by Ray Black
The Investigation
An experienced detective, Major Mikhail Fetisov, from the Moscow militia, was sent to Rostov in September 1983 to head the investigation. He immediately criticized the incompetence of the local police and told them that the killings were the work of a single sex-crazed man. He even went as far as to use the words ‘serial killer’ which was unheard of in the Soviet Union at the time and was still seen as a purely western concept.
The police started to study the criminal profiles on their records in the hope that they might find someone who had a mental health background.
The Rostov police placed patrols at the bus and train stations, having realized that this was where their killer picked up most of his victims. One day when Inspector Aleksandr Zanosovsky was on duty he noticed a middle-aged man in glasses who seemed to be paying a lot of attention to young girls. The detective approached the man and asked to see his identification papers. The man produced his documents which identified him as Andrei Chikatilo, a freelance employee of the Department of Internal Affairs, which was a wing of the KGB. He was allowed to go about his business but several weeks later, Sanosovsky noticed the same man acting suspiciously.
This time the detective did not approach him but kept a watch on him for several hours. Chikatilo didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular but he just rode bus after bus around the local district. During these bus rides he would approach young women and try to engage them in conversation. After numerous rejections Chikatilo eventually found a young girl who had had too much to drink and he persuaded her to put her head in his lap while he fondled her. Zanosovsky decided it was time to make a move and he approached Chikatilo who immediately started to perspire profusely. The detective demanded that he open the briefcase he was carrying and inside they discovered a jar of Vaseline, a piece of rope, some dirty towels and a kitchen knife.
On arriving back at the police headquarters, Zanosovsky learned that the culprit was already under investigation for stealing a car battery from the factory where he worked. This was enough to keep him in custody while they made further investigations to connect him with the ‘Forest Strip Killer’ as he had become known. However, when they checked Chikatilo’s blood group it did not appear to match and to make matters even worse an incompetent policeman allowed the contents of the briefcase to be returned to their owner. Of course Chikatilo took no time at all in destroying this evidence. With no other evidence to hold him on, the police could only prosecute him with the theft of the battery and he served three months in prison. This time the police had let their man slip through their fingers.
As a result of his conviction Chikatilo lost his job at the factory, but in January 1985 he managed to get a new one, this time working as a travelling buyer for a locomotive factory in Novocherkassk. Whether his three months incarceration had had any effect on Chikatilo is a matter of opinion, but for six months he resisted any urge to kill again. That was until August 1985 when he killed 18-year-old Natalya Pokhilstova and dumped her body near Domodyedovo Airport.
On August 27 Chikatilo murdered 18-year-old Irina Gulyayeva and police once again stepped up their investigations to apprehend the Rostov killer. It is believed that, for some reason, Chikatilo did not murder again until May 1987, a long period which leaves many questions unanswered. On May 16, 1987, 13-year-old Oleg Makerenkov was murdered near the village of Revda and the remains were not discovered until after the arrest of Chikatilo.
From this point Chikatilo’s killing spree seems to have spiralled out of control. In 1988 he claimed eight lives and in his last year of freedom, 1990, he killed another nine people.
A new man, Issa Kostoyev, who was director of the Central Department for Violent Crime, had now taken over the investigation and started very carefully going over all the evidence they had gathered. After the body of 16-year-old Vadim Tishchenko was discovered near the railway station in Rostov, Kostoyev decided to inundate the area with undercover agents, many of them equipped with night vision goggles. However despite this increase in patrol, Chikatilo still managed to claim his very last victim – 22-year-old Svetlana Korostik.
After Chikatilo had killed her he cut off parts of her body and ate them before covering the remains with leaves and returning to the station. One of the plain-clothes officers on patrol noticed the middle-aged man who was sweating heavily, and also that he had spot of blood on his cheek and earlobe. He checked his papers, but unaware of Svetlana’s murder, he felt he had no reason to hold the man and let him go on his way.
Korostik’s body was discovered on November 13 and when Kostoyev came across the report of a man being stopped in the vicinity of the railway station on the night of the murder he decided to look further into the background of Chikatilo. When he discovered that Chikatilo’s work records showed him in the vicinity of many of the murders, Kostoyev decided to have his suspect followed.
On November 20 Chikatilo left work to get treatment for a broken finger which, unbeknown to the doctor, had been bitten by one of his victims. Then he picked up his briefcase and went off in the search for a young boy. He spotted one but was distracted when the boy’s mother called him away. Annoyed at being interrupted, Chikatilo carried on further down the street and was promptly approached by three men who identified themselves as police officers. They demanded that he opened up his briefcase and again the contents were a knife, a length of rope, a jar of Vaseline, and a few dirty rags. Andrei was searched and they found there was a cut on his finger and abrasions on his genitals, but he denied any knowledge of how they had got there. He was arrested and the police arranged for a search of his home. Here they found another 23 knives, a hammer and a pair of shoes that matched a footprint found at one of the crime scenes.
A leading Russian psychologist was called in and, after eight days of interrogation, Chikatilo confessed to a total of 55 murders. He led the police to several corpses that had not yet been discovered. Chikatilo told the psychologist that he got sexual gratification from murdering and mutilation, and he also told him how he reached an even higher level of satisfaction from cannibalism. He seemed to delight in recounting his stories and played the part of a lunatic with an enormous bloodlust.
Chikatilo faced trial in April 1992, throughout which he was transported to and from the court in a large metal cage. This was for two reasons, firstly to keep the revenge-seeking public out but also to keep Chikatilo in. He remained locked inside the cage during the trial and he lived up to the image of a caged animal. He rattled the bars, beat himself against them and ranted and raved like a madman. He screamed insults and obscenities at the judge and his poor wife, Fayina, was understandably both shocked and horrified by her husband’s behaviour.
The court was not convinced by his lunatic ravings and he was found legally sane and sentenced to die for the 53 murders he was known to have committed. To loud cheers from the public section of the courtroom, the judge pronounced 52 death sentences – one of the charges had been dropped due to insufficient evidence.
After losing an appeal, on February 21, 1994, Chikatilo was taken from his prison and marched to the execution room. He was made to kneel while his sentence was read, and then the executioner drew a gun and fired a single shot into the back of the serial killer’s head. Unlike his victims, many of whom were still alive when they were mutilated, Andrei Chikatilo was killed quickly and compassionately.
Ed Gein
‘Weird old Eddie’ as the local community knew him, told the police that he just had a compulsion to do it!
Ed Gein is seen as one of the most weird and bizarre serial killers of the 20th century. He became a grave robber, a necrophiliac, a cannibal and his crimes were such that he inspired movies like Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Silence of the Lambs.
Ed Gein was born in August 1906 into the small farming community of Plainfield, Wisconsin. Gein lived a solitary life on his family’s 160-acre farm with his ineffectual brother, Henry, his alcoholic father, George, and his very domine
ering mother, Augusta. Augusta was a powerful woman with a puritanical view of life, and she drummed into her two sons the immorality of sex. This view clashed with with Ed’s natural attraction towards girls and probably contributed to his sexual confusion in adolescence. Augusta discouraged her sons from having any contact with women and kept them busy with work on the farm.
Ed’s father, George, died in 1940 and a few years later in 1944, his brother, Henry, died whilst fighting a forest fire. Shortly after Henry’s death Augusta suffered a stroke, followed by another one in 1945, from which she never recovered. This left Ed, who was now 39 years old, traumatized and alone and still very much enslaved to the mother-figure who had dominated his life. Left to his own devices Ed did his own sort of house decorating. He started off by sealing off the upstairs, the parlour and his mother’s bedroom by boarding it up and decided to make his own living quarters in the remaining bedroom, the kitchen and a shed in grounds of the farmhouse. He was able to stop working the farm due to a subsidy provided by a government soil-conservation programme, and so he left the farmland untouched and did odd jobs for the residents of Plainfield, to earn a little extra cash.
Ed remained on his own in the big old rambling farmhouse, uncertain about his masculinity and even considering amputation of his penis from time to time. He also considered having transsexual surgery because he had read so much about it in the newspapers, but he realized that the operation would not only be costly but it also frightened him. He tried to think of other ways in which he could turn himself into a woman. He began to develop a very unhealthy interest in the intimate anatomy of the female body – an interest which he fed by reading books and pornographic magazines. He became interested in the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the Second World War and in particular the experiments they carried out on the Jewish people contained in their concentration camps. All alone, with hardly any friends, Ed thought endlessly about sex and then one day he knew what he had to do when he read about a woman who had been buried that very day.
Ed decided to enlist the help of an old friend named Gus, who, like Ed, was a very weird loner. However, Gus was Ed’s trusted buddy and he agreed to help his friend open up a newly-dug grave to obtain a body for experimental purposes. The first corpse came from the cemetery where Ed’s own mother was buried and over the next ten years Ed would do the same thing again and again. First he checked the newspaper for fresh bodies, then always visiting the graveyard during a full moon, would dig up a female corpse or just the parts he wanted, fill in the grave and take his pickings home with him.
The experiments he carried out on these corpses were bizarre to say the least. He would dissect the body, and keep some parts like the head, sex organs, liver, heart and intestines. Next he would remove the skin from the body, draping it over a tailor’s dummy. On some occasions he would actually wear the skin himself and dance around the farm, a practice which apparently gave him intense satisfaction. On other occasions Ed would simply take the body parts that particularly interested him, especially the excised female genitalia. He loved to fondle them and would sometimes stuff them into a pair of women’s panties which he would wear around the house. This was the closest he could get to being a woman, and soon he made a full body suit from human skin, complete with a mask and breasts. Soon, and not surprisingly, he became a total recluse, discouraging anyone from calling on him at the farm.
As his collection of trophies grew, so did his range of experiments and obsessions. Then his trusted friend Gus was taken away to an asylum and once more Ed was on his own.
Turning to Murder
Ed started to tire of his lifeless corpses and he decided he needed much fresher flesh, and this is when he turned to murder. Mary Hogan was a 51-year-old divorcee who ran the local Hogan’s Tavern at Pine Grove, around six miles from the farm. Ed liked women who were around his deceased mother’s age, and Mary fitted the description of what he needed. She was on her own at the tavern when Ed turned up on cold afternoon in December 1954. He shot her in the head with his revolver, placed her body in the back of his truck and then took her back to his lair.
Mary’s disappearance was discovered when a customer dropped into the tavern and found the place deserted. When they saw a large bloodstain on the floor and a spent cartridge beside it, they realized that something was very wrong. The bloodstains ran all across the floor and out of the back door into the parking lot where they stopped beside some tyre tracks. The police were unable to find any clues as to Mary’s disappearance, but a few weeks later when a sawmill owner named Elmo Ueeck was talking to Ed about the missing woman, Ed replied that she wasn’t missing, she was up at his farm right now. Ueeck, realizing that Ed was an oddball, didn’t even bother to ask him what he meant. Even thought the police considered Ed Gein to be a suspect in the case, no charges were ever made and the files were left open.
There may have been other victims between the years 1954 and 1957, but there is no definite evidence – that is until November 16, 1957. Bernice Worden was a woman in her late fifties who ran the local hardware store. Ed shot Bernice with a .22 rifle that he stole from a display rack within the store, and then he drove the body home in the store’s own truck. Ed also took the cash register containing $41, but not because he wanted the money, he later explained, but because he wanted to see how it worked.
Bernice’s son, Frank, was a deputy sheriff who also often helped his mother out in the store. On the Saturday morning his mother was shot, Frank had gone deer hunting. When he got back to the store in the afternoon, he found the place closed with the lights still on, his mother missing and blood on the floor. He also noticed that the cash register was missing. When he asked the neighbours if they had seen anything, somebody mentioned that they had seen the store truck drive away at around 9.30 that morning. Frank immediately called the Sheriff, Art Schley, and told him what had happened. They checked the record of sales that had been made that morning, and one of them was for a half gallon of antifreeze. Frank remembered that Ed Gein had stopped by the previous evening just before they were closing and said that he would be back in the morning to pick up some antifreeze. Frank also remembered that Ed had taken an interest in the fact that he was going hunting in the morning.
Very suspicious that the peculiar Ed Gein had been spotted in the town that morning, the sheriff and his deputy decided to go and check the farmhouse, which the local children had nicknamed the ‘Haunted House’.
Gruesome Discoveries
The farmhouse was in darkness when they arrived, and Ed Gein was nowhere to be found. Acting on a hunch, they drove to a store in West Plainfield where Ed normally did his grocery shopping and it paid off. Ed had just had lunch with the proprietor and his wife and as Frank and the Sheriff arrived Ed was about to leave in his truck. The sheriff called him over and asked if he would mind sitting in the police car while they asked him a few questions. Ed told the Sheriff that he thought someone was trying to frame him for Bernice Worden’s death. The Sheriff decided immediately to take Ed Gein into custody – he hadn’t even mentioned the death of Bernice!
With Ed safely locked up, Sheriff Schley and Captain Schoephoester returned to the house with some other officers. The doors to the farmhouse itself were locked, but the door to the side shed at the rear of the house opened when Schley pushed it with his foot. By now it was dark, and as the farmhouse had no electricity, so they had to carry out their search by torchlight. It was then that the gruesome evidence of Gein’s bizarre obsessions was uncovered. In the woodshed they found a naked, headless body hanging upside down from a meat hook, the legs spread wide apart and a long slit running from the genitals up to the throat. Like the head, the genitals and anus were missing – Bernice Worden had been disembowelled just like a deer.
Already sickened by what they had seen, the sheriff and his men moved on to the main house. Again they had to use torches and oil lamps to light the rooms. As they broke into the farmhouse they noticed that it obviously hadn’t been clean
ed for years, there were piles of rubbish everywhere and the stench was overpowering. The few remaining rooms that hadn’t been nailed up were littered with books and magazines, various utensils, old tin cans and loads of other old junk. But the mess was nothing compared to what else they found in the jumbled old farmhouse – two shin bones, four human noses, a quart can converted into a drum by human skin stretched over both the top and bottom, a bowl made from the inverted half of a human skull, nine ‘death masks’, ten female heads with the tops sawn off above the eyebrows, bracelets made from human skin, a purse with a handle made from human skin, a sheath for a knife made from human skin, a pair of leggings made from human skin, four chairs with the seats being replaced by strips of human skin, a shoe box containing nine salted vulvas of which his mother’s was painted silver, a hanging human head, a lampshade made from human skin, a shirt made of human skin, a number of shrunken heads, two skulls for Ed Gein’s bedposts, a pair of human lips hanging from string, Ed’s full woman body suit constructed with human skin and complete with mask and breasts, Bernice Worden’s heart in a pan on the stove, and a refrigerator full of human internal organs.
The scattered remains of an estimated 15 bodies were discovered at the Gein farmhouse, but Ed himself was unable to remember how many murders he had actually committed. Neighbours reported to the Sheriff that Ed had often bought them gifts of fresh venison and yet he had never been hunting or indeed shot a deer in his life.
By Reason of Insanity
On January 16, 1958, a judge found Ed Gein insane and had him committed to the Central State Hospital at Waupon. After ten years Ed was considered to be competent to stand trial and although he was found guilty he was also pronounced to be criminally insane. He was returned to the Central State Hospital and then moved in 1978 to the Mendota Mental Health Institute. Ed Gein died of cancer on July 26 1984, at the age of 78.