It was getting dark, too dark to film, and Kostoyev ordered the operation halted for the night. The next morning, under a cold gray drizzle, it began again. Slowly, the investigators finished the excavation, uncovering the yellowing skeleton of a boy, lying face down in the mud. It was, medical records later confirmed, the body of Aleksei Khobotov.
On December 11, Chikatilo agreed to write down the particulars of all the murders he had committed that were not on the initial list of thirty-six.
"There was a woman in Krasny Sulin in about 1987 in a field of high grass," he wrote. He gave them directions toward the remains. "From the Krasny Sulin station, go right and up the road. Second, a boy from Zaporozhe [Ukraine]. About 1986, in the woods near the railroad. Third, a boy from an internal in the city of Shakhty, around 1985 in the woods near the Shakhty station. Fourth, a woman in Shakhty, in 1989, near the Shakhty station. She was from Kamensk. A boy in Leningrad, who studied at a vocational school, around 1986. Sixth, a boy in Sverdlovsk oblast, in Revda, in the woods near the Revda station, about 1986. Seventh, a boy in the town of Kolchugino, Vladimir oblast, whom I took from the beach into the forest in 1987. Eighth, a boy in Krasnodar in 1986, approximately, in the forest outside of town. Ninth, a girl from Krasnodar, in an orchard near the airport. Tenth, a woman in Tashkent, in 1984, on the bank of a river. Eleventh, a girl in Tashkent, in some farmland outside the city; she was from Alma-Ata."
Other admissions came almost haphazardly. It occurred to Kostoyev that Chikatilo might be responsible for the killing of a woman found in the beach area on the left bank of the Don in 1988, a murder whose signature did not fit the lesopolosa pattern and which therefore had not been on the list of thirty-six murders.
No, said Chikatilo, but he did seem to recall killing in that area a different woman, who also had not been on the victims' list; it was, he thought, in 1987 or 1988. Chikatilo was taken over the bridge to the general area and asked to point out the site. He led the investigators to the spot where, in 1981, the militsia had found the body of a woman named Larisa Tkachenko, stabbed to death. On second thought, Chikatilo said, he probably had committed that murder in 1981 or 1982.
The Tkachenko case had never been added to the lesopolosa list because the medical examiners in 1981 had concluded that the killer probably had type B blood. Now, with all the laboratory analyses called into question and Chikatilo's confession at hand, the Tkachenko case was added to the accusation.
Other cases Chikatilo mentioned had not made the original accusation because the killer's method had been at variance with the usual lesopolosa signature or because they occurred far from Rostov.
The young woman from Kamensk that Chikatilo mentioned turned out to be a sixteen-year-old student named Tatyana Ryzhova. He described meeting her in the Shakhty station at the end of February 1989. He had taken her to an apartment that his daughter, Lyudmilla, had vacated a few months previously, when she married a man from Kharkov, Ukraine. The Chikatilos, like nearly all Soviet families, knew better than to give up an apartment they controlled, and they kept paying rent in the expectation that their son, Yuri, would move into it when he got out of the Soviet army.
Inside the apartment, a familiar scene unfolded. The woman had a drink and agreed to have sex. She undressed. "I tried to get an erection and to put my penis into her with my hands," Chikatilo recounted. He failed. "Evidently, this hurt her, because she started to get angry and demand five hundred rubles, or else her gang would come and destroy the apartment. I tried to calm her down, but saw that I couldn't. So I hit her and she lost consciousness." Soon, he recounted, he realized that he could not simply leave the body there, as he had done in the woods. So he dismembered the corpse.
Chikatilo went outside and walked around until he saw a sled sitting behind an open gate. He stole it. He remembered that a dog had barked, and he had a fear that someone could catch him in the act of theft. No one did. He took the sled back to the apartment and found some old cloths in a garbage pile. Furtively, in the dark, he laid the body parts on the sled and covered them with the cloths. Then he set out into the night to try to find a place to dispose of the body. He headed toward the Shakhty station, thinking he would take the corpse into the same woods where he had left other victims. At one point, he recounted, the sled got stuck and a stranger helped him pull it across the street, never suspecting what lay under the pile of cloths. Before Chikatilo got to the forest, he saw an open sewer main. Quickly, he pushed the body parts inside. He left the sled in a gutter a few hundred yards away.
Ryzhova's body, found ten days later, was never associated with the lesopolosa killings until Chikatilo's confession, because it had been dismembered, rather than disemboweled, then left in a sewer pipe, not in the woods.
Chikatilo's disclosures about the murders of Aleksei Khobotov, Larisa Tkachenko, and Tatyana Ryzhova solidified Burakov's conviction that they had indeed found the lesopolosa killer. After untangling no fewer than five false confessions between 1983 and 1986, Burakov did not want to have to rely on confessions obtained for crimes the investigators already knew about. He had seen how easy it was to coerce an admission of guilt, and there was always the possibility that Chikatilo, reacting to the list of accusations, had fabricated a story about each of them, or been prompted.
No investigator, however, had known with certainty that Aleksei Khobotov was dead, much less where the body was buried. Only the killer could have shown them to the site.
As the weeks passed and more information came in, other parts of Chikatilo's confession checked out. Small details corroborated some confessions. He knew, for instance, that Marta Ryabenko, the drunken woman slain in February 1984, was the granddaughter of a famous Soviet general. The general's name had not been Ryabenko, and it was presumably a detail Chikatilo had learned in conversation with the victim. Chikatilo recalled that one of the victims, Anna Lemesheva, had threatened as she struggled with him that a man named Bars would get Chikatilo for what he was doing. Lemesheva, it turned out, had a boyfriend with the nickname "Bars" tattooed on his fist.
In Leningrad, Tashkent, Sverdlovsk, Krasnodar, and other Soviet cities where Chikatilo said he had murdered, the militsia dredged up records of unidentified remains or missing persons that fit Chikatilo's descriptions. For some of the cases, Chikatilo traveled, under guard, to the sites of those murders and correctly pointed out where the remains had been found years before.
Chikatilo had, it became clear, been affected by his 1984 arrest. From 1985 to 1989, he did nearly all his killing while traveling on business outside Rostov oblast. Gradually, though, his obsession had overpowered his caution, and he had resumed killing close to home.
Chikatilo also eventually confessed to three killings that Burakov and his crew could not verify. Chikatilo said these murders were committed in the Shakhty area between 1980 and 1982, and he showed the investigators the sites where he remembered leaving the bodies. The militsia spent three months combing the areas Chikatilo designated. In one instance, they drained part of a swamp. But they found no human remains, and the times and places Chikatilo remembered did not correspond to any missing-persons reports.
By the end of the interrogation, Chikatilo had confessed to fifty-six murders. The investigators found sufficient corroborating evidence to charge him with fifty-three, thirty-one females and twenty-two males. Burakov, however, believed that the true total might never be known. There were, he suspected, victims Chikatilo had not remembered or had chosen, for some reason, not to reveal. Though he had no proof, Burakov thought that the true total of victims might be much higher.
12
PORTRAIT OF A KILLER
Andrei Chikatilo himself wondered what had made him the man he was. "The more I've thought about it," he told Kostoyev during an interrogation in early December, "the more I've come to the conclusion that I suffer from some kind of sickness. It was as if something directed me, something outside me, something supernatural. I was absolutely not in control of myself when I committed t
hese murders, when I stabbed people, when I was cruel. Therefore, I have a request for the investigators. I want you to show me to specialists in psychology and sexual pathology. I am ready to discuss my condition in detail with these specialists and I'm ready to answer all their questions. I want the specialists to know the truth."
Chikatilo's eagerness to undergo a psychiatric evaluation suggested that he could recognize his own best interests. Given the confession that he had made, the psychiatrists were the only ones likely to be able to save his life. Only if they found him criminally insane was he likely to escape the death penalty.
The investigators, on the other hand, had no choice but to comply with Chikatilo's request. At his trial, the question of his sanity was certain to come up. They would need a psychiatric evaluation to rebut the insanity defense. In August 1991, after completing the interrogation and all the attendant crime scene trips, the investigators transferred Chikatilo, under guard, to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow for a sixty-day evaluation.
The Serbsky is located at 23 Kropotkinsky Pereulok, in one of the capital's oldest neighborhoods. Some of the neighboring buildings are graceful prerevolutionary merchants' mansions, with pastel walls, arches, Palladian doorways, and white Doric columns, now used by foreign embassies. But the Serbsky is a product of the Soviet era, and it has neither warmth nor polish. High granite walls, topped with barbed wire, surround its buildings. Inside, the walls are sheer and intimidating, with tiny barred apertures for windows. Guards and doctors carry rings with heavy iron keys to unlock the whitewashed doors leading to the Serbsky departments.
In the Brezhnev years, the Serbsky Institute had a reputation for malevolence. It was known for inventing diagnoses of schizophrenia that the KGB could use to lock up dissidents who had violated no criminal laws. By the time Chikatilo arrived, perestroika had changed the Serbsky's orientation. It was still the government's leading institution for diagnosing aberrant criminals, but it no longer provided a legal pretext for confining dissidents.
Chikatilo was sent to the Third Department at Serbsky, the one that deals with what Russian psychiatry defines as psychogenia — personality disorders that seem to arise in reaction to environmental factors. Other sections deal with schizophrenia and with organic brain disorders like epilepsy. In the Third Department, Chikatilo lived in a cell with high, dingy green walls, a bunk with a mattress that was leaking stuffing, and a single window, mounted high on the wall and painted over so that only a little light shone through.
There, he fell under the authority of Andrei Tkachenko, a thin young psychiatrist with freckles, blue eyes, and an unruly shock of strawlike blond hair. Dr. Tkachenko had come from medical school to Serbsky in 1985, the first year of Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure in office. He helped to organize an informal group of psychiatrists from Serbsky and other institutes who work on sexual disorders like pedophilia and exhibitionism, about which he published a book. If Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky in Rostov was a maverick who practiced modern psychiatry in spite of the Soviet system, Andrei Tkachenko represented a younger generation of psychiatrists, who began to practice as the system changed and became more receptive to Western ideas and methods.
Tkachenko made certain that Chikatilo received a battery of tests that are familiar to Western practitioners. The prisoner took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. He looked at the ink blots in Rorschach tests. He had an electroencephalograph and other physical examinations. The psychiatrists also had access to the protocols of Kostoyev's interrogation and to the reports of the other investigators' interviews with Chikatilo's relatives. Finally, they interviewed him every day and felt that he willingly answered their questions.
From the work done by Tkachenko and other specialists, from the protocols of the confessions, and from interviews conducted for this book with many of Chikatilo's associates and relatives, it is possible to piece together a portrait of the accused killer.
"I was born in Yablochnoye, in Sumskaya oblast," Chikatilo said in one of his first post-arrest interrogations. "There were two children, myself and my sister, Tatyana, who was born in 1943. Until the end of secondary school, I lived in that village with my parents. My father was at the front [in World War II] and was captured. After the war, as a prisoner who returned, he was condemned and sent for a time to Chuvashkaya [a region on the lower Volga in Russia, the site of many prison camps]. My mother, a kolkhoz worker, raised me and my sister. Despite hunger and poverty, I was a good student."
Behind that sparse and factual account of his early life, however, lay an enormous burden of suffering.
Sumskaya oblast is not in Russia but in Ukraine, midway between the cities of Kiev and Kharkov. Ukraine, when Andrei Chikatilo was born in 1936, was the scene of one of this century's worst crimes against humanity, Joseph Stalin's genocidal collectivization of agriculture. Beginning in 1930, Stalin decided to crush private agriculture in the Soviet Union. Communist zealots went out into the countryside and, backed with bayonets, forced the small farmers to give up their land and their animals to collective farms. Simultaneously, the state began draconian requisitions of grain, intended to provide food for the new proletariat that was filling the cities in response to the First Five-Year Plan's manic quest for steel mills and smokestacks. Sometimes, the requisitions seized even the peasants' seed grain, and terrible famines resulted.
In Ukraine, Stalin seemed bent as well on making the people, who represented the largest ethnic minority in the Soviet Union, so fearful of Communist power that an independence movement would be unthinkable. Haifa million of the most capable Ukrainian peasants were sent to the Gulag in Siberia, where most of them perished. An estimated six million Ukrainians died in the ensuing famine. Then, in 1941, Ukraine was invaded and occupied by Nazi troops. The Soviet army drove them out during 1943.
The precise impact of these events on Roman and Anna Chikatilo can only be guessed. Their daughter, Tatyana, said in a 1992 interview that she and her brother heard in their childhood that there had been another child, an older brother named Stepan, born seversil years before Andrei. He died during Stalin's famine. Their parents told them, Tatyana said, that Stepan's body was eaten by starving neighbors. There is no way of knowing if the story is true. But there were hundreds of documented cases of cannibalism in Ukraine at the time. It quite likely happened.
Andrei Chikatilo, the doctors at Serbsky discovered, was born abnormal. "His electroencephalograph [a reading of electrical activity in the brain] showed certain disturbances associated with the early period of brain development," Tkachenko said. "It was probably the result of something that happened in the uterus, during his mother's pregnancy. We found other symptoms characteristic of this. He had a slightly hydrocephalic skull. The pupils of his eyes were of different sizes. When he stuck his tongue out, it didn't come out straight, but to the right."
For Chikatilo, unfortunately, this brain abnormality manifested itself in his genitalia. Until he was twelve years old, Tkachenko learned, he was unable to control his bladder. Later, the abnormality would manifest itself as a tendency toward extremely premature ejaculation, often before Chikatilo achieved an erection.
But in his early childhood, his bladder problem was paramount. The circumstances of the Chikatilo family magnified its importance. The family was, as he said in his confession, very poor. They lived in a one-room hut. There was only one place to sleep—a wooden platform they called the divan; their bodies, in the winter, were often the only source of heat. When Andrei Chikatilo wet the bed, everyone in the family knew it and suffered.
And his mother, Anna, was not the sort to suffer in silence. Perhaps because of the traumas she had suffered herself, she was a woman with a cruel, nasty temper. Twenty years after Anna Chikatilo died, her daughter, Tatyana, could not find a good word to say about her when an interviewer broached the subject.
"We were very poor and we were hungry. My parents worked day and night and got nothing for it," she recalled. "My father was kind despite it all. But
my mother was very harsh and rude. I suppose it was because of the difficulties of her life. But she only yelled at us and bawled us out, bawled us out. She never had a kind word. When girlfriends came to visit me, she'd bawl them out and ask them why they didn't have anything to do at home. I left home when I was fourteen."
Andrei Chikatilo slept with his mother from infancy and, presumably, repeatedly wet her bedclothes. Roughly from the time he was five or six, when his father went off to war, until he was seven, when his sister was born, he slept with her alone, and there was no one to protect him from her rage. His father did not return permanentiy to the family until after the war and his stint in a postwar camp had ended, when Andrei was about ten years old.
Tkachenko could only imagine how this period might have affected Andrei Chikatilo. He could imagine Chikatilo wetting his mother's bed at night and the consequences—the words and blows occasioned by his undiagnosed physical weakness and his mother's foul temper. But he could not get Chikatilo to talk about it. During his time at Serbsky, Chikatilo talked of many things, including murder. But his memories of that childhood period were locked so tightly away that the doctors could not get to them.
"He wouldn't talk about how his mother reacted, although we asked about it," Tkachenko recalled. "He didn't refuse to answer. He would say he didn't remember or he would talk about something else. And maybe he really didn't remember. Maybe he repressed it."
Chikatilo did recall for his doctors two childhood memories that apparently had imprinted themselves quite deeply in his mind.
"His sister [Tatyana], when she was a newborn, had a falling out of the colon," Tkachenko recalled. This is a relatively common event in infancy, when a section of the large intestine protrudes from an infant's anus. In the West, a doctor can usually reinsert it without surgery. In Ukraine, in 1943, Anna Chikatilo did it herself as her seven-year-old son watched. "He saw that and had feelings of fear and hot flashes of blood," Tkachenko recalled. "He spoke of it very clearly, as an event he clearly remembered."
The Killer Department Page 23