Eat Thy Neighbour

by Daniel Diehl

  When Chikatilo hired a prostitute to give him oral sex in a corner of the railway station he was arrested for indecent public behaviour. Under questioning Chikatilo admitted a weakness for prostitutes. It was a pretty unsavoury admission, but not a major crime, and Major Zanasovsky might have let him go if it had not been for the contents of his briefcase. Inside were a jar of petroleum jelly, a long kitchen knife, a piece of rope and a dirty towel, not the sort of things a businessman usually took with him on a buying trip for a construction company.

  Handed over to Viktor Burakov for questioning, Chikatilo was given a blood test to see if his antigens matched those of the semen samples recovered from the victims. While the lab was carrying out its tests, Chikatilo was left to cool his heels in a cell in the hope that he might change his story. Burakov learned two things about Chikatilo: he was a member in good standing in the Communist Party and his blood was type A, not AB. One more in the parade of thousands of possible suspects was turned loose. A few months later, Burakov heard that André Chikatilo had been convicted of the theft of three rolls of linoleum and was sentenced to three months in prison. It would cost him his membership in the Party and probably his job, but petty theft certainly did not make the man the Rostov Ripper.

  After August 1984 the killings seemed to stop altogether. A few more horribly mutilated bodies turned up, but they had obviously been murdered much earlier. Since his encounter with the police and arrest for theft, Chikatilo was keeping his head down and following the progress of the Rostov Ripper case in the now much-liberalised Russian press. He was clever enough, cautious enough and sufficiently in control to wait more than two-and-a-half years before he struck again.

  Meanwhile, Viktor Burakov took a step unprecedented in Russian police history: he contacted a psychiatrist familiar with western methods of profiling serial killers. Dr Alexandr Bukhanovsky put together a six-page report that Burakov found interesting, but it did nothing to help him narrow down his search. By May 1987 Burakov was no closer to solving the case than he had been three years earlier, but his flagging interest was reinvigorated when Moscow police began reporting the murders of young boys – all stabbed repeatedly and sexually mutilated. Realising that there had to be a connection between these new deaths and the ones around Rostov, Burakov went back to Bukhanovsky, this time allowing the psychiatrist full access to every police report from every case tied to the Rostov Ripper. Bukhanovsky’s new report ran to 65 pages and gave a detailed description of the unknown suspect. The man, Bukhanovsky said, was not psychotic because he could control what he did. He was heterosexual, he was a sadist and probably impotent – the knife serving as a substitute for entering the victim with his penis. Because the killings had almost all taken place during the middle of the week, the man probably had a job that allowed him to travel. His age was probably between forty-five and fifty years of age. Most unsettling was the conclusion that while the perpetrator was able to control his need to kill for extended periods, he would kill again and continue to do so until he was forcibly stopped. It was a good report, but how did Burakov go about finding one specific, impotent, travelling man in his late forties, among the hundreds of thousands of possible suspects?

  In mid-1990 Chikatilo started killing again. After having abstained for so long, the frantic bloodlust that drove him had become stronger than ever and, once resumed, the murders and mutilations occurred at an ever-increasing pace. By July of that year the police in Rostov and Moscow estimated that the Rostov Ripper had accumulated a tally of 32 victims. Under increasing pressure to catch the man whom Dr Bukhanovsky had dubbed ‘Suspect X’, Burakov devised a new plan that he hoped would force the killer into the open. Every train and bus station in the greater Rostov area would remain under police surveillance, but now the officers at the majority of the stations would be in uniform to make their presence obvious. Those at the remaining stations would be in plain clothes, making it appear that only some stations were being watched. Burakov hoped that the suspect would avoid those stations where uniformed officers were stationed, limiting his activities to those which appeared unguarded. To cover every possible avenue, there would also be police stationed in any woodland near a rail or bus station; these men would be disguised as peasants and foresters so they would remain as anonymous as possible. It was a massive task requiring more than 350 officers.

  One of the railway stations to be covered by plain-clothes officers was located in the village of Donleskhoz. While Burakov was still in the process of putting his plan into action the killer struck again. At Donleskhoz a sixteen-year-old retarded boy was abducted, stabbed 27 times and sexually mutilated. Almost immediately a nearly identical murder took place not far from the station in Shakhty. Frantically, Burakov got his men into the field but, once there, all they could do was wait and collect information on men who appeared ‘suspicious’. One of the suspects on whom police did gather information was a man named André Chikatilo, aged fifty-four. He had been seen at the Donleskhoz station on 6 November – the day the retarded boy was abducted and murdered. Burakov instantly recognised the name and ordered his men to interview anyone who might have been in the area of the Donleskhoz station that day. The interviews produced information that told Burakov all he needed to know. On the day in question Chikatilo had been seen coming out of the wooded area near the station with grass and twigs on his coat and a red smear on one cheek. Later, he was observed washing his hands at a pump near the station. Immediately, Burakov had Chikatilo placed under surveillance.

  While Chikatilo was being watched, Burakov dug deeper into the suspect’s background and movements. The reasons for his dismissal from his teaching job were revealed, as was the fact that his travels for the Rostovnerund company coincided with the location of many of the murder victims’ bodies.

  On 20 November 1990, André Chikatilo was arrested on suspicion. The following day the police questioned him in the presence of his court-appointed lawyer. An inspector named Kostoyev, who had an enviable record of getting confessions out of even the most difficult suspects, handled the questioning.

  Chikatilo insisted it was all a mistake, just as it had been in 1984. On the third day of questioning he admitted to certain ‘sexual weaknesses’ that drove him to hire prostitutes and that he did participate in ‘perverse sexual activity’, which he refused to specify. He did, however, admit that he was impotent; one of the motivational factors mentioned in Dr Bukhanovsky’s profile of ‘Suspect X’. Burakov was now so certain that he had the right man that he requested Dr Bukhanovsky to come to Rostov and question Chikatilo. While waiting for Bukhanovsky to arrive, Burakov ran into his first snag. Just as the blood test had shown in 1984, Chikatilo was type A, not the AB found on the murder victims. Improved methods of testing had come into existence over the past six years, however, and when Chikatilo’s blood was retested in Moscow it proved to contain a recessive type B antigen, which could easily make it appear that his semen was type AB rather than type A. Such a result could be expected in less than one in a million men and it was only by this quirk of fate that Chikatilo had not been kept in custody six years earlier.

  By the time Alexandr Bukhanovsky arrived in Rostov, little doubt remained in Burakov’s mind that Chikatilo was the Rostov Ripper. The only thing left was to extract a full confession, and that was Bukhanovsky’s job. Taking the slow, non-confrontational approach typical of those in the medical profession, Bukhanovsky began simply by reading his profile of ‘Suspect X’ to Chikatilo. Amazingly, after a dozen years of unspeakable murder, mutilation and cannibalism, that was all it took for Chikatilo to start talking.

  He began at the beginning, with the December 1978 murder of Yelena Zakotnova, which must have caused some embarrassment since another man had already been executed for the crime. On and on he went, enumerating the crimes and describing what motivated him. ‘The whole thing, the cries, the blood, the agony, gave me relaxation and a certain pleasure.’ He described how he felt an ‘animal satisfaction’ in biting off wom
en’s nipples and eating vaginas, penises and testicles, both raw and cooked. He said that he especially enjoyed smearing his sperm on a newly excised vagina and then chewing on it.

  He described how he varied the method of his hunt, sometimes stalking his victims for days or weeks and sometimes simply jumping out and attacking them at random. He admitted that the brutal stabbing was a substitute for intercourse and made a show of demonstrating how he knelt beside his prey in such a way that he could almost always avoid getting covered with blood. The one part of his rambling confession that everyone had most feared was the final body count. The police knew of 36 – Chikatilo’s list included another 19 they had never found.

  The unspeakable confessions and interrogations went on for more than eighteen months. Some of that time Chikatilo spent at the Serbsky Psychiatric Institute in Moscow, where he was examined by Dr Andrei Tkachenko. Included in Tkachenko’s report was evidence that at least a part of Chikatilo’s problem dated to his pre-natal hydrocephalic condition. ‘We discovered in our research that Chikatilo had a whole range or neurological symptoms, which indicated that he had certain brain defects related to development before and during birth. In particular, using functional imaging, we found that he showed signs of dysfunction in the frontal sections of the right side of the brain.’

  The trial of André Chikatilo, the Rostov Ripper, began on 14 April 1992 in front of a packed courtroom. Nearly all of the 250 seats were taken up by his victims’ surviving family members. When Chikatilo was led into the room and locked inside a large iron cage, the public began to shout and scream at him, crying for justice and Chikatilo’s death. Not at all cowed by this demonstration, Chikatilo shouted back at them. Throughout the trial his behaviour was disruptive, often degenerating into outright obscenity. He screamed, he sang the Communist anthem, the ‘Internationale’, he dropped his trousers and shook his penis at the judge and spectators, he insisted he was being ‘radiated’, he referred to his victims as ‘enemy aircraft I had shot down’ and, on one occasion, ripped open his shirt screaming, ‘It’s time for me to give birth.’

  None of this grandstanding impressed the court. With 225 volumes of evidence and numerous psychiatrists testifying that although his crimes may have been monstrous, André Chikatilo was sane enough to control his urges when he wanted, or needed, to do so, the physical evidence presented at the trial was so horrific and so graphic that even one of the military guards stationed near Chikatilo’s cage fainted.

  The verdict was almost a foregone conclusion and on 14 October, six months after the trial began, Chikatilo was found guilty of 52 counts of murder. An appeal was immediately lodged, but turned down. On 15 February 1994, Chikatilo was taken from his cell, led to a soundproof room in the basement of the prison and shot once through the back of the head.

  In 1995 a television film of the Chikatilo case, starring Donald Sutherland as Inspector Viktor Burakov, was released under the title Citizen X. In 1999 Newsweek magazine carried a story naming Rostov-on-Don as the serial murder capital of the world. According to the story, ‘Twenty-nine multiple murderers and rapists have been caught in the area over the past ten years’.

  Thirteen

  Zombie Sex Slaves of Milwaukee: Jeffrey Dahmer (1978–91)

  If you had met Jeffrey Dahmer on the street the only thing you might have noticed about him was just how average he was. Born in the American heartland city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in May 1960, Dahmer was about as typically American as you can get.

  With a population of about 700,000 Milwaukee is known for its hard-working, largely Germanic population, the fact that it produces about 20 per cent of all the beer in America and is the home of Harley Davidson motorcycles. Dahmer’s family was just as typical as their city. His father, Lionel, was a chemist whose work, and PhD research, kept him away from his family more than he would have liked, but he tried to make up for it by spending as much ‘quality time’ with them as his schedule allowed. Joyce, Jeffrey’s mother, was a slightly neurotic homemaker obsessed with her health. Like most kids, little Jeff had a dog and picked up injured birds hoping his dad could mend their broken wing. When he got a baby brother, David, in 1966, the family seemed complete. In Dahmer’s own words, ‘When I was a kid I was just like everybody else.’ Well, not quite.

  One summer day, when Jeff was four years old, his father was sweeping the debris from under the porch. Mixed among the leaves and twigs were a large number of bird carcasses. Jeff seemed almost morbidly fascinated by the tiny bones, playing with them and running his fingers through them. At the time, Lionel laughed it off as a ‘childish episode’ but later remembered it as ‘colouring almost every memory’ of Jeff.

  In the year Jeff ’s brother David was born, 1966, Lionel’s new job as a research chemist forced a family move from Milwaukee to Akron, Ohio. In retrospect, Lionel believed that the trauma of a new brother, the move and his first year at school might have affected Jeff more than normal. In his book about his son, Lionel later wrote: ‘A strange fear had begun to creep into his personality, a dread of others and a general lack of self confidence. The little boy who had once seemed so happy was now deeply shy, distant, nearly uncommunicative.’ His parents were concerned but with a new baby, a new job, a new house and a new city to deal with their attention was divided. Besides, kids all go through phases. With Jeff, however, the phase did not seem to pass. In his book, his father remembered, ‘His posture and the general way in which he carried himself changed radically between his tenth and fifteenth years. He grew increasingly shy during this time and when approached by other people, he would become very tense. More and more he remained at home, alone in his room or staring at television. His face was often blank and disengaged.’

  In fact, Jeffrey was withdrawing into his own little world of nightmares brought on, at least in part, by his parents’ dissolving relationship and the dawning awareness that he was gay, something his family’s Christian fundamentalism would never understand. Unable to cope with the problems, Jeff simply withdrew. Still, he did his best to get along in high school. He worked on the school newspaper and joined the 4H Club (a youth organisation dedicated to agricultural and livestock raising, generally found in rural, faming communities), but his classmates always saw him as a loner and more than one of them noticed that Jeff was developing a drink problem, sometimes smuggling beer into school and more than once coming back from his lunch break a little drunk.

  As Jeff ’s eighteenth birthday and his high school graduation approached, his parents’ marriage collapsed in an acrimonious divorce. Almost simultaneously they left home, intending to sell the house later. Joyce took eleven-year-old David with her. Communication between her and Lionel had broken down to such an extent that each of them assumed the other was taking care of Jeff. As a result, one day Jeff came home from school to find himself deserted by his parents, without money, in a house with no food and a broken refrigerator. The confusion was eventually straightened out, but its effect on Jeffrey Dahmer was permanent. For the rest of his life he would be terrified of abandonment.

  Only days after graduation in June 1978, Jeff picked up a casual acquaintance, eighteen-year-old Steve Hicks, who was hitchhiking to his girlfriend’s house. Jeff offered to buy Steve a few beers at a local bar and, being in no particular hurry, Steve agreed. After a few beers they drove to Jeff ’s grandmother’s house where, terrified of being alone once Steve left, Jeff beat his friend to death and stuffed the body into the void beneath the house. A week later, he returned late at night and dismembered the body, shoving the pieces into plastic bin bags and heaving the bags into the boot of his car. He then headed off to a nearby wood to bury the evidence. By this time, Jeff had had more than a few beers and his erratic driving was noticed by a passing policeman who pulled him over. When the officer asked the boy what the awful smell was, Jeff told him it was trash that he was taking to the local dump. The cop told him to watch his drinking and waved him on.

  Later, Jeffrey Dahmer realised that the
murder of Steve Hicks had irrevocably changed his life. During one psychiatric evaluation, he said: ‘That night in Ohio, that one impulsive night. Nothing’s been normal since. It taints your whole life. After it happened I thought I’d just try to live as normally as possible and bury it, but things like that don’t stay buried.’

  Worried that his son was becoming an aimless drifter, Lionel Dahmer, and his new wife Shari, tried to convince Jeff to cut down his drinking and get some direction into his life. Something. Anything. Finally, Jeff agreed to enrol in Ohio State University, but he spent most of his time in the local college bars and by the end of the first semester he had flunked out. Now completely frustrated, Lionel insisted that Jeff either get a responsible job or join the army. Jeff chose the army.

  For a while after his induction in January 1979, Jeff ’s condition seemed to improve. He made it through basic training, became an army medic and was stationed at a US base in Germany. But his problems, especially the drinking, inevitably caught up with him. In early 1981 he was discharged on grounds of alcoholism. He moved back to Ohio, dug up Steve Hicks’s bones, pounded them to dust with a hammer and scattered them across the woodland. Months later, in October, he was arrested on charges of drunk and disorderly conduct. No longer able to cope with his son, Lionel insisted that Jeff move to West Allis, Wisconsin – a suburb of Milwaukee – where his grandmother had a spare apartment he could rent. Maybe the move and the expense of living on his own would force him to become responsible.