The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  Chikatilo also told the psychiatrists of traumatic wartime memories. He said that he recalled the aftermath of a German bombing raid, a vision of dismembered corpses and pools of blood. "It was one of the strongest experiences of his childhood," Tkachenko said. "When he saw them, he felt a mixture of fear and excitement, an excitement that in this type of person is almost sexual."

  Tkachenko had heard a similar memory from Anatoly Shvko, the serial murderer from Stavropol whom Burakov, Fetisov, and Kostoyev interviewed before his execution in 1986. "Slivko also lived under the [German] occupation, and he remembered seeing a German kill a dog, and he had the same emotional reaction. He didn't feel sexual excitement as such, but a beginning kind of excitement."

  Nothing went well for Andrei Chikatilo in childhood. He did not make friends easily. In fact, his boyhood peers ridiculed him and bullied him. Tatyana, seven years younger, has vague recollections of her brother during this time that indicate how unhappy he must have been. "I only remember that they picked on him and chased him," she said. "I would sometimes see him hiding in the vegetable garden next to the hut, afraid to go out."

  "He has never been able to have a good relationship with his peers," Tkachenko said in more clinical terms. "His personal qualities hindered him. He feels inadequate, and he is extremely sensitive. He didn't have the qualities boys respect, like aggressiveness or physical strength."

  Tkachenko found the roots of sadism in this period of Chikatilo's life. Not only were the boy's relationships with his mother and his peers suffused with humiliation and repressed anger, he had also seen the fearful bloodshed of war and found it exciting. After the war, pervasive propaganda reinforced the message of redeeming cruelty and violence.

  "Chikatilo loved the novel The Young Guard, about underground partisans during the war who beat up Germans and threw them in mine shafts. One of his repeated fantasies was that he was a partisan and he was torturing a German prisoner for information, then killing him. This kind of fantasy is quite common among sadists of that generation. The common root is that the fantasizer sees himself in the role of a person with power over another person," Tkachenko recalled.

  Chikatilo himself, as he sorted through his boyhood memories, focused most of all on his nearsightedness, which he recalled as a humiliating weakness. "Until I was thirty years old, I felt inadequate because of my nearsightedness," he wrote in one of his essays for the procurator. "I couldn't wear glasses because I was ashamed to. But without them I often fell into awkward situations." When he was thirty, Chikatilo went on, he bought a motorcycle. He could get a driver's license only by correcting his vision. For the first time in his life, he bought and wore eyeglasses.

  He had other compensating mechanisms in childhood. He sat close to the blackboard in school and he studied very hard. "Schooling did not come easy to me, because of my bad vision and the fact that I had trouble remembering a lot of the material the instructors taught me," Chikatilo wrote. "But by virtue of perseverance, I finished ten classes [the Soviet equivalent of high school] successfully. Not many people in my village did so."

  Chikatilo was, in some respects, a model student as he struggled to find some niche for himself He got good grades. He was chairman of one of the approved student activities, a committee that helped the elderly. He drew placards glorifying Stalin for the rallies organized by the Komsomol, or Communist Youth League. He worked on Komsomol wall newspapers for his fellow students.

  But in one important respect, Chikatilo could not keep up with his peers. His brain abnormality, Tkachenko found, delayed his sexual maturation. Chikatilo gave slightly varying accounts of his early sexual experience to different examiners. But the accounts had enough common elements to enable the examiners to establish a history. Chikatilo's sexual development started quite late. He did not masturbate until he was seventeen. And, apparently, his sexual development frightened him. He told the psychiatrists at the Center for the Study of Sexual Pathology in Moscow that he had vowed, when he was fourteen or fifteen, not to touch a woman until he was married. It was not, of course, a vow he could keep.

  His few experiences with girls were nearly all traumatic. When he was about sixteen years old, a friend of his sister's came to the Chikatilo hut. No one else was at home. Chikatilo had been watching, enviously, as his peers in the village were initiated into sex. This visitor was much younger than Andrei Chikatilo—about ten or eleven years old. Apparently, he felt a sudden and overpowering urge to rape her. He grabbed the girl, pushed her to the floor, and, as she struggled, had his first ejaculation. Then he let the girl up. This event, according to Dr. Vyacheslav Maslov of the Center, cemented in Chikatilo's mind the connection between sexual satisfaction and overpowering a victim.

  At the end of his adolescence, a critical academic failure intensified his feelings of inadequacy. Chikatilo had set his sights on following the same path out of rural poverty that Mikhail Gorbachev had taken five years previously. Gorbachev, from Stavropol Krai in southern Russia, had made it off the kolkhoz by winning admission to the Law Faculty at Moscow State University, the most prestigious school in the Soviet Union. Chikatilo, though he, of course, had never heard of Gorbachev, applied to the same faculty at the same school. Admission (except for those whose parents had sufficient influence within the Party) was by a highly competitive examination. The exam, Chikatilo pointed out, was in Russian, which gave him a further disadvantage. In his part of Ukraine, the people generally spoke a mixed dialect of Ukrainian and Russian, which differ from each other about as much as Spanish and Portuguese. Chikatilo traveled to Moscow and took the examination. He passed, he would recall, with good-to-excellent grades. But they were not high enough to make the cut for Moscow State.

  Chikatilo recalled his rejection as yet another humiliation. He told the doctors at the Serbsky Institute that the director of his high school had advised him that he would never get into Moscow State because of his father's tainted war record. This may have been true, although by this time Stalin had died and an ideological thaw was beginning under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev. Whatever the reason, Chikatilo's failure was hardly the disgrace he deemed it. It was as if a bright farm boy from Nebraska had been turned down at Harvard. That boy might enroll at the University of Nebraska instead. Chikatilo, similarly, could have applied to a less prestigious university. He could have studied on his own for a year and taken the exams in Moscow again. But he chose not to.

  Andrei Chikatilo was not prepared to risk further humiliation. "I decided to find work somewhere," he told Kostoyev. "I took the train to Kursk, and I worked there for three months as a laborer." Then he enrolled in a vocational school, where he was trained to become a communications technician. The boy who had aspired to a career as a lawyer in Moscow had settled for becoming, in effect, a telephone repairman.

  Once he had completed this school, the army drafted him. He was assigned to a special KGB communications unit, where he served for three years in the enlisted ranks. After the army, he bounced around for a couple of years in technicians' jobs in Rostov oblast. His chief distinction was membership in the Communist Party, which he joined in 1960.

  He remained painfully inadequate with women. Occasionally he would meet a woman, work up the nerve to ask her out, and try to demonstrate his manhood. In some cases the women were willing. "We checked and corroborated one account he gave us," Tkachenko recalled. "He tried to have sex with a woman in 1960, just after he got out of the army. She said that when he tried to have sex with her, he couldn't manage it. And there were a few other attempts he made earlier than that that were unsuccessful. Either he didn't have an erection or he very quickly ejaculated."

  Tkachenko described two distinct problems in Chikatilo's sexual makeup. "The inability to get an erection was the result of his personality problems. He didn't believe in himself; he felt inadequate, and so on. But the premature ejaculation was the result of a physical condition. Because of the peculiarities of the organic functioning of his brain, he had wha
t sexual pathologists call a lowered threshold of excitement. He could become excited without sexual stimuli or with asexual stimulation. He could ejaculate without an erection."

  Afflicted with these related, but distinct, sexual disabilities, Chikatilo grew more withdrawn and introverted. "I was shy and silent," he told Kostoyev. "I never had sexual relations with a woman and I had no concept of a sex life. I always preferred to listen to the radio, watch television, or read the newspapers."

  In 1961, when she was eighteen, Chikatilo's sister, Tatyana, finished her schooling. Rather than see her return to Yablochnoye, to their impoverished hut and to the mercies of their mother, Andrei invited his sister to live with him. They shared his one-room apartment for six months, and Taty^ana felt grateful to her brother. "He cared for me," she said. She noticed nothing abnormal about his behavior, except that he had no girlfriends.

  Very soon, Tatyana married a laborer named Vasily and moved out. But she was intent on trying to help her older brother find a wife and have a family. Andrei Chikatilo had some attractive attributes. He was a serious young man who continued taking correspondence courses after finishing his schooling. He belonged to the Party. Most important, he drank very little. In the Soviet Union, male drunkenness was by far the leading cause of divorce. Many women dreamed of nothing more than a sober, reliable working man for a husband.

  In 1963, Tatyana and her husband's family found such a woman for Andrei Chikatilo. She was Feodosia Odnacheva, the daughter of a coal miner from Novoshakhtinsk. Feodosia was a stocky young woman, not particularly attractive, with a secondary school education. At twenty-four, she was a bit past the age when most Soviet girls married.

  It was, Andrei Chikatilo recalled, basically an arranged marriage. "The decisive role was played by my sister, Tatyana," he told Kostoyev. "She and her relatives on her husband's side set me up with my wife. They agreed on everything among themselves. After two weeks, we were married."

  Chikatilo could not, at first, get an erection and consummate his marriage. But, eventually, he had his first sexual intercourse with his wife. Sex was, for him, infrequent and difficult, Tkachenko learned. But it occurred often enough for Feodosia to become pregnant. Their first child, a girl named Lyudmilla, was born in 1965. Their second, a boy named Yuri, was born in 1969.

  Both families were quite pleased with the match. "I had a very good impression of Feodosia," Tatyana recalled. Feodosia's family looked at their new in-law as an intellectual. "We saw him every Easter, when they would visit to help us tend our parents' graves [a Russian custom]," recalled Ivan Odnachev. "He would have a drink or two, eat, then go off and read a newspaper. I thought very highly of him. He read a lot. He was a member of the Party."

  Chikatilo maintained the facade of a normal family man until his arrest in 1990. In 1985, his daughter married Pyotr Moryakov, a young man studying to be a ship's engineer. Moryakov and Lyudmilla Chikatilo lived with his parents, but they saw her parents often. Moryakov had more personal experience with Andrei Chikatilo than perhaps anyone outside the immediate family.

  He found his father-in-law to be a quiet man who was submissive to his domineering wife. The marriage between Andrei Chikatilo and Feodosia did not seem to their new son-in-law to be a particularly warm one. He could not remember ever seeing them kiss. Feodosia, Moryakov thought, was the dominant partner. "The women played the bigger role in that family," he recalled. "Feodosia decided what to do and told him to do it."

  Moryakov's recollections about Andrei Chikatilo's wife, in fact, resembled Tatyana Chikatilo's recollections of their cruel mother. "Feodosia liked to yell and to bawl him out," Moryakov recalled. "It was nothing that seemed really serious. She'd complain that the water was not running or the gas was off and tell him to do something about it. And he would not say anything at all, usually, and would just go and do what she said."

  Moryakov suspected nothing of his father-in-law's secret life, and he saw no evidence that anyone else did. Everything seemed to be quite normal. He and Chikatilo played chess together. The older man, Moryakov recalled, usually won. They talked about Russian literature and of Chikatilo's regret that he did not have a good library. When he was not off on a business trip, Chikatilo seemed often to be working on a home improvement project in the family's apartment, and gave his son-in-law occasional lessons in carpentry and plastering.

  Lyudmilla, he recalled, respected her father enormously. "She held him up to me as a model. I paint as a hobby, and she suggested that I paint her father's portrait. I didn't, because I like to paint only women. But she thought he was a very cultured individual."

  In 1986, Pyotr and Lyudmilla had their first child, a son. Andrei Chikatilo reacted like a normal grandparent, his son-in-law recalled. He was proud of the newborn boy's size and good health. As the baby got older, his grandfather would take him to the park and treat him to rides on the carousel.

  Moryakov was not aware of it, but a few people in fact did know a little about what lay beneath Andrei Chikatilo's facade of normalcy. They had, however, long ago decided tacitly to ignore it.

  In 1964, the year after his marriage, Chikatilo made another effort to get a higher education. He was accepted in the liberal arts school of Rostov State University as a correspondence student. This meant that he attended classes two months a year and did the rest of his course work on his own, through the mail. It took much longer to complete a degree this way, but Chikatilo persisted. In 1970, he was awarded his degree, with a specialty in Russian literature. He had made it from the kolkhoz of his birth into the ranks of the Soviet intelligentsia.

  Immediately, he looked for work befitting his new status. He had reasonably good contacts within the Party; he had been to the Party school in Rostov for course work in 1968 and 1969. He called on an acquaintance from that school, Pavel Voznikov, who was directing an evening school in Novoshakhtinsk. Voznikov called a friend of his named Aleksandr Sorochkin, the director of Vocational School No. 32 in Novoshakhtinsk. Sorochkin agreed to take Chikatilo on as a deputy director and a teacher of Russian language and literature.

  But Chikatilo failed as an administrator and failed as a teacher. "I was too shy to be a deputy director," he recounted. The job involved supervising other teachers. Sorochkin soon asked Chikatilo to give it up and simply be a teacher. Chikatilo agreed.

  But he could not handle that, either. "I couldn't maintain discipline in my classes," he recalled. "Some of the students took advantage of my weak character and acted rudely. They laughed at me and called me 'Antenna.' Sometimes they even smoked cigarettes in class. The director heard about it, and I was warned several times to maintain discipline in class. I tried, but I couldn't do it."

  Vocational School No. 32 had an intemat section for boarding students, and part of Chikatilo's work involved supervising their dormitories. What he saw there inflamed him. "I noticed that a few of the stronger boys were committing acts of sodomy with the weaker ones. Despite the measures we took, girls started to have sex at an early age. There were cases where we caught boys and girls together in bed. This disturbed me. I could see children doing what I had not done even when I was thirty years old."

  Teaching was obviously a terrible career choice for Chikatilo. It subjected him daily to humiliation and ridicule. The sexuality of his adolescent charges seemed to taunt him. Sorochkin suggested that he might do better going back to technical work. Chikatilo resisted. He had his university degree, and he thought it would be shameful to go back to working with his hands.

  In the spring of 1973, Chikatilo's mother died. In his interviews with the psychiatrists, he did not ascribe any particular importance to it. But it was only a month later, in May 1973, that his perversion first slipped the chains of legality and began claiming victims.

  He was then thirty-seven years old. In the United States, serial killers generally begin to act out their internal rage at a much younger age—from late adolescence to their mid-twenties. Chikatilo's later start is probably attributable, in part, to th
e constraints of the marriage his sister helped arrange, and to the generally repressive and limiting aspects of Soviet society. He could not, for instance, have been constantly exposed to the sexual stimuli in the media that assail American serial killers.

  Dr. Andrei Tkachenko saw in Chikatilo's history a steady but gradual descent into perversion. "His libido became distorted," Tkachenko said. His sexual inclination gradually turned from normal, heterosexual activity, which no longer brought him satisfaction, because it didn't respond to his true desires. To get satisfaction and relieve the tension within him, he needed aggressive, violent, and destructive acts with his object."

  But Chikatilo did not begin by killing. From 1973 to 1978, he confined himself to acts of molestation. Dr. Tkachenko saw in these acts an intermediate stage in the development of Chikatilo's sadism. "They were sadistic in the sense that there was a moment of power that he could experience when he forced someone to undress or submit. He said he wanted to touch them or pinch them. That is sadistic."

  In his confessions, Chikatilo outlined the growing power of his perversion. It began with hanging around near the public toilets, hoping to catch glimpses of young girls with their clothes in disarray. In May 1973 (although in his initial confession, he remembered it as 1977 or 1978), he took some pupils swimming at a pond in the woods around Novoshakhtinsk. In the pond, he swam up behind a fifteen-year-old student, Lyubov Kostina, and grabbed her breasts and genital area. She yelled and struggled and Chikatilo had an immediate ejaculation.

  Later in the same month came the incident with Tonya Gultseva that he first recounted to Kostoyev. He forced the girl to stay after school to do some remedial work. "I noticed that her skirt had ridden up," he recalled, "and I could see her panties and bare legs. This excited me. I got a passionate desire to touch her breasts, her sex organs. She resisted, pushed me away, and cried out."