Criminal Minds (40 page)

By this time, Dinsdale had a regular MO. He either entered a house through an unlocked door and poured kerosene, then lit it, or he poured the kerosene inside through the mail slot and stuffed burning paper in to ignite the accelerant.

During his teen years, Dinsdale wasn’t just setting fires. He worked at a racetrack and a pig market, sometimes babysat for younger children, and earned extra cash as a “rent boy,” a young man who loiters around public restrooms to provide sexual services for older men.

His fire-setting habit continued, however. He severely injured Ros Fenton, who spent months in the hospital and lost her unborn baby, as well as her daughter, Samantha. In another incident, six-month-old Katrina Thacker was killed.

Dinsdale’s worst attack might have been at the Wensley Lodge retirement home. Eleven elderly men perished in the blaze, making it one of Britain’s worst mass murders. This fire was blamed on a plumber who had been using a blowtorch in the boiler room earlier that day.

All of these fires were attributed to accidents, so the police never got involved. Only the Brewer and the Thacker fires were the results of some slight, real or imagined; Dinsdale set the others simply because he could.

In “Zoe’s Reprise,” Morgan and the team pursue a copycat serial killer who is re-creating the techniques used by past famous murderers.

The end of Dinsdale’s reign of fire came after he set a fire at the home of Tommy and Edith Hastie. Tommy was a small-time criminal who was in prison for burglary. His oldest son had been involved in the robbery with him, and the other children were frequently in trouble. The night of the fire, the couple’s three daughters were staying with relatives, and Edith Hastie was home with her four sons. She woke up when the house was almost fully engulfed in flames. Charlie, fifteen, managed to push Edith out a second-story window. She broke an ankle, but she lived. Only one of her sons survived his burns.

This time, arson was easily confirmed. Detective Superintendent Ronald Sagar discovered a ring of kerosene and some used matches near the door. Dinsdale later admitted that he had tried to start the fire with matches and, failing that, had shoved lit newspaper inside.

Sagar had a hard time making progress in the case. In that neighborhood, talking to the police was frowned upon. Every apparent lead turned into another dead end.

Only one tip seemed promising. A witness had seen two men running away from the Hastie house and getting into a Rover 2000. Drug dealers favored those cars, and the Hastie family was known to have crime connections. Perhaps one of the Hasties had angered a dealer. This, too, led nowhere, and after a couple of months of the police watching everyone in the area who drove a Rover 2000, the witness declared that he’d made a mistake—the occurrence he had seen had taken place on a different night, not the night of the fire.

Sagar was running out of ideas, and the case was growing colder. Because one of the Rover 2000 drivers he’d followed had been a frequent customer of rent boys, Sagar decided to haul some of them in for questioning.

One, Bruce George Peter Lee, admitted not only to knowing Charlie Hastie but also to having engaged in sexual activity with him. The case had been open six months, and Sagar’s superiors wanted to shut the investigation down. Sagar read Dinsdale his rights, then accused him of starting the fire, suggesting that their “indecency” was behind it.

“I didn’t mean to kill them,” Dinsdale said of the Hasties. He admitted that Charlie had demanded money or else he’d tell the police what they’d been up to. Dinsdale had a crush on Angie Hastie, Charlie’s older sister, but she wouldn’t give him the time of day. These two factors made him angry enough to burn down the house.

Once he started confessing, Dinsdale told Sagar about the other fires and pointed out houses that he’d burned. He had, he said, started at least thirty fires around Hull. By the time he was finished confessing, he had accepted the blame for twenty-six deaths. “I like fires,” he said. “I do. I like fires.”

Dinsdale pleaded guilty to twenty-six counts of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished capacity, with some arson counts thrown in for good measure. He was sentenced to the Rampton Secure Hospital, a high-security mental institution.

In 1981, the
Sunday Times
of London investigated Dinsdale’s claims and concluded that he could not have started the fire at Wensley Lodge. A justice agreed and struck those eleven deaths from Dinsdale’s record, setting his body count at only fifteen—still a major figure in the annals of British murderers.

At Rampton, Dinsdale married a fellow patient, Ann-Marie Davison. He’s legally entitled to be married, but he and his wife are not allowed to consummate their marriage.

Although Dinsdale could theoretically be released if he’s ever judged sane, given his record it’s unlikely that he will ever be free to start fires again or to enjoy relations with his bride.

 

 

WHEN THE BAU
profilers travel to Mexico in “Machismo” (119), they discuss the apparent discrepancy between the number of serial killers that Mexico has had and the number that the country admits to having. Jason Gideon blames the “Chikatilo syndrome.” Spencer Reid elaborates a bit, explaining that Andrei Chikatilo, a Russian, murdered more than fifty people before he was caught, largely because the Soviet Union believed that serial killers were a decadent Western phenomenon and therefore wouldn’t admit that it had one.

Not only did that attitude make it hard for the Soviet police to track down the killer, it also meant that potential victims didn’t take steps to protect themselves, because the state-run media weren’t allowed to warn the public that a serial killer was on the loose.

After Chikatilo’s first murder, on December 22, 1978, the Soviet bureaucracy made it easy for him to get away with it. He lured a nine-year-old girl into an old house and tried to rape her, but he was unable to achieve an erection. He choked her to death and stabbed her, which finally brought him to a climax.

Evidence could have connected Chikatilo to the murder, but the authorities focused on another man who had a previous conviction for rape and murder. They arrested this man and tortured him until he confessed. He was sentenced to fifteen years, but when the victim’s relatives pressured the courts for harsher justice, the wrong man was retried and executed. Chikatilo had killed, but he would not be punished for it.

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born in Ukraine on October 16, 1934. He was born with hydrocephalus, an excess of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain, which caused him to have a misshapen head and other physical ailments. A terrible famine racked Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, thanks to Joseph Stalin’s desire to crush Ukrainian nationalism. In 1932 Stalin raised Ukraine’s grain procurement quotas by 44 percent. This meant that there would not be enough grain for the peasants, because Soviet law required that no grain from a collective farm could be given to the residents of the farm until the government’s quota was met. The result was that at least six million people died. Some turned to cannibalism to survive.

Chikatilo’s mother told Andrei and his sister that their older brother, Stepan, had been a victim of cannibals. There is no independent evidence that Stepan ever existed, and he might have simply been a figment of her imagination. When the USSR entered World War II, Chikatilo’s father was conscripted, and Chikatilo spent those years sleeping in his mother’s bed. He was a chronic bed-wetter, and she beat him every time he soiled her sheets.

During the war, Chikatilo witnessed the effects of German bombing, and later he said that the bodies in the street both frightened and excited him.

Chikatilo was a lonely child, partly blind and given to violent fantasies. His first sexual experience was at fifteen, when he grabbed a ten-year-old friend of his sister’s and wrestled with her, which caused him to ejaculate. For most of his life thereafter, he was impotent, although he could achieve orgasm through the violent abuse of his victims.

Despite his physical and emotional problems, Chikatilo was intelligent, and he tried to get into Moscow State University. He failed the entrance exam, so he fulfilled his mandatory military service and then became a telephone engineer. His sister moved in with him and arranged a meeting with a girlfriend, Fayina, whom Chikatilo subsequently married. Even with her he couldn’t achieve an erection, but he could ejaculate and inseminate her by hand; in this way they had two children and the semblance of a normal life.

Chikatilo changed careers and became a schoolteacher. That didn’t last long, because there were complaints about his inappropriate behavior toward the children. He moved from school to school and town to town as he kept being fired from each teaching job. He finally ended up as a factory clerk near the city of Rostov-on-Don, and he held this position until his arrest. It was there that he began killing, at the advanced age of forty-two.

Enough trust was put in him by the company that Chikatilo was sent all over the country by himself, and he did this frequent travel by train or bus. Although many of his homicides occurred close enough to home to earn him the nickname the Rostov Ripper, he frequently picked victims near bus depots and train stations in the cities he traveled to—making him even more difficult to pin down.

After his first victim in 1978, Chikatilo didn’t kill again until 1981. That year he took one victim, a seventeen-year-old student whom he enticed to have sex but who laughed at his inability to become erect. Between June and December 1982, he killed six girls between the ages of ten and nineteen as well as a nine-year-old boy.

His pattern was to lure them from a rail station or depot into nearby woods, where he would stab and slash and mutilate, some with as many as seventy separate wounds. He often slashed or cut out the eyes. Sometimes he ate internal organs, and possibly sexual organs, which he frequently removed from his victims. Later he took to slicing off the upper lip or nose and leaving it inside the victim’s mouth or slashed-open stomach.

The next year, 1983, Chikatilo again took a break until June. Between then and the end of the year, he murdered six more women and girls, who ranged in age from thirteen to twenty-five, and two boys, ages seven—his youngest victim yet—and fourteen. Chikatilo murdered fifteen victims in 1984, including his oldest yet, a forty-five-year-old woman, and a mother-daughter combination. Two of the year’s victims were male, the rest female.

Chikatilo was arrested twice during these years, once when a police officer observed suspicious behavior around the bus stops and saw Chikatilo receiving oral sex from a prostitute. When Chikatilo was arrested, he had a knife and a length of rope under his coat, but his blood type didn’t match what the authorities were looking for, based on semen samples from other crime scenes, so he was released. Another time he served three months in prison for petty thefts.

In 1985, Chikatilo was relatively quiet, killing only twice: both victims were eighteen-year-old girls. He didn’t kill again until 1987, when his victims were three boys, ages twelve, thirteen, and sixteen. In 1988 he committed three more murders, two boys and a young woman, and that pattern repeated in 1989. During this period, the authorities learned that semen samples don’t always match up to blood types.

As if a dam had broken, in 1990 Chikatilo broke his own record, killing eight victims: six boys and two women. The Soviet investigators were drawing nearer, and during that year they developed a plan to place obvious officers at certain stations and depots, forcing their unsub to take his victims from the stations where they had plainclothes officers positioned.

Their plan worked, and they came up with a suspect. He was someone they had talked to before and had released, but now they knew that their science had been faulty. Chikatilo was picked up again, in spite of a lack of solid evidence. He could be held for ten days, and nine passed before he finally confessed. The police thought they had him on thirty-six homicides, but there were far more, as many as fifty-five or fifty-six, Chikatilo claimed. Some could not be corroborated, and he was charged with fifty-three counts of murder.