The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  "I pulled down her panties and put my hands on her sex organs. Right after that, wishing to keep her quiet, I evidently squeezed her throat. I tore at her sex organs with my hands. Lying on top of her, I ejaculated. There was no sex as such. The sperm came out on her abdomen. Then I realized that the girl was dead. I dressed her again and threw her body into the river."

  Kostoyev ordered up the files on the Zakotnova killing and read them. In many respects, they corroborated Chikatilo's account. The body had indeed been found in the river. But the girl had died of knife wounds, not strangulation. How could that be, he asked Chikatilo.

  "I said that I hit her a few times. I meant with a knife. But in my opinion, she was already dead when I stabbed her. I thought she died from the strangling," he said.

  Kostoyev pressed on. The body had been found blindfolded. Did he have an explanation?

  "After I attacked her and pushed her to the ground and strangled her, I covered her eyes with her scarf. I did this because I had heard that the image of the murderer remains in the eyes of his victim. For that reason, I tried to wound my other victims in the eyes with my knife. In later years I became convinced that this was just an old wives' tale, and I stopped wounding eyes," Chikatilo said.

  It was an explanation of the clue that first suggested the presence of a serial killer in Rostov back in 1982, the striations in the eye sockets of the victims.

  But there were still other discrepancies between Chikatilo's account of the Zakotnova killing and the 1978 case files. Kostoyev continued to press him.

  There were, Chikatilo finally admitted, a few details he had tried to hide. He had killed the girl inside the hut, not out on the creek bank. He lied about it in the initial interrogation, he said, because he feared that an investigation among the neighbors on Mezhovoy Street would reveal his identity to the people of Shakhty; he wanted, he said, to protect family members who still lived in Shakhty. That explanation made little sense; his admission was going to reopen the Zakotnova case regardless of where, specifically, he said he killed the girl.

  More likely, he had tried to hide the role of the hut in the killing because the hut was connected, in his mind, with his true intent when he first approached the little girl. He had wanted to rape her. But admitting this entailed an admission evidently more shameful to him than murder. He had not been able to achieve an erection, and his knife had become a substitute.

  Eventually Kostoyev extracted an amended account.

  "It was about five or six o'clock, dark and cold," Chikatilo said. "I saw her alone on a dark street and I asked her why she was out so late. She was either coming or going from a girlfriend's, and she said she wanted to fix her hair. I said, 'Come to my place.'

  "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. I started to put the sperm into her vagina by hand."

  But the little girl, remarkably, was still alive.

  "She said something very hoarsely, and I strangled her," he said.

  He also changed his story about the blindfold.

  "During this act, I covered her eyes with her scarf because it was terrible to see her gaze."

  The amended confession corresponded remarkably well with the analysis of the lesopolosa killer's perversions and rituals that Bukhanovsky had written in 1987. It convinced Kostoyev that Chikatilo had indeed killed Yelena Zakotnova and that a terrible miscarriage of justice had occurred in Shakhty in 1979. He put Zakotnova's name on the list of victims and asked how Chikatilo had avoided suspicion during the earlier investigation by the authorities in Shakhty.

  "After a few days, they called me into the police station and interrogated me. They asked me where I spent the night of the killing. I said I spent it at home, and my wife confirmed it," Chikatilo recalled.

  In fact, the case was more complicated than that. A witness had given the militsia a description of a man she saw walking with Yelena Zakotnova. A drawing was made, and it resembled Chikatilo enough that the director of Technical School No. 33 responded, "It's Andrei Chikatilo" when a syshchik showed it to him.

  What saved Chikatilo, apparently, was the presence in the neighborhood around Mezhovoy Street of a suspect the investigators viewed as a more plausible killer. Aleksandr Kravchenko was a convicted murderer, out of prison on parole. He was the sort of person who would immediately fall onto a suspect list.

  The case file, not unexpectedly, did not specify the means used to interrogate Kravchenko. But he had confessed, he had been convicted, and he had been executed. His was another name to add, retroactively, to the list of collateral victims in the lesopolosa case.

  After Yelena Zakotnova's death, Chikatilo related, images of her agony filled his mind. He could not stop thinking of the sight of his hands on her. When he was alone, the urge to relive the experience all but overwhelmed him. He had, he told Kostoyev, struggled against it. Sometimes he would cut short a business trip and return home rather than face the temptation to find a victim and kill again.

  But in the fall of 1981, he said, he had succumbed. "At a bus station in Novoshakhtinsk, I saw a girl alone, looking like a vagrant, going up to one car after another and asking the driver to give her a ride. I followed her for a while and watched her. Then she came up to me and asked for money for beer or wine. She said I could have sex with her in exchange. I said that Fd give her the money.

  "We left the station and crossed the road into a grove of trees. We walked for a mile or so and sat down. She took off all her clothes and invited me to have sex with her. I loosened my pants and pulled out my sexual organ and tried to get it into her. But nothing happened. I couldn't get excited. And she kept saying I should hurry up and get it over with and give her her money. I got enraged. I remembered a video with sadistic moments and I pulled my knife out and started to stab her in different parts of her body, completely at random. At the moment of cutting her and seeing the body cut open, I involuntarily ejaculated."

  This woman, he said, became the first victim from whom he excised sexual organs. "I can't explain why I had this desire; at the moment of committing the crime, I wanted to tear everything. I did cut open the abdomens of my victims and cut out the uterus or other sexual organs. As I left the scenes of the killings, I would throw them and the victims' clothing away. I was in an animal fever and I remember some of my actions only vaguely.

  "How long I was with the victims is hard to say. It seems to me that everything happened quickly, although leaving the scene, I felt a terrible physical fatigue. I became apathetic. There were times when I would come out of the woods and onto a road and almost get run over because I was too tired to react to the horns of the cars and the buses."

  He had never, he said, learned the last names of any of his victims. "It's possible that someone told me his or her last name, but I don't remember them. The last names didn't interest me."

  This admission did not fit the facts of any outstanding Rostov murder cases. Burakov set his staff to work trying to determine who this second victim was.

  Speaking in a low mumble, looking most often at the table or the floor, Chikatilo began, over the ensuing days, to tell the story of the thirty-six murders on the initial list of lesopolosa murders. He had, as it turned out, a remarkable memory.

  "There were instances," he said, "when I learned about the way people were planning to go, watched them, and killed them along the way. This is what happened with [Lyubov] Biryuk, the first name on the list of charges. This was the beginning of the summer, 1982."

  He recalled the day of the week when she died, a Saturday. He had the day off, and he decided to take a bus from Shakhty to an area on
the opposite bank of the Don called the Bagayevsky Raion. It was, he said, locally famous for the quality of its cucumbers and other vegetables. He wanted to buy some.

  He remembered that he had to change buses in Donskoi, and discovered that the bus had broken down. He decided to set off on foot.

  "When I had gone a little way down the left side of the street, I noticed that a girl of twelve or thirteen was coming along behind me, carrying some kind of bag in her hand. I slowed down and let her catch up to me. We walked together beside the woods. I started talking to her, about whatever I thought might interest her. I remember she said she was going home from the store. When we had gone about a quarter of a mile, I pushed her off the road and grabbed her by the waist and dragged her into the woods. I pushed her onto the ground and tore her clothing off and lay on her. At the same time, I was stabbing her, imitating sex.

  From that, I ejaculated. When I had done that, I threw leaves and branches on the girl's body and left. I threw her clothes and bag away somewhere, but I don't remember where.

  "After the killing, I had blood all over my hands. I cleaned them off sometimes on grass, sometimes on the victims' clothing. Sometimes I found a lake or a pond or something."

  The account fit the known facts in the Biryuk killing. It was remarkable that Chikatilo had managed to murder the girl without attracting attention, a few yards away from a public road, on a sunny Saturday afternoon. But apparently, he had an instinctive ability to assess the surroundings and avoid witnesses.

  Like the Stavropol serial killer, Anatoly Slivko, Chikatilo said he had learned to cope with the problem of shedding his victims' blood without getting it all over his own clothes, so that he could leave a murder scene without attracting attention. He squatted beside his victims until they died and their hearts stopped beating. After that, the blood did not flow much from their wounds. If he arrived home disheveled or even scratched and bloody, he would claim that he had gotten that way unloading a shipment at work.

  Steadily, Chikatilo worked his way down the list of victims, connecting names and dates with events.

  "After a while, this was at the Shakhty train station, I saw a girl maybe eighteen or twenty, and it was obvious she was a tramp. I see from the charges that her name was Karabelnikova. [Irina Karabelnikova was one of the unidentified victims found in the autumn of 1982. Her corpse was identified in 1985.] I saw how she walked around the station with various guys who had botties. When the men around her had gone off, Karabelnikova came up to me, and we agreed to get together in the woods—to have sex for money. We went together across the tracks, and when we had gone a few meters into the woods, Karabelnikova squatted down to relieve herself At that moment, my instinct took over and I pulled out my knife and started beating her."

  That account of the Karabelnikova murder was not entirely correct, Chikatilo admitted in a later interrogation. He still found it easier to admit to murder than to impotence.

  In fact, he acknowledged, "I lay with her but nothing happened. She started to yell at me, to insult me, to push me off with her legs. I got angry and I got my knife out. We fought. In the midst of the struggle, I ejaculated. I started to stab her harder in the abdomen, then got up. I cut her in the eye sockets, in the breasts, in her sex organs."

  The moment of shameful, rage-triggering impotence figured in many of Chikatilo's confessions, particularly when the victims were mature women. "As a rule," he said, "I couldn't complete the sex act with a woman in the normal way. I was brought to a rage by the fact that my victims—I mean, the tramps—would demand that we get started as soon as we got together. Because of my condition [his impotence], I couldn't do it immediately. Gradually, I understood that for sexual excitement for myself, I had to see blood and wound the victims."

  He seemed compelled, however, to seek out the humiliation he would find when he failed to get an erection with one of the women he lured from a station into the woods. He repeated the pattern again and again. One evening in the summer of 1983, he said, he hung around the bus station in Novoshakhtinsk, watching a young woman about twenty years old trying to find a man who owned a car. Maybe she thought a man with a car could also provide her with shelter for the night. Maybe she just didn't want to sell her body in an alley or a grove of trees.

  "She was trying to connect with men who had their own cars, but she couldn't attract anyone," Chikatilo recounted. "Then I suggested that we go off into the woods together.

  " 'Do you have a car?' she asked.

  " 'No,' I said.

  " 'Without a car, I won't do it,' she said.

  "But she couldn't get a man with a car, so she came back to me and said we could go into the woods. We walked into a grove and lay down, but I couldn't get started."

  At this point, the young woman made a joke. In Russian, the word for "car" is mashina. The diminutive form, mashinka, means "little machine."

  "You don't have a mashina and your mashinka doesn't work either," the woman taunted.

  Whereupon, Chikatilo said, he pulled out his knife and killed her, taking care to inflict a lot of shallow cuts in her neck and breasts before she died. The body was found, but never identified.

  With the boys he killed, the ritual was somewhat different. Chikatilo did not, he stated, think of himself as a homosexual, and there was no evidence that he had ever engaged in homosexual relations with an adult. But a male victim offered the same potential for an arousing bloodletting as a female victim did. When he lured a boy into the woods, he often fantasized that he was a Soviet partisan during the Second World War. The victim, in this fantasy, played the role of a captured Nazi.

  This was a common fantasy among people of Chikatilo's generation. Too young to have participated in the war as soldiers, they grew up listening to and watching tales of heroism by partisan guerrillas during the years from 1941 to 1943, when German soldiers occupied the western quarter of the Soviet Union. Quite often, the tales involved torturing the Nazi to force him to reveal some secret about troop movements or ammunition caches. Evidently, these tales had made an enormous impression on young Andrei Chikatilo, because he relived them with his male victims.

  He spotted Dmitri Ptashnikov, he related, as the boy looked at stamps in a kiosk in Novoshakhtinsk. Chikatilo struck up a conversation, pretending to be a stamp collector. He invited the youngster to come home with him to see his collection. The boy agreed.

  Once in the woods, Chikatilo said, "I started to shake and get dry in the mouth. I stopped trying to control myself and attacked him. I tied his hands. This was a mania with me. It seemed to me that I was a partisan and was taking my victims to prison camp. I would yell at them, 'Hands up!' The victim would say he couldn't because his hands were tied. Then I'd start cutting them. I stripped Ptashnikov and tried to sodomize him. I stabbed him a lot and I cut off his penis. I don't remember why, but I cut off his tongue as well. He wasn't the only one I tied up. I cut out their tongues and cut off their sex organs. I can't say why I did it all. But the whole thing—the cries, the blood, and the agony—gave me relaxation and a certain pleasure."

  He had, he said, often tasted the blood of his victims. "At the sight of blood, I felt chills. I shook all over. Sometimes, I would tear at my victims' lips or tongues with my teeth. With women, I bit off their nipples and swallowed them. I'd cut out the uterus with my knife; with boys, I would slit open the scrotum and take the testicles. I gnawed at them, then threw them away. It gave me some animal pleasure and satisfaction," he said.

  Through the first week of December 1990, Chikatilo confessed in detail to all the murders on the list of thirty-six. His recollections, in each instance, fit the known facts of the case. He knew that Aleksandr Dyakonov had been killed near a busy street in Rostov. He remembered, in fact, that the noise of the passing cars drowned out the little boy's cries. He remembered that Ivan Fomin died in the reeds near the beach in Novocherkassk; he recalled being surprised that none of the bathers heard him. In most cases, when asked, he could draw a rough sketch
of the crime scene that accurately placed roads, bridges, and the place where the investigators later found the body.

  Then he began to add more victims to the list.

  At the end of August 1989, he said, he met a boy about ten years old in the center of Shakhty. Chikatilo was hanging around a salon that showed videos when he spotted the boy. He struck up a conversation. The boy complained that he had seen all the videos in town. Chikatilo said that he had some videos at home, and the boy agreed to follow him there. Chikatilo led him into Shakhty's central cemetery, and there he killed him. But in this case, he said, he altered his usual ritual. Normally, he covered male victims with pieces of their own clothing, and he covered female victims with leaves and branches. But this time, he spotted a shovel nearby, probably left by someone who had been tending a relative's grave. He dug a shallow grave and buried the victim.

  Kostoyev relayed the information to Burakov, who quickly responded that the date, place, and the victim's description in Chikatilo's account matched the missing-persons report filed for Aleksei Khobotov. He had disappeared at the end of August 1989 and never been found.

  Kostoyev decided to call a temporary halt to the questioning and see whether Chikatilo could verify his story and help the investigators recover the boy's body.

  On December 7, a group of investigators, including Kostoyev and Burakov, took Chikatilo outside the KGB building for the first time since his incarceration. They manacled his hands and flanked him with two burly men. Slava Vinokurov, the militsia photographer, videotaped the process. The suspect, wearing the clothes he had been arrested in, looked gaunt and troubled. His head hung low, and he responded to questions without raising his eyes to meet his interrogator's. He seemed ashamed.

  They took Chikatilo to the cemetery in Shakhty, and he led them to a thicket, a few yards away from the nearest tombstones. At his direction, they began to dig in a slight depression in the muddy earth. Within a few minutes, they uncovered a boy's sneaker.