The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  Tkachenko readily acknowledged that the horrible nature of Chikatilo's crimes changed the standard for judging whether he was sane. "The more social significance the crime has, the more pathological the personality must be in order not to be able to abstain from that action," he explained. "A personality that is judged incapable of refraining from murder must be profoundly destroyed."

  In other words, he was saying, if Chikatilo's crimes had been less horrible, if, for instance, his personality disorders had driven him merely to expose himself, he might have been found legally insane. But to be deemed incapable of refraining from murder, Chikatilo would have had to be all but foaming at the mouth. He would certainly have had to be incapable of the kind of care and planning required to commit fifty-three murders over a period of twelve years. It was a catch-22 of sorts for serial killers. To be capable of avoiding detection long enough to commit a series of murders, a person would have to be sane, at least by the definition imposed by Dr. Tkachenko and Judge Akubzhanov.

  This standard of sanity would have been exposed to a stiff challenge in an American courtroom. Since the FBI, under the direction of ex-special agent Robert Ressler, began compiling and analyzing data about serial killers, many American criminologists have come to recognize two broad categories. Some serial killers are disorganized; they tend to be sloppy in the commission of their crimes and careless about the details of the murder scene and ritual. Others are highly organized, with precise rituals that are repeated time and again. Chikatilo, for the most part, fit the "organized" category. But that would not have meant, in an American courtroom, that he was sane. To take one example, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee serial killer, also had an organized murder pattern. But he was judged insane.

  Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky had spent somewhat less time with Chikatilo than the psychiatrists at the Serbsky Institute. Kostoyev, at various times during the interrogation, had allowed him to see Chikatilo for a total of about forty hours. After that experience, Bukhanovsky agreed with Tkachenko on the judgment that Chikatilo suffered from organic brain abnormalities and a series of childhood traumas. But Bukhanovsky thought the Serbsky Institute opinion had been unduly influenced by Kostoyev, who selected the material from the investigation files that was sent to the psychiatrists for review. He differed with Tkachenko on the question whether Chikatilo was really capable of controlling his compulsions. "You can't get away from genetics," he said in an interview during the trial.

  The trial, in the end, obscured more about the lesopolosa case than it clarified. On May 13, Chikatilo denied several murders that he had earlier confessed to.

  "Of the fifty-three, how many do you acknowledge?" Akubzhanov demanded.

  "Grushevsky Bridge, that didn't happen. [Grushevsky Bridge was the little bridge from which he had confessed to throwing the body of Yelena Zakotnova in 1978.] Also the one at Collective Farm No. 6, Stalmachenok. [Olga Stalmachenok was killed in Novoshakhtinsk in December 1982.] And the girl Tsana from Riga, I don't remember her. [Sarmite Tsana, a homeless woman originally from Latvia, was killed in July 1984 in Aviators' Park in Rostov.] I don't know whether you should count her or not. I doubt that I killed her. They used to talk to me from a list and I would remember things," Chikatilo said.

  At a later session, Chikatilo added several other victims to the list of those he denied killing: Larisa Tkachenko, killed in 1981 in Rostov; Natalia Shalopinina, killed in 1984 in Rostov; and Ivan Bilovyetsky, killed in 1987 in Zaporozhe, a city in Ukraine.

  At another session he said he had committed four additional murders that were not part of the accusation, although he could not give the names of three of the purported victims. They presumably were the three uncorroborated murders near Shakhty about which he had confessed to Kostoyev; the militsia had never been able to find any remains. The fourth was Irina Pogoryelova, the court secretary from Bataisk, killed in 1986. Chikatilo had denied killing her throughout his pre-trial interrogation. He gave no reason for choosing to admit her murder in court.

  His denial of the six murders was spontaneous and surprised his lawyer. It made little sense from a legal point of view. The penalty for killing forty-seven people would be the same as the penalty for killing fifty-three.

  To Viktor Burakov, who followed the trial from the militsia headquarters, Chikatilo's six denials and four new admissions were not surprising. Burakov had seen condemned men change their confessions before in an effort to delay the death penalty by requiring the militsia to investigate their new admissions. He assumed that Chikatilo had in mind the same thing.

  The only denial that struck Burakov as plausible was that of the murder of Yelena Zakotnova. Burakov had gone over the record of the Zakotnova case carefully after Kostoyev elicited Chikatilo's confession. He still found it hard to believe that so many syshchUd and sledovatyeli could have erred in 1979, when they condemned and executed Aleksandr Kravchenko for that crime. He was not convinced that Chikatilo was guilty in the Zakotnova case. That, of course, did not change his certainty that Chikatilo had indeed committed the remaining fifty-two murders he was accused of.

  The trial also failed to explain satisfactorily the discrepancy between Chikatilo's type A blood and the semen samples found on fourteen victims and analyzed as type AB. Judge Akubzhanov accepted a document from Dr. Gurtovaya's laboratory in Moscow attesting to the fact that Chikatilo's semen was type AB and stating that he was an example of an extremely rare, newly discovered phenomenon called "paradoxical secretion," in which an individual has blood of one type and secretions of another.

  Dr. Gurtovaya's explanation would have been difficult or impossible to defend in a courtroom where the defense had the right to call its own expert witnesses. Special agent David Bigbee, chief of the FBI's DNA analysis laboratory in Washington, stated flatly in an interview for this book that "paradoxical secretion" does not exist.

  So did one of the world's leading experts on blood and secretion analysis. Dr. Rafael Oriol of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research in Paris. Dr. Oriol, after learning of Dr. Gurtovaya's theory, was convinced that the Soviet laboratory work on the killer's semen had been systematically flawed. He had, he said, helped organize an international conference on problems in blood typing in Lund, Sweden, in 1990. The Soviet delegation to the conference presented a newly developed laboratory reagent known as a monoclonal anti-B antibody. The Soviet antibody was found to work perfectly well in tests of blood. If it was applied to type B blood, it caused the cells to cluster under the microscope. But when it was used to type semen, the reagent caused a false B reading in some, but not all, type A semen. In other words, certain kinds of type A semen would be read, falsely, as AB. Until the international conference, the Soviet scientists had not been aware of the flaw in their reagent. Dr. Oriol said.

  This monoclonal anti-B antibody was too new to have been in use in Rostov and Moscow in 1983 and 1984, when most of the semen analyses were done. Dr. Oriol speculated that some similar problem had caused a systematic error in typing Chikatilo's semen. That speculation was consistent with the article published by T. A. Stegnova in 1989 in the Russian journal Forensic Medicine Expertise, which found about a forty-percent error rate in semen samples initially judged to be type AB by Soviet forensic laboratories. But, due to Judge Akubzhanov's willingness to accept Dr. Gurtovaya's "paradoxical secretion" theory, there may never be a complete explanation of this critical aspect of the lesopolosa case.

  On August 9, a warm and humid morning, the attorneys began their summations.

  Andrei Chikatilo, wearing his Olympic souvenir sport shirt and baggy gray slacks, swayed gently on his bench, staring vacantly at the wall over Akubzhanov's dais, as he waited in his cage for the session to begin. His appearance had undergone another transformation since the start of the trial. The hair on his head had grown out somewhat, but it was completely gray, and his pate had gone bald. He had added a mustache, also gray, and resumed wearing glasses. He looked like neither the man who was arrested on November
20, 1990, nor the shaven-skulled demon who came to trial on April 14, 1992. He looked like an old man, idle and used up.

  Only a handful of spectators and journalists looked on as Judge Akubzhanov and the two jurors took their seats. Chikatilo rose to his feet and began declaiming in his loud monotone, talking about being exposed to radiation and still swaying back and forth. Suddenly, he let down his pants and exposed himself The guards, quicker this time, were in his cage instantly, and they jerked Chikatilo down the staircase, pulling up his pants as they went. There was a crash and a shout from the cell block below, and then silence.

  "We'll let him back in to have a final word if he wants it," Akubzhanov said.

  Marat Khabibulin rose at his table, wearing an open white shirt, blue trousers, striped socks, and gray sandals. "I have no confidence that my voice will be heard above the general outcry to kill Chikatilo," he began.

  He questioned the competence of Russian forensic psychiatry. "A healthy person couldn't have committed all these murders," he maintained. He again questioned Akubzhanov's objectivity and his decision not to allow the defense to obtain and present testimony from independent psychiatrists.

  Khabibulin did not try to refute each charge against Chikatilo. He did raise four of the cases Chikatilo had denied, pointing out some flaws in the prosecution's evidence. A witness who came forward after the 1990 arrest and stated that she saw Chikatilo with Olga Stalmachenok had not come forward when police scoured Novoshakhtinsk for witnesses in 1982. There were no travel records to place Chikatilo in Ukraine when Ivan Bilovyetsky was killed. The sperm found on Larisa Tkachenko had initially been analyzed as type B, and was now being called undetermined. "Chikatilo was beaten down and indifferent when he was being interrogated," he said. "His confessions are dubious and senseless. How could he have given up his desire for self-preservation? It had to have been coerced. I don't know why he did it. But I know it wasn't sincere. It was the fever of a sick man, reacting to prompting."

  He could not, of course, refute the two most convincing items of evidence against his client. The first was the way Chikatilo had led the investigators to murder scene after murder scene, especially the previously undiscovered grave of Aleksei Khobotov. The second was the fact that after Chikatilo's 1990 arrest, the lesopolosa killings stopped. Khabibulin mentioned neither. After an hour and forty minutes, he asked the judge and jurors to find Chikatilo not guilty, wiped his brow, and sat down. Akubzhanov declared a recess until the following day.

  The next morning, Chikatilo was back in his cage, a slight smirk on his face. His guards had fashioned a belt from a length of rope and knotted it at his waist; he would need time to untie the knot if he decided to drop his trousers again. But this time, Chikatilo was in a mood to sing. As Akubzhanov took his seat, he broke into the "Internationale," the anthem of the international Communist movement. When the song was over, he launched another monologue, rambling from the Assyrian Mafia to the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl to the independence movement in Ukraine.

  Akubzhanov let Chikatilo go on for five minutes, then ordered him removed. After the guards had trundled him away, the judge turned toward the benches where journalists were sitting. "I let him go on a little longer than I usually do for the benefit of the reporters here for the final arguments," he said.

  Prosecutor Anatoly Zadorozhny began his summation by noting that 1990, the year of Chikatilo's arrest, was also the year of "the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of the Marquis de Sade."

  Sadism, he said, "is not a new phenomenon. But this is not a man who is sick or psychopathic. Leading experts have said he doesn't lack the ability to understand what he is doing or to control his actions."

  Zadorozhny went on to recount, drily and without emotion, the details of each of the crimes in the accusation. He asked for the death penalty, and sat down.

  Judge Akubzhanov ordered Chikatilo returned to the courtroom. When the prisoner was again in his cage, he informed him that this was his final opportunity to say something in his own defense.

  Chikatilo refused to speak or even to rise. He sat in his cage, mute, with his head bowed, and said nothing.

  After glaring at the defendant for a few minutes, Akubzhanov declared a two-month recess to allow himself and the jurors to review the evidence and prepare their verdict. Then he walked down the center aisle and left the courtroom.

  Chikatilo sat in his cage, waiting for his guards to take him away. Some spectators started to trickle out; others milled around, talking about the trial. A young man named Vladimir Kulyevatsky stepped out of the crowd and walked up to the cage. He took a small, heavy piece of metal from his pocket and hurled it through the bars of the cage. It hit Chikatilo in the chest and bounced to the floor. Chikatilo blinked, but said nothing. Kulyevatsky, an unemployed factory worker, was the half brother of Lyudmilla Alekseyeva, killed in 1984, and he had watched most of the trial. A sympathetic militsioner told him to get out of the courtroom before he got into trouble.

  It would have been difficult to find many people in Rostov who did not sympathize with Vladimir Kulyevatsky. A random sampling of opinion on the streets found no one who thought that the court should spare Chikatilo's life, either on the grounds of insanity or because of general opposition to the death penalty. Russia is a country where millions of people have been unfairly put to death by their government, under both czars and commissars. But that has not, apparently, diminished public support for capital punishment. Even people who believed that Chikatilo was too insane to control his impulses tended to think that execution was the right way to deal with him. "Even if they sent him to jail for life, he might escape and kill someone again. Better to execute him," said a man named Volodya, whose view seemed to sum up that of many people.

  On October 14, the courtroom was packed with people as Akubzhanov read the verdict. He took three hours to repeat the list of crimes and quote from Chikatilo's confessions regarding each. Some victims' relatives sobbed and wailed as the details of their children's deaths were read. Nurses stationed in the courtroom distributed valerian, a mild sedative sold over the counter in Russia.

  Akubzhanov then pronounced Chikatilo guilty of five molestation charges and fifty-two of the fifty-three counts of murder. In one case, that of an Armenian girl named Laura Sarkisyan, who disappeared in 1983, Akubzhanov ruled that there was insufficient evidence to convict Chikatilo. He had confessed to killing an Armenian girl in that year, at about the same time as Sarkisyan had been reported missing. But the militsia had found only scattered remains that could not be precisely identified.

  Whether the actual number of victims was fifty-two, fifty-three, or more, Chikatilo was the most savage serial killer to emerge from a modern society. The Guinness Book of World Records notes the case of Pedro Alonso Lopez, who confessed to the murder of three hundred girls, none over the age of ten, in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru between 1973 and 1980. But after his confession, only fifty-three bodies were found. And Alonso Lopez did not disembowel his victims, as Chikatilo did.

  Despite the number and nature of the crimes he found Chikatilo to have committed, Akubzhanov declared Chikatilo legally sane. "At every stage of his crimes, from the beginning to the end, Chikatilo was in complete control of all his actions," the judge pronounced.

  "Why me? I demand the podium! Get me a lawyer!" Chikatilo burst out as the verdict was read. "I didn't confess to anything! Show me the corpses!" He pressed his head against the bars of his cage before the guards led him down the stairs again.

  In the spectator section, there were calls for blood. "They should rip him apart like a dog," said Lydia Khobotova, mother of Aleksei Khobotov. "I hope he dies the most horrible death, like my son did."

  "Let me tear him apart with my own hands!" another woman shouted.

  The next day, Akubzhanov gave the listeners the sentence that came closest, under law, to what they wanted. He condemned Chikatilo to be executed.

  Marat Khabibulin prepared an appeal. In a Western legal system,
given the case against him, Chikatilo might never have been convicted, at least not of fifty-two counts of aggravated murder. Independent psychiatrists would doubtless have testified that he was not legally responsible for his crimes. Independent forensic experts would have shredded the state's explanation of the discrepancy between Chikatilo's blood type and the semen found on the victims, which was the primary physical evidence in the case.

  Most important, the case against Chikatilo depended largely on his confession. No Western defense lawyer would have permitted Chikatilo to talk freely to the investigators without first securing some kind of plea bargain, most likely lifetime confinement in a mental institution.

  Khabibulin knew, he said, that all those factors would carry weight in a Western setting. He could not judge how they would be received in Moscow, where the Russian Supreme Court would review the trial and conviction. Under the old Soviet system, of course, an appeal would have had no chance to succeed. But these were new times. The Supreme Court was, as Chikatilo's trial ended, hearing a lawsuit over the abolition of the Communist Party. It might be willing to consider arguments that Kostoyev and Akubzhanov had violated Andrei Chikatilo's rights. Khabibulin could not guess, he said, how the appeal would end.

  Andrei Chikatilo went back to his cell in the KGB building to await his fate.

  Well before the trial ended, finger-pointing began among the investigators.