"If I had known what my husband was doing all those years, then of course I would have done something to stop him." The woman who said it had been married to Andrei Chikatilo for 27 years, and she said it to prosecutors in Rostov. The Moscow Times correspondent Peter Conradi reported her words from his trial in 1992, at which Chikatilo faced 53 murder charges. Prosecutors, he wrote, believed her. Neighbors and strangers did not.
A spouse’s claim of ignorance is hard to test. A wife cannot prove what she did not see. What can be tested is what she did: whether she gave an alibi, swore an affidavit, signed over property, refused a request from the police, left town. The eight cases below are cases in which a husband or a wife spoke, or declined to, and in which the record shows what came of it. Some of the spouses were believed. One was convicted. Several were sued. A claim is a claim, and most of these were never tried.
Chikatilo married in 1963, according to Kommersant and Britannica, a woman to whom his sister had introduced him; another account gives 1964. They had a daughter and a son. In letters from custody he called her "my dear Fenichka, my swallow" and wrote of his love for his son, Izvestia reported. He was a teacher, then a supply agent for factories, a Communist Party member, a husband and a father of two, and between 1978 and 1990 he killed children and young women across the Soviet Union, most of them near the rail lines around Rostov-on-Don.
His wife’s first reaction, as the investigator Issa Kostoyev remembered it, was disbelief: "Andrei never harmed a fly in his life; what murders?" At the trial in Rostov in 1992 she told prosecutors she had never suspected anything. Conradi reported that 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.
### An alibi, and what it cost another man
The wife’s word had already been tested once, in 1978, in a case that did not become known for more than a decade. Yelena Zakotnova, a girl of nine, died in Shakhty that December. 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 gave an account of where he had been that evening, and his wife confirmed it. The police accepted the alibi and turned to another man.
The man was Aleksandr Kravchenko, 25, who had a previous conviction. He too had an alibi: his wife and a friend gave him an alibi for the evening of December 22. In January 1979 he was arrested on a theft charge. His wife was pressured into withdrawing the alibi, and about three weeks after his arrest he confessed. His account changed repeatedly, and he withdrew the confession, saying it had been forced out of him. A court first sentenced him to 15 years. The girl’s relatives pressed for a harsher outcome, the case was returned for further investigation, and at a retrial he was sentenced to death. He was executed on July 5, 1983.
One wife’s account was accepted and the other’s was bent until it gave way, and the two were never weighed against each other in any court. After his arrest in 1990 Chikatilo confessed to the Zakotnova killing, and 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. Neither man now stands convicted of it.
### The verdict and the petition
The Rostov Regional Court convicted Chikatilo of 52 murders on October 15, 1992, and sentenced him to death. In 1993 the Supreme Court of Russia removed nine of those murder episodes and upheld the sentence on the rest, so that 43 murders stand as legally proven. In one of his petitions for clemency to President Boris Yeltsin, published by Novaya Gazeta in 2002, he wrote that he feared his ill wife would not survive without him. The newspaper presented the petition as his own words and did not vouch for any of it. He was executed on February 14, 1994.
In June 1999, while he was wanted for murder, Angel Maturino Resendiz was fingerprinted by the Border Patrol in New Mexico and sent back to Mexico, because no lookout had been entered for him. By then the FBI had put him on its Ten Most Wanted list under the name Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, as fugitive number 457, and offered a reward that eventually reached 125,000 dollars. In Mexico, his wife and other relatives told reporters they could not believe he was wanted for murder. CBS News reported that his wife told the Houston Chronicle he had been a model husband and had never shown violence.
On July 13, 1999, he walked from Ciudad Juarez onto a bridge at El Paso and surrendered to Texas Ranger Sgt. Drew Carter, under an arrangement his sister had made through an intermediary.
A Harris County jury convicted him on May 18, 2000, of the capital murder of Dr. Claudia Benton, a 39-year-old physician at Baylor College of Medicine who was killed in West University Place, Texas, in December 1998. It rejected his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and voted for a death sentence days later. Charges in Texas, Illinois, Kentucky and Georgia over other deaths were reported as filed but never tried, and the Associated Press linked him to at least 15 killings in all. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence on May 21, 2003.
He was executed on June 27, 2006. His list of witnesses named his sister, his mother, two brothers and a woman who said she was his wife. He looked toward the room where victims' relatives were watching. "I want to ask if it is in your heart to forgive me," he said, and told them they did not have to. The wife who described a model husband in 1999 and the sister who arranged the surrender that ended his flight give two different pictures of a family that was close to him, and neither was asked in court what she had seen.
Marie Fikackova, born Marie Schmidova in Susice, western Bohemia, on September 9, 1936, was a nurse on the maternity ward of the hospital in Susice from October 1957. She was married and had no children. Her husband told investigators that the couple had agreed to wait. They were training together for the national Spartakiada gymnastics display of 1960 and planned a holiday by the sea, and they had put off starting a family until 1961, CT24 reported. CNN Prima NEWS added that the couple shared a household with her mother and that her husband knew nothing of her difficulties at work or of her anger at small children.
On February 23, 1960, two infant girls on her ward died during her shift. A pathologist noticed that two babies had died within a short time of each other, and the police were told. She was arrested on the ward on February 27, 1960, and confessed. She was convicted of the murder of both girls and of bodily harm to two other infants, and on October 6, 1960, was sentenced to death. In interrogation she spoke of about ten further children; sources differ on whether she said they died or survived, and no court found that any other child died at her hands. She was executed at Pankrac prison in Prague on April 13, 1961.
The case was not reported at the time. CT24 suggested in 2010 that the silence may have reflected the Communist regime’s wish to avoid alarming pregnant women. Parents were told that their babies had died of postpartum shock or heart failure, CT24 reported, though some later received a medical report describing the injuries.
Russell Williams, a colonel, took command of 8 Wing at Canadian Forces Base Trenton on July 15, 2009. He was married, and the couple had no children. After his arrest in February 2010 he pleaded guilty on October 18, 2010, to 88 counts, including the first-degree murders of Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, 38, and Jessica Lloyd, 27, the sexual assault and forcible confinement of two other women in Tweed, Ontario, and 82 counts of breaking and entering and attempted breaking and entering. On October 21, 2010, Justice Robert F. Scott sentenced him to two concurrent life terms with no parole eligibility for 25 years.
The questions about his wife came afterward, in civil court. In June 2010 the first woman he sexually assaulted in Tweed filed a suit for 2.45 million dollars against Williams and his wife. Jessica Lloyd’s mother and brother sued for 4 million dollars. Both suits alleged that a transfer of property to his wife about six weeks after the arrest was a fraudulent attempt to shield assets. Under a domestic contract signed in March 2010, she paid him 62,000 dollars and took on the mortgage of their Ottawa property, while he kept the Tweed property, which was later sold with the proceeds held in trust.
His wife denied any wrongdoing, said the arrangement was for her own financial security, and described herself as a victim too. In an affidavit in June 2010 she said the charges had devastated her. About four years after the sentencing, Williams settled both suits out of court on confidential terms. The plaintiffs' lawyer, Michael Pretsell, said the settlements were reached "to the mutual satisfaction of all parties," and the claims against his wife were dismissed without costs.
### The claim that she knew
The second woman assaulted in Tweed filed a 7 million dollar claim against Williams, his wife and the province of Ontario. It alleged that the Ontario Provincial Police had failed to warn the neighborhood that a predator was at work, and that his wife had known of his conduct without reporting it. The province said police had acted in good faith, and his wife’s lawyers called the allegations frivolous. Superior Court Justice Martin James allowed the claim to be amended to include the allegation against his wife, finding it relevant, but refused to add a Charter challenge to the law that shields military pensions from such claims. The OPP settled with the woman in 2015, The Canadian Encyclopedia records.
None of the allegations in the civil suits was tested at trial. His wife began divorce proceedings after the guilty pleas; Maclean’s later reported that they had stalled. She stands in the record with a denial and an affidavit, and with two lawsuits that ended without a finding about what she knew.
Hubert Pilcik was a locksmith at the Skoda works who lived in Senec, near Pilsen, with his wife, who was eleven years younger. The couple had no children. In the village he had a good name; people called him "Strycek," Uncle, and he told stories, among them a claim that he had survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. "He told it so convincingly that people even believed him," Radek Galas, director of the Police Museum, told Seznam Zpravy.
After the communist takeover of 1948 he took money and valuables from people who wanted to escape to West Germany. Investigators concluded that instead of guiding them he killed and robbed them. They held him responsible for five murders, estimated the true number of victims at between 30 and 40, and arrested him in Senec in early September 1951. He died in his cell on the night of September 9, 1951, before any trial. His death was officially recorded as suicide. Contemporary documents say he had been beaten repeatedly during interrogation, and researchers have questioned the official account.
Detectives arrested his wife and other people in September 1951. She told investigators she knew nothing of the murders. She was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison and ten years' loss of civil rights, Seznam Zpravy reports. The charges against her and the other members of the six-person group concerned the illegal border crossings. The other members received prison terms of several years and loss of civil rights; one woman with only a marginal role received eight months.
In the early 1990s, during the rehabilitation proceedings that re-examined communist-era political convictions, unauthorized departure from the country under the 1948 law was treated as a political offense, and the whole group was rehabilitated. Seznam Zpravy points out that this happened even though the group’s members had committed ordinary crimes rather than political ones.
In a village in Banjarnegara Regency, Central Java, Slamet Tohari, known as Mbah Slamet, presented himself as a dukun who could multiply money. People came to Balun from as far away as Lampung, Palembang and Sukabumi. They paid him fees and waited for the large sums he promised. The Banjarnegara District Court later convicted him of the premeditated murder of 12 people, clients who, he told the court, kept pressing him to deliver or to return their money. Nine of the twelve were identified by police; three were not identified as of October 2023.
Reporters from detikJateng visited his family in April 2023. His wife told them she felt relieved after the arrest, and that in the year before it he had often been away. At his trial a younger woman who had married him in an unregistered religious ceremony, a nikah siri, testified that she had known him since early 2022 and became his wife about six months after they met.
The two women’s testimony, as reported, did not satisfy the bench. The younger wife testified on October 5, 2023, in answers that the presiding judge criticized as evasive; the judge urged her to testify honestly. On October 26 the older wife told the court about the guests who had come to the family’s residence. She first said she did not know her husband’s guests. Pressed by the presiding judge, she said more than 20 guests, men and women, had come. She also confirmed that she had once urged him to give up his work as a money-multiplying dukun.
On November 23, 2023, Tohari testified himself. He told the court that he had killed twelve people. Judge Arief Wibowo told him that the killings could have continued if the case had not come to light in March 2023. The Banjarnegara court sentenced him to death, with the verdict reported on February 4, 2024. Whether he appealed has not been reported. He had also claimed to police in April 2023 that he had killed 16 more people in 2011 and 2012; police found none, and the claim was not tried.
Robert Hansen moved to Anchorage in 1967. By the mid-1970s, the Alaska Supreme Court wrote in 1978, he had been steadily employed as a baker and a warehouseman, with good references, and he was the main support of his wife and two young children. In that year the court cut a five-year sentence for larceny, describing a hard worker and a respectable member of his community. UPI described him in 1984 as a twice-married father of two, a pilot and a big-game hunter. He ran a bakery in an Anchorage strip mall.
On February 27, 1984, he was sentenced to life plus 461 years without parole, after pleading guilty to four counts of first-degree murder. In a taped confession he said he had killed 17 women in all, and police said in April 1984 that he had by then admitted 20. His wife and children lived across town from the bakery and, the Associated Press reported, knew nothing of the life he led away from them. A 1984 AP report quoted the prosecutor Frank Rothschild as saying that even Hansen’s wife of 20 years had had no idea. No statement from her has been reported. Hansen died at Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage on August 21, 2014, aged 75, of apparently natural causes.
Herbert Baumeister was an Indianapolis businessman who ran two thrift stores, a married father of three, the owner of an 18-acre estate in Westfield, Indiana. WRTV described him in 2022 as a successful businessman with a wife, three children and a horse farm in the suburbs. He was never charged, tried or convicted.
Of the spouses here, his wife left the clearest documentary trail, because she acted through lawyers. On November 1, 1995, a private investigator and an Indianapolis police lieutenant confronted Baumeister at one of his stores about the deaths of men in Indianapolis between 1993 and 1995. Weeks later his lawyer told police he would not consent to police entering the property. In December 1995, on the advice of her own lawyer, his wife also declined to allow it. She filed for divorce on January 4, 1996, months after police had first asked her about a possible link between her husband and those men, WRTV reported.
On June 24, 1996, the lawyer representing Baumeister’s wife in the divorce contacted the detective, WRTV reported, and she gave her consent to investigators. The Associated Press reported on July 5, 1996, that the divorce was in progress, that his wife and the three children were living on the property, and that she had obtained a protective order against him. CBS News reported that the court granted her an emergency protective order and custody. Baumeister died by suicide at Pinery Provincial Park, Ontario, on July 3, 1996. Police named him the only suspect. As of May 2026 the Hamilton County coroner had identified ten men, and the work continued.
A wife who declined in December 1995 consented in June 1996, after a divorce filing, a protective order and her own lawyer’s advice. The record does not say what she knew, or when she learned it. It says that she declined while the question was a request from the police, and agreed when it came through counsel in the middle of a divorce.
The statements of ignorance in these cases come from different sources. One wife told prosecutors. One wife told the Houston Chronicle. One husband told investigators about a holiday and a family they had put off until 1961. One wife told reporters she was relieved, and another was pressed by a judge to say more. A prosecutor spoke for a third. In one case the claim was part of a conviction: Pilcik’s wife, who said she knew nothing, was sentenced to five years. In two others it was put in front of a civil court, where it was neither upheld nor rejected.
The cases are not alike in what they let a reader conclude. A confirmed alibi in Shakhty in 1978 led police to another man, who was executed. A wife in Ottawa signed a contract that two plaintiffs called a shield. A wife in Westfield declined a request and later granted one. These are acts, not beliefs, and they are the only part of the record that a court or a historian can weigh. What each spouse knew remains, in every case here, where the spouse left it.
• 1951: Hubert Pilcik arrested in early September; dies in custody September 9; his wife later convicted on border-crossing charges.
• February 27, 1960: Marie Fikackova arrested on a Susice maternity ward; sentenced to death October 6, 1960; executed April 13, 1961.
• December 1978: Yelena Zakotnova dies in Shakhty; Chikatilo’s wife confirms his alibi; another man is arrested in January 1979 and executed July 5, 1983.
• February 27, 1984: Robert Hansen sentenced to life plus 461 years.
• October 15, 1992: Chikatilo convicted of 52 murders; Supreme Court of Russia upholds 43 in 1993; executed February 14, 1994.
• November 1, 1995: Herbert Baumeister confronted by a private investigator and a police lieutenant; in December his wife declines to allow police onto the property.
• January 4, 1996: Baumeister’s wife files for divorce; June 24, 1996, she consents to investigators; Baumeister dies July 3, 1996.
• July 13, 1999: Angel Maturino Resendiz surrenders at El Paso; his wife tells the Houston Chronicle he was a model husband; convicted May 18, 2000; executed June 27, 2006.
• February 2010: Russell Williams arrested; civil suits filed June 2010; pleads guilty October 18, 2010; sentenced October 21, 2010.
• August 21, 2014: Robert Hansen dies in Anchorage.
• 2015: The Ontario Provincial Police settle with the second woman assaulted in Tweed.
• March 2023: Slamet Tohari’s case comes to light in Banjarnegara; wives testify October 2023; death sentence reported February 4, 2024.