Andrei Chikatilo stopped being a schoolteacher because of complaints about his conduct with pupils. He was not reported to the police. He was moved into a supply clerk's job for a group of factories, which sent him travelling constantly by rail across the southern Soviet Union, and he killed at least fifty-two women and children over the following twelve years, most of them lured from railway stations near Rostov-on-Don.
That sequence is the reason this subject is worth writing about, and it is not the reason it is usually written about. The interest in a killer who taught school is normally the classroom: the idea of him standing in front of children. The three cases in this archive point somewhere else. In each one the significant moment is the exit, or the absence of one.
Teaching is among the few jobs that arrives with a formal apparatus for exactly this. There are complaints procedures, registration bodies, background checks and colleagues trained to notice. All three of these men passed through that apparatus and it produced, between them, one job transfer. That is not an argument that the apparatus is useless. It is an argument that it is built to answer a question about conduct in a school, and that none of these three men was caught by anything that happened in one.
Ronald Janssen taught technical drawing at the Sint-Martinus schools in Herk-de-Stad, in Belgian Limburg. He was born in Boorsem in 1971, was separated from his wife, had two children, and lived in Loksbergen. Colleagues and neighbours described a quiet, unremarkable man.
On April 28, 2007 an eighteen-year-old, Annick Van Uytsel, left a party in Schaffen at about four in the morning and cycled towards Kaggevinne. She sent her boyfriend a text at one minute past five. Her parents began worrying at six. Her body was found wrapped in grey plastic bags, a cloth and a blue tarpaulin, and her bicycle turned up in Leuven that July. Nearly three years later he killed his own neighbour and her boyfriend. He was given life in 2011.
The part of his case that belongs here came afterwards. At Hasselt in October 2012 he was convicted of ten rapes, with torture and assault, committed between 2001 and 2006, which is to say during the years he was teaching. No further prison term was added, because he was already serving life. He was fined and ordered to pay more than three hundred thousand euros in damages, and the Antwerp Court of Appeal upheld the convictions in full.
Ten separate offences over six years, by a teacher, and the first thing anyone connected to him was a body in 2007. Nothing in his working life surfaced any of it. The description his colleagues gave, quiet and unremarkable, is not a failure of perception on their part. It is an accurate account of what there was to perceive.
His record as this archive holds it is three convicted killings and four confessed, alongside the ten rapes tried separately. The gap between three and four is the ordinary gap in these cases, and it is the reason the rape convictions matter more than they look: they are the part of his life that was running the whole time, and the part nobody was looking for.
Chikatilo is the case where something was perceived and then handled. His entry records that complaints about his conduct with pupils forced him out of teaching. What followed was not an investigation but a job change, and the job he moved to is the shape of the whole case: constant rail travel across the southern Soviet Union, which is where he found almost everyone he killed. He was convicted of fifty-two counts in 1992 and shot in 1994.
It is worth being exact about the scale of what that transfer preceded. Fifty-two convictions, an estimate running to fifty-six, and twelve years. Another man was executed for the first murder. The Soviet and then Russian press called him the Butcher of Rostov, the Red Ripper and the Rostov Ripper, and none of those names has anything to do with a school.
This archive has an article about the employers who moved people on rather than reporting them, and it is mostly about hospitals. Chikatilo belongs in the same argument. A complaint about a teacher's conduct with children, resolved by removing him from the school and saying nothing to anybody outside it, is the same decision a hospital administrator makes about a nurse, taken for the same reasons, with a longer tail. The difference is that a hospital administrator moving a nurse on is at least handing them to another hospital, which keeps them inside a system that might eventually notice. Chikatilo was handed a rail pass.
Mohan Kumar is the third, and he runs the other way. He worked more than twenty years as a physical education teacher in government primary schools in Dakshina Kannada, on the coast of Karnataka; his prosecutor put the career at 1980 to 2003. The killings began in 2003. Twenty murder cases were charged and twenty convictions followed, covering the years 2003 to 2009.
His method had nothing to do with schools. He offered marriage to poor young women, took them to lodges in other districts, and in the morning gave each one potassium cyanide as what he told her was a contraceptive pill, collecting her gold after she died in a bus station lavatory. He was married twice and neither wife knew about the other until he was arrested. Twenty women died that way over six years before anyone connected them, which is a failure of a completely different kind: not an employer declining to report, but a series of deaths in separate districts that nobody put together.
So the teaching ended and the killing started, in the same year. This archive cannot say whether one caused the other, and the entry does not claim it. What can be said is that nothing in his case turns on his having been a teacher, and that the detail is in the headline because it is arresting rather than because it explains anything.
That is the honest summary of the whole category. One of the three is documented as committing serious offences during the years he was teaching, and nothing in his working life surfaced any of it. One was moved out of a school on complaints and into the job that made him possible. The third had stopped teaching before the killings began.
There is a version of this article that treats the profession as the point, and it is a poor version, because the profession is not doing the explanatory work. What the cases have in common is not a staffroom. It is that not one of the three was caught by anything that happened in a school, and that in the single case where a school did hold an early opportunity, the decision it took was to hand him the job that made the rest of it possible.