Aleksandr Kravchenko was shot by firing squad in July 1983 for a murder Andrei Chikatilo committed. On the evening of December 22, 1978, in the coal town of Shakhty, Chikatilo lured nine-year-old Yelena Zakotnova to a run-down hut he had secretly bought that year, tried and failed to rape her, choked her, stabbed her three times in the abdomen, strangled her and threw her into the Grushevka River; she was found under a bridge two days later. There was blood in the snow by the fence facing his hut, neighbors had seen him there that evening, and a witness described a man much like him talking to Yelena at the bus stop where she was last seen. The police arrested Kravchenko instead, a twenty-five-year-old laborer who had served a prison term for the 1970 rape and murder of a young girl. He had a strong alibi: he had spent the afternoon at home with his wife and one of her friends, and the neighbors confirmed it. Detectives threatened his wife with a charge of being an accomplice and her friend with perjury, and both changed their statements. Faced with that, Kravchenko confessed. At his 1979 trial he retracted it and said it had been extracted under duress, and he was convicted and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court commuted the sentence to fifteen years in December 1980; under pressure from Yelena's relatives he was retried, convicted again and executed. Chikatilo went on killing for seven more years after that.
He was born on October 16, 1936, in the village of Yabluchne, in the Sumy region of Soviet Ukraine, to collective-farm laborers who lived in a one-room hut, as the country was recovering from the famine caused by Stalin's forced collectivization. He said later that he did not eat bread until he was twelve. His mother, Anna, told him again and again that an older brother, Stepan, had been kidnapped and eaten by starving neighbors at the age of four; it has never been established that it happened, or that a Stepan Chikatilo ever existed. His father, Roman, was conscripted in 1941, wounded and taken prisoner, and on his return was branded a traitor for having been captured. During the German occupation the boy and his mother hid from bombing and shooting in cellars and ditches and watched their hut burn. He shared his mother's bed, wet it chronically, and was beaten for it. In 1943 his mother gave birth to a daughter, Tatyana, who could not have been her husband's; it has been suggested she was conceived in a rape by a German soldier, possibly in front of her son.
He was myopic, weak, often faint from hunger, and bullied at school, and he worked hard and was praised by his teachers. He edited the school newspaper at fourteen, chaired the pupils' Communist committee at sixteen, and in 1954 was the only student from his collective farm to finish the final year. He discovered in adolescence that he was impotent. At seventeen he jumped on an eleven-year-old friend of his sister and wrestled her to the ground, ejaculating as she struggled. He failed to get into Moscow State University, blamed his father's war record, and trained instead as a communications technician. A relationship in the mid-1950s ended after eighteen months when he could not have intercourse. He did his military service from 1957 to 1960 with border guards in Central Asia and then a KGB communications unit in East Berlin, and joined the Party. Back in his village, another relationship failed the same way, the woman asked her friends for advice, and word spread; he later said he tried to hang himself and was pulled from the noose. In 1961 he moved to the Rostov region to work as a communications engineer, and in 1963, two weeks after his sister introduced them, he married Feodosia Odnacheva. They had a daughter, Lyudmila, in 1965 and a son, Yuri, in 1969.
He took a correspondence degree in Russian language and literature from Rostov University in 1970 and began teaching at Vocational School No. 32 in Novoshakhtinsk. He could not keep order in class. He went into the girls' dormitory hoping to see them undressed, and in May 1973 he committed his first known sexual assault on a pupil, swimming up to a fifteen-year-old girl and groping her; months later he locked another girl in his classroom, assaulted her and beat her. He was never disciplined for either, but as complaints mounted the director told him to resign or be fired, and he moved quietly to another school in January 1974. Laid off in September 1978, he found a place at Technical School No. 33 in Shakhty and moved there, and it was that December that he killed Yelena Zakotnova. His teaching career ended in March 1981 after complaints that he had molested pupils of both sexes. That month he became a supply clerk for a Rostov factory, a job that sent him traveling across the Soviet Union.
After Yelena, he said, he could reach arousal and orgasm only by stabbing and slashing, and for a while he cut business trips short to avoid the temptation. On September 3, 1981, he met Larisa Tkachenko, a seventeen-year-old boarding-school student, at a Rostov bus stop, lured her to woods by the Don with talk of vodka, and killed her there. On June 12, 1982, walking from a bus stop in the Bagayevsky district, he fell in beside Lyubov Biryuk, thirteen, on her way home from shopping, and stabbed her to death in the undergrowth. After that he stopped trying to resist. His method became a pattern. He approached children, runaways and homeless young people at bus stops and railway stations, offered a shortcut, company, food, a look at stamps or films or coins, and led them into woods or the forest strips of trees between the fields, where he tied their hands, filled their mouths with earth to stop them screaming, and killed them with dozens of knife wounds, mutilating the bodies and, in many cases, the eyes. With adult women, often prostitutes or homeless women he tempted with drink or money, he would attempt intercourse and fly into a fury when he failed. His victims were boys as well as girls, and most were between nine and their early twenties.
On December 11, 1982, he persuaded Olga Stalmachenok, ten, to get off a bus with him in Novoshakhtinsk; a passenger saw a middle-aged man lead her away by the hand. By January 1983 four killings had been tentatively linked, and a team from Moscow under Major Mikhail Fetisov came to Rostov; in March a forensic analyst, Viktor Burakov, was put in charge of what investigators called Operation Forest Strip. When Olga's body was found that spring, Burakov saw the marks on her eye sockets and was sure that he was dealing with one killer. In June Chikatilo killed Laura Sarkisyan, a fifteen-year-old Armenian girl, near a railway halt outside Novocherkassk, and by September five more. On September 6, 1983, the Soviet public prosecutor formally linked six of the killings. On October 27 he killed Vera Shevkun, nineteen, in Shakhty, and on December 27 he took Sergey Markov, a fourteen-year-old schoolboy from Gukovo, off a train and killed him at a rural station.
The investigation looked hardest at the mentally ill, gay men and known sex offenders, and it did real damage. From September 1983 several young men, most of them intellectually disabled, confessed after long and often brutal interrogations, and three gay men and a convicted sex offender killed themselves under the pressure. The inquiry solved more than a thousand unrelated crimes along the way, including ninety-five murders. Meanwhile the bodies kept coming. In 1984 Chikatilo killed two women in Rostov's Park of Aviators, then, on March 24, lured ten-year-old Dmitry Ptashnikov from a stamp kiosk in Novoshakhtinsk in front of witnesses who described him well. On May 25 he killed Tatyana Petrosyan, a woman he had known for years, and her ten-year-old daughter, Svetlana, in woods outside Shakhty. He killed Anna Lemesheva, a nineteen-year-old student, near Shakhty station on July 19; she told him as she fought that a man called Bars would pay him back, and her fiancé had that nickname tattooed on his hand. On August 2 he killed Natalya Golosovskaya, sixteen, in the Park of Aviators, and on August 7 Lyudmila Alekseyeva, seventeen, on the bank of the Don. On a business trip to Tashkent he killed a young woman who was never identified and ten-year-old Akmaral Seydaliyeva. Eleven-year-old Aleksandr Chepel was found near the Don that month, and on September 6 he killed Irina Luchinskaya, a twenty-four-year-old librarian.
A week later, on September 13, 1984, two undercover detectives watched him trying to talk to young women at a Rostov bus station, followed him through the city as he rubbed himself against women in crowds, and arrested him at the central market. In his bag were a knife with an eight-inch blade, lengths of rope and a jar of Vaseline, and he matched the description of the man seen with Dmitry Ptashnikov. But his blood tested as group A, and the semen recovered from six victims that year had been typed as AB, and the result largely cleared him. He was held instead on a theft complaint from a former employer over two rolls of linoleum, expelled from the Party, sentenced to a year, and released on December 12 after three months. When he was arrested again in 1990, his semen tested as AB while his blood and saliva tested as A; the discrepancy had kept the right man out of custody for six years. On October 8, 1984, the Russian prosecutor's office linked twenty-three killings into one case and dropped the charges against the young men who had confessed.
He found work in the supply department of a locomotive factory in Novocherkassk and kept a low profile until August 1, 1985, when, on a trip to Moscow, he lured Natalia Pokhlistova, eighteen, off a train near Domodedovo Airport and killed her in woods by the village of Vostryakovo. Investigators combed Aeroflot passenger lists between Rostov and Moscow, but he had gone by train, during the World Festival of Youth and Students. On August 27 he killed Irina Gulyaeva in Shakhty. That November a special procurator, Issa Kostoyev, took over the case, by now fifteen procurators and twenty-nine detectives, and at Burakov's request the investigators consulted a psychiatrist, Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, the first time a psychiatrist had been brought into a Soviet serial murder inquiry. His sixty-five-page profile described a man of forty-five to fifty, lonely since childhood and incapable of courting women, probably married with children but expected to give little intimacy, an impotent sadist for whom the knife stood in for the act he could not perform, whose work took him traveling on a production schedule. Chikatilo followed the investigation in the newspapers, which had begun to report it, and held back.
In 1987 he killed three times, each far from Rostov and none linked to the case at the time: Oleg Makarenkov, twelve, at Revda in the Urals on May 16, whose body was not found until 1991; Ivan Bilovetsky, twelve, in Zaporizhia in July; and Yuri Tereshonok, sixteen, outside Leningrad on September 15. In 1988 he killed an unidentified woman at Krasny Sulin, nine-year-old Aleksey Voronko at Ilovaisk in Ukraine, and on July 14 Yevgeny Muratov, fifteen, at Donleskhoz station near Shakhty. On February 28, 1989, he killed Tatyana Ryzhova, sixteen, in his daughter's empty apartment and hid her dismembered body in a sewer; that August he killed Aleksey Khobotov and buried him at the edge of a Shakhty cemetery. In 1990 came Andrei Kravchenko, eleven, lured from a Shakhty theater on January 14 with the promise of Western films; Yaroslav Makarov, ten, taken from a Rostov station to the Botanical Gardens on March 7; Lyubov Zuyeva, thirty-one, on April 4 near Donleskhoz; Viktor Petrov, thirteen, on July 28; and Ivan Fomin, eleven, in the reeds near the Novocherkassk beach on August 14. By then glasnost had loosened the press, and the case was reported widely.
Burakov's answer was to flood the busy stations on the Rostov line with uniformed police the killer could not miss, and to post only plainclothes officers at the three small halts where he had struck most often, Kundryucha, Donleskhoz and Lesostep, so that he would be pushed toward them. Three hundred and sixty officers went out on October 27, 1990. Three days later Vadim Gromov, sixteen, was found at Donleskhoz, killed on October 17, and that same day Chikatilo took Viktor Tishchenko, also sixteen, off a train at Kirpichnaya and killed him; Tishchenko fought hard. On November 6 Chikatilo killed Svetlana Korostik, twenty-two, in the woods near Donleskhoz. Coming back to the platform he was seen by an undercover officer, Igor Rybakov, washing his hands and face at a well. He wore formal clothes and carried a nylon sports bag, not the gear of a mushroom picker, had grass and soil on his elbows, a red smear on his cheek and a bad wound on one finger. Rybakov checked his papers, had no grounds to hold him, and filed a routine report.
Korostik's body was found on November 13, the thirty-eighth victim linked to the case. The name in Rybakov's report was familiar: Chikatilo had been questioned in 1984 and was on a 1987 suspect list. His employers' records put him in towns where victims had died, and former colleagues told how he had been pushed out of two schools. He was followed from November 14, approaching lone women and children on trains and buses, and on November 20, as he left a cafe in Novocherkassk, four plainclothes officers arrested him. He had a folding knife and two lengths of rope, and the middle finger of his right hand had a deep wound he had treated with iodine; examiners said it was a human bite. Held in a cell at the KGB building in Rostov with an informer, he was questioned by Kostoyev, who tried to make him believe he was a sick man who needed help, but for a week he denied the killings, admitting only that he had molested pupils. With the ten-day limit for holding him nearly up, Burakov and Fetisov brought in Bukhanovsky on November 29. Bukhanovsky read him passages of the profile, and within two hours Chikatilo was in tears and admitting his guilt. The next day he confessed to thirty-six of the thirty-eight killings linked to him, denying two from 1986, and was charged with those thirty-six. Over the following days he confessed to twenty more that had never been connected, among them Yelena Zakotnova, and to fourteen-year-old Lyubov Volobuyeva, from Novokuznetsk in Siberia, whom he had met in the waiting room of Krasnodar Airport and killed in a field on July 25, 1982. In December he led police to Aleksey Khobotov's grave, and later to two more bodies.
He described fifty-six killings in all. Three of those victims could never be found or identified, and he was charged with fifty-three. From August 20, 1991, he spent sixty days at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, where the psychiatrist Andrei Tkachenko found a borderline personality disorder with sadistic features and concluded on October 18 that he was fit to stand trial. His trial opened on April 14, 1992, in Courtroom Number 5 of the Rostov Provincial Court before Judge Leonid Akubzhanov, on fifty-three counts of murder and five of sexual assault against minors from his teaching years. It was the first great media event of post-Soviet Russia, and he sat in an iron cage built to protect him from the victims' relatives, some of whom fainted as the indictment was read. He sang, dropped his trousers, said he was pregnant and lactating and being bombarded with radiation, denied killings he had confessed to and claimed others no one had charged. "I did not need to look for them," he said of his victims. "Every step I took, they were there." Akubzhanov questioned him with open contempt.
On October 14, 1992, he was convicted of fifty-two murders and sentenced to death for each. In 1993 the Supreme Court of Russia held that the evidence was insufficient to prove his guilt in nine of the fifty-two, and the sentence stood on the rest. He was shot at Novocherkassk on February 14, 1994, aged fifty-seven. Fifty-three were charged, fifty-two were returned, forty-three survived the only appellate review the case received, and he claimed fifty-six, with three who were never found; the figures do not reconcile.