his mother lived in a one-room hut, this rape may have been committed in Chikatilo's presence.
In September 1944, Chikatilo began his schooling. Although shy and ardently studious as a child, he was physically weak and regularly attended school in homespun clothing. His stomach was often swollen from hunger resulting from the post-war famine which plagued much of the Soviet Union. On several occasions, this hunger caused Chikatilo to faint both at home and school, and he was consistently targeted by bullies who regularly mocked him over his physical stature and timid nature. At home, Chikatilo and his sister were constantly berated by their mother. Tatyana later recalled that despite the hardships endured by her parents, their father was a kind man, whereas their mother was harsh and unforgiving toward her children.
Chikatilo developed a passion for reading and memorizing data. He often studied at home, both to increase his sense of self-worth and to compensate for his myopia, which often prevented him from reading the classroom blackboard. To his teachers, Chikatilo was an excellent student upon whom they would regularly bestow praise and commendation.
At the onset of puberty, Chikatilo discovered that he had chronic impotence, worsening his social awkwardness and self-hatred. He was shy in the company of women; his first crush, at age 17, had been on a girl named Lilya Barysheva, with whom he had become acquainted through his school newspaper, yet he was chronically nervous in her company and never asked her for a date. The same year, Chikatilo jumped upon an 11-year-old friend of his younger sister and wrestled her to the ground, orgasm as the girl struggled in his grasp.
Following his graduation, Chikatilo applied for a scholarship at Moscow State University. Although he passed the entrance examination with good-to-excellent scores, his grades were not deemed good enough for acceptance. Chikatilo speculated his scholarship application was rejected due to his father's tainted war record (his father had been branded a traitor for being taken prisoner in 1943) but the truth was that other students had performed better in a highly competitive exam. He did not attempt to enrol at another university; instead, he travelled to Kursk, where he worked as a labourer for three months before—in 1955—enroling in a vocational school to become a communications technician. The same year, Chikatilo formed his first serious relationship, with a local girl two years his junior. On three occasions, the couple attempted intercourse, but on each occasion, he was unable to sustain an erection. After eighteen months, she broke off the relationship.
Upon completing his service, Chikatilo returned to his native village to live with his parents, briefly working alongside them on the collective farm. He soon became acquainted with a young divorcée. Their three-month relationship ended after several unsuccessful attempts at intercourse, after which the woman innocently asked her friends for advice as to how Chikatilo might overcome his inability to maintain an erection. As a result, most of his peers discovered his impotence. In a 1993 interview regarding this incident, Chikatilo stated: "Girls were going behind my back, whispering that I was impotent. I was so ashamed. I tried to hang myself. My mother and some young neighbours pulled me out of the noose. Well, I thought no one would want such a shamed man. So I had to run away from there, away from my homeland."
Chikatilo later claimed that his marital sex life was minimal and that, after his wife understood he was unable to maintain an erection, they agreed she would conceive by him ejaculating externally and pushing his semen inside her vagina with his fingers. In 1965, Feodosia gave birth to a daughter, Lyudmila. Four years later, in 1969, a son named Yuri was born.
Chikatilo was largely ineffective as a teacher; although knowledgeable in the subjects he taught, he was seldom able to maintain discipline in his classes and was regularly subjected to mockery by his students who, he claimed, took advantage of his modest nature.
One of Chikatilo's duties at this school was ensuring the students who boarded at the school were present in their dormitories in the evenings; on several occasions, he is known to have entered the girls' dormitory in the hope of seeing them undressed. On other occasions, he discovered adolescent pupils who boarded at the school engaged in sex. He later stated the sight of adolescents engaged in intercourse "disturbed" him as he was confronted with the sight of "children doing what I hadn't done even when I was thirty years old."
In response to the increasing number of complaints lodged against him by pupils, the director of the school summoned Chikatilo to a formal meeting and informed him he should either resign voluntarily or be fired. Chikatilo left his employment discreetly and found another job as a teacher at another school in Novoshakhtinsk in January 1974. He lost this job as a result of staff cutbacks in September 1978, before finding another teaching position at Technical School No. 33 in Shakhty, a coal-mining town forty-seven miles north of Rostov.
By Chikatilo's own admission, by the mid-1970s, his desire to view naked children drove him to loiter around public toilets, where he frequently spied on young girls. He also purchased chewing gum which he gave to female children he encountered in efforts to initiate contact and gain their trust. Chikatilo is known to have sexually assaulted at least three girls whom he encountered via this method.
Chikatilo's career as a teacher ended in March 1981 following several complaints of child molestation against pupils of both sexes. The same month, he began a job as a supply clerk for a factory based in Rostov which produced construction materials. This job required him to travel extensively across much of the Soviet Union either to physically purchase the raw materials required to fulfil , or to negotiate supply contracts.
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: 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 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.
Nine months after the murder of Tkachenko, on 12 June 1982, Chikatilo travelled by bus to the Bagayevsky District of Rostov to purchase vegetables. Having to change buses in the village of Donskoi, he decided to continue his journey on foot. Walking away from the bus station, he encountered a 13-year-old girl, Lyubov Biryuk, who was walking home from a shopping trip. The two walked together for approximately a quarter of a mile until their path was shielded from the view of potential witnesses by bushes, whereupon Chikatilo pounced upon Biryuk, dragged her into nearby undergrowth, tore off her dress, and killed her by stabbing and slashing her to death as he imitated performing intercourse. When her body was found on 27 June, the medical examiner discovered evidence of twenty-two knife wounds inflicted to the head, neck, chest, and pelvic region. Further wounds found on the skull suggested the killer had attacked Biryuk from behind with the handle and blade of his knife. In addition, several striations were discovered upon Biryuk's eye sockets.
Following Biryuk's murder, Chikatilo no longer attempted to resist his homicidal urges: between July and September 1982, he killed a further five victims between the ages of 9 and 18. He established a pattern of approaching children, runaways, and young vagrancy at bus or railway stations, enticing them to a nearby forest or other secluded area, and killing them, usually by stabbing, slashing and Disembowelment the victim with a knife; although some victims, in addition to receiving a multitude of knife wounds, were also strangled or battered to death.
Many of the victims' bodies bore evidence of mutilation to the eye sockets. Pathologists concluded these injuries had been caused by a knife, leading investigators to the conclusion the killer had gouged out the eyes of his victims. Chikatilo's adult female victims were often or homeless women whom he would lure to secluded areas with promises of alcohol or money. He would typically attempt intercourse with these victims, but he would usually be unable to achieve or maintain an erection; this would send him into a murderous fury, particularly if the woman mocked his impotence. He would achieve orgasm only when he stabbed and slashed the victim to death. Chikatilo's child and adolescent victims were of both sexes; he would lure these victims to secluded areas using a variety of ruses, usually formed in the initial conversation with the victim, such as promising them assistance, company or offering to show them a shortcut, a bus stop, a chance to view rare stamps, films or coins, or with an offer of food or candy. He would usually overpower these victims once they were alone, often tying their hands behind their backs with a length of rope before stuffing mud or loam into the victims' mouths to silence their screams, and then proceed to kill them. After the killing, Chikatilo would make rudimentary—though seldom serious—efforts to conceal the body before leaving the crime scene.
On 11 December 1982, Chikatilo encountered a 10-year-old girl named Olga Stalmachenok riding a bus to her parents' home in Novoshakhtinsk and persuaded the child to leave the bus with him. She was last seen by a fellow passenger, who reported that a middle-aged man had led the girl away firmly by the hand. Chikatilo lured the girl to a cornfield on the outskirts of the city, stabbed her in excess of fifty times around the head and body, ripped open her chest and excised her lower bowel and uterus.
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 organ transplant, the work of a Satanism 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 or had been convicted of homosexuality or paedophilia were checked and logged in a Index card. Registered 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 her 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 emasculation and suffered over seventy knife wounds to his neck and upper torso before being eviscerated.
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 pretence of showing her a shortcut to a bus terminal. Alekseyeva suffered thirty-nine slash wounds to her body before Chikatilo mutilated and disembowelled 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 SSR capital of Tashkent on a business trip to purchase electrical switches. 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.
Chikatilo was found guilty of theft of property from his previous employer. His membership of the Communist Party was revoked and he was sentenced to one year in prison. He was released from custody on 12 December 1984 after serving three months. On 8 October 1984, the head of the Russian Public Prosecutors Office formally linked twenty-three of Chikatilo's murders into one case and dropped all charges against the mentally disabled youths who had previously confessed to the murders.
Based upon the hypothesis that the killer had travelled from the Rostov Oblast to Moscow via air, investigators checked all Aeroflot flight records of passengers who had commuted between Moscow and the Rostov region between late July and early August. On this occasion, however, Chikatilo had travelled to Moscow by train and, accordingly, no documentation existed for investigators to research. Four weeks later, on 27 August, Chikatilo killed another young woman, Irina Gulyaeva, in Shakhty. As had been the case with Pokhlistova, the wounds inflicted upon the victim linked her murder to the hunt for the serial killer.
In November 1985, a special procurator, Issa Kostoyev, was appointed to supervise the investigation, which had by this stage expanded to include fifteen procurators and twenty-nine detectives assigned to work exclusively upon the manhunt. The known murders linked to the manhunt were carefully re-investigated, and police began another round of questioning of known sex offenders and homosexuals. The following month, the militsiya resumed the patrolling of railway stations around Rostov, and plain clothed female officers were ordered to loiter around bus and train stations.
At the request of Burakov, 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. All crime scene and medical examiner's reports were made available to Bukhanovsky, upon the understanding he would produce a psychological profile of the unknown murderer for investigators.
Chikatilo followed the investigation carefully, reading newspaper reports about the ongoing manhunt which had begun to appear in the press and keeping his homicidal urges under control. For almost a year following the August 1985 murder of Gulyaeva, no further victims were found in either the Rostov or whose bodies bore the signature mutilations of the unknown murderer. Investigators did tentatively link the murder of a 33-year-old woman named Lyubov Golovakha—found stabbed to death in the Myasnikovsky District of Rostov on 23 July 1986—to the investigation, although this was solely upon the basis that the killer's semen type matched that of the killer they were seeking, that the victim had been stripped naked prior to her murder, and that she had been stabbed in excess of twenty times. The victim had not been dismemberment or otherwise mutilated, nor had she been seen near mass transportation. Because of these discrepancies, many investigators expressed serious doubts as to whether Golovakha's murder had been committed by the killer they were seeking.
As the victims killed in the Rostov Oblast in 1985 and 1986 had died in the months of July and August, by the autumn of 1986, some investigators gave credence to the possibility that the perpetrator had relocated to another part of the Soviet Union and was returning to the Rostov Oblast only in summer. The Rostov police compiled bulletins to be sent to all forces throughout the Soviet Union, describing the pattern of wounds their unknown killer inflicted upon his victims and requesting feedback from any police force who had discovered murder victims with wounds matching those upon the victims found in the Rostov Oblast. The response was negative.
Chikatilo did not kill again until 28 February 1989, when he killed a 16-year-old girl, Tatyana Ryzhova, in his daughter's vacant apartment. He dismembered her body and hid the remains in a nearby 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 these victims were linked to the manhunt.
With the resurfacing of victims definitively linked to the manhunt and the fact the majority of these victims' bodies had been discovered close to railway stations, investigators assigned numerous plainclothed officers to discreetly film and photograph passengers on trains throughout the Rostov Oblast. Several trains were also fitted with hidden cameras with the intention of filming or photographing a victim in the company of his or her murderer.
On 14 January 1990, Chikatilo encountered 11-year-old Andrei Kravchenko standing outside a Shakhty theatre. Kravchenko was lured from the theatre on the pretext of being shown imported Western world films Chikatilo claimed to have at his residence; his extensively stabbed, emasculated body was found in a secluded section of woodland the following month. Seven weeks after Kravchenko's murder, on 7 March, Chikatilo lured a 10-year-old boy, Yaroslav Makarov, from a Rostov train station to Rostov's Botanical Gardens. His eviscerated body was found the following day.
Chikatilo had killed three further victims by August 1990. On 4 April, he lured a 31-year-old woman, Lyubov Zuyeva, off a train and killed her in woodland near Donleskhoz station. Her body was not found until 24 August. On 28 July, he lured a 13-year-old boy, Viktor Petrov, away from a Rostov railway station and killed him in Rostov's Botanical Gardens; and on 14 August, he killed an 11-year-old boy, Ivan Fomin, in the reeds near Novocherkassk beach.
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.
On 13 November, Korostik's body was found; she was the thirty-eighth victim linked to the manhunt. 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. Not only was Chikatilo's name among those reports, but it was familiar to several officers involved in the case because he had been questioned in 1984 and had been placed upon a 1987 suspect list compiled and distributed throughout the Soviet Union. After checking with Chikatilo's present and previous employers, investigators were able to place him in various towns and cities at times when several victims linked to the investigation had been murdered. Questioning of former colleagues from Chikatilo's teaching days revealed that he had been forced to resign from two teaching positions due to repeated complaints of lewd behaviour and sexual assault made by his pupils.
Upon his arrest, 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 of the suspect revealed a further piece of evidence: one of Chikatilo's fingers had a deep flesh wound he had self-treated with iodine. Medical examiners concluded the wound was from a human bite. Chikatilo's penultimate victim, Viktor Tishchenko, was a physically strong youth. At the crime scene, the police found numerous signs of a ferocious physical struggle between the victim and his murderer. Although a finger bone was later found to be broken and his fingernail had been bitten off, Chikatilo had never sought medical treatment for this injury.
A search of Chikatilo's belongings revealed he was in possession of a folding knife and two lengths of rope. A sample of his blood was taken, and he was placed in a cell inside the KGB headquarters in Rostov with a Informant, who was instructed to engage Chikatilo in conversation and elicit any information he could from him. The next day, 21 November, formal questioning of Chikatilo began. The interrogation was performed by Issa Kostoyev. The strategy chosen by the police to elicit a confession was to lead Chikatilo to believe that he was a very sick individual in need of medical help. The intention was to give Chikatilo hope that if he confessed, he would not be prosecuted by insanity plea. 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 either charging or releasing him.
Throughout the questioning, Chikatilo repeatedly denied that he had committed the murders, although he did confess to molesting several of his pupils during his career as a teacher. He also produced several written essays for Kostoyev which, although evasive regarding the actual murders, did reveal psychological symptoms consistent with those predicted by Dr. Bukhanovsky in the 1985 profile he had written for the investigators. The interrogation tactics used by Kostoyev may also have caused Chikatilo to become defensive; the informer sharing a KGB cell with the suspect reported to police that Chikatilo had informed him that Kostoyev had repeatedly asked him direct questions regarding the mutilations inflicted upon the victims.
Armed with the handwritten notes Bukhanovsky had prepared, Kostoyev prepared a formal accusation of murder dated 29 November—the eve of the expiration of the ten-day time period during which Chikatilo could legally be held before being charged. The following morning, Kostoyev resumed the interrogation. According to the official protocol, Chikatilo confessed to thirty-six of the thirty-eight murders police had linked to him, although he denied two additional murders committed in 1986 the police had initially believed he had committed. One of these victims was Lyubov Golovakha, found stabbed to death in the village of Chaltyr on 23 July 1986 and whom many investigators had had serious doubts about linking to the manhunt; the second was Irina Pogoryelova, found murdered in Bataysk on 18 August 1986 and whose mutilations closely matched those inflicted upon other victims linked to the manhunt.
Chikatilo gave a full, detailed description of each murder on the list of charges, all of which were consistent with known facts regarding each killing. When prompted, he could draw a rough sketch of various crime scenes, indicating the position of the victim's body and various landmarks in the vicinity of the crime scene. Additional details provided further proof of his guilt: one victim on the list of charges was a 19-year-old student named Anna Lemesheva, whom Chikatilo had killed on 19 July 1984 near Shakhty station. Chikatilo recalled that as he had fought to overpower her, she had stated that a man named "Bars" ("Leopard") would retaliate for his attacking her. Lemesheva's fiancé had the nickname "Bars" tattooed on his hand.
In describing his victims, Chikatilo falsely referred to them as " elements" whom he would lure to secluded areas before killing. In many instances, particularly (though not exclusively) with his male victims, Chikatilo stated he would bind the victims' hands behind their backs with a length of rope before he would proceed to kill them. He would typically inflict a multitude of knife wounds upon the victim; initially inflicting shallow knife wounds to the chest area before inflicting deeper stab and slash wounds—usually thirty to fifty in total—before proceeding to eviscerate the victim as he writhed atop his or her body until he achieved orgasm. Chikatilo had, he stated, become adept at avoiding the spurts of blood from his victims' bodies as he inflicted the knife wounds and eviscerations upon them, and would regularly sit or squat beside his victims until their hearts had stopped beating, adding that the victims' "cries, the blood and the agony gave me relaxation and a certain pleasure."
When questioned as to why most of his later victims' eyes had been stabbed or slashed, but not enucleated as his earlier victims' eyes had been, Chikatilo stated that he had initially believed in an old Russian superstition that the image of a murderer is left imprinted upon the eyes of the victim. However, he stated, in "later years", he had become convinced this was simply an old wives' tale and he had ceased to gouge out the eyes of his victims.
Chikatilo also informed Kostoyev that although he was not homosexual, a male victim offered the same arousing bloodletting as a female via his mutilations and that he had often tasted the blood of his victims, to which he stated he "felt chills" and "shook all over". He also confessed to tearing at victims' genitalia, lips, nipples and tongues with his teeth. In several instances, Chikatilo would cut or bite off the tongue of his victim as he performed his eviscerations, then—either at or shortly after the point of death—run around the body as he held the tongue aloft in one hand. Although he also admitted that he had chewed upon the excised uterus of his female victims and the testicles of his male victims, he stated he had later discarded these body parts. Nonetheless, Chikatilo did confess to having swallowed the nipples and tongues of some of his victims.
On 30 November, Chikatilo was formally charged with each of the thirty-six murders he had confessed to, all of which had been committed between June 1982 and November 1990. Over the following days, Chikatilo confessed to a further twenty killings which had not been connected to the case, either because the murders had been committed outside the Rostov Oblast, because the bodies had not been found or, in the case of Yelena Zakotnova, because an innocent man had been convicted and executed for the murder. As had been the case with the victims compiled upon the initial list of charges, Chikatilo was able to provide details of these additional killings only the perpetrator could have known: one of these additional victims, 14-year-old Lyubov Volobuyeva, had lived in south-western Siberia, and had been killed in a sorghum field near Krasnodar Airport on 25 July 1982. Chikatilo recalled that he had killed Volobuyeva in a millet field and that he had approached the girl as she sat in the waiting rooms at Krasnodar Airport. Volobuyeva, Chikatilo stated, had informed him she lived in the Siberian city of Novokuznetsk, and was awaiting a connecting flight at the airport to visit relatives.
In December 1990, Chikatilo led police to the body of Aleksey Khobotov, a boy he had confessed to killing in August 1989 and whom he had buried on the outskirts of 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, but he was charged with killing fifty-three women and children between 1978 and 1990. He was held in the same cell in Rostov where he had been detained on 20 November to await trial.
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 Facial composite 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 the 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 him 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' murders were revealed. After reading the indictment, Akubzhanov announced to the journalists present in the courtroom his intention to conduct an public 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 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, Khabibulin 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. Judge Akubzhanov would later rule that the prosecutor be replaced instead, briefly conducting the trial in the absence of a prosecutor until a replacement prosecutor, Anatoly Zadorozhny, could be found.
On 3 July, Bukhanovsky was permitted to testify as to his analysis of Chikatilo, although solely in the capacity of 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 his confession. Four psychiatric experts from the Serbsky Institute also testified as to the results of a Behaviorism they had conducted on Chikatilo in May, following the initial adjournment of the trial. All testified as to his courtroom behaviour being strikingly in 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.
The following day, prosecutor Anatoly Zadorozhny delivered his closing argument before the judge. Harking towards the earlier testimony of psychiatrists at the trial, Zadorozhny argued that Chikatilo fully understood the criminality of his actions, was able to resist his homicidal impulses, and had made numerous conscious efforts to avoid detection. Moreover, Zadorozhny emphasized that in 19 of the charges, the material evidence of the crimes had been provided by Chikatilo himself. Zadorozhny then recited each of the charges before formally requesting the death penalty.
Following the conclusion of the prosecutor's closing argument, Akubzhanov invited Chikatilo back into the courtroom before formally asking him whether he would like to make a final statement on his own behalf. In response, Chikatilo simply sat mute. Akubzhanov then announced an initial date of 15 September for himself and the two official jurors to review the evidence and pass the final sentence upon Chikatilo. (This date was later postponed until 14 October.) As court announced recess, the older brother of Lyudmila Alekseyeva, a 17-year-old girl killed by Chikatilo in August 1984, threw a heavy chunk of metal at Chikatilo, hitting him in the chest. When security tried to arrest the young man, other victims' relatives shielded him.
On 14 October, the court reconvened to hear formal sentencing (this sentencing would not finish until the following day). Akubzhanov began sentencing by announcing Chikatilo guilty of fifty-two of the fifty-three murders for which he had been tried. He was sentenced to death for each offence. Chikatilo was also found guilty of five counts of sexual assault committed during the years he worked as a teacher in the 1970s. In reciting his findings, the judge read the list of murders again, before criticizing both the police and the prosecutor's department for various mistakes in the investigation which had allowed Chikatilo to remain free until 1990. Particular criticism was directed towards not local police, but the prosecutor's department—primarily procurator Issa Kostoyev—whom Akubzhanov scathed as "negligent", and who had been dismissive of Chikatilo's inclusion upon a 1987 suspect list compiled by police. Akubzhanov also rejected the numerous claims Kostoyev had made to the media in the months prior to the trial that police had deliberately withheld documents pertaining to Chikatilo from the prosecutor's department as being provably baseless, adding that proof existed he had been in possession of all internal bulletins.
On 15 October, Akubzhanov formally sentenced Chikatilo to death plus eighty-six years' imprisonment for the fifty-two murders and five counts of sexual assault for which he had been found guilty. Chikatilo kicked his bench across his cage when he heard the verdict and began shouting abuse. However, when given an opportunity to make a speech in response to the verdict, he again remained silent. Upon passing the final sentence, Akubzhanov made the following remark:
Chikatilo was taken from the courtroom to his cell at Novocherkassk prison to await execution. He did lodge an appeal against his conviction with the Supreme Court of Russia, but this appeal was rejected in the summer of 1993.
On 14 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. He was buried in an unmarked grave within the prison cemetery. Андрей Чикатило: ″Я молю Бога, чтобы таких, как я, больше не было на земле!" Fakty.ua (in Russian)
| 1 | Yelena Zakotnova | F | 9 | 22 December 1978 | No | Chikatilo's first victim. Accosted while walking home from an ice-skating rink. She was killed inside a small hut Chikatilo had secretly purchased in Shakhty. |
| 2 | Larisa Tkachenko | F | 17 | 3 September 1981 | No | Approached by Chikatilo while waiting for a bus back to her boarding school. Her body was found the following day. |
| 3 | Lyubov Biryuk | F | 13 | 12 June 1982 | Yes | Biryuk was abducted while returning from a shopping trip in the village of Donskoi. She was the first victim linked to the manhunt. |
| 4 | Lyubov Volobuyeva | F | 14 | 25 July 1982 | No | Killed in an orchard near Krasnodar Airport. Her body was found on 7 August. |
| 5 | Oleg Pozhidayev | M | 9 | 13 August 1982 | No | Chikatilo's first male victim. Pozhidayev was killed in woodland near the settlement of Enem in the Republic of Adygea. His body was never found. |
| 6 | Olga Kuprina | F | 16 | 16 August 1982 | Yes | A runaway from the Semikarakorsky District. Kuprina was killed in Kazachi Lagerya. Her body was found by a soldier gathering logs on 27 October. |
| 7 | Irina Karabelnikova | F | 18 | 8 September 1982 | Yes | A vagrant lured away from Shakhty station by Chikatilo. Her body was found on 20 September but remained unidentified until 1985. |
| 8 | Sergey Kuzmin | M | 15 | 15 September 1982 | No | Kuzmin was a runaway from a boarding school. His body was found in woodland close to Shakhty station on 12 January 1983. No soft tissue was left upon his remains, which were initially determined to be those of a female. |
| 9 | Olga Stalmachenok | F | 10 | 11 December 1982 | Yes | Lured off a bus while riding home from her piano lessons in Novoshakhtinsk. Her body was found in a cornfield on 14 April 1983. |
| 10 | Laura Sarkisyan | F | 15 | After 18 June 1983 | No | A runaway from Armenia killed in woodland near an unmarked railway platform close to Shakhty. Chikatilo was cleared of this murder at his trial. |
| 11 | Irina Dunenkova | F | 13 | July 1983 | Yes | Dunenkova was a mentally disabled student whom Chikatilo had known prior to her murder. Her body was found in Aviators' Park, Rostov, on 8 August. |
| 12 | Lyudmila Kutsyuba | F | 24 | July 1983 | Yes | A homeless mother of two children killed in woodland near a Shakhty bus station. Her body was found on 12 March 1984. |
| 13 | Igor Gudkov | M | 7 | 9 August 1983 | Yes | Chikatilo's youngest victim. He was killed in Aviators' Park. Gudkov was the first male victim linked to the manhunt. |
| 14 | Unknown woman | F | 18–25 | July–August 1983 | Yes | Chikatilo claimed he encountered this victim at Novoshakhtinsk bus station while she tried to find a "man (client) with a car." Her body was found on 8 October. |
| 15 | Valentina Chuchulina | F | 22 | After 19 September 1983 | Yes | Chuchulina's body was found on 27 November in a wooded area near Kirpichnaya station. |
| 16 | Vera Shevkun | F | 19 | 27 October 1983 | Yes | Killed in a mining village near Shakhty. Her body was found on 30 October. |
| 17 | Sergey Markov | M | 14 | 27 December 1983 | Yes | Disappeared while returning home from work experience. His body was found near Novocherkassk on 4 January 1984. |
| 18 | Natalya Shalapinina | F | 17 | 9 January 1984 | Yes | Killed in Aviators' Park. Shalapinina had been a close friend of Olga Kuprina, killed by Chikatilo in 1982. |
| 19 | Marta Ryabenko | F | 44 | 21 February 1984 | Yes | Chikatilo's oldest victim. She was killed in Aviators' Park. Her body was found the following day. |
| 20 | Dmitriy Ptashnikov | M | 10 | 24 March 1984 | Yes | Lured from a stamp kiosk in Novoshakhtinsk by Chikatilo, who pretended to be a fellow collector. |
| 21 | Tatyana Petrosyan | F | 29 | 25 May 1984 | Yes | Murdered together with her daughter in woodland outside Shakhty, close to Kirpichnaya station. She had known Chikatilo since 1978. Her body was identified in 1985. |
| 22 | Svetlana Petrosyan | F | 10 | 25 May 1984 | Yes | Svetlana saw Chikatilo murder her mother before he chased her for almost half a mile and killed her with a hammer. Her decapitated body was found on 5 July. |
| 23 | Yelena Bakulina | F | 21 | 22 June 1984 | Yes | Bakulina's body was found on 27 August in the Bagasenski region of Rostov. She had been stabbed to death, and her body covered with leaves and branches. |
| 24 | Dmitriy Illarionov | M | 13 | 10 July 1984 | Yes | Vanished in Rostov while on his way to get a health certificate for summer camp. His emasculated and stabbed body was found in a cornfield on 12 August. |
| 25 | Anna Lemesheva | F | 19 | 19 July 1984 | Yes | A student who disappeared on her way home from a dental appointment. She was killed near Kirpichnaya station. |
| 26 | Sarmite Tsana | F | 20 | c. 28 July 1984 | No | Originally from Riga. Her body was found on 9 September 1984 in Aviators' Park. Tsana's murder was the final to which Chikatilo confessed. |
| 27 | Natalya Golosovskaya | F | 16 | 2 August 1984 | Yes | Vanished on a visit to Novoshakhtinsk, where she was to visit her sister. She was killed in Aviators' Park. |
| 28 | Lyudmila Alekseyeva | F | 17 | 7 August 1984 | Yes | A student lured from a bus stop by Chikatilo, who offered to direct her to Rostov's bus terminal. |
| 29 | Unknown woman | F | 20–25 | 8–11 August 1984 | No | Chikatilo encountered this victim on the banks of the Chirchiq River while on a business trip to the Uzbek SSR. Her decapitated body was found on 16 August, but was never identified. |
| 30 | Akmaral Seydaliyeva | F | 10 | 13 August 1984 | No | Seydaliyeva was a runaway from Alma-Ata, Kazakh SSR, whom Chikatilo lured off a train in Tashkent. She was bludgeoned and stabbed to death in a cornfield. |
| 31 | Aleksandr Chepel | M | 11 | 28 August 1984 | Yes | Killed on the banks of the Don River, near where Alekseyeva had been killed. His strangled body was found on 2 September. |
| 32 | Irina Luchinskaya | F | 24 | 6 September 1984 | Yes | A Rostov librarian. Luchinskaya disappeared on her way to a sauna. She was killed in Aviators' Park. |
| 33 | Natalya Pokhlistova | F | 18 | 1 August 1985 | Yes | Pokhlistova was killed by Chikatilo near Domodedovo Airport, Moscow Oblast. Her body was found on 3 August, just 200 metres from her home. |
| 34 | Irina Gulyayeva | F | 18 | 27 August 1985 | Yes | Killed in a grove of trees near Shakhty bus station. Her body was found the following day. |
| 35 | Oleg Makarenkov | M | 12 | 16 May 1987 | No | A boarding school student killed in Revda, Sverdlovsk Oblast. Chikatilo led police to Makarenkov's remains after his arrest. |
| 36 | Ivan Bilovetsky | M | 12 | 29 July 1987 | No | Bilovetsky was killed in woodland alongside a rail line in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia. His body was found by his father on 30 July. |
| 37 | Yuri Tereshonok | M | 16 | 15 September 1987 | No | A vocational school student whom Chikatilo lured off a train in Leningrad. Chikatilo led police to his remains after his arrest. |
| 38 | Unknown woman | F | 22–28 | 1–4 April 1988 | No | Killed in the grounds of a metals factory near Krasny Sulin station. Her body was found on 6 April. |
| 39 | Aleksey Voronko | M | 9 | 15 May 1988 | Yes | Chikatilo encountered Voronko while on a business trip to Bakhmut. He was killed in Ilovaisk, Ukraine. |
| 40 | Yevgeny Muratov | M | 15 | 14 July 1988 | Yes | The first victim killed near Rostov since 1985. Muratov's body was found in a forest close to Donleskhoz station on 10 April 1989. |
| 41 | Tatyana Ryzhova | F | 16 | 28 February 1989 | No | A runaway from Kamensk-Shakhtinsky, she was killed inside Chikatilo's own daughter's apartment in Shakhty. Her dismembered body was found on 9 March. |
| 42 | Aleksandr Dyakonov | M | 8 | 11 May 1989 | Yes | Killed in a thicket of bushes near Rostov city centre the day after his eighth birthday. His body was found by a taxi driver on 14 July. |
| 43 | Aleksey Moiseyev | M | 10 | 20 June 1989 | No | In his confessions, Chikatilo described Moiseyev as "a boy from Kolchugino, Vladimir Oblast, whom I took from the beach into the forest". Chikatilo confessed to this murder after his arrest. |
| 44 | Yelena Varga | F | 19 | 19 August 1989 | Yes | A student from Hungary who had a child. She was lured from a bus stop and killed in woodland close to a village near Rostov. |
| 45 | Aleksey Khobotov | M | 10 | 28 August 1989 | No | Encountered Chikatilo outside a theatre in Shakhty. He was buried in a shallow grave in a nearby cemetery. Chikatilo led police to his remains after his arrest. |
| 46 | Andrei Kravchenko | M | 11 | 14 January 1990 | Yes | Kravchenko was abducted from the streets near his Shakhty home. His emasculated body was found in a section of woodland on 19 February. |
| 47 | Yaroslav Makarov | M | 10 | 7 March 1990 | Yes | Disappeared from Rostov railway station while truanting from school. Makarov was killed in Rostov's Botanical Gardens. His body, missing the tongue and sexual organs, was found the following day. |
| 48 | Lyubov Zuyeva | F | 31 | 4 April 1990 | No | Encountered Chikatilo while travelling from Novocherkassk to Shakhty. Her skeletonization body was found in woodland close to Donleskhoz station on 24 August. |
| 49 | Viktor Petrov | M | 13 | 28 July 1990 | Yes | Chikatilo lured Petrov from the Rostov-Glavny station, where the boy and his family had chosen to await an early morning bus. He was killed in Rostov's Botanical Gardens, a few yards from where Makarov had been murdered. |
| 50 | Ivan Fomin | M | 11 | 14 August 1990 | Yes | Fomin was killed at Novocherkassk municipal beach when he entered a thicket to change his clothes. He was emasculated and stabbed 42 times. His body was found on 17 August. |
| 51 | Vadim Gromov | M | 16 | 17 October 1990 | Yes | A mentally disabled student from Shakhty. Gromov vanished while riding the train to Taganrog. |
| 52 | Viktor Tishchenko | M | 16 | 30 October 1990 | Yes | Killed in Shakhty. Tishchenko fought hard for his life; he was the victim who bit and broke Chikatilo's finger. |
| 53 | Svetlana Korostik | F | 22 | 6 November 1990 | Yes | Korostik was a homeless woman whom Chikatilo killed in woodland near Donleskhoz station. Her body was found on 13 November. |
Note
Akubzhanov cleared Chikatilo of the murder of 15-year-old Laura Sarkisyan at his trial due to insufficient evidence. Sarkisyan, a runaway from Soviet 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 railway station.
Although he had been unable to identify Sarkisyan's picture when presented to him, the timing of her 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. Despite the fact that 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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