Manhunters

by Colin Wilson

  In the autumn of 1990, a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukrainian police were hunting a serial murderer who had been killing for at least ten years, and who was one of the worst sadists and sexual perverts in human history.

  One of the main reasons the police found him so difficult to track down was the Soviet policy of giving little or no publicity to murder. While a wave of serial killings was taking place around Rostov-on-Don, the Soviet press continued to insist that Russia’s crime rate was virtually nil. So Russian women or children who might otherwise have thought twice about accompanying a strange man to some lonely spot had no idea that they might be in danger.

  To the police, the Rostov Ripper was known as the lesopolosa killer, or Forest Path Killer, because so many of the victims had been found in woodland. He killed children just as readily as adults, and boys as readily as girls. He preferred to pick up his victims on trains, or in public places such as bus stations, and then take them to some quiet place, where he strangled or stabbed them to death, performed horrific mutilations, and sometimes cooked and ate parts of the body. As far as Major Mikhail Fetisov, the head of the Rostov CID, was concerned, the murders had begun on June 12, 1982, when thirteen-year-old Lyubov Biryuk disappeared on her way home from an errand in the village of Donskoi. Thirteen days later, her body—reduced to little more than a skeleton by the heat—had been found behind some bushes. She had been stabbed twenty-two times, and chips of bone missing from around the sockets suggested that the killer had even stabbed at her eyes. Her state of undress indicated a sex crime. Because Lyubov was the niece of a police lieutenant, the case aroused more attention than it might otherwise have done, and Fetisov investigated it personally. From the fact that the killer had taken such a risk—the main road was a few yards away—Fetisov deduced that he was driven by an overpowering sex urge, while the number of stab wounds indicated a sadist for whom stabbing was a form of sexual penetration.

  Thirty-four-year-old Vladimir Pecheritsa, a convicted rapist, was hauled in for questioning—he had been at a nearby venereal clinic on the day of the murder. Russian interrogation techniques, developed by the secret police, were designed to extract a confession in the shortest possible time. But instead of confessing, Pecheritsa went away and hanged himself, the first of five men who would end their lives after becoming suspects.

  With Pecheritsa’s death, Fetisov hoped that the case was closed. But before 1982 was over, two adult female bodies—reduced to unidentifiable skeletons—were discovered lying in woodland near Rostov. Both victims had been stabbed repeatedly, and stab marks around the eyes made it clear that these killings were the work of the same person as the others—the Forest Path Killer. Fetisov organized a special squad of ten detectives to hunt the maniac. It would later develop that the Forest Path Killer had killed another four victims that year: Lyuba Volubuyeva, fourteen; Oleg Pozhidayev, nine; Olga Kuprina, sixteen; and Olga Stalmachenok, ten. Many of the murders took place near the town of Shakhty, not far from Rostov. The newly formed “Red Ripper” unit therefore began by dispersing police over a wide area, hoping to come upon the murderer by chance.

  During 1983, the Forest Path Killer kept up a steady pace of slaughter: June 18, Laura Sarkisyan, fifteen; August 8, Igor Gudkov, seven; August 8, Irina Dunenkova, thirteen; and December 27, Sergei Markov, fourteen. By the next year, however, the killer seemed to be butchering in a frenzy. On January 9, he killed seventeen-year-old Natalya Shalapinia. On February 22, he killed a forty-four-year-old vagrant named Marta Ryabyenko, in Rostov’s Aviator Park. Ten-year-old Dmitri Ptashnikov was found near Novoshakhtinsk on March 27. In early July, police found evidence of a double murder in woods near Shakhty—a woman whose skull had been smashed in, and a ten-year-old girl who had been beheaded. In late July, another woman’s body as found in woods near Shakhty. On August 3, it was a sixteen-year-old girl named Natalia Golosovskaya, found in Aviator Park; on the 10th, seventeen-year-old Lyudmila Alekseyeva, in woods near the Rostov beach; on the 12th, a thirteen-year-old boy named Dmitri Illaryonov, who had been castrated; on August 26, an unidentified woman in woods thirty miles east of Rostov; on September 2, eleven-year-old Aleksandr Chepel; on September 7, twenty-five-year-old Irina Luchinskaya, again in Aviator Park. Twelve murders in eight months.

  The police had one important clue. Semen found on the clothes of many of the victims revealed that the killer had blood type AB, the rarest blood group. Unfortunately, this seemingly ironclad clue would mislead investigators more disastrously than any other during the long investigation.

  On a hot evening at the end of August 1984, Major Alexander Zanasovsky, one of the “murder squad” watching the Rostov bus station, spotted a tall, well-dressed man with a briefcase and thick glasses talking to a teenage girl. When she caught a bus, he then moved on to another. Zanasovsky decided to ask the man to step into the police office on the station. There the gray-haired suspect produced his identification papers, which showed him to be Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo—not a typical Russian name. His credentials seemed to be impeccable: he was graduate of the philological faculty of Rostov’s university, a married man with two children, the head of the supply department of one of the city’s main factories, and—most impressive of all—a member of the Communist Party. Chikatilo explained to Zanasovsky that he lived in Shakhty, and was about to return home. He had once been a teacher, he said, and simply enjoyed talking to kids. His story sounded reasonable enough, and Zanasovsky let him go. The soft-spoken man certainly did not look like a serial killer.

  Zanasovsky asked the girl if Chikatilo had tried to persuade her to go with him; she said no, he just asked her about her studies.

  But when, two weeks later—on August 13—Zanasovsky again spied Chikatilo approaching two teenaged girls in succession at the bus station, he decided that it might be worth following him. When Chikatilo boarded an airport bus, Zanasovsky was right behind him, together with a plainclothes colleague, and they watched him trying to catch the eye of female passengers. Two stops farther on, Chikatilo got off the bus and boarded another on the other side of the road. Here again he tried to engage female passengers in conversation—not with the irritating manner of a man looking for a pickup, but casually and kindly, as if he simply liked people. When he had no luck, he climbed on another bus. In two and a half hours he switched buses repeatedly, after which he tried to approach girls outside the Central Restaurant, and then sat on a park bench paying particular attention to female passers-by. At three in the morning, he was in the waiting room at the mainline railway station, attempting more pick-ups. Finally, when the station was almost deserted, he succeeded with a teenaged girl in a track suit, who was lying on a bench trying to sleep. She seemed to agree to whatever he was proposing, and he removed his jacket, and placed it over her head as she lay in his lap. Movements under the jacket, and the expression on Chikatilo’s face, revealed that she was performing oral sex on him. After that, at 5 a.m., Chikatilo took the first tram of the day, and got off in the central market. Zanasovsky decided it was time to make an arrest, and placed his hand on the man’s shoulder. Chikatilo recognized him, and his face broke into sweat; but he made no protest when Zanasovsky told him that he would have to accompany him to the nearest police station.

  There the contents of the briefcase seemed to justify Zanasovsky’s belief that he had arrested the Forest Path Killer. It contained a kitchen knife with an eight-inch blade, a dirty towel, some rope, and a jar of Vaseline.

  Chikatilo’s story was that he had missed his bus to Shakhty and was merely killing time. The knife, he said, was to slice sausage and other comestibles. He also agreed to take a blood test.

  Zanasovsky was amazed when the test showed Chikatilo to be innocent. His blood group was A, not AB as was the semen found in the bodies. He was held, nevertheless, on an unrelated charge relating to the theft of a roll of linoleum that had vanished when Chikatiko was in charge of supplies to a factory. Three months later, he was released.

 
; The murders near Rostov had stopped, but when a woman’s corpse was found with similar mutilations near Moscow, there was fear that the killer had moved.

  In fact, it soon became clear that the killer was still in the Rostov area when, on August 28, 1985, another mutilated corpse was found in the woods near Shakhty—an eighteen-year-old mentally retarded vagrant named Irina Gulyaeva

  In retrospect, her death was a turning point in the investigation. In Moscow, the authorities decided that the case must be solved at all costs. The murder team was increased substantially with additional detectives and legal experts. And a new man had to be placed in charge of the new “Killer Department.” He was Inspector Issa Kostoyev, known as one of the best detectives in Russia. It was Kostoyev who finally had the satisfaction of hearing the confession of the Forest Path Killer.

  At the start of Kostoyev’s investigation, all was frustration. The murders ceased for almost two years. But between May 1987 and November 1990 the body count rose by at least eighteen. During that time, Fetisov and Buratov used their greatly increased manpower to keep a watch on railway stations, bus stations, and trains. There was evidence that the killer had lured victims off trains at fairly remote stations—for example, two victims had been found in Donleskhoz, in the middle of a forestry commission area. Was there some method of persuading the Forest Path Killer to choose such a station, rather than Rostov or Shakhty? Suppose, for example, they placed uniformed policemen at all the large stations? Would that not encourage the killer to use the smaller ones?

  The huge operation required 360 men, mostly placed prominently at large stations. But at three smaller stations—Donleskhoz, Kundryucha, and Lesostep—there would only be a few discreet plainclothes men.

  On November 12, 1990, Fetisov reached a new low point in morale. Yet another body—this time of a young woman—had been found near Donleskhoz station, in spite of the plainclothes surveillance. Her name was Svetlana Korostik, twenty-two, and she had been disembowelled; her tongue had also been removed. She had been dead about a week.

  But, explained the quite nervous and stammering plainclothesman, they had been taking names of all middle-aged men on the station during that time. They had a pile of forms, which they intended to send to Rostov very soon . . .

  When the promised paperwork at last arrived, Fetisov ran his eye over the forms, noting the names. Suddenly, he stopped. He had seen this name before—Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo. He turned to Burakov. “Have you ever heard of this man?” Burakov had. He recalled that Fetisov had been on holiday when Chikatilo was arrested in 1984. Now he was able to tell his superior that Chikatilo had been cleared because he was of the wrong blood type. But Fetisov then recalled an interesting piece of information issued to all law enforcement agencies from the Ministry of Health in 1988: police should no longer assume that a sex criminal’s blood type was the same type as his semen. Rare cases had been found of men whose blood and semen types differed. Both Fetisov and Burakov felt that Chikatilo had to be the man they were looking for. The first step was to find his address. It seemed that he no longer lived in Shakhty, but in Novocherkassk, and that he worked in a locomotive repair works in Rostov.

  The entire investigation now focused on Chikatilo.

  Fetisov learned that his job had once allowed him to travel widely, and that this was the period when victims were found over a wide area. When his job confined him to the Rostov area, the victims were found there. As a schoolteacher, he had been dismissed for child molesting. He had been dismissed from the Communist Party. And while he had been in prison for three months in 1984, the murders had stopped abruptly.

  Now that they were almost certain that they had their man, it was tempting to shadow him and try to catch him in the act. But that entailed the obvious risk that he might kill before the tail could stop him. It would be safer to place him under arrest. Kostoyev, told of this development, agreed. He also agreed to allow Fetisov to conduct the preliminary interview.

  At 3:40 on the afternoon of November 20, 1990, three plainclothesmen in an unmarked car drove to Novocherkassk, and waited at a point where—they knew from the surveillance team—Chikatilo would soon be passing. In fact, Chikatilo halted outside a café. The policemen approached him, and one asked his name. “Andrei Chikatilo,” he replied.

  “You’re under arrest.”

  Without speaking, Chikatilo held out his wrists for the handcuffs.

  The man who was brought into Mikhail Fetisov’s office did not look like a mass murderer. He was tall—about six feet—and thin, although obviously muscular, and his face had a worn and exhausted look. He wore glasses and certainly looked “respectable.” His shoulders were stooped, and he walked with a shuffle, like an old man. The only sign of degeneracy was the mouth, with its loose, sagging corners, suggesting a weak character.

  Chikatilo was subdued and politely uncooperative. He never looked Kostoyev in the eye. At first all he would say was that he had been arrested for the same crimes before, and had been released as innocent.

  But Kostoyev had received a piece of information that left him in no doubt that Chikatilo was the Forest Path Killer. Comparison of his blood type and his semen—he had been masturbating behind a newspaper in his cell and left traces on his underpants—revealed that he was indeed one of those rare males whose blood type differs from his semen. His blood type was A, his semen AB—as was the killer’s.

  At the third interrogation, Kostoyev spoke to him kindly, and asked about childhood problems. Suddenly, Chikatilo asked if he could write a statement. In this, he spoke of having deranged sexual feelings, and “committing certain acts.” The remainder consisted of self-pitying complaints about how he had felt degraded since schooldays, how everyone jeered at him, and how later employers had treated him with contempt. His “perverted sex acts,” he said, were an expression of his fury at all this mistreatment. “I could not control my actions.”

  The next day, all the ground seemed to be lost as Chikatilo went back to fencing and evasions.

  Time was running out. They had ten days to question a suspect before charging him, and this allotment was nearly up. Chikatilo did not take well to Kostoyev’s approach—the approach of a top Soviet official who is accustomed to authority. And as it became clear that the ten days would not bring the confession they expected, Buratov made a suggestion—that Kostoyev should give way to someone with a “softer” approach. A local psychiatrist, Alexander Bukhanovsky, had already written his own detailed psychological portrait of the Forest Path Killer. He was now called in, and his more sympathetic approach soon produced results. As Bukhanovsky read his own words aloud, Chikatilo listened with a silence that had ceased to be hostile or noncommittal, and was obviously moved by the psychiatrist’s insights into the lifetime of humiliation and disaster that had turned him into a killer. Soon he was holding back tears. Next he was telling the story of his life as if he was lying on a couch. Towards evening, he suddenly confessed to his first murder.

  It was not, as Bukhanovsky had expected, that of Lyuba Biryuk in 1982, but of a nine-year-old child named Lena Zakhotnova, and it had taken place four years earlier, in 1978. In that year, Chikatilo explained, he had bought a dacha—hardly more than a wooden hut—at the far end of Shakhty.

  Three days before Christmas 1978, when night had already fallen, he saw a pretty little girl dressed in a red coat with a furry collar and a rabbit-fur hat standing at a tram stop. He asked her where she had been until such a late hour, and she explained that she had gone to see a friend after school. As they talked, she found his friendly manner irresistible, and was soon admitting that she badly needed to find a toilet. Chikatilo told her that he lived just around the corner, and invited her to use his.

  Inside the hut, he hurled her onto the floor, and with his hand over her mouth, tore at her clothes. His intention was rape, but he was unable to summon an erection. He ruptured her hymen with his finger—and immediately achieved a violent orgasm at the sight of the blood.

 
; It was, he admitted to Bukhanovsky, a revelation. Now he suddenly understood: he needed to see blood to achieve maximum excitement. Still gripped by sexual fever, he took out a folding knife, and began to stab the screaming child in the stomach. It was then that he discovered something else about himself—that stabbing with a knife brought an even greater delight than normal sexual penetration.

  He carried the girl’s body and her clothes to the river, and hurled them in. They drifted under a bridge and were not found for two days.

  Chikatilo was an immediate suspect. He was taken in for questioning nine times. Then he had an incredible piece of luck. Not far from his shack lived twenty-five-year-old Alexander Kravchenko, who had served six years in prison for a rape-murder in the Crimea. The police transferred their attention to Kravchenko, “interrogated” him, and soon obtained a “confession.” Kravchenko was executed—by a pistol shot in the back of the head—in 1984.

  From then on, Chikatilo admitted, he knew that his deepest sexual satisfaction could only come from stabbing and the sight of blood. But the unpleasant memories of the police interrogations made him cautious, and for almost three years he kept out of trouble. Meanwhile, he had been made redundant as a schoolteacher, and begun working as a supply clerk in Shakhty. This involved traveling all over the country, and offered him new opportunities. On September 3, 1981, he fell into conversation with a seventeen-year-old girl, Larisa Tkachenko, at a bus stop in Rostov. She was his favorite kind of pickup—a rebellious school dropout with a taste for vodka, who would offer sex in exchange for a meal. She agreed to accompany him to a local recreation area. There his control snapped. He hurled her to the ground, bludgeoned her with his fists, rammed earth into her mouth to stop her screams, and then strangled her. After that, he bit off her nipples and ejaculated on the naked body. Then he ran around the corpse, howling with joy, and waving her clothes. It was half an hour before he hid the body under branches.