Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936, in the Ukrainian village of Yablochnoye, into the famine years. He grew up on his mother's account that an older brother, Stepan, had been taken and eaten by starving neighbours, a story never independently verified and possibly untrue, and on his father's disgrace as a returned prisoner of war. He was bookish, short-sighted and bullied, took a degree in Russian literature, joined the Communist Party, married and had two children. He was also impotent, which he was never able to separate from what he did.
He worked as a schoolteacher until complaints about his conduct with pupils forced him out, then as a supply clerk for factories, a job that sent him travelling constantly by rail across the southern Soviet Union. That travel is the shape of the case. The Soviet and then Russian press called him the Butcher of Rostov, the Red Ripper and the Rostov Ripper.
His first victim was nine-year-old Yelena Zakotnova, taken to a derelict house in Shakhty on December 22, 1978. A local man, Aleksandr Kravchenko, was convicted of the murder and executed in 1983. He was innocent, and the Soviet system's need for a conviction bought Chikatilo twelve more years.
The victims named in the record include Yelena Zakotnova, nine; Larisa Tkachenko, seventeen; Lyubov Biryuk, thirteen; Lyubov Volobuyeva, fourteen; Oleg Pozhidayev, nine; Olga Kuprina, sixteen; Irina Karabelnikova, nineteen; Sergey Kuzmin, fifteen; Olga Stalmachenok, ten; and Laura Sarkisyan.
Between 1982 and 1990 he killed relentlessly. He approached women and children at bus stops, railway halts and station waiting rooms, offered a lift, a drink, a walk, and led them into woodland. He stabbed them, mutilated the bodies, and often damaged the eyes. Victims were boys as well as girls and women, most between nine and seventeen, many of them runaways or people whose absence nobody reported quickly. The investigation, code-named Lesopolosa, or forest strip, after the shelter belts where bodies were found, grew to be the largest manhunt in Soviet history.
He was interviewed and released more than once. In 1984 he was in custody on suspicion, and was cleared because the semen recovered from the scenes typed as group AB while his blood typed as A. He was a rare paradoxical secretor whose secretions do not match his blood group, a condition Soviet forensic doctrine of the time did not admit. He served a short sentence for petty theft from his workplace and went back to it.
The trap that caught him was a saturation of the railway halts, with plainclothes officers left visible at busy stations and hidden at quiet ones. On November 6, 1990, he was seen coming out of a wood near Donleskhoz station and stopped for a document check. A body was found there days later. He was arrested on November 20 and, after refusing for a week, confessed to fifty-six killings.
His trial opened in Rostov in April 1992 with the defendant in an iron cage at the front of the court, as much to keep the victims' families from him as to keep him in. He was convicted of fifty-two murders in October 1992 and sentenced to death. He was executed by a single shot on February 14, 1994.