The Devil's Dozen (17 page)

Burakov was in despair. They’d formed a good plan, and had it been in place, they might have caught the Maniac!

When another missing boy was found dead near the Shakhty railroad station, Burakov got moving. He set the snare, with everyone in place, but, undetected, the killer grabbed a young woman—number thirty-six. Burakov was beginning to think they were chasing the devil himself.

Yet there were reports of men who had been at the train station near this crime scene. One name stood out. In fact, the very sight of it chilled Burakov to the bone. Over half a million people had been investigated by this time, but this particular man had been interrogated and released only because his blood type had not matched that of the semen samples. This man had to be the killer. Burakov was sure of it. The man fit the descriptions, he had gray hair, and he’d been carrying a knife and a rope in his briefcase.

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo, fifty-four, had been at the Donleskhoz train station on November 6. A witness said he’d emerged from the woods, a red smear on his face, and washed his hands at a pump.

Burakov placed him under surveillance and did a thorough background review. He was married with two children, and had been accused of molesting a student, which forced him to resign from a teaching post. So he had sexual problems. He had then worked for a company at a job that allowed him to travel, but was fired when he failed to return from business trips with the supplies he was sent to get. He had spent three months in jail for a petty offense, and during that time, there had been no murders. In addition, records showed that his trips coincided with other murders—including the one in Moscow. He had once been a member in good standing in the Communist Party, but had ultimately been expelled.

Yet even with all this documentation, Burakov knew his case was weak. They would need to catch Chikatilo in the act or get him to confess, but allowing him to freely roam risked letting him kill someone else. Kostoyev ordered his arrest, believing he could get a confession out of him.

On November 20, 1990, three officers dressed in street clothes surrounded Chikatilo and brought him in for interrogation. They noticed that he did not have a mouth full of gold teeth, as one witness had stated, but in his satchel was a pocket-knife. Chikatilo was put into a cell where a gifted informant had been placed, but this strategy failed. A search of Chikatilo’s home produced no items that had belonged to any of the victims, but did yield no fewer than twenty-three knives. A medical examination indicated that Chikatilo’s semen supposedly had a weak B antibody, making it appear that his blood type was AB. The lab personnel called him the “paradoxical” rare case. More likely, the lab had screwed up in the first place and then tried to cover up the mistake.

Kostoyev decided to handle the interrogation himself, in the presence of Chikatilo’s court-appointed lawyer. He wanted the room to be spartan, with only a table, chairs, and a safe that would hint of the presence of incriminating evidence. Kostoyev had failed to obtain a confession in only three out of the hundreds of interrogations he had conducted. He reputedly had a knack for getting inside a suspect’s head, figuring out how he thought, and getting him to talk. All guilty men eventually confessed, he believed: they had to. In any event, he knew he had a full ten days, and in addition, he had some bait.

When Chikatilo was brought in, Kostoyev could see that he was a tall, older man with a long neck, sloping shoulders, oversize glasses, and gray hair. He walked with a shuffling gait, like a weary elderly person, but Kostoyev was not fooled. He believed Chikatilo was a calculating killer with plenty of energy available when he needed it.

Chikatilo insisted that his arrest had been a mistake. He denied that he had been at a train station on November 6 and did not know why this had been reported. He said little else, but the next day, he waived his right to legal counsel. He wrote a three-page document in which he confessed to “sexual weakness”—the words he had used before. He hinted at “perverse sexual activity,” but did not specify what this meant, and said that he was out of control. Then he wrote another, longer essay in which he said that he had moved around in train stations and had seen how young people there fell victim to homeless beggars. He also admitted that he was impotent.

Kostoyev told him that his only hope would be to confess everything in a way that showed he had mental problems, so that an examination could affirm that he was, in fact, legally insane. Otherwise the evidence would surely convict him without a confession. That was Kostoyev’s bait.

Chikatilo asked for a few days to collect himself and said he would submit to an interrogation. Everyone expected him to confess, but when the day arrived, he insisted that he was guilty of no crimes. For each crucial time period involving a murder, he claimed that he was at home with his wife.

The next day, he revised his statements. In 1977, he had fondled some female students who had aroused him. He had difficulty controlling himself around children, but there were only two instances in which he had lost control.

Nine days elapsed and Kostoyev had gotten no closer to his goal. Clearly, he had met his match. He could think of no other approach to take to pressure this man to finally open up. He brought in photographers and said they had witnesses to whom they were going to show these photographs. Still, Chikatilo did not yield.

It was looking as if they might have to let him go, which would be disastrous. Burakov thought they should try another interrogator—Dr. Bukhanovsky. Kostoyev initially resisted, but finally had to admit he was getting nowhere. He agreed to let the psychiatrist see what he could do.

Bukhanovsky agreed to question Chikatilo, but only out of professional interest. He was soon alone in a closed room with the likeliest suspect in the
lesopolosa
murders. The psychiatrist saw right away that Chikatilo was the type of man he had described in his profile: ordinary, solitary, ostensibly nonthreatening. He introduced himself and then showed Chikatilo the profile. He sensed that the offender wanted to talk about his rage and his humiliation, so it was best to show sympathy. He listened for a while before he discussed the crimes. Discussing his report, he spoke for some time, in rich detail, and as Chikatilo listened, he seemed affected by the psychiatrist’s analysis and finally surrendered, saying he would tell everything. His story was even more perverse than anyone had realized.

Among his admissions was that his first murder had occurred in 1978, before the police had begun to keep track of them. He had killed a little girl. This was alarming, since a man had already been arrested, tried, and executed for that murder. But Chikatilo said that he had moved to Shakhty that year to teach. He spent time watching children and feeling a strong desire to see them naked. To maintain his privacy, he purchased a hut on a dark, dirty street. When he went to it one day, he encountered the girl, so he took her inside and attacked her. When he could not achieve an erection, he used his knife as a substitute for his penis. After she died, he tossed her body into a nearby river.

Kostoyev asked him to explain the blindfolds he had used, and just as investigators had suspected, Chikatilo admitted that he had heard that the image of a killer remains in the eyes of a victim. That was why he had stabbed so many of his victims in the eyes. Then he had decided it was not true, so he stopped doing it (explaining the change in pattern).

Chikatilo had grown obsessed with reliving the crime, and this was compounded by anger over an injustice he believed he had suffered. His fantasies became more violent. In 1981, he attacked a girl who was begging for money, and used his teeth to bite off one of her nipples and swallow it. This, he found, made him ejaculate. He covered the body with newspaper and took her sexual organs away with him.

The killer went on and on. He remembered the details of each of the thirty-six
lesopolosa
murders. Sometimes he acted as a predator, learning someone’s routes and habits. Others were victims of opportunity. The stabbing almost always was a substitute for sexual intercourse, and he had learned how to squat beside victims in such a way as to avoid getting their blood on his clothing. His impotence generally triggered his rage, especially if a woman ridiculed him. He soon understood that he could not get aroused without violence and blood.

With the boys, Chikatilo would fantasize that they were his captives and that he was some kind of hero for torturing them. He could not give a reason for cutting off their tongues and penises, although at one point he said he was getting revenge against life. With grown women, Chikatilo would place his semen inside a uterus that he had removed, and as he walked along, he would chew on it—“the truffle of sexual murder.” He said it gave him an “animal satisfaction” to chew or swallow nipples or testicles.

To corroborate what he was saying, he drew sketches of the crime scenes, and what he said fit the known facts. Then he confirmed what everyone had feared—he added more victims to the list. Many more. One boy he had killed in a cemetery and placed in a shallow grave. He took the interrogators there and they recovered the body. Another was killed in a field, and she was located. On and on it went, murders here and there, and the bodies were always left right where they were killed, except for one. Chikatilo described a murder in an empty apartment; in order to get the body out, he’d had to dismember it and dump the parts down a sewer.

In the end, he confessed to fifty-six murders, although there was corroboration for only fifty-three: thirty-one females and twenty-two males. The police now had sufficient evidence to take this man to court.

Chikatilo was born in 1936 in a small Ukrainian village; his head was misshapen as a result of water on the brain. His father was a POW in World War II and had been sent to a prison camp in Russia, so his mother raised him and his younger sister on her own.

During the early part of the twentieth century, citizens of the former Soviet Union were often subjected to famines, especially in the Ukraine, after Stalin crushed independent farmers and sent many citizens to the Siberian gulag. Some six million people died of starvation, and desperate people were known to strip meat from corpses in order to survive. Sometimes they went to a cemetery, where corpses were stacked for burial, and sometimes (legend has it) they grabbed someone on the street. Human flesh was bought and sold, or just hoarded.

Children saw disfigured corpses and heard terrible tales of hardship. Chikatilo had grown up during several of these famines; according to his mother, he had once had an older brother, Stepan, who had been killed. In a prison interview, he said, “Many people went crazy, attacked people, ate people. So they caught my brother, who was ten, and ate him.” He might simply have died and been consumed, if he even existed (which could not be corroborated in any records), but Chikatilo’s mother used to warn him to stay in the yard or he might get eaten as well.

Most of his childhood was spent alone, living in his fantasies. Other children mocked him for his awkwardness, so to entertain and empower himself, he dreamed up images of torture, which remained a feature of his killings later in life. He had his first sexual experience as an adolescent when he struggled with a ten-year-old friend of his sister’s and ejaculated. That impressed itself on him, especially as he grew older and realized he was unable to get an erection but able to ejaculate.

When he returned from the army ready to settle down with a wife, he found he was still unable to perform sexually. A girl spread this information around, humiliating him, and he dreamed about catching her and tearing her to pieces. His sister arranged a marriage for him with a woman who belittled him, but he could only impregnate her by ejaculating outside her and pushing his semen in by hand. He became a teacher and soon found himself attracted to young girls. Molesting them gave him satisfaction, but when such incidents were reported, they were covered up and denied instead of leading to prosecution.

For true satisfaction, Chikatilo needed violence, so he started to commit murder. Since he was on the road quite often as a parts supply liaison, it was easy to find vulnerable strangers. Chikatilo believed he suffered from an illness that caused his uncontrollable transgressions. He asked to see specialists in sexual deviance, so he was sent to Moscow’s Serbsky Institute for two months. Neurologists there determined that his brain had been damaged at birth, and this had affected his ability to control his bladder and emissions of semen. However, he was found to be sane: he knew what he was doing and he could have controlled it. That was good enough for the prosecutor.

Brought back to Rostov, Chikatilo went to trial on April 14, 1992, placed inside a large iron cage. The judge sat at a dais and two citizens on either side acted as jurors. There were 225 volumes of information against him. Since the press spread the word about the Maniac’s trial, the courtroom was filled with relatives of his victims. When he entered, they screamed at him. Now bald and without his glasses, he looked slightly psychotic, especially when he drooled and rolled his eyes or dropped his trousers.

That he would be found guilty of murder was a foregone conclusion, but there was a chance that his psychological problems could save him from execution. However, his lawyer, Marat Khabibulin, was not allowed to call psychiatric experts; he could only cross-examine those experts that the prosecution put on the stand, and since he had not been appointed until after Chikatilo had fully confessed, he was at a serious disadvantage.

Judge Leonid Akubzhanov asked sharp questions and tossed off demeaning comments at the prisoner. Chikatilo challenged him, claiming to be a victim of the former Soviet system and calling himself a “mad beast.” He also stated that he had murdered seventy people, not fifty-three.