by Daniel Diehl
Ed seemed to have improved a lot over the years. The hospital administrator, Dr Schechter, always described him as a model patient who never required anti-psychotics or tranquillisers to remain calm. He always appeared at ease during his therapy sessions with the doctors and enjoyed working in the craft centre where he learned stone polishing, rug weaving and other forms of occupational therapy. It is unlikely that he was ever allowed to do leatherwork. By and large, he kept to himself, but when he mingled he got along well with the other patients and staff, except for the disconcerting way he would occasionally stare at the female patients and nurses – especially the ones who were plump and middle aged.
In 1978, at the age of seventy-two, Ed Gein was transferred to the Mendota Mental Health Institute where he died in the geriatric ward six years later.
Even though the world at large had long since forgotten about Ed Gein, there were a few who remained fascinated by America’s most famously twisted killer. Only months after his arrest in 1957 internationally famous horror writer, Robert Bloch, began work on a novel based on the Gein case. Because the world was still not ready for all the gory details, the tale was toned down and made more psychological than graphic. When the book, entitled Psycho, came out in 1959, master film producer, Alfred Hitchcock, immediately picked up the movie rights. The following year Anthony Perkins’ portrayal of the mother-fixated killer, Norman Bates, made audiences shiver all over the world.
In 1967 Ed became the model for the lead character in the film It, in which Roddy McDowall portrays a psychopathic museum curator who keeps his mother’s decaying body at home in her bed. Gein again surfaced on celluloid in 1974 as Leatherface in Tobe Hooper’s splatter classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But Hollywood was still not done with poor Ed. In yet another, and probably not final, appearance, Ed was transformed into the transvestite killer ‘Buffalo Bill’ who, like Ed, wore a suit made from women’s skin. The book Silence of the Lambs was written by Thomas Harris in 1988 and three years later the story brought to the screen by Jonathan Demme. We can probably assume that Ed Gein, like his victims, will be dug up again at some point in the future.
Twelve
From Russia with Hate: André Chikatilo (1978–90)
Life has always been hard in the Russian states and it was especially true in 1936 when André Chikatilo was born in the Ukrainian village of Yablochnoye. The peasants who worked the land in the once fertile expanses of the Ukrainian steppes were suffering through their fifth year of famine. Unlike most famines this one was man-made; it was dictator Josef Stalin’s personal revenge for the Ukrainian people’s resistance to handing over their farms to the Soviet collective system. Year after year the Russian soldiers confiscated the livestock and the harvest, including the seed grain needed to replant the fields. Sometimes they cleaned out the peasants’ cupboards and larders too for good measure. By 1936 an estimated ten million had starved to death. One of the side-effects of the famine was an epidemic of cannibalism as hunger-crazed people were forced to choose between eating their dead relatives or watching while their children wasted away. The Chikatilo family had already lost an elder son, Stephan, to a band of cut-throats who had probably kidnapped him to be sold as meat at a local market.
As if this were not enough to ensure that little André Chikatilo was off to a less than hopeful start, he was born with hydrocephalus – a condition once known as ‘water on the brain’ – which can cause damage to the frontal cortex along with a variety of physical impairments. One of the immediate effects of André’s condition was an inability to control his bladder at night. In a peasant culture where the entire family slept on a single, raised platform the presence of a bed-wetter was immediately noticed by the entire family. While André’s father and sister tried to make light of the problem, his foul-tempered mother, Anna, constantly humiliated him. Years later, André’s sister, Tatyana, would remember her mother as ‘very harsh and rude. She only yelled at us and bawled us out. She never had a kind word.’
By the time André reached the age of five, in 1940, the already intolerable situation in the Ukraine became even worse when the armies of Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. One entire army was dedicated to subduing the Ukraine in an effort to seize its vast oilfields to fuel the German war machine. As with almost everywhere the Nazis invaded, the killing and terror was beyond belief. Along with everyone else, André was constantly exposed to the sight of dead, mutilated bodies littering the streets and mass executions carried out in reprisal for the smallest infractions of German rule. For unknown reasons, André’s father was arrested by the Germans and sent to a forced labour camp, leaving an increasingly embittered Anna to bring the children up alone.
When the Germans were finally driven out of the Soviet Union, André’s father returned home, but there were new problems. By the time he reached puberty André was no longer wetting the bed, but he had begun experiencing uncontrollable ejaculations. Unlike most boys, who occasionally experience night-time emissions, André’s were almost constant and seldom accompanied by an erection.
Bullied at home, he received the same treatment at school because he was so shy and awkward. As a defence mechanism, André increasingly withdrew into a fantasy world filled with sadism and violence. To a boy who had seen so much suffering and cruelty, and felt such intense humiliation and inadequacy because of his physical problems, these nasty fantasies were the only thing which allowed him to feel he had any control over his world. On one occasion, when a friend of his sister came to the Chikatilo home, he tried to act out one of his fantasies. André was now sixteen and his younger sister’s friend was ten or eleven. Grabbing the child, he tried to tear her clothes off as a prelude to rape, but found that although the sheer excitement of the violence caused him to ejaculate, he could not achieve an erection. The girl was terrified and he was completely humiliated.
Although André was a fairly bright student he failed the entrance exam that would have allowed him to enter the state university in Moscow, and escape his life in the Ukraine. Like most boys who did not qualify for higher education, André Chikatilo served his time in the Soviet armed forces. Again, every time he attempted to have sexual relations with a girl he met on leave he was incapable of the sex act, embarrassing himself with his impotence and nearly instantaneous ejaculation.
By 1960 Chikatilo was again a civilian and had taken a job with the Ukrainian telephone company. Desperate to live as normal a life as possible, he enlisted the help of his sympathetic sister in finding a girlfriend who would tolerate his shyness and sexual problems. Amazingly, she found one for him. The girl’s name was Feodosia and in 1963 she became Mrs André Chikatilo. How they accomplished it can only be guessed at, but together they produced two children, a boy and a girl who, in the fullness of time, would make them grandparents. Determined to make the most of what he had, André took a correspondence course in Russian literature and by 1971 had not only graduated but obtained a position teaching in a boarding school at Novo Shatinsk near the city of Rostov-on-Don.
To his family, neighbours, friends and colleagues at school, André Chikatilo appeared perfectly normal, if a little withdrawn. Like most Russians he was an avid chess player, he seemed to get on well with his family and enjoyed the theatre. But inside André’s head something was terribly wrong. The first sign came when school administrators heard rumours that Chikatilo had attempted to molest some of the girls in his class. They may have dismissed the tales the first time, but in 1978 André was quietly asked to leave. As a member in good standing in the Communist Party, the school authorities must have provided him with a letter of recommendation because he soon found another teaching position in the mining village of Shakhty a few miles away.
While waiting for the government to provide him with suitable accommodation for his family, Chikatilo stayed in a run-down shack he had purchased in a Shakhty slum. When the new apartment came through and the Chikatilo family moved to Shakhty, André kept the shack but failed to tell anyone about
it. It was to this place that, on 22 December 1978, he lured nine-year-old Yelena Zakotnova. Later, he would recall every minute of Yelena’s ordeal. ‘As soon as I turned on the lights and closed the door, I fell on her. The girl was frightened and cried out. I shut her mouth with my hands. I couldn’t get an erection and I couldn’t get my penis into her vagina. The desire to have an orgasm overwhelmed all else and I wanted to do it by any means. Her cries excited me further. Lying on her and moving in imitation of the sex act, I pulled out my knife and started to stab her. I climaxed as if it had happened during a natural sex act.’ Chikatilo must have realised that this was as close as he had ever come to experiencing the tense excitement of intercourse; and all it had cost was the life of one small child.
Amazingly, he had been witnessed walking through the neighbourhood with little Yelena. When he was interrogated by the police in connection with her disappearance, his wife insisted he had been at home during the time in question and Chikatilo was released without charge. Later, a man named Aleksandr Kravchenko would be arrested, tried and executed for Yelena’s murder.
For more than three years André Chikatilo kept the beast in his head under control, but it surfaced again in 1981 shortly after he got a new job with the Rostovnerund construction company in Rostov-on-Don. As Rostovnerund’s supply administrator Chikatilo was required to travel a lot, sourcing the endless list of material and equipment his company needed in their work. When he got off the bus at Nvovshankhtinsk on 3 September he spotted seventeen-year-old Larisa Tkachenko standing in the bus shelter. He approached her and propositioned her; eventually she agreed to sex for a small price. By the time she realised just how high the price was going to be it was too late.
Together they walked to a nearby strip of woodland commonly used as an erosion break between fields all over the Ukraine. Once safely beyond prying eyes, Chikatilo strangled the girl, sinking his teeth into the tender flesh of her neck almost before she slipped into unconsciousness. He drank her blood as it gushed from the wound but quickly turned his attention to her breasts. He bit off her nipples, swallowing them whole before mutilating her genitals with a knife. The taste of flesh and blood was far more sexually exciting than just strangling a nine-year-old child. It would be more than nine months before André Chikatilo struck again, but in the second half of 1982 he would claim five victims. This time a little boy would be included in the list of casualties.
When the first body was discovered in early autumn 1982 it had lain so long in the tiny strip of woodland that only fragments of skin, hair and clothing remained intact. Police inquiries determined that her name was Lyubov Biryuk and she had been thirteen years old. She had been missing since 12 June – the day she met André Chikatilo. What police found most startling about the crime scene was how exposed it was. Although the body was found among the trees, the wooded area was only 50 yards wide and a main roadway ran only 20 yards beyond the tree-line. A well-worn footpath lay only feet from the body. If this seemed like a peculiarly exposed place to commit murder, the autopsy revealed just how horrifyingly odd the murder was. There were at least 22 knife wounds on the little body, the eyes had been savagely hacked out and although the corpse was badly decomposed there was clear evidence of knife wounds on the pelvic bone.
Local police knew all too well that the majority of murders are committed either during an argument among family or friends, the so-called ‘crime of passion’, or as a result of a robbery attempt gone wrong. Neither of these scenarios fitted the case in question and police assumed it had been a random act of violence, making it almost impossible to solve unless the assailant was clumsy enough to leave physical evidence at the scene. There was no such evidence anywhere near Lyubov’s body. Considering the violence of the crime, police in the western world would immediately have considered the possibility of a serial killer, but in the Soviet Union there was, officially, no such thing. Serial killers, like unemployment, homosexuality and prostitution were sicknesses confined to the decadent, capitalistic West. The only thing left was to begin rousting all mental patients not under lock and key and any known sex offenders. The only obvious indicator was that the perpetrator was undoubtedly male. When the next body turned up it was found to be a boy. This completely confused the search parameters and, despite the fact that the wound patterns were the same as on the first body, the police could not believe that sexual assaults on a girl and a boy could have been committed by the same man. There must be two murderers at work and one of them was obviously a crazed homosexual. Former mental patients, convicted sex offenders and members of the tightly closeted gay community were rounded up, thrown in jail and grilled endlessly. One man who had served time for rape committed suicide, as did three members of Rostov’s gay community.
While police were trying to make sense of the growing string of mutilated corpses and hordes of suspects, André Chikatilo was looking for ever more creative ways to satiate his unquenchable desires. Not only were young boys now on his list of victims, but how the grotesque, vicarious sexual encounters were acted out was becoming ever more bizarre. The mouths of most of the victims were now stuffed with dirt and grass; whether this was simply to keep them quiet or for some more subtle reason is not known. The earlier attacks had been swift and violent but now he was taking his time, making more and shallower cuts to prolong the victim’s agony and his own sexual arousal. The genitals of most early victims, both male and female, had been cut out and Chikatilo would later admit that he carried them away with him to chew on as a way of reliving the attack. The police also began finding evidence of small fires near the bodies, but could not imagine how this might relate to the killings; the fact was Chikatilo had begun carrying a small pot along with him on his ‘business trips’ for the construction company, in order to cook the victim’s genitals and eat them. If cannibalism had not been a part of his master plan, it had definitely evolved into an integral component. The tongues of many of his later prey were also found to be missing, having been added to the cannibalistic stew. The greater the indignity he could inflict, either before or after death, the more powerful Chikatilo felt.
Despite the best efforts of the police to keep the lid on a situation they were clearly unable to handle, rumours of what was happening to the missing children and young people were rapidly spreading beyond the Rostov area. Even if word of the fifteen children who had disappeared by May 1984 could have been kept secret, the continuing interrogations – which had now been carried out on more than 150,000 men – could not have gone unnoticed. But even on the rare occasions when the press mentioned one of the killings, or missing children, nothing was said to indicate there was any connection with past disappearances. There could be no serial killers in the Soviet Union.
Finally, in complete frustration, the head of the Rostov police detective bureau asked Moscow for help. It came in the form of Viktor Burakov from the Moscow Division of Serious Crime. At thirty-seven, Burakov was better at analysing physical evidence than any other detective in the Soviet Union and was noted for his absolute doggedness. There was no doubt the Rostov police needed all the help they could get; during the first eight months of 1984 the mutilated bodies of eight more children were discovered, along with those of two unidentified women. Unlike the earlier corpses, the eyes in these had been left intact, but the sexual mutilations were becoming worse with each attack: the autopsy on a fourteen-year-old boy showed more than 70 knife wounds. And not only were the attacks getting closer and closer together, they were starting to appear in places where earlier bodies had been found. The monster was revisiting his old haunts.
Because of the ferocity of the attacks, even Burakov was convinced that the assailant had to be someone with demonstrable mental problems. Twice, mildly retarded teenage boys were arrested and a confession was beaten out of them, but Burakov was astute enough to know that forced confessions were less than worthless. The only thing that seemed to link the two boys with the victims was the fact that they had both used public transport, an
d most of the victims had been found near bus or railway stations. But this was certainly not enough to convict anyone of anything. When yet another freshly murdered body turned up, Burakov was forced to turn his prime suspect loose – the boy had obviously been killed while the suspect was in jail.
It was only when forensic experts found semen smears around the rectum of one of the young, male victims that Burakov had his first, solid piece of evidence. The antigens in semen were known to match the antigens in blood, so the man now known as the ‘Rostov Ripper’ would have to have AB blood type, the same as the semen found on fourteen-year-old Sergi Markov. Unfortunately, none of the suspects in custody, and virtually no one on the possible suspect list, matched this type, but at least it was a lead that could be followed in future investigations.
At Burakov’s request, the Minister of the Interior appointed a dozen more detectives to the case and a task force numbering more than 200 people in different capacities was now conducting the largest manhunt in the history of the Soviet Union.
Working on the theory that the Rostov Ripper was finding most of his victims at bus stops and railway stations, Burakov placed plain-clothes officers at nearly every public transport terminal in any town or village where bodies had been found. They were instructed to watch for anyone acting suspiciously, or approaching children or young women. A description of suspects was to be taken and if possible without arousing too much suspicion, their names acquired.
One of those who did, eventually, catch the eye of a detective assigned to the Rostov-on-Don central railway station was a slim, grey-haired man who appeared to be in his late forties, who consistently approached teenage girls and young women with whom he obviously had no connection. He had done nothing to warrant arrest so a few questions were quietly put to him. His name, he said, was André Chikatilo; he worked for Rostovnerund Construction and travelled a lot in and out of Rostov. Yes, he did talk to the youngsters. He used to be a teacher and still missed the company of young people. It all seemed perfectly logical and innocent, so the detective allowed Chikatilo to walk away. Still, there was something odd and furtive about the way the man kept looking around him even when he was not talking to the police. So the detective followed him.