The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  But the failure to catch the killer at Shakhty intensified Kostoyev's anger and the militsia's own discomfiture. Burakov and Fetisov did not have to be told that they had better not fail again. Pressure was piling on the investigators like snow from an avalanche.

  Burakov's office churned out lists of potential suspects to check out. There was a boxing instructor from Novoshakhtinsk with homosexual tendencies. He was checked out. There were some recently released convicts with type AB blood. They were checked out.

  Once more, the syshchiki questioned every potential witness they could find. The ticket seller at the Shakhty station said she thought she remembered Tishchenko, and she thought she remembered seeing a middle-aged man with glasses standing behind him. But her description was vague. The woman's daughter, interviewed separately by a sledovatyel, said that she, too, had seen a bespectacled, middle-aged man in suspicious circumstances a week or so earlier. He was riding an elektrichka train, conversing animatedly with a young boy who suddenly jumped up and bolted from the train at Shakhty. Her description was also vague, but it could have fit the man seen walking, in 1984, in front of Dmitri Ptashnikov before he died. But who was the man?

  In desperation, without consulting Fetisov or Burakov, the Shakhty militsia turned to a psychic, whom they identified in their written report only as "K." They escorted the psychic into the morgue where Tishchenko's body was being kept and allowed him to commune with the spirit of the dead boy. Thereupon K. gave them a remarkably detailed portrait of the killer. He was a man in his early thirties, married, with a son between the ages of four and six. He was an athlete, perhaps a former physical education teacher. He had a scar on his upper left lip and a birthmark on his right cheek. He had had surgery on his right knee. He drove a Moskvich automobile and he lived in Shakhty. probably on either Shkolnaya or Koshevo streets. And he would be attending Tishchenko's funeral. The Shakhty syshchiki looked carefully for a man fitting this description at Tishchenko's funeral. They found no one.

  The rest of the USSR, meanwhile, slowed down in preparation for the long holiday in observance of the seventy-third anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Wednesday, November 7, was the actual holiday, and the following day, November 8, was traditionally also a day off. In every city and town in the nation, factories and offices worked an extra day in the first week in November in order to add Friday, November 9, to the vacation; Saturday and Sunday followed. In effect, the nation took a week off.

  Once, the November 7 parade in Moscow had been the high point of the Party's annual calendar. Tanks and missiles rolled through Red Square under the stern eyes of the Politburo members and military leaders standing atop Lenin's mausoleum. Carefully selected marchers carried thousands of portraits of the general secretary and his colleagues in the leadership. Crack troop units goose-stepped crisply across the cobblestones. Diplomats and foreign journalists carefully studied the slogans in the parade and the arrangement of faces atop the mausoleum for clues to policy or personnel changes in the Kremlin.

  In 1990, this stern glory was fading quickly. Mikhail Gorbachev had done away with the portraits in 1988 and then with the military hardware in 1989. The parade of November 7, 1990, made clear that he had not won the gratitude of his countrymen for doing so. In fact, it showed that the Party had lost control of the streets. Unofficial marchers got into Red Square and walked through with placards denouncing both Gorbachev and the Party. Gorbachev retreated from the platform atop the mausoleum well before the parade ended.

  In provinces like Rostov, there were no such provocative protests. The population reacted to the political situation by taking its holiday vodka rations, holing up in cottages or apartments, and relishing the chance to spend five days in potted oblivion.

  After the holiday ended on November 11, the workers on the forestry sovkhoz where the snare had been set went back out into the woods to cut lumber. On November 13, they found that the lesopolosa killer had not been idle. There was yet another body in the woods near the Donleskhoz station—the thirty-sixth victim on the lesopolosa list.

  Mikhail Fetisov, as it happened, was only a few miles away from Donleskhoz when he heard about the latest corpse. The chief of the militsia in Gukovo, a man named Alik Khadakhyan, had dropped dead of a heart attack on November 12. Fetisov decided to attend the funeral. He was en route, near Shakhty, when he got the news via radiotelephone from Rostov. He sped to the scene. It was a typically cold, drizzly November day in southern Russia, and the mud stuck to his shoes as he slogged toward the glade where the body lay.

  When Fetisov arrived, the corpse was lying just as it had been found. He could see that the victim was a young woman with dirty-blond hair, cropped short and ragged. She lay on her back, naked, her hands at her sides. Her face was swollen and blackened by bruises, one eye open and one eye shut. Her mouth was agape, as if she had died with a scream on her lips. Her lips were caked with blood; medical examiners would later determine that the killer had sliced off her tongue. He had also sliced open her abdomen, leaving a deep, vertical gash from her breastbone to her genitals. The body looked, to his eyes, as if it had been lying there about a week.

  There had been, Fetisov knew, no reports of any man exiting a train with a young woman at Donleskhoz during the previous week. The snare had failed again. Fetisov's body shook with rage. He ordered his driver to take him to the Krasny Sulin militsia department, the local station with the responsibility for organizing the surveillance of Donleskhoz.

  He summoned Vasily Panfilov, the officer directly in charge of the Donleskhoz operation, and demanded to know how the killer had slipped through the surveillance. Were there plainclothesmen on duty all the time?

  Well, Panfilov replied, nearly all the time.

  "Nearly all the time?" Fetisov demanded.

  "Except for their mealtimes," Panfilov said. "They have to eat."

  There were no restaurants, of course, in the middle of the woods. Sometimes, a plainclothesman left his post and went back to Krasny Sulin to eat. But there was always supposed to be at least one left on the platform, Panfilov assured him.

  Fetisov, furious, began shouting that Panfilov would be fired.

  Why had no reports been filed by the men on the platforms, regardless of when they ate, he yelled.

  Blushing, Panfilov handed him a pile of papers. There had been reports, he explained. But during the holidays, no one had bothered to send them to Burakov's office in Rostov.

  Angrily, Fetisov began to read the names of the mushroom pickers and forest workers who had been stopped and asked to identify themselves. Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov . . .

  One name seemed familiar to him: Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo, stopped and identified on the Donleskhoz platform on November 6.

  Fetisov telephoned Burakov. He told him about the unfiled reports. Then he told him the name that had caught his eye.

  "Do you have anything on a guy named Chikatilo?"

  As soon as he heard the name, Viktor Burakov felt an enormous sense of relief The long hunt, he began to hope, was over.

  Fetisov had been on vacation in September 1984 when Chikatilo had been arrested, interrogated, and cleared because he had type A blood. The name was only vaguely familiar to him.

  But Burakov had searched the man's apartment. He had placed him ninth on the 1987 suspect list. This was the first time a reliable witness had placed one of the chief suspects at the scene of a murder.

  Chikatilo must be, Burakov felt, the lesopolosa killer. The snare had worked—barely.

  As Burakov later discovered, the investigators had almost missed Chikatilo on the afternoon of November 6. Two plainclothesmen were assigned to the Donleskhoz station at that hour. But only one, a militsioner named Igor Rybakov, assigned from Donetsk, was at his post. The other had gone to eat. And Rybakov had not been wearing civilian clothes. The day was cold and drizzly, and his uniform overcoat was the warmest and driest garment he had. So he wore it.

  Late that afternoon, Rybakov noticed a
tall, bespectacled man carrying a briefcase walk up one of the paths out of the woods to the platform. Just before he reached it, he stopped at a well, pumped some water up, and washed his hands. The man walked up onto the platform, where a few late-season mushroom hunters were gathered, waiting for the next elektrichka. Rybakov had already checked their documents.

  The tall man started to chat with the mushroom hunters. How many had they gotten? Where were the best ones?

  Rybakov walked up and, in the manner of Soviet militsionery, gave him a half-salute, flashed his badge, and said, "Documents."

  Wordlessly, the man handed over his passport.

  Rybakov wrote the name down: Andrei Chikatilo. He looked the man over. He saw a pale red smear on the man's cheek. It seemed to him that Chikatilo had perhaps washed some blood off his face.

  But Rybakov had no grounds to arrest him. He jotted a few words about the smear in his notebook.

  The train clattered in. Chikatilo and the mushroom hunters boarded and rode away.

  It had been a near thing, Fetisov and Burakov realized as they reviewed the report a week later. If Chikatilo was in fact the killer, they were very lucky that Rybakov's gray militsia overcoat, which might have been recognizable from the edge of the forest, had not frightened Chikatilo back into the woods.

  Isa Kostoyev had by then arrived in Krasny Sulin. Fetisov showed him the report on Chikatilo. They agreed that he should be placed under immediate, twenty-four-hour surveillance. And they ordered a thorough investigation of his record.

  To the embarrassment of the militsia, the syshchiki sent out to tail Chikatilo could not find him immediately. The card file in Burakov's office had data from 1984. It said the suspect lived at 5 Fiftieth Anniversary of the Communist Youth League Street in Shakhty and that he worked at Spetzenergoavtomatika in Rostov. But it turned out that he had not lived in Shakhty nor worked at Spetzenergoavtomatika for four years. The syshchiki had to be circumspect about looking for him; they did not want friends or relatives tipping him off that the militsia had asked about him. It took three days to track down his whereabouts. He lived in Novocherkassk, in Apartment 68 in a large, prewar building at 36 Gvardeiskaya Street. He worked in Rostov, at a locomotive repair works called Elektrovozoremontny Zavod.

  Now that they could focus on one man, the investigators quickly gathered information on Chikatilo. What they found persuaded them that they had the right man. Chikatilo had worked for several years as a teacher at Vocational School No. 32 in Novoshakhtinsk. According to the official records, he had voluntarily resigned. But an interview with the director established that he had, in fact, been asked to leave quietly after the director received complaints that Chikatilo had molested several of his female students. He had drifted into work as a snabzhenyets, a supply specialist, at several Rostov enterprises. But he had been fired from one job after another, in part because he would frequently go off on business trips and return without the supplies he was supposed to be getting. His arrest in September 1984 and the three months he subsequently spent in jail coincided neady with one of the killer's periods of inactivity.

  Most significantly, the syshchiki found travel records at a locomotive factory called NEVZ in Novocherkassk, where Chikatilo had worked from January 1985 to January 1990. At the end of July 1985, during the period when Natalia Pokhlistova was killed, the factory had indeed sent him on business to Moscow. But he had apparently gone by train, which explained why the check of the Aeroflot tickets had not turned up his name. There was no good explanation for the investigators' failure to find the travel records at NEVZ in 1985. They had simply not completed their assignment. It was not, in the context of the general collapse of discipline and efficiency in the Soviet Union, an altogether unusual failure.

  Other NEVZ travel records placed Chikatilo at the scene of other murders. He had, for instance, been traveling back to Rostov from Ukraine when Aleksei Voronko was murdered in Ilovaisk in 1988. As Burakov relayed the new data to him, Fetisov shook his head. Everywhere the man had been, it seemed, he had left bodies behind.

  Once the investigators had located Chikatilo, they watched him for four days, hoping that he would do something to strengthen their case. Ideally, they wanted to see him select a victim as the lesopolosa killer had done, then follow secretly as he lured his prey into the woods. They wanted to arrest him just as he was on the verge of killing.

  Otherwise, they knew, their case was weak. They had no witnesses who could say they actually saw Chikatilo kill someone. They could place him at or near the scenes of many murders, but that was circumstantial evidence. And the only physical evidence they had, the semen samples typed AB, might work against them. Suppose Chikatilo gave them a semen sample and it was, like his blood, type A? Then everything would depend on extracting a confession from the man. And he had not confessed in 1984. It would be best to catch him in the act.

  But Chikatilo did not kill anyone or do anything else illegal during the days he spent under constant surveillance. He went to work at the locomotive repair works. He went home. He put out the garbage. He went to the stores on Gvardeiskaya Street. He walked in the park that lay between his apartment and the huge NEVZ factory that dominated that side of Novocherkassk. Three times, the watchers reported, he approached a boy or a girl and struck up a conversation. But each time, either he or the child broke off the contact and Chikatilo walked away alone. When the syshchiki questioned the children later, they all reported much the same thing. The man had asked them how things were going, where they went to school, what sports they played—nothing overly malign.

  By November 20, Burakov and Fetisov felt the time had come to bring him in. The evidence gathered about Chikatilo's business trips, though circumstantial, would be a powerful lever in an interrogation, as would his presence on the Donleskhoz platform at around the time of the murder of the still-unidentified woman found November 13. Moreover, Fetisov was afraid of another mistake. Chikatilo might notice the tail. He might slip out of his home under cover of darkness and flee. He might commit suicide. Kostoyev agreed and signed the arrest order.

  Fetisov asked Kostoyev for one favor. Once the man was brought in, the militsia's primary job—to find the suspect and arrest him—would be done. The next step, the interrogation, would be primarily Kostoyev's responsibility. But before turning him over, Fetisov wanted a chance to see the man for himself He asked that the preliminary interrogation and examination of the suspect be conducted in his office, on the second floor of the militsia building. There was no precedent for doing so, but Kostoyev agreed.

  Fetisov ordered his deputy, Vladimir Kolyesnikov, who had been reassigned to Rostov after completing his courses at the academy in Moscow, to organize the arrest. Fetisov told Kolyesnikov to stay on Chikatilo's tail during the daytime, giving him one more chance to be caught in the act. But before nightfall, Fetisov wanted Chikatilo under arrest. He wanted the arrest, if possible, on film, as part of a videotape archive they would build for the case. Kolyesnikov consulted with Burakov, and they picked two experienced undercover surveillance men, Vladimir Pershikov and Anatoly Yevseev, for the assignment. They also detailed a young militsioner named Slava Vinokurov, who operated their newly acquired video camera; they wanted to get as much of this arrest as possible on film. Then Burakov and Fetisov settled in to await the arrival of the suspect.

  Half an hour later, Kolyesnikov and his crew arrived in Novocherkassk in an unmarked, light blue sedan and checked in with the local surveillance detail. Chikatilo, they were told, had emerged from his apartment half an hour before they arrived and taken a walk in the park adjacent to his home. He had strolled half a mile through a grove of linden and acacia trees to a small metal beer kiosk. There, he had pulled a large jar from the bag he carried over his shoulder and had it filled. He had begun to walk back toward his apartment.

  Kolyesnikov deployed his men on Chikatilo's homeward route, standing outside a small cafe called Snezhinka, or Snow Fairy. It catered to the children in the park, ser
ving them ice cream and cookies. Behind the cafe was the park's playground, with dozens of children shouting and clambering over the teeter-totters and swings. Kolyesnikov's crew had not yet seen Chikatilo, but they had a description, augmented by two details radioed in by the men on his tail. He was carrying the jar of beer, and he had a bandage on one hand. They lit cigarettes and assumed the guise of four men killing time in the park.

  They spotted him ambling slowly through the alley of black, bare trees. He did not look like a man capable of killing thirty-six people. He was thin, bespectacled, and stoop-shouldered, about six feet tall. He wore a dark brown coat and a cap; the hair beneath the cap was graying and a little scraggly. Carrying a small leather satchel, he looked like just another Soviet bureaucrat, walking home from work, thinking, perhaps, about the time he had left until retirement.

  As he reached their position, Chikatilo turned and entered the children's cafe, walking over a faded little red-and-yellow footbridge that spanned an empty fountain. Kolyesnikov let him go in. They would give him a last chance to be caught in the act. Through the large glass windows in the front of the cafe, they watched him approach a boy and begin to talk. The conversation lasted for only a couple of minutes. Chikatilo ambled out of the cafe and turned toward his apartment. Kolyesnikov gave the signal. The three militsionery surrounded him, and he stopped. Vinokurov stepped out from behind some trees and began to film.

  "What's your name?" Kolyesnikov demanded, quietly.

  "Chikatilo, Andrei Romanovich," the man answered.

  "You're under arrest," Kolyesnikov said.

  Silently, the man offered his hands to be cuffed.