In 1970 Andrei Chikatilo finished a correspondence degree in philology at Rostov State University and took a teaching post at a school in Novoshakhtinsk, a coal town north of Rostov-on-Don. Before long the school had complaints from pupils about the way he behaved toward girls. Staff kept them inside the building. In 1974, when the school’s leadership had finally had enough, he resigned "of his own accord," as NEWS.ru later put it, and was hired by another school. He was never punished for what the girls described. In October 1992 a court in Rostov convicted him of 52 murders.
Teaching is work that runs on trust, and the few convicted killers who have practiced it are remembered partly for that reason. Their stories do not follow one pattern. Chikatilo was eased out of the classroom while the complaints against him stayed inside the school. Anatoly Slivko was decorated as a model teacher in a southern Russian town although he had never trained as one. Theodore Kaczynski lectured in mathematics at Berkeley and then walked away from the profession altogether. Ronald Janssen taught in a quiet corner of Flanders and still held his teaching post when his neighbors were found dead. Mohan Kumar spent about two decades in Indian government schools before the deaths of young women in distant towns were traced to him.
Chikatilo’s school years ended in complaints rather than charges. NEWS.ru, reconstructing the case in 2023 from the investigation’s history, reported that the Novoshakhtinsk staff covered up what girls said about him, that he blamed the accusations on pupils resentful of his strictness, and that he faced no punishment when he left. Issa Kostoyev, the investigator who later took charge of the case, told Lenta.ru in 2022 that at a vocational school where Chikatilo taught, boys in the dormitory also complained about him. When he gave up teaching he became a supply agent for industrial enterprises in the Rostov region, a job built on business trips.
The first killing he would later describe took place in Shakhty in December 1978, when a nine-year-old schoolgirl, Lena Zakotnova, was killed. Police arrested another man, A.K., who confessed after his arrest. He was sentenced to death and shot on July 5, 1983. Amurkhan Yandiev, an investigator who worked on the Chikatilo case, told TASS in September 2026 that he had learned A.K. took the blame because a cellmate was tormenting him; A.K.'s sentence was overturned in 1990, Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported. Had Chikatilo been held to account in 1979, Yandiev said, more than 50 later killings would not have happened.
The charges eventually brought covered 53 women and children killed between December 1978 and November 1990, Peter Conradi reported from the trial for The Moscow Times. Most died in the Rostov region; others were killed in Tashkent, Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), the Sverdlovsk region and Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine, United Press International reported. In September 1984 police detained Chikatilo at a market in Rostov and held him for three months while they looked into the March killing of a ten-year-old boy, Dima Ptashnikov, in Novoshakhtinsk. A blood-group test appeared to rule him out, and he was released early in 1985. By Conradi’s count, 21 of the alleged victims died between that release and his final arrest.
That arrest came in the street in Novocherkassk on November 20, 1990. By December 18, Kostoyev said, his confessions had reached 55 murders. The trial opened in the Rostov Regional Court in April 1992 before Judge Leonid Akubzhanov and lasted almost six months, with the defendant held in a metal cage. His wife of 27 years told prosecutors she had never suspected anything. "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, according to Conradi.
The court convicted him of 52 murders, with other charges: 21 boys, 14 girls and 17 young women, by UPI’s count. On October 15, 1992, he was sentenced to death. Amnesty International, which opposes capital punishment in every case, asked the Russian authorities to commute the sentence. On appeal the Supreme Court of Russia upheld it but struck the Zakotnova killing from the verdict, Kostoyev told Lenta.ru, because A.K. had already been condemned for it. The murders that stand as proven number 43, all committed between 1982 and 1990, according to a 2019 Investigative Committee film series on old cases. President Boris Yeltsin refused clemency, and Chikatilo was shot on February 14, 1994. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the cemetery of the prison at Novocherkassk.
Slivko never trained as a teacher. He worked as an operator at the nitrogen fertilizer plant in Nevinnomyssk, an industrial town in Stavropol Krai, and in his spare time led school nature groups and then a children’s tourist club, Chergid, which grew into one of the most successful youth organizations in the region, Novaya Gazeta Europe and Lenta.ru reported. Parents saw him as a man who kept boys off the street. In 1977, despite having no teaching qualification, he was named an Honored Teacher of the RSFSR for his work with children outside school. He was elected to the city council, and Pionerskaya Pravda and national radio covered his club.
Over the same years boys from the town went missing. In the summer of 1985 the file on a missing 13-year-old passed to an assistant city prosecutor, Tamara Langueva, while the investigator who had it was on leave. Working back through the missing-persons files, she found that most of the boys who had disappeared had belonged to the same club. The testimony she gathered from its members was enough for the city prosecutor to authorize a search. Police searched Chergid and arrested Slivko on December 28, 1985, his 47th birthday.
In 1986 a court found him guilty of murdering seven boys between 1964 and 1985 and sentenced him to death. The trial was held behind closed doors. He was shot at the prison in Novocherkassk on September 16, 1989, NEWS.ru reported. Novaya Gazeta Europe, citing a former military prosecutor who studied the file, reported that about 50 boys disappeared in the area over those two decades. None of the other cases was ever tried against him. Before the execution Issa Kostoyev, then hunting the Rostov killer who would turn out to be Chikatilo, went to see him in the hope of learning how such a man thought. The town party secretary who had championed Slivko’s Honored Teacher title took her own life after the verdict, and residents set fire to the club.
Kaczynski alone among them taught adults. He entered Harvard in 1958 at 16, and at the University of Michigan, where he taught undergraduates while working toward his doctorate, he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1967 with a dissertation on boundary functions that won the Sumner Myers prize for the year’s best thesis, The Michigan Daily reported. The University of California, Berkeley, hired him from July 1, 1967, first as an acting assistant professor and then as an assistant professor. He published six papers between 1965 and 1969.
At Berkeley he let almost no one know him. The department chairman, John Addison, wrote in 1970 that he had seemed "almost pathologically shy," and a student evaluation from the winter of 1969 complained that he refused to answer questions, The Berkeleyan reported after his arrest. In 1969 he resigned, "quite out of the blue," Addison wrote, saying he was leaving mathematics and did not know what he would do next. In the summer of 1967, the university’s paper noted, a visiting mathematics student named Hugh Scrutton had also been at Berkeley.
In 1971 Kaczynski built a small cabin without electricity or running water near Lincoln, Montana. Between 1978 and 1995 he made and sent or planted the 16 bombs the FBI investigated as the UNABOM case, which killed three men and injured more than 20 other people. Hugh Scrutton, who ran a computer rental store in Sacramento, was killed by a bomb left at his business on December 11, 1985. Thomas J. Mosser, an advertising executive, was killed by a mailed bomb at his home in North Caldwell, New Jersey, on December 10, 1994. Gilbert Murray, president of the California Forestry Association, was killed by a package bomb in his Sacramento office on April 24, 1995.
After the bomber’s long essay against industrial society was published in September 1995, Kaczynski’s brother, David, and David’s wife, Linda Patrik, recognized his ideas in it and took their suspicion to the FBI. Agents arrested him at the cabin on April 3, 1996. On January 22, 1998, in federal court in Sacramento, he pleaded guilty to every count of two indictments covering all three deaths and two of the bombings that caused injuries, and he admitted responsibility for all 16 bombings. In exchange the government withdrew its notice that it would seek the death penalty. On May 4, 1998, he was sentenced to four consecutive life terms plus 30 years. The Ninth Circuit rejected his later attempt to withdraw the plea. He died in federal custody at the medical center in Butner, North Carolina, on June 10, 2023, at 81; the North Carolina medical examiner ruled the death a suicide, the Associated Press reported.
Ronald Janssen taught in the Belgian province of Limburg and lived in Loksbergen, a village in the municipality of Halen, in one half of a semi-detached house. When VRT NWS, the Flemish public broadcaster, looked back on the case in 2021, it described a teacher and father who had led an ordinary life for years before anyone saw the other side of him.
On April 28, 2007, Annick Van Uytsel, an 18-year-old student from Diest, left a party in nearby Schaffen by bicycle and never reached home. She was found dead at Lummen on May 3. Her bicycle turned up in Leuven that July. For almost three years the investigation, run by the Leuven prosecutor’s office, produced no arrest, although Janssen’s name had come up in it. In December 2010 the justice minister, Stefaan De Clerck, told a committee of the Chamber of Representatives that the police oversight body, Comité P, had found faults in the way that investigation was organized and in the handling of information.
On January 2, 2010, his next-door neighbor, 18-year-old Shana Appeltans, and her boyfriend, Kevin Paulus, were found dead in Loksbergen. Both had been shot. Investigators making routine inquiries among the neighbors found Janssen nervous, and he was taken in for questioning on January 5. Two days later he confessed to the double murder. Over the following weekend he confessed to killing Annick Van Uytsel, and on January 11 the Leuven prosecutor’s office announced it. In July 2010 a special committee of Flanders’s free education sector ruled that he could be dismissed from his teaching post; his confession was the basis of the decision.
At Tongeren, on October 20, 2011, a jury of the assize court of Limburg found him guilty on all nine charges after about two hours of deliberation, holding that all three murders were premeditated; the charges included the rape and torture of Shana Appeltans. The next day he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The presiding judge, Michel Jordens, found no mitigating circumstances, called him a danger to society and told him that society no longer wanted him in its midst.
A second trial followed. On October 5, 2012, the correctional court in Hasselt convicted him in ten cases of sexual violence against women, among them attempted murder, committed in Hasselt and Leuven between 2001 and 2006, years before the first killing. The Antwerp Court of Appeal upheld the convictions on all counts on May 24, 2013. No further prison term could be added to a life sentence. Janssen had also described to investigators a possible fourth killing, which VRT called incoherent; no victim was found and he was never charged with one. In October 2021 he was still in prison, and an attempt to obtain early release had failed.
Mohan Kumar came from Kanyana, a village in Bantwal taluk of Dakshina Kannada district on the Karnataka coast. When he was arrested in 2009, at 46, the Deccan Herald described him as a former primary school teacher who had left teaching after about 23 years. Open magazine wrote in 2014 that he taught mathematics, social science and English in a transferable government post. The Karnataka High Court recorded in 2017 that he had been a government school teacher who was often absent from duty and was dismissed from service in 2009 after a long unauthorized absence.
The deaths that brought him to court were those of young women, most of them unmarried and from poor families in Dakshina Kannada and in neighboring Kasaragod district in Kerala, whom he had met under false names. Between 2005 and 2009 they died of cyanide poisoning in Mysuru, Bengaluru, Hassan and other towns far from their homes, and most of the deaths were recorded at the time as suicides or unexplained deaths, Open reported. Some of the women were buried or cremated without being identified.
The disappearance of a 22-year-old woman from Bantwal taluk in June 2009 broke the pattern. Protests over the failure to find her led police to form a special team, and her call records led investigators to Deralakatte, a suburb of Mangaluru, where they arrested Kumar on October 21, 2009. Within a day police said he had been linked to the deaths of 18 young women. Each case was registered separately, and the sessions courts in Mangaluru tried them one at a time over the next decade, with Kumar often conducting his own defense. Because every case reported in detail included a charge of a sexual offense, Indian law bars publication of the women’s names.
The first three verdicts came in December 2013, when Judge B.K. Naik convicted him and imposed three death sentences. In the High Court in 2017 the results diverged. On October 12 the court upheld his murder conviction in the Hassan case of June 2009 but set aside the death sentence and ordered imprisonment for the rest of his life without remission. On October 24 it set aside his murder conviction in a Mysuru case of September 2005 for lack of proof that he was with the woman when she died, keeping only a robbery conviction. On November 15 it confirmed the death sentence in a Mysuru case of February 2008, calling him a serial killer.
The trials went on. In October 2019 a Mangaluru court sentenced him to death in another case; by then, the Press Trust of India reported, he had been convicted in 17 murder cases. On January 29, 2019, the same court had acquitted him in the case of a woman who died at Kollur in November 2006, and on August 17, 2026, the High Court dismissed the state’s appeal against that acquittal, finding that the medical evidence did not establish cyanide and that the description of Kumar as a serial poisoner had not been proved in that case. In June 2020 he was convicted in the 20th and last case and sentenced to life imprisonment. Press tallies of his convictions differ from one report to the next, and the reversal of 2017 and the Kollur acquittal show that not every case against him ended in a murder conviction. The High Court’s 2026 judgment records that he remains in custody.
None of these five men was stopped by anything that happened in a school. Chikatilo was arrested in 1990 after he was seen near the scene of a killing, with his name already in police files from 1984; Slivko because a stand-in prosecutor read old missing-persons files side by side; Kaczynski because his brother recognized his prose; Janssen because detectives knocking on doors found the man next door uneasy; Kumar because a missing woman’s phone records led to his house. The one school that held an early warning, in Novoshakhtinsk in the early 1970s, let its teacher go quietly. The murders that stand against him began in 1982.
• 1964 to 1985: the seven killings of boys for which Slivko is convicted.
• July 1, 1967: Kaczynski joins the Berkeley mathematics faculty; he resigns in 1969.
• 1970: Chikatilo completes a correspondence degree in philology and begins teaching in Novoshakhtinsk.
• 1974: after pupils' complaints, Chikatilo leaves the Novoshakhtinsk school and moves to another school.
• 1977: Slivko is named an Honored Teacher of the RSFSR.
• December 1978: Lena Zakotnova, 9, is killed in Shakhty.
• July 5, 1983: A.K., a man wrongly convicted of it, is executed for the Zakotnova killing; his sentence is overturned in 1990.
• September 1984: Chikatilo is detained in Rostov and released early in 1985.
• December 11, 1985: Hugh Scrutton is killed in Sacramento.
• December 28, 1985: Slivko is arrested in Nevinnomyssk; convicted in 1986.
• September 16, 1989: Slivko is executed at Novocherkassk.
• November 20, 1990: Chikatilo is arrested in Novocherkassk.
• October 15, 1992: Chikatilo is sentenced to death for 52 murders; the Supreme Court later upholds 43.
• February 14, 1994: Chikatilo is executed.
• December 10, 1994: Thomas Mosser is killed in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
• April 24, 1995: Gilbert Murray is killed in Sacramento.
• April 3, 1996: Kaczynski is arrested in Montana.
• January 22, 1998: Kaczynski pleads guilty; sentenced May 4, 1998.
• 2005 to 2009: the deaths later tried against Mohan Kumar.
• April 28, 2007: Annick Van Uytsel disappears; she is found dead at Lummen on May 3.
• October 21, 2009: Kumar is arrested near Mangaluru.
• January 2, 2010: Shana Appeltans and Kevin Paulus are found dead in Loksbergen.
• January 7 and 11, 2010: Janssen’s confessions are made public.
• October 21, 2011: Janssen is sentenced to life imprisonment at Tongeren.
• October 5, 2012: Janssen is convicted in ten cases of sexual violence at Hasselt; upheld May 24, 2013.
• December 2013: Kumar’s first three convictions and death sentences in Mangaluru.
• October and November 2017: the Karnataka High Court rules on Kumar’s first three cases.
• June 2020: Kumar is convicted in the last of the cases against him.
• June 10, 2023: Kaczynski dies in federal custody at Butner, North Carolina.
• August 17, 2026: the Karnataka High Court upholds Kumar’s acquittal in the Kollur case.