by Ray Black
The Edwards’ called the police and when they arrived they found the house in a total shambles. They assumed the motive was theft of valuables, but discovered to their disgust that the burglar had not only urinated in a drawer containing clean laundry but had also defecated on the child’s bed.
Chase was once asked by the FBI how he chose which victim to kill. He responded by saying that he went from house to house until he found one that was unlocked, because if the door was locked it meant that you weren’t welcome.
Unfortunately, for Teresa Wallin, he found her door unlocked. Teresa was twenty-two years old and three months pregnant. Teresa ran into Chase as she was taking out the garbage. When she saw the man with the gun, she dropped the rubbish bag, and put her hands up as if to protect herself. Chase shot her three times, once in the palm of the hand, one through the top part of her skull and another in her temple after she had fallen to the ground. But this was not the end of his bloodlust. His next move was to drag her body into the bedroom. He then went into the kitchen to get a knife and also removed an empty yoghurt carton from the rubbish bag that Teresa had dropped. At last Chase had a human victim at his mercy. He proceeded to slice off her left nipple, and cut her open from the neck to her groin pulling out many of her internal organs. Then he stabbed her many times in the chest area and left the yoghurt container in the bathroom, from which he had drunk his victim’s blood.
Two days later a puppy was found killed and mutilated not too far from where Teresa Wallin had been so brutally murdered.
It wasn’t long before Chase struck again, in fact only four days. This time his victims were Evelyn Miroth, her six-year-old son Jason, her twenty-two-year-old nephew David Ferreira, and a family friend by the name of Danny Meredith. The bodies were discovered when a friend of Jason’s called round to the house to see if he could come out to play. When no-one answered the door even though she was certain she had seen someone inside, the child alerted the neighbours. The neighbours were concerned that something had happened, but didn’t expect to find such a gruesome scene when they opened the door. Jason Miroth and Danny Meredith had been shot exactly where Chase had come across them, but Evelyn Miroth had been shot in the head, sliced open with her intestines removed, stabbed in the anus, eyes and neck, and had also been sodomized. There were also signs once again that he had drunk her blood, from a container that was found at the scene. But what was even more horrifying was the fact that they could not find the body of Evelyn’s son, Jason, although blood was discovered in the child’s playpen. Apparently, Chase had stolen Meredith’s car and taken the body of the baby back to his home where he continued with his mutilations and blood-drinking until his cravings were satisfied. The child’s decapitated body was discovered a couple of months later in a vacant car park.
AN END TO THE KILLING
Thankfully that was to be the end of Richard Chase’s horrifying spate of killing. The day after the murders the police were inundated with calls from people who said they had seen a suspicious looking man hanging round. The FBI developed a composite sketch and profile of the man they thought they were looking for. They felt that this was a psychotic, disorganized killer who had clearly not planned any of his murders. He did little, if anything, to destroy the evidence and possibly walked around in broad daylight with blood still on his clothes. The fact that the killings had been within the same area, pointed to the fact that maybe the assailant didn’t have a car and lived in the close vicinity. They knew that he was very likely to kill again and the FBI had to act quickly.
Luckily witnesses came forward to say that a man named Richard Chase had an uncanny resemblance to the composite sketch issued by the police. They also had another clue from a gun, a .22-calibre semi-automatic handgun, that had been sold in December 1977 and registered to a Richard Chase. The police immediately ran a background check on Chase and discovered that he had a history of mental illness, a concealed weapons charge, and a series of minor drug busts.
When the police arrived at Chase’s apartment they knocked on the door, but he would not let them in. The police pretended to leave and waited round the corner to see if he would come out. This is exactly what happened and Chase came out of his apartment carrying a box under his arm. The detectives immediately pounced on him and managed to apprehend him but not without Chase putting up quite a considerable fight.
The first thing they noticed about the dishevelled man was the fact that both his clothes and shoes were covered in blood. Also he was carrying a .22 handgun and in his back pocket they found a wallet which belonged to Dan Meredith and a pair of latex gloves. Inside the box he was carrying were a collection of blood-stained rags and pieces of paper. Chase was immediately taken to the station for questioning, where he admitted to killing several animals, but refused point-blank to talk about any of the murders.
While Chase was being questioned back at the police station, other detectives were searching his apartment for clues as to the disappearance of the baby, David. What they did discovered at Chase’s home sickened the detectives right to the pit of their stomachs. The first thing they noticed as they entered the front door was the putrid smell and the fact that nearly everything within the apartment was covered with blood. In the kitchen they found human body parts in the refrigerator, several small pieces of bone, and a food blender that was badly stained and smelt of decomposing flesh. There were also three pet collars, but no sign of any pets.
THE TRIAL
The FBI now had all the evidence they needed to prosecute Richard Chase, who entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. The trial had to be moved one hundred and twenty miles to a new venue in Santa Clara County, San Jose, because of the intense hatred that was being directed at Chase by the residents of Sacramento.
Chase was examined by at least a dozen psychiatrists. He admitted to them that he was disturbed about what he had done, but he needed the blood for therapeutic reasons, but at no time did he ever admit that he was compelled to do it.
The entire trial stretched across a period of four months during which time they called upon nearly one hundred witnesses, and gave 250 exhibits as evidence. Chase took the stand in his own defence, he had lost an incredible amount of weight, his eyes were sunken, his face was expressionless and he looked as though he barely had the strength to stand. He described in detail about how he had been mistreated throughout his life and that he barely remembers any of the killings. He admitted to drinking the blood from his victims because he said it was ‘his medicine’. He felt that his problems all stemmed from the fact that he was unable to have sex with girls as a teenager and finally admitted to the court that he was sorry for what he had done.
Although his defence pleaded with the judge to be lenient in this case as they felt their client was a legally insane and had never really received the correct treatment. However, the prosecution disagreed and described his as a sexual sadist who knew exactly what he was doing at the time of the murders.
The jury took five hours to come up with their verdict and on May 8, 1978, found Chase guilty of six counts of first-degree murder. They also considered that he was legally sane and he was sentenced to death in the gas chamber at San Quentin. Chase, however, never did get to go to the gas chamber, as he overdosed on a prescribed medication and died on December 26, 1980.
VAMPIRE OR NOT?
Even though Richard Chase was dubbed ‘Vampire Killer of Sacramento’, he did not hide from the sun, nor did he sleep in a coffin during the day, change into a bat, or indeed have mesmerizing powers that were inescapable by human prey. He did not flinch from the glare of a cross, start to melt from the touch of holy water, nor did he wither away when exposed to fresh garlic. On the contrary, this vampire-like offender murdered his victims and then drank their blood with little or no remorse. This vampire was human.
Andrei Chikatilo
Andrei Chikatilo is Russia’s, and possibly the world’s worst serial killer. He is responsible for the murders of at least 53 peop
le, most of them young boys and girls under the age of ten, his motive – sexual gratification. His rampage started in 1978 and ended in 1990, but only because he was captured.
Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936 in Yablochnoye, a village in the heart of rural Ukraine. The Soviet Union, and the Ukraine in particular, suffered a period of great upheaval during the 1930s. His family suffered greatly during Stalin’s enforced collectivization and were subjected to extreme poverty and hunger.
In 1931 Andrei’s older brother, Stefan, went missing and it is alleged that he was murdered and cannibalized by neighbours during the famine which claimed millions of Russian lives. Whether this story was true or not, Andrei’s mother constantly warned him not to stray from the back yard or he might be eaten as well. This must have played on his mind as a young child and the death of his brother certainly had a terrible psychological effect on the young Andrei.
Times were hard, especially during the Nazi occupation and it wasn’t unusual for children to see bodies blown up in the streets. Andrei later admitted that although it was all very frightening, at the time he found it quite exciting as well. A lot of his childhood was spent on his own in a sort of fantasy world, for which he received a lot of mockery from the other children in the neighbourhood. He started to become angry which soon developed into a deeper rage. In his fantasies he used to envisage scenes of torture which gave him great pleasure, and this was to become a big part of his killings later in his life.
Although times were hard during the war, things were even worse when it was over. His father, Roman, had been captured by the Germans and held in a prisoner of war camp until 1945. When he returned home he was a broken man which was only exacerbated by the fact that he was accused of treachery for ‘allowing himself to be caught’ in the first place. Andrei, who by this time was a true Communist, condemned his father’s betrayal of the homeland, but he was still teased and ridiculed about it by his fellow schoolfriends.
Andrei was always being picked on at school for being effeminate and desperately shy. Even though he was desperately shortsighted, Andrei refused to wear his spectacles to school for fear of being further ridiculed. Finally, Andrei would go to any lengths to cover up a very embarrassing problem even into his teenage years, and that was that he was a bedwetter. So the scene is now set for a very troubled child to grow into an even more confused adult.
HIS LOVE OF VIOLENCE
His first sexual experience as a youth was when he fumbled with a ten-year-old friend of his sisters, and during the ensuing struggle he ejaculated. That struggle and ultimate sexual satisfaction remained implanted in his brain as much as his fantasies about torture.
Andrei was now starting to realise that violence was more of a turn-on for him than the sexual act itself. After leaving school, he failed the entrance exam to get into Moscow University and decided to join the army. He got a job as a telephone engineer in the town of Rodionovo-Nesvatayevsky, near Rostov and in 1963 his sister moved in with him. She noticed he wasn’t really interested in girls and introduced him to a local girl called Fayina and before long they were married.
Fayina was soon to realise that her husband was painfully shy and was not at all interested in conventional sex, but amazingly they did manage to conceive two children, Lyudmila and Yuri. In 1971 Chikatilo took a correspondence course and obtained degrees in Engineering, Russian and Marxism-Leninism. With these new qualifications, Andrei was able to obtain a job as a school teacher.
Even as a teacher he was desperately shy and was unable to keep his pupils under control. But what he did realise that he loved to be around the company of young girls and boys, and before long he began to commit indecent sexual acts on them.
When the complaints started coming in he was forced to resign his job, but as the matter was never reported he was able to get a job at another school. His abuse started up again and on one occasion was actually caught trying to perform oral sex with a sleeping boy. He was severely beaten by a group of older boys who had discovered his disgusting act, and from that moment on he always carried a knife.
Again the incident was not reported, instead it was just covered up and denied, which allowed this pervert to change into a killer. The sexual acts he had been committing had made him feel powerful, but to achieve complete satisfaction he knew he needed to get violent.
In 1978 Chikatilo moved to the town of Shakhty where he took a job at a mining school. On December 22, 1978, Andrei claimed his first victim – nine-year-old Lena Zakotnova. He started talking with the young girl while she was waiting for a tram and, luring her with the promise of some American chewing gum, he tricked her into going back to his house. Once behind closed doors, this polite, shy, meek man turned into a complete monster. He jumped on top of the petrified little girl, and as she screamed for her life, he covered her mouth and started to tear at her clothes. He rubbed his genitals against her body but for some reason was unable to obtain an erection. This caused him to get really angry and he forced his finger inside the helpless little victim, causing her to bleed. As soon as he saw the blood trickle out, Andrei achieved a satisfying orgasm, the strongest and most pleasurable one he had ever experienced. It was from that precise moment that he realised that fondling and rape was not what he needed, he needed to see his victim’s blood. Now in a complete sexual frenzy he took out his pocket knife and plunged it into the girl’s stomach. Seeing the child in agony only enhanced Chikatilo’s excitement and he tore open her chest cavity using his hands to get at the blood and organs. Finally he ended her life by squeezing the girl’s throat until every last breath was out of her.
His grotesque act over, Chikatilo began to realise the seriousness of his crime. The body lying in front of him was a mutilated mess and the bloody torso was barely recognizable as that of a small girl. He managed to regain his composure and covered the little girl’s corpse with the remains of her clothes and carried her body to the nearby Grushevka River.
The body was discovered two days later. A witness, Svetana Gurenkova, told the police that she had seen Lena with a tall, thin, middle-aged man who had been wearing glasses and a dark coat. They made an artist’s impression of the man and when it was shown to the Principal of the local mining school, he noticed the similarity to one of his teachers, Chikatilo. When the police arrived at Andrei’s house they noticed some specks of blood on the front steps and Chikatilo was taken in for questioning but was later released, because his wife gave him an alibi. Instead the police turned their attentions to a man named Aleksandr Kravchenko, who had a previous conviction for rape. But Kravchenko was far too young to fit the description of the man seen with Lena, nor had he ever worn glasses. He was questioned mercilessly and the police eventually forced a confession out of the innocent man. He was charged for the murder and sentenced to death in 1984. It wasn’t until a few years later when Chikatilo confessed, that the authorities realised that they had executed the wrong man.
THE SECOND VICTIM
In 1981 Chikatilo was forced to resign his post at the mining school due to the fact that there had been numerous reports regarding his inappropriate behaviour with the students. This time he took a job as a supply clerk at the Rostovnerud factory in Shakhty.
It had been almost three years since Andrei had killed his last victim – but now his frustrations had built up again and he was ready to kill once more. On the evening of September 3, 1981, Andrei Chikatilo was wandering around the streets seeking out his next victim. Seventeen-year-old Larisa Tkanchenko caught his eye while she was sitting waiting for a bus. The not-so-innocent girl accepted the man’s invitation to go for a walk, and while they headed to a quiet area the couple chatted as if they were old friends.
However, once in a secluded spot, the man turned into a depraved, manic beast and stripped Larisa of all her clothes, punching her, strangling her and piling dirt into her mouth to muffle her screams. As her life ebbed away Chikatilo ejaculated over her body and bit off one of her nipples in his ex
citement. He then dumped her body in the River Don where it was discovered the very next day.
The murder of Larisa had temporarily satisfied Chikatilo’s obsession with torture and he did not attack again until June of the following year. This time the victim was thirteen-year-old Lyubov Biryuk and his method of attack followed the same pattern as before. Most of the wounds were to the girl’s breasts and genitals, but what differed about this attack was the fact that she had been stabbed in both eye sockets.
It was now that the killing would start in earnest and over the period of the next nine years, numerous corpses would be discovered in wooded or secluded areas. A team, headed by Major Mikhail Fetisov, was sent to Rostov to take control of the investigations. They concentrated their investigations around the area of Shakhty, and their main priority was to interview the mentally disturbed and any known sexual criminals that might fit the profile they had built up of the killer. The police spread their search wider and wider until eventually over 150,000 people had been questioned, but all to no avail. In 1984 alone another fifteen murders took place, and the police posted additional patrols at bus and train stations, as it appeared this was where the killer picked up most of his victims.
THEIR FIRST BREAK
Then the police got their first break. Inspector Aleksandr Zanosovsky spotted a middle-aged man wearing glasses acting suspiciously at Rostov bus station. He seemed to be paying particular attention to young girls. The inspector approached the man and asked him to produce his papers. The man produced some 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 on his way, but a couple of weeks later Kanosovsky spotted the man again acting suspiciously. This time, instead of approaching him, he watched him for several hours as he caught one bus after another, just riding around the district. Chikatilo did not seem to have any particular destination, but he did seem to concentrate his efforts on chatting up young girls. After several rejections, Chikatilo eventually found a young girl, who was drunk, who was prepared to put her head in his lap and let him fondle her. The Inspector seized the moment and went over to Chikatilo, who started to sweat profusely. Kanosovsky asked him to open his briefcase, and inside he discovered a jar of lubricant, a length of rope and a long-bladed knife. He was taken back to the police station and when they looked up his records they discovered that he was already under investigation for a minor theft from the factory where he worked. This was sufficient for the police to keep him in custody, and while they held him they checked to see if he could be the ‘Rostov Ripper’ as he had been so aptly named by the media.