Andrei Chikatilo was a married father of two, a Communist Party member and a former teacher of Russian literature who worked as a supply agent for factories in the Rostov region of southern Russia. Between 1978 and 1990 he killed children, teenagers and young women, most of them near the railway and bus routes linking Shakhty, Novoshakhtinsk, Novocherkassk and Rostov-on-Don, and others on business trips as far away as Moscow, Leningrad, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. He was charged with 53 murders. The Rostov Regional Court convicted him of 52 in October 1992 and sentenced him to death. In 1993 the Supreme Court of Russia removed nine of those murders from the verdict for lack of proof and upheld the sentence on the rest, so that 43 murders stand as legally proven. He confessed to more than 50.
The case is remembered as much for the failures of the hunt as for the killer. A man named Aleksandr Kravchenko was shot in 1983 for the first killing Chikatilo later confessed to, and his conviction was overturned in 1990. In 1984 police held Chikatilo with a knife and rope in his briefcase and released him as a murder suspect because a blood test seemed to clear him. Young men with intellectual disabilities confessed under pressure to killings they had not committed. The search, known as Operation Lesopolosa ("forest strip"), checked hundreds of thousands of people and solved more than a thousand unrelated crimes before an officer on a station platform wrote down Chikatilo's name in November 1990.
Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936, in the village of Yablochnoye, in the Akhtyrka district of the Sumy region of Soviet Ukraine, Gazeta.Ru reported, giving the village's Russian name; Kommersant placed it about 100 kilometers from Kharkiv. His family lived in deep poverty and often went hungry. The war reached the village when he was a small child, and German troops occupied it in 1942. His father was drafted in 1941 and was taken prisoner by the Germans; accounts differ on what happened to him afterward, with one account saying he was repressed on his return and another that he died in a Soviet camp after being accused of collaboration. A sister, Tatyana, was born in 1943. Kommersant noted one unconfirmed version, that her father was a German soldier.
He grew up shy, sensitive and nearsighted, and his family could not afford glasses. Classmates mocked and beat him. He wet the bed until he was about 12, and his mother beat him for it. He later told investigators that an older brother named Stepan had been kidnapped and eaten by starving neighbors during the famine of the early 1930s, before he was born. He believed his mother's account, but no document has ever confirmed that the brother existed, and investigators could not establish it. The writer of the Britannica entry, John Philip Jenkins, describes the story as one that cannot be verified. In letters he wrote from pretrial detention, which were passed to investigators, he described the eaten brother again, and an attempt by an adult woman to seduce him when he was 14.
He finished school in 1954 with nearly all top grades, NEWS.ru reported. He tried for the law faculty of Moscow State University and was not admitted; he blamed his father's war record. He trained instead as a communications technician. Accounts of his military service differ: Life.ru says he served with KGB border troops in Central Asia and then in Berlin, while Gazeta.Ru says he served with Interior Ministry troops. He joined the Communist Party, settled near Rostov-on-Don, and worked as a telephone engineer.
In 1963, according to Kommersant and Britannica, he married a woman to whom his sister Tatyana had introduced him; Gazeta.Ru gives the year as 1964. His wife is named in his clemency petition as Feodosiya Semyonovna. In letters from custody he called her "my dear Fenichka, my swallow" and wrote of his love for his son, Izvestia reported. The couple had a daughter and a son.
In 1970 Chikatilo completed a correspondence degree in Russian language and literature at the philology faculty of Rostov State University, the university's successor confirmed in 2018. That year he took a teaching post at a boarding school in Novoshakhtinsk, a mining town north of Rostov, first teaching physical education and then Russian and literature. Gazeta.Ru names it as School-Boarding House No. 32.
Pupils soon complained about him. He lingered at the doors of the girls' dormitory, according to Life.ru, and touched pupils. In May 1973 he molested a 14-year-old girl during a school outing, and he later tried to assault another girl he had kept behind after class, the Russian press reported. The school did not go to the police. He was allowed to resign "at his own request" and faced no other penalty. He then spent several years at a vocational school in Novoshakhtinsk. When he lost that post in a staff cut in 1978 he moved to the neighboring city of Shakhty, where he taught at another vocational school and his wife worked as a dormitory supervisor. Rumors there that he watched boys while they slept were dismissed by colleagues. Kommersant reported in 1992 that he had been dismissed from two schools in all. Years later, investigators reopening an old theft file found reports of these complaints in it.
In Shakhty he also kept a small house of his own, away from the family flat, which he used to meet women in secret, Gazeta.Ru reported.
On December 22, 1978, Yelena Zakotnova, a nine-year-old second-grader known as Lena, disappeared in Shakhty after school. At about six in the evening a witness saw her at a stop near the Grushevsky bridge, talking with an older man in glasses, and Gazeta.Ru reported that he offered her chewing gum. Her body was found two days later in the Grushevka River near the bridge. She had been stabbed, according to the charges later brought against Chikatilo.
Several witnesses gave descriptions that pointed toward Chikatilo. A composite drawing resembled him, and the director of a local vocational school recognized him from it, but that identification was never properly recorded. Police questioned him. He said he had been at home, and his wife confirmed it. The police accepted the alibi and turned to another man.
Chikatilo confessed to this killing after his arrest in 1990, describing a girl in Shakhty in 1978 before investigators had found a matching file. The Rostov Regional Court included it in his conviction in 1992. The Supreme Court of Russia removed it from the verdict in 1993 for insufficient evidence. The killing of Lena Zakotnova therefore remains legally unsolved.
The man police arrested was Aleksandr Kravchenko, 25, who lived near the Grushevka and had a previous conviction for killing a girl. He had an alibi for the evening of December 22: his wife and a friend said he had been at home. In January 1979 he was arrested on a theft charge. His wife was pressured into withdrawing the alibi. Media accounts later reported that he was put in a cell with a violent inmate who beat him, and about three weeks after his arrest he confessed. Amurkhan Yandiev, an investigator who later worked on the Chikatilo case, told TASS in September 2026 that he had learned afterward that a cellmate had tormented Kravchenko, and that this was why he took the blame.
Kravchenko's account changed repeatedly. He confessed, then withdrew the confession, saying it had been forced out of him. A court first sentenced him to 15 years in prison. The girl's relatives pressed for a harsher outcome, the case was sent back for further investigation, and at a retrial he was sentenced to death. His clemency petition ran to 42 pages, the investigator Issa Kostoyev recalled. He was shot on July 5, 1983.
Chikatilo's teaching career ended in 1981. That year he became a senior engineer in the supply department of a Shakhty building-materials association, Life.ru reported, and from then on he worked as a tolkach, the Soviet term for a supply agent who traveled between factories to obtain materials. The job gave him long stretches of unsupervised time and constant rail travel. He later worked at the electric locomotive repair plant in Novocherkassk, where personnel records would one day show business trips matching the dates of killings far from home.
A 1981 police report, later found by Kostoyev, recorded that Chikatilo had been detained at a railway station that year with a kitchen knife, petroleum jelly and cord in his bag. Kostoyev told Lenta.ru that police had checked him as a suspect in 1979 and 1981, and that between 1981 and 1990 he had been seen near murder sites at least five times.
The killings that would be proven began in 1982. The Investigative Committee of Russia, in a 2019 film series on old cases, dated the 43 proven murders from 1982 to 1990. He killed seven children and teenagers that year, according to NEWS.ru and The Spectator, and the count of bodies found rose to 13 by 1984, by The Spectator's account, or 12 or 15 by others.
His method stayed the same for years. He approached boys and girls, homeless people, runaways and young women at stations, bus stops and on suburban trains, offering food, drink, company or something to see, and walked with them into the woods or into the lesopolosy, the belts of trees planted between fields along the rail lines. Gazeta.Ru reported that he offered rides, chewing gum or a look at a cartoon on video. Investigators told Peter Conradi of The European in 1992 that up to 70 percent of the victims were vagrants, tramps or sex workers, and the rest children and young people from stable homes. "Boy or girl, it was all the same to me," Chikatilo said. Most of the bodies were found along the railway north of Rostov.
In 1983 Vladimir Kazakov, a senior investigator from the prosecutor's office in Moscow, convinced local officials that one killer was responsible. On September 6, 1983, after the sixth body was found, the cases were merged into one investigation, Gazeta.Ru reported.
In March 1984 a 10-year-old boy, Dima Ptashnikov, was killed in Novoshakhtinsk. That year bodies were also found in the Park of Aviators near Rostov, four of them by Gazeta.Ru's count.
The early investigation went badly wrong. Investigators assumed the killer was mentally ill and searched psychiatric registers. On September 8, 1983, police arrested a 19-year-old on a psychiatric register, Kostoyev told Lenta.ru; other detainees included a resident of a boarding home for people with intellectual disabilities. They confessed under pressure, their acquaintances began confessing too, and their accounts contradicted one another. Amurkhan Yandiev told RIA Novosti in 2020 that three or four mentally ill people were detained in all and held as suspects for three to four months each. Because so many of the detainees had intellectual disabilities, the file became known as the delo durakov, "the case of the fools." The killings went on while they were in custody, and by 1984 the confessions had been discredited.
Aleksandr Kuyumdzhi, a former state prosecutor in the Chikatilo case, told Novaya Gazeta in 2005 that twelve people were held in pretrial detention on false charges during the hunt. The Spectator reported that police also persecuted the region's gay men, and that several men took their own lives after being exposed. In Kostoyev's account, after Kazakov reported falsified evidence, a criminal case was opened against Rostov police officers on August 19, 1985, and closed on November 25, 1985, for insufficient evidence.
In September 1984 police watching the Rostov bus station near the Park of Aviators saw a man approaching girls. They followed him to the central market and detained him. In his briefcase they found a knife, rope, petroleum jelly, soap and a towel. He said the knife was for food on business trips and the rest was for the household. The man was Andrei Chikatilo. Investigators examined him over the March killing of Dima Ptashnikov in Novoshakhtinsk, Conradi reported.
There was no direct evidence tying him to any murder, and a blood test (discussed in the next section) seemed to rule him out. He was instead prosecuted for stealing a car battery from a former employer, an old complaint that Kostoyev later reopened. He was expelled from the Communist Party and sentenced to a year of corrective labor, and he was released after about three months, by the accounts of Britannica and Life.ru. Conradi wrote that he was released in early 1985.
The forensic evidence that cleared him in 1984 became the most debated point in the case. Investigators had concluded from biological traces found on victims that the killer belonged to blood group IV (AB in the Western notation). Chikatilo's blood was recorded as group II (A). On that basis he was ruled out as the main suspect and left in the files as an already cleared man.
After his arrest in 1990 the discrepancy was explained for years as "paradoxical secretion," the idea that his body fluids showed a different group from his blood. Popular books called it "the Chikatilo phenomenon." Investigators and criminologists have since rejected that explanation. In 2021 Zigmund Lozis, head of the Main Forensic Directorate of the Investigative Committee of Russia, said the phenomenon did not exist and that what happened was an error. Kostoyev told Lenta.ru that the first expert recorded Chikatilo's group as II and that later testing confirmed group IV. Kommersant reported in 2026 that the likelier causes were contaminated material and an expert conclusion stated too categorically. The Investigative Committee's 2019 film made the broader point: without DNA testing, the evidence against him remained weak until he talked.
By the summer of 1985 the investigation had split into a feud between Kazakov in Moscow and officials in Rostov. In June 1985, according to Kostoyev's account to Lenta.ru, the Prosecutor General of the USSR, Aleksandr Rekunkov, assigned the case to Issa Kostoyev, a senior investigator of his office. Kostoyev formally took charge on November 10, 1985. He removed the Rostov police colonel who had run the search, appointed Vladimir Kolesnikov as his deputy, and built a team of 44 people. When Kostoyev took over, the cases against the earlier detainees were closed and they were released.
Viktor Burakov, a forensic specialist in the Rostov regional police, was the other central figure. Born on August 18, 1946, in the Bryansk region, he had graduated in 1978 from the Volgograd Higher Investigative School as a forensic expert and joined the Rostov police. David Thompson, reviewing three books on the case for The Seattle Times in 1993, described Burakov as the first officer to argue that Soviet society could produce such a killer, and Kostoyev as his supervisor and rival. The two men disliked each other, Thompson wrote, and their rivalry helped crack the case.
Burakov asked Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, a psychiatrist at the Rostov Medical Institute, for a psychological portrait of the killer. Bukhanovsky's "prospective" profile, drawn up in 1984 at investigators' request, concluded that the killer was neither psychotic nor intellectually disabled and described his likely age, behavior and motives, Lenta.ru reported. By Owen Matthews's 1999 account in The Moscow Times, Bukhanovsky inferred that the killer was a middle-aged, educated man with a history of molestation and sexual problems; Kommersant described the portrait as a socially integrated, married man who traveled by rail. The police paid it little attention at first. Kostoyev later said the profile does not appear in the case file, and the role of the portrait remains disputed between the participants.
The search grew into one of the largest operations in Soviet policing. Operation Lesopolosa, dated by different sources to 1985 or 1986, was overseen by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Gazeta.Ru and Kommersant reported. Plainclothes officers patrolled stations, trains and parks, policewomen were used as decoys, and officers lay in ditches along the railway. Gazeta.Ru put the cost at about 10 million rubles and reported that more than 200,000 people were checked and 5,800 placed on a watch list; Conradi reported almost half a million people questioned. The operation solved more than 1,000 other crimes, among them 95 murders and 245 rapes by Conradi's count. Chikatilo himself carried a card as a volunteer police auxiliary, RIA Novosti and Lenta.ru reported. Kostoyev also consulted Anatoly Slivko, a convicted killer of seven teenagers held in Novocherkassk prison, without result.
From 1985 the killings moved away from the region that was being watched. Kostoyev's team found from the locomotive plant's records that Chikatilo had been on business trips at the times of killings in Uzbekistan and near Domodedovo, outside Moscow. Gazeta.Ru reported killings from 1986 to 1988 in Tashkent, Moscow, the Sverdlovsk region, Zaporizhzhia and Leningrad.
In 1987 a 12-year-old boy named Ivan disappeared in Zaporizhzhia, in Ukraine, while picking apricots. His mother, Nina Beletskaya, found his body three days later. She told United Press International in 1992 that police had laughed at her when she reported him missing.
In Kostoyev's account, Chikatilo did not kill in the Rostov region again until April 1988. On April 8, 1988, a woman's body was found near Krasny Sulin. On May 17, 1988, Aleksey Voronko, known as Alyosha, nine years old, was killed near Ilovaisk, in Ukraine, and a composite drawing was made.
From March 1989 to November 1990, twelve more victims were found, Kostoyev said. One of them was a 10-year-old boy named Alyosha, killed in August 1989; his mother, Lida Khovata, as UPI spelled her name, told UPI after the sentence that she wished only to kill him and wanted it to end. Another was a boy from a chess club whose remains Chikatilo later led investigators to in a grave he had dug near a cemetery in Shakhty. Clothing and a toy matching the missing boy's description were found there.
By then the press had begun reporting the case. The Moscow Times wrote in 1992 that because serial killing was officially treated as a problem of capitalist countries, the search had long been kept secret, and that Rostov residents did not learn for years that such a killer was active.
By the autumn of 1990 plainclothes officers were watching stations and suburban trains. On November 6, 1990, Svetlana Korostik, 22, was killed in woods near the Leskhoz railway platform. She was the last victim.
That day Sergeant Igor Rybakov, on plainclothes duty at the platform, saw a man in a suit and tie come out of the forest, an unusual sight in November in a place where people went to pick mushrooms. He had fresh scratches, Gazeta.Ru reported. Rybakov checked his documents and wrote down his name. He had no grounds to hold him, and he could not leave his post because his partner had not arrived, Kostoyev explained in 2025. The report went up the chain, but the name was not connected to the killings until Korostik's body was found about a week later.
When it was, the name in Rybakov's report was already in the files. Chikatilo had been held in 1984, and his blood result had cleared him. Kostoyev now pulled his work records and found the business trips that matched killings in other republics. Chikatilo was put under surveillance and was seen approaching children.
On November 20, 1990, police arrested Chikatilo in Novocherkassk, as he walked away from a beer kiosk after trying to approach a lone boy. He was carrying a can of beer, and a finger of his hand was bandaged. Searches turned up a folding knife and hemp cord on him, and a large number of kitchen knives and hammers at home, 23 knives by one Gazeta.Ru count, and boots whose prints matched those found near a victim. A medical examiner concluded that the finger wound was a human bite and that scratches on him were nail marks, Gazeta.Ru reported. A schoolboy had been killed in Shakhty about two weeks before the arrest, Kostoyev said.
His wife's first reaction, as Kostoyev remembered it, was disbelief: "Andrei never harmed a fly in his life; what murders?"
Chikatilo was held in a cell of the regional KGB detention center in Rostov. From the arrest until December 18, 1990, Kostoyev was the only investigator with access to him, and he worked with Chikatilo almost in isolation, sending colleagues out for kefir and buns. Investigators placed an informer in the cell, a man previously convicted of fraud, Burakov told RIA Novosti. The cellmate said he could find Chikatilo a good lawyer if he wrote out the story of his life. Chikatilo wrote 25 letters. They went to investigators and psychiatrists instead of a lawyer.
At first he denied the killings, for about ten days by Kommersant's account; Burakov said he was silent for eight days and that investigators had two days left before they would have had to release him. On about the fifth or sixth day, Kostoyev said, he wrote to the prosecutor asking first to be "treated." His first written statement included the line, as Kostoyev quoted it, "What I did is terrible, my mind may not withstand the memories. But it all happened." He began to give consistent testimony on November 28.
Bukhanovsky was brought in at this stage, presented to Chikatilo as an academic. In Burakov's account and in Bukhanovsky's own, it was the psychiatrist who persuaded him to confess, and Burakov said Bukhanovsky's notebook contained the first confession, to strangling a girl in Grushevka in 1978. Kostoyev has always said the written confession came before Bukhanovsky's involvement and that the psychiatrist helped continue and organize the testimony. The dispute was never resolved. Yandiev, in a 2026 account reported by Kommersant, said he threatened Chikatilo with a psychiatric examination and drugs, and that Chikatilo changed his testimony the next day; Kommersant noted that this was a personal recollection, not a document.
Once he began talking, Chikatilo described more killings than investigators had linked to the case. In December 1990 he gave detailed statements, sometimes drawing maps, for about seven hours a day, Gazeta.Ru reported. By December 18, Kostoyev had recorded 55 murders. Bukhanovsky's account put the total at 56, against the 53 that investigators had known. About 20 of the killings he described had not been connected to the case before, UPI reported. Among them was the girl in Shakhty in 1978, whose file had been closed for years with Kravchenko's execution.
He was taken to the scenes and showed investigators how and where he had killed. At the cemetery in Shakhty he began to dig at the grave of the boy from the chess club. NEWS.ru reported that he identified burial sites accurately with only one error. The case file grew to about 220 volumes; UPI gave 222.
The charges finally brought covered 53 murders: 21 boys, 14 girls and 18 women, Kommersant reported when the trial opened. Two of the killings he had first confessed to were dropped for lack of evidence, Conradi wrote.
Before trial Chikatilo underwent a psychiatric examination at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow. Andrei Tkachenko, a Serbsky psychiatrist who examined him for more than two months, described him to Conradi as a shy problem child who grew into an adult unable to relate to women. Tkachenko concluded that he was sane and fit to stand trial. "One must be very deeply deranged to commit murder unconsciously, totally without control, and Chikatilo was not," he said.
Three forensic psychiatric examinations in all found him legally responsible, Kommersant reported. The experts concluded that he understood his actions, planned his crimes, chose his victims and the places, concealed evidence, and changed his behavior according to what the police were doing. Amnesty International noted that examinations before and during the trial found him sane enough to be held accountable. His defense lawyer, Marat Khabibulin, argued that the Serbsky conclusion was reached in a single day without study of the case file.
The trial opened in the Rostov Regional Court on April 14, 1992, before Judge Leonid Akubzhanov. Chikatilo was then 56. He sat in a metal cage, the first time one had been used in a Russian courtroom by RIA Novosti's account, built to protect him from the victims' relatives. The reading of the charges took nearly a week. Relatives shouted at him, and one woman fainted. "I will make this case open. There will be no secrets," Akubzhanov said. "May this case teach us something." Doctors and nurses sat in court in case anyone collapsed, The Moscow Times reported.
At the opening Chikatilo pleaded guilty to most of the charges but denied three, UPI reported; by Conradi's count he denied six during the trial. As the months went on he tried to appear insane. He shouted, insulted the judge and the prosecutor, claimed he had signed his confession while agitated and nearly blind, and undressed in the courtroom. Burakov said he witnessed it. He told the court that the crisis of world communism had driven him to kill, and that he had wanted to become General Secretary of the Communist Party and President of the USSR, Kommersant reported. Reuters reported that he called himself a "mad beast."
His wife, married to him for 27 years, told prosecutors she had never suspected anything, Conradi reported from the trial. "If I had known what my husband was doing all those years, then of course I would have done something to stop him," she said. Prosecutors believed her. Neighbors and strangers did not, and she left Rostov before the trial for Ukraine. The family changed their surname and their place of residence, and they did not contact him during or after the trial, Kommersant reported.
The trial ran for almost six months. It drew more attention in the West than in Russia, UPI noted in 1994.
The verdict, 330 pages long, was read over two days, October 14 and 15, 1992. On the first day the court found Chikatilo guilty of 52 murders of women and children. On October 15 it sentenced him to death by shooting. Kommersant summarized the finding: his guilt in deliberate murders committed with particular cruelty, in attempted rape and in sodomy was "proven beyond doubt." The court rejected the insanity claim, saying that the psychopathy diagnosed in him was not a morbid condition. The verdict described him as a limited, mediocre man with inflated ambitions, Gazeta.Ru reported.
Akubzhanov said Chikatilo had "an iron psyche and nerves of steel" and had been in total command of his actions at every stage. He also condemned the police, saying their incompetence had helped the killer escape capture and that officers had mocked parents who reported missing children.
As the verdict was read, Chikatilo shouted that he did not consider himself guilty and that he had been tortured and drugged during the investigation. He beat on the bars of his cage, cried out for an injection and an ambulance, and declared support for Ukraine; a woman in the gallery shouted back that she was Ukrainian. Spectators applauded the sentence. Relatives rushed toward the cage, and one woman tried to break through the guards, shouting, "Give him to us, give this murderer to us."
Of the 53 murders charged, one did not become part of the conviction. Which one, and why, was not reported.
Khabibulin filed a cassation appeal with the Supreme Court of Russia on October 30, 1992. He argued that the psychiatric findings were rushed and that the confessions were unreliable from a man who was not sane, and he said there was no convincing direct proof linking his client to the crimes, since no witness had seen him at any scene. Amnesty International, which opposes the death penalty in all cases, called on the Russian authorities to commute the sentence.
Chikatilo was moved to the pretrial detention center in Novocherkassk immediately after the verdict. In March 1993 he had finished reading the trial record, and the court's deputy chairman, Boris Nikolaev, said more than 200 volumes, the transcripts and the verdict would go to the Supreme Court. Chikatilo was writing an account of his life in his cell and hoped, Kommersant reported, to die a natural death there.
In 1993 the Supreme Court of Russia removed nine murder episodes and one sodomy episode from the verdict for insufficient evidence and upheld the death sentence on the rest. The episodes it struck out included the killing of Lena Zakotnova. Since then the legally proven count has been 43 murders, the figure Kommersant and the Investigative Committee of Russia give. The exact date of the Supreme Court's ruling was not reported.
Chikatilo sent petitions for clemency to President Boris Yeltsin; NEWS.ru counted four. One of them, published by Novaya Gazeta in 2002, recorded the Rostov court's sentence of October 15, 1992, and asked: "I ask you to spare my life." In it he described himself as a devoted communist with 40 years of work and 30 in the Party, called his crimes a "partisan" resistance against a "mafia" that persecuted him, asked that his father and grandfather be rehabilitated, said he feared his ill wife would not survive without him, and asked to be moved to Moscow to write his memoirs. The newspaper presented the petition as his own words and did not vouch for any of it. He also wrote complaints to newspapers and officials, casting himself by turns as a madman, a victim, a dissident and a communist, Kommersant reported.
Yeltsin rejected his appeal for clemency in early February 1994, UPI reported. On Monday, February 14, 1994, Chikatilo was shot in the back of the head at the prison in Novocherkassk. The Interfax news agency announced the execution the next day. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery. Mikhail Fetisov, a former head of the Rostov regional police, said that researchers from Japan had asked for his brain after the sentence; the law did not allow it.
Kostoyev began a review of the Kravchenko case after Chikatilo described the 1978 killing, and an investigator named Nichiporenko traveled to Ukraine to see Kravchenko's mother, Kostoyev told Lenta.ru. In 1990 the verdict against Kravchenko was overturned, Kommersant and Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported. The court that set it aside was not named in the reports. The same year, prosecutors opened a criminal case over his unlawful prosecution; according to Yandiev, the facts were confirmed, but the case was closed because more than ten years had passed and the limitation period applied. Kostoyev's effort to prosecute the officials responsible came to nothing, NEWS.ru reported.
Kravchenko was 29 when he was shot, Radio Svoboda noted. Novaya Gazeta wrote in 2002 that an innocent man had been convicted and executed for Chikatilo's crimes, and argued that the state had never acknowledged the error. UPI described him in 1992 as wrongly convicted. Yandiev said in 2026 that many investigators still believe Kravchenko was guilty, and that he does not; had Kravchenko been acquitted and Chikatilo held responsible in 1979, he said, more than 50 lives could have been saved.
The legal position is that the court convictions of both men for the Zakotnova killing were set aside: Kravchenko's in 1990, Chikatilo's in 1993. Kommersant reported in 2026 that neither man is legally recognized as her killer. It also reported that Kravchenko is the only person whose execution in connection with these crimes is documented, and that the widespread claim that several innocent men were shot is not supported by the record.
Most of the people Chikatilo killed were not named in the press. The counts recorded are the 53 in the charges (21 boys, 14 girls and 18 women), the 52 in the trial verdict (21 boys, 14 girls and 17 young women, by UPI's 1994 count) and the 43 upheld in 1993. The boys were 8 to 16 years old and the girls 9 to 17, UPI reported when the trial opened.
Some of the families became known through the trial. Nina Beletskaya searched for her son Ivan in Zaporizhzhia for three days in 1987 before she found him. Lida Khovata lost her son Alyosha, who was 10, in August 1989. Relatives packed the gallery in Rostov, and doctors were kept on hand for them. When the death sentence was read they applauded, and some tried to reach him.
Others are remembered mainly by name and age: Lena Zakotnova, 9, in Shakhty in 1978; Dima Ptashnikov, 10, in Novoshakhtinsk in 1984; Alyosha Voronko, 9, near Ilovaisk in 1988; Svetlana Korostik, 22, near the Leskhoz platform in 1990. Judge Akubzhanov singled out the police officers who had laughed at mothers reporting their children missing.
His wife and children changed their surname and moved away. Burakov described the letters from custody as those of a man who loved his family.
After the case the Rostov regional prosecutor's office set up a unit to investigate serial killings, which Novaya Gazeta described in 2005 as the first of its kind in the USSR. The long hunt pushed the Rostov police toward forensic science and away from relying on confessions, The Moscow Times reported in 1999. "We quickly realized that we would only catch this killer through good science, through careful forensics," the pathologist Yury Maslov said.
Bukhanovsky founded the Phoenix rehabilitation center for mental disorders in Rostov-on-Don in 1991 and went on advising police in other serial cases. In February 1991, when a new series of killings of girls began in the region, he appealed on television to the unknown killer to come for treatment, and ten people with sadistic tendencies answered. He died in Rostov-on-Don on April 18, 2013, at 69. Burakov became first deputy chief of the Rostov regional police in August 1994, was promoted to major general, and died in July 2018. In his last interview he said the death sentence had been politically driven by the number of victims' relatives and the public mood.
Books followed quickly. Peter Conradi's The Red Ripper was due from Dell in November 1992, and Robert Cullen's The Killer Department, Richard Lourie's Hunting the Devil, told from Kostoyev's side, and Mikhail Krivich and Ol'gert Ol'gin's Comrade Chikatilo were reviewed together in 1993. The 1995 American film Citizen X dramatized the hunt, with Max von Sydow playing the psychiatrist. In 2012 two engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles, Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury, published a statistical model of the intervals between his killings, comparing their distribution with that of epileptic seizures. In 2018 Southern Federal University, the successor to Rostov State University, asked Google to remove Chikatilo from its list of notable graduates, calling him a dangerous criminal.
Proven by final judgment: 43 murders committed between 1982 and 1990, upheld by the Supreme Court of Russia in 1993 together with the death sentence.
Convicted at trial, then removed on appeal: nine murders, including the killing of Lena Zakotnova in December 1978, and one sodomy episode. The Supreme Court found the evidence insufficient. These nine are confessed or attributed, not proven. The other eight were not identified in the reports.
Charged but not convicted at trial: one of the 53 murders charged. Which one was not reported.
Confessed but never charged: the killings beyond the 53 charges. He confessed to 55 by Kostoyev's count in December 1990 and to 56 by Bukhanovsky's account and most later reports; Gazeta.Ru cited operational sources putting the total at 65. Two of the confessed killings were dropped from the charges for lack of evidence.
The Zakotnova killing: Kravchenko was convicted and shot for it; that conviction was overturned in 1990. Chikatilo confessed to it and was convicted of it at trial; that conviction was removed in 1993. The killing is legally unsolved.
The blood-group evidence: whether the 1984 clearance came from a real biological anomaly ("paradoxical secretion") or from a laboratory error is disputed; the Investigative Committee's forensic chief and Kommersant's 2026 review favor error.
Who obtained the confession: Burakov and Bukhanovsky credited the psychiatrist; Kostoyev said the written confession came first.
The eaten brother: no document confirming Chikatilo's story of an older brother eaten during the famine has been reported.
Numbers that vary between sources: the year of his marriage (1963 or 1964); the region of his birthplace (Sumy region, or "Kharkiv region" in several reports); the length of his 1984 detention (about three months, or 15 days in one report); the item he was convicted of stealing (a battery or batteries in most accounts); and the dates of the Kravchenko sentences. Several reports say he was convicted of 53 or 56 murders, which is wrong: he was charged with 53, convicted at trial of 52, and 43 were upheld.
October 16, 1936: Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo is born in Yablochnoye, Sumy region, Soviet Ukraine.
1942: German troops occupy the village; his sister Tatyana is born in 1943.
1954: finishes school.
1963 (or 1964): marries; the couple later have a daughter and a son.
1970: completes a correspondence degree in Russian language and literature at Rostov State University; begins teaching at a boarding school in Novoshakhtinsk.
May 1973: complaints of molesting pupils; he resigns without penalty.
1978: moves to a vocational school in Shakhty.
December 22, 1978: Lena Zakotnova, 9, disappears in Shakhty; her body is found two days later.
January 1979: Aleksandr Kravchenko is arrested and later confesses.
1981: Chikatilo leaves teaching and becomes a supply agent.
1982: the killings later proven in court begin.
July 5, 1983: Kravchenko is executed.
September 6, 1983: the killings are merged into one investigation.
September 8, 1983: the first of several mentally ill young men is arrested; the "case of the fools" begins.
March 1984: Dima Ptashnikov, 10, is killed in Novoshakhtinsk.
1984: Bukhanovsky draws up a profile at investigators' request.
September 1984: Chikatilo is detained near the Rostov bus station and central market; his blood group seems to clear him; he is convicted of theft and released within months.
November 10, 1985: Issa Kostoyev takes charge of the investigation.
1985 to 1986: Operation Lesopolosa begins.
1987: a 12-year-old boy, Ivan, is killed in Zaporizhzhia.
May 17, 1988: Alyosha Voronko, 9, is killed near Ilovaisk.
August 1989: a 10-year-old boy, Alyosha, is killed.
1990: Kravchenko's conviction is overturned; a criminal case over his prosecution is opened and later closed on limitation grounds.
November 6, 1990: Svetlana Korostik, 22, is killed near the Leskhoz platform; Sergeant Igor Rybakov records Chikatilo's name.
November 20, 1990: Chikatilo is arrested in Novocherkassk.
November 28, 1990: he begins consistent testimony.
December 18, 1990: Kostoyev has recorded 55 confessed murders.
April 14, 1992: trial opens in the Rostov Regional Court before Judge Leonid Akubzhanov; 53 murders charged.
October 14 to 15, 1992: convicted of 52 murders and sentenced to death.
October 30, 1992: cassation appeal filed.
1993: the Supreme Court of Russia removes nine murder episodes, including Zakotnova's, and one sodomy episode; the death sentence is upheld on 43 murders.
Early February 1994: Yeltsin refuses clemency.
February 14, 1994: Chikatilo is shot at Novocherkassk prison and buried in an unmarked grave.
1995: the film Citizen X is released.
April 18, 2013: Aleksandr Bukhanovsky dies.
July 2018: Viktor Burakov dies.
2021: the Investigative Committee's forensic chief says the "Chikatilo phenomenon" was an error.
September 2026: Amurkhan Yandiev's TASS interview on the Kravchenko case.