by Ray Black
Victims followed in quick succession, one killed by a hammer blow, another stabbed thirty-nine times with a kitchen knife; a mother and daughter killed at the same time; the eyes were stabbed and now sometimes the upper lip and nose were cut off and deposited in the corpse’s mouth or stomach. The death toll rose to at least twenty-four.
The police were lost and confused. They split into factions and Burakov argued with his superiors. Two hundred officers were by this time working on the case. They worked undercover at bus and train stations, they walked the streets and parks on the lookout for the tall, hollow-cheeked man.
At Rostov bus station an older man was spotted taking an interest in a young girl. The undercover officer became suspicious and brought him in for questioning. It was a man called Andrei Chikatilo, the manager of a Shakhty machinery supply company. When questioned about his behaviour, he told police that he had once been a teacher and missed the company of the young. They let him go.
He was followed, however, and when he continued to act suspiciously, accosting women and even receiving oral sex from a prostitute in the street, he was picked up. In his briefcase was a jar of Vaseline, a long knife, a length of rope and a grimy towel. Hardly the accoutrements of a businessman.
But his blood type was A and not AB. They held him for a few days, but he persisted in his denials. There was nothing untoward in his background and he was a member of the Party. He was released again.
Burakov, in the meantime, asked a psychiatrist, Dr Bukhanovsky, to create a profile of the killer. He was a sexual deviant, the psychiatrist said, twenty-five to fifty years old and around five feet ten in height. He was sexually inadequate to the extent that he had to mutilate the corpses to achieve arousal. He was a sadist. He damaged the victims’ eyes to stop them looking at him. He was a loner and he definitely worked alone. Bukhanovsky named him ‘Citizen X’.
The pressure was on the officers, but all went quiet. Only one body in ten months, a woman killed near Moscow. Had the Maniac moved there?
Then, in August 1985, a dead woman, bearing the usual marks, was found near an airport. Officers checked flights and tickets, but found nothing. Checking other murders in the capital, however, they found three murders of young boys that seemed in all likelihood to have been committed by the man they were looking for – all had been raped and one had been decapitated.
But soon they were back at Shakhty where another young woman was found near the bus station, her mouth stuffed with leaves in the same way as one of the dead women in Moscow. Officers continued to work the train and bus stations, but without success.
Another profile of the killer provided some stark facts. Stabbing his victims was for him a way to enter them sexually. He might masturbate, either spontaneously or with his hand. He might damage the eyes because he believed the old superstition that the image of a killer is left on his victims’ eyes. He cut women’s sexual organs as a means of establishing control over them. Organs were often missing; he might have eaten them. He cut boys’ sexual organs off to make them appear feminine. He would have had a difficult childhood, and had a vibrant fantasy life and a perverse response to sexuality.
Nothing happened until July and August, 1986, when a couple of women’s bodies turned up, the second buried with only a hand pointing up out of the earth.
Burakov cracked under the pressure towards the end of 1986 and spent time in hospital. The killer, too, took a rest and no bodies were found until April 1988. A woman was discovered, the tip of her nose sliced off and her skull smashed. Her eyes had not been touched, however. Then a nineteen-year-old boy was found in May with his penis cut off. He had been seen entering the woods with a middle-aged man with gold teeth and a sports bag. Even with that lead, they turned up nothing and in April 1989 another boy’s body was found and in July an eight-year-old boy. Elena Varga was killed in August and that same week, ten-year-old Aleksei Khobotov went missing, his body showing up four months later. A ten-year-old boy was found with his tongue bitten off; in July 1990, a thirteen-year-old was discovered mutilated in the botanical gardens. In fact there were thirty-two victims in a period of eight years.
The fall of communism meant newspapers were now free to report on the case and there was a feeding frenzy with officials threatening each other and people becoming desperate for the case to be solved and the killing to stop. When an eleven-year-old was stabbed forty-two times and castrated, the public were outraged.
Another couple of sixteen-year-old boys were murdered before Burakov’s work at the stations, checking the names of passengers, began to bear fruit. Over half a million people had been investigated up to this point, but one name stood out.
Andrei Chikatilo had been at the station the day one of the recent murders had been carried out nearby. He had been seen emerging from the woods and washing his hands. On his cheek had been a red smear, his finger had been cut and his coat was covered in twigs. When checked out, it turned out he had resigned from a teaching job after molesting students. His travel records coincided with several murders and there had been no deaths while he had spent time in prison in 1984.
Chikatilo was arrested and a search of his house revealed twenty-three knives, but nothing linking him with his victims. At first, Chikatilo denied everything, but then he began to admit to ‘sexual weakness’ and ‘perverse sexual activity’, and to the fact that he was impotent.
He was persuaded that it would be best for him to admit everything but claim insanity. Days passed while Chikatilo considered this, still denying he was the killer. Finally, however, he confessed, going through each of the thirty-six murders in detail. He explained that he was clearing the world of undesirables – vagrants, runaways and prostitutes. These were the people he killed. He told how he could not achieve an erection and used the knife as a penis substitute. He had also believed the story of the killer’s image being imprinted on the victim’s eyes, but had stopped believing it which explains why he stopped damaging the eyes at one point. He told how he could only get gratification if he committed violence. ‘I had to see blood and wound the victims.’ He talked about placing his semen inside a uterus that he had just removed and as he walked back through the woods, he would chew on it – ‘the truffle of sexual murder’, as he described it. He would tear at his victims’ mouths with his teeth. He said it gave him an ‘animal satisfaction’ to chew or swallow nipples or testicles. In all, he confessed to fifty-six murders and said that being caught was a relief.
Why had he done it? Perhaps because of his chilling childhood: father a POW during World War II and desperate famine in Russia, a famine so bad that there were reported instances of cannibalism. Human flesh was bought and sold and Chikatilo was told by his mother that his ten-year-old brother had been taken and killed and eaten.
He was examined and found to be sane before being brought to a court in Rostov, where he was kept in a large iron cage. The court was full, some 250 people screaming at him when he was brought in. The trial was a fiasco and there was little doubt from day one that Chikatilo would be found guilty. His efforts at pretending to be mad, drooling and rolling his eyes, singing, speaking nonsense and claiming that he was being ‘radiated’ were to no avail.
He was found guilty on fifty-two counts of murder and five of molestation. The people in the courtroom cried out for him to be handed over to them so that they could do to him what he had done to his victims, and it is reported that the Japanese offered a million dollars for his brain so that they could study it.
However, on February 14, 1994, he was taken to a soundproofed room, told to face the wall and not turn round. He was then executed with a single shot behind the right ear.
Albert Fish
It was probably a good job that Delia Budd was illiterate because, in 1934, six years after her daughter, Grace, had been abducted, she received a letter containing these chilling words:
On Sunday June the 3, 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Gra
ce sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said yes she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick — bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her tho I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.
The letter had been written by Albert Hamilton Fish, the man who had taken and killed Grace Budd. Fish, then fifty-eight years old, had arrived on the Budds’ doorstep in May, 1928, pretending to be Frank Howard, a farmer from Farmingdale, New York. He was calling in response to an advert placed in the New York World by Edward Budd, Grace’s eighteen-year-old brother. It read: ‘Young man, 18, wishes position in country. Edward Budd, 406 West 15th Street.’ Fish spun a story that he needed someone to work on his farm and Edward was eager for the work. Fish returned a few days later to confirm that Edward had the job and was asked to stay for lunch. While there, Fish befriended Grace. She sat on his lap at the dinner table. As he was about to leave, he said he was on his way to a children’s birthday party at his sister’s house and wondered whether Grace would like to accompany him. Grace’s mother was unsure, but her husband Albert thought it would be fun for the girl and off Grace went with Albert Fish. It was the last they saw of their daughter.
Albert Fish was born Hamilton Fish in 1870 and his father was forty-three years older than his mother. When his father died in 1875, the five-year-old Hamilton was put into St John’s Orphanage by his mother. It was there that he changed his name to Albert to avoid the nickname ‘Ham and Fish’ that he had been given by the other children.
Life in the orphanage was harsh and cruel. There were regular beatings and whippings, but, perversely, Albert grew to enjoy the pain. He enjoyed it so much, in fact, that he would have erections for which the other children mocked him. His mother was able to look after him again when she found employment in 1879, but Albert was already scarred by his experiences at St John’s. By the age of twelve, he was engaged in a homosexual relationship. His partner, a telegraph boy, introduced him to perverse practices such as coprophagia and drinking urine. He spent his weekends watching boys undress at the public baths.
Fish claimed that by 1890 he was working as a male prostitute in New York City and that he was raping young boys on a regular basis. In 1898 he married and six children followed. He was working as a house painter but was also molesting countless children, mostly boys under the age of six. At this time, he developed an interest in castration and tried it out on a man with whom he had been having a relationship; the man fled before Fish could carry it out.
In 1903, he was charged with embezzlement and was sent to Sing Sing. But it wasn’t that much of a hardship for him as he could have sex with other inmates.
His life changed completely in 1917, when his wife ran off with another man. Fish began to behave even more strangely than before. He claimed to hear voices and once wrapped himself up in a carpet, saying he had been ordered to do so by Saint John. His children reported seeing him beat himself on his nude body with a nail-studded piece of wood until he was covered with blood. Once they saw him standing alone on a hill with his hands raised, shouting, ‘I am Christ.’
He inserted needles into his body, in the area of the groin – twenty-nine were discovered by an X-ray following his eventual arrest – and inserted alcohol- covered balls of cotton wool into his anus; he would then ignite them. In this way, he thought he could cleanse himself of his sins.
Some four years prior to the abduction of Grace Budd, seven-year-old Francis McDonnell was playing with some friends near his home on Staten Island. His mother saw a man behaving oddly. He walked up and down the street, wringing his hands and talking to himself. She thought no more of him and went indoors. Later that same day, the same man lured Francis into some nearby woods. Next day his body was discovered, sexually brutalised, mutilated and strangled. It would be another ten years before they would discover who the killer was.
A year before Grace’s murder, Fish abducted, tortured and killed another child, Billy Gaffney. Fish later confessed:
I brought him to the Riker Avenue dumps. There is a house that stands alone, not far from where I took him. I took the boy there. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked out of the dump. Then I burned his clothes. Threw his shoes in the dump. Then I walked back and took the trolley to 59 Street at 2 a.m. and walked from there home. Next day about 2 p.m., I took tools, a good heavy cat-o-nine tails. Home made. Short handle. Cut one of my belts in half, slit these halves in six strips about 8 inches long. I whipped his bare behind till the blood ran from his legs. I cut off his ears, nose, slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood. I picked up four old potato sacks and gathered a pile of stones. Then I cut him up. I had a grip with me. I put his nose, ears and a few slices of his belly in the grip. Then I cut him through the middle of his body. Just below the belly button. Then through his legs about two inches below his behind. I put this in my grip with a lot of paper. I cut off the head, feet, arms, hands and the legs below the knee. This I put in sacks weighed with stones, tied the ends and threw them into the pools of slimy water you will see all along the road going to North Beach. I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked best. His monkey and pee wees and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears, nose, pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good. Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put them in the oven. Then I picked 4 onions and when the meat had roasted about G hour, I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy. In about 2 hours, it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was as sweet as a nut, but his pee-wees I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet.
Ultimately, it was Fish’s arrogance that betrayed him. The letter he wrote to Mrs Budd was delivered in an envelope that bore the logo of the New York Private Chauffeurs’ Benevolent Association. It turned out that a janitor of the association had left some stationery in a boarding house when he had moved out. Albert Fish had moved in after him but, the landlady told police, he had also since moved out. However, he had been expecting some money to be sent and had asked her to hold on to the cheque for him until he could call round to collect it. Detective William F. King waited at the house and when Fish arrived, asked him to accompany him to police HQ to answer some questions. Fish lunged at King with a razor, but the policeman easily overpowered him and arrested him.
Fish confessed to the premeditated murder of Grace Budd, launching a debate as to whether he was sane that raged both before his trial and throughout it. However, he was found to be both sane and guilty and was sentenced to death. He thanked the judge for his death sentence and after sentencing confessed to the murder of Francis McDonnell. It is speculated that as well as the three murders that can be ascribed to Albert Fish with certainty, he may actually have murdered at least fifteen children and assaulted hundreds more over the years.
At Sing Sing on January
16, 1936, at 11.06 a.m., he was strapped into ‘Old Sparky’, the electric chair, and three minutes later, was dead. He is reported to have said that the execution would be ‘the supreme thrill of my life’.
Carl Panzram
He was escorted from his cell at 5.55 a.m. on Friday, September 5, 1930, and led to the gallows where the witnesses waited, a few newspapermen and about a dozen guards. He was six feet tall and 200 pounds of muscle. On his left forearm was a large tattoo of a boat’s anchor, on his right another anchor with an eagle and the head of a Chinese man; underneath his shirt, on his massive chest were two eagles with the words ‘Liberty’ and ‘Justice’ tattooed underneath their wings. His eyes were a cold steel-grey, and a thick black moustache covered his top lip, lending his face the appearance of a perpetual sneer. He ran up the thirteen steps to the platform and just before the marshals placed the hood over his head, he spat in the face of the hangman and growled: ‘Hurry up you bastard; I could kill ten men while you’re fooling around!’
The executioner obliged and by 6.03 a.m., Carl Panzram’s lifeless body was swinging in the early morning breeze.
A few thousand words can barely do justice to the evil that Carl Panzram wrought on the world. He was a killing machine like no other, a man without conscience or compassion. ‘I was so full of hate that there was no room in me for such feelings as love, pity, kindness or honour or decency,’ he once said. ‘My only regret is that I wasn’t born dead or not at all.’
Born in 1891, he was the product of a poor farming family in Minnesota. His parents split up when he was seven and by the age of eleven he was in reform school, the notorious Red Wing, near St Paul, Minnesota. There, he was beaten, whipped, abused and sodomised on a regular basis and it was there that he learned to hate religion, viewing it as the cause of most of his troubles. In truth, though, he hated everyone and everything, especially prison where he spent a large proportion of his life.