Andrei Chikatilo is one of the most famous Soviet serial killers, who committed 53 proven murders from 1978 to 1990 (although the criminal himself confessed to 56 murders, and, according to operational information, more than 65 murders were committed by the maniac): 21 boys aged 7 to 16 years old, 14 girls aged 9 to 17 and 17 girls and women.

For the murder committed by Chikatilo, Alexander Kravchenko was mistakenly shot. Nicknames: "Mad Beast", "Rostov Ripper", "Red Ripper", "Woodland Killer", "Citizen X", "Satan", "Soviet Jack the Ripper". Although according to some reports, Chikatilo surpassed Jack the Ripper in his atrocities.

Andrei Chikatilo - childhood

Andrei Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936 in the Kharkov region of the Ukrainian SSR in the village of Yablochnoe (today the village belongs to the Sumy region). There is evidence that Chikatilo was born with signs of hydrocephalus. Until the age of 12, he suffered from bedwetting, for which he was constantly beaten by his mother.

In 1943, a sister was born to A. Chikatilo. His father Roman Chikatilo, who was at the front at that time, could hardly be the girl's father. Therefore, it is possible that at the age of 6-7 he could have witnessed the rape of his mother by a German soldier, with whom he lived in the same room on the territory of Ukraine occupied by the Germans at that time.

In 1944, Chikatilo went to first grade. When the famine began in 1946, he did not leave the house, fearing that he might be caught and eaten: his mother told him that during the famine his older brother Stepan was allegedly kidnapped and eaten. There is also a version that the parents themselves ate the older brother during the famine. Subsequently, no documents about the birth and death of Stepan were found.

In 1954, Andrei graduated from high school and tried to enter the law faculty of Moscow State University, but did not pass the competition. However, he considered that he was not taken to the university because of his father, a "traitor" and "traitor to the Motherland."

In 1955, Chikatilo graduated from the Akhtyrsk Technical School of Communications. After college, he entered the correspondence department of the Moscow Electromechanical Institute of Railway Engineers.

From 1957 to 1960 he served in the army, he served in the army in the troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, according to other information - as a signalman in the Soviet troops in Berlin.

After the army, he moved to the village of Rodionovo-Nesvetaiskaya, not far from Rostov-on-Don. There he got a job as an engineer at a telephone exchange.

In 1962, Chikatilo's sister Tatyana introduced him to her friend Faina (Evdokia), who in 1964 became his wife. Immediately after the wedding, Chikatilo entered the correspondence department of the philological faculty of Rostov University. In 1965, his daughter Lyudmila was born, and on August 15, 1969, his son Yuri, who later became a criminal. In April 1965, Chikatilo got a job as chairman of the district committee of physical culture and sports. In 1970, already at the age of 33, he graduated from the Pedagogical Institute in absentia on the course of Marxism-Leninism and literature, began working as a teacher of Russian language and literature (and then as an educator) at boarding school No. 32 in Novoshakhtinsk.

In 1974, Chikatilo began working as a master of industrial training at the Novoshakhtinsk GPTU No. 39.

In 1978, he moved with his family to Shakhty, where in September he began working as an educator at GPTU No. 33, and in December he committed his first murder.

The first murder of Andrei Chikatilo

On December 22, 1978, Chikatilo killed his first victim, 9-year-old Elena Zakotnova. The murder took place in house number 26 (the so-called "hut") on Mezhevoy Lane, which Chikatilo bought for 1,500 rubles secretly from his family and used to meet with prostitutes.

December 24 The mines, and indeed the entire Rostov region, were shocked by a terrible find. Near the bridge across the river Grushevka, the body of a 9-year-old student of the 2nd grade of school No. 11, Elena Zakotnova, was found. As the examination showed, the unknown person committed sexual intercourse with the girl in the usual and perverted forms, causing her vaginal and rectal ruptures, and also inflicted three penetrating stab wounds to the stomach. The death of the girl, however, came from mechanical asphyxia - she was strangled. The expert suggested that Lena was killed on the day of her disappearance (her parents turned to the police on December 22), not earlier than 18.00.

The murder of a child, and even with the special cruelty associated with sexual violence, required immediate disclosure. One of the most experienced local detectives was thrown into the case - the senior investigator, the adviser of justice, Izhogin. Local residents were passed through a fine sieve.

As it turned out later, Chikatilo lured the girl into the "hut" with promises to give chewing gum. As he testified during the investigation, he only wanted to "play around with her." But when he tried to undress her, the girl began to scream and struggle. Fearing that the neighbors would hear her, Chikatilo fell on her and began to choke her. The suffering of the victim aroused him, and he experienced an orgasm.

Chikatilo threw the girl's body and her school bag into the Grushevka River. On December 24, the body was found and on the same day a suspect in the murder, Alexander Kravchenko, who had previously served 10 years in prison for raping and murdering his peer, was detained. Kravchenko's wife gave him an alibi for December 22, and on December 27 he was released. However, on January 23, 1979, Kravchenko stole from his neighbor. The next morning, the police detained him and found the stolen goods in the attic of his house. A murderer and a drug addict were planted in Kravchenko's cell, who beat him, forcing him to confess to the murder of Zakotnova. Kravchenko's wife was informed that her husband had already been in prison for the murder, and she was accused of complicity in the murder of Zakotnova. The frightened woman signed everything that was demanded of her.

On February 16, 1979, Kravchenko confessed to the murder of Zakotnova. At first he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but the relatives of the murdered girl demanded a review of the case and the death penalty. As a result, Kravchenko's case was sent back for further investigation three times and, in the end, he was sentenced to death. On July 5, 1983, 29-year-old Alexander Kravchenko was shot for the murder committed by Chikatilo. In 1990, Kravchenko's death sentence was overturned.

However, the investigation had another suspect. On January 8, 1979, a certain Anatoly Grigoriev, 50 years old, a native of the city of Shakhty, hanged himself in Novocherkassk. On December 31, on the eve of the New Year, in the tram depot, where he worked, Grigoriev, being very drunk, boasted to his colleagues that he supposedly stabbed and strangled the girl about whom they "wrote in the newspapers." The hard workers knew that "Tolka's fantasy wakes up when drunk," and therefore no one believed him. However, Grigoriev, apparently, expected that these drunken revelations would still backfire. Arriving to his daughter in Novocherkassk, he was very worried, drank a lot, cried that he did not kill anyone, but slandered himself. After waiting for his daughter to go to work, Grigoriev hanged himself in the toilet.

Beginning of the killing spree

The first murder scared Chikatilo, and for 3 years he did not kill anyone. However, on September 3, 1981, he killed 17-year-old prostitute Larisa Tkachenko. Taking her to the forest belt, he tried to have sex with her, but he could not get excited. When Tkachenko began to mock him, he beat her, bit off her nipple, filled her mouth with mud and strangled her. The body was found the next day.

Almost a year later, on June 12, 1982, he killed 12-year-old Lyubov Biryuk. A series of murders began: in 1982, Chikatilo killed a total of seven children aged 9 to 16. Most often, he met future victims at bus stops and train stations, under some plausible pretext (show a short road, puppies, stamps, a video recorder, etc.) lured them into a forest belt or other secluded place (sometimes the victims passed with the killer several kilometers - Chikatilo always walked ahead), unexpectedly pounced with a knife. Up to sixty stab wounds were found on the mutilated bodies of the dead, many had their noses, tongues, genitals, breasts cut off and bitten off, their eyes gouged out (Chikatilo could not stand the look of his victims). Among his victims were many vagrants, alcoholics and mentally retarded.

The first arrest of Andrei Chikatilo

In 1984, Chikatilo's criminal activity peaked - he killed 15 people, the total number of his victims reached 32. On August 1, he entered the position of head of the supply department of the Rostov production association Spetsenergoavtomatika. The work was connected with constant trips around the country, which was very convenient for him. On August 8, he went on his first business trip to Tashkent, where he killed a woman and a 12-year-old girl.

On September 14, 1984, at the Rostov Central Market, due to suspicious behavior, he was detained by a district inspector, police captain Alexander Zanosovsky, with his partner Shaikh-Akhmed Akhmatkhanov. Chikatilo tried to get acquainted with girls, molested them in public transport, right at the bus station a prostitute was engaged in oral sex with him. A knife, a can of Vaseline, a bar of soap and two coils of rope were found in his briefcase (for some reason, all this was returned to Chikatilo or, according to other sources, was simply lost). They took blood from him for analysis, his blood type was the second.

The group of sperm that was found on the corpse of one of the victims was the fourth. Later, this circumstance will be explained by the fact that Chikatilo allegedly had a so-called. “paradoxical excretion”: his blood was of the second group, and the secretions of the body were of the fourth, and this provided him with a kind of alibi. After the trial, Chikatilo will appear in the media as a "paradoxical highlighter" - a person with an extremely rare feature of the body ("one in several million"). In fact, the analysis of the detected semen gave an incorrect result due to the microbial contamination of the material.

Chikatilo was released without a more detailed investigation and analysis. However, he was soon expelled from the CPSU, of which he had been a member since 1960, and sentenced to a year of hard labor under Article 92 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR for stealing a battery. But he was released already on December 12, 1984. In January 1985, Chikatilo moved with his family to Novocherkassk and there he got a job as an engineer at the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Plant. Later, he became the head of the metal department of this plant, and in 1990 he transferred to the external cooperation department of the Rostov Electric Locomotive Repair Plant, where he worked until his arrest.

After his first detention, Chikatilo killed 21 more people.

Operation "Woodland"

Time passed, and the killings in the forest belts continued. Therefore, in December 1985, Operation Forest Belt, which is under the control of the Central Committee of the CPSU, began - perhaps the largest operational event ever carried out by Soviet and Russian law enforcement agencies. Over the entire period of the operation, more than 200 thousand people were checked for involvement in a series of murders, 1062 crimes were solved along the way, information was accumulated on 48 thousand people with sexual deviations, 5845 people were put on special records, 163 thousand drivers of vehicles were checked. Military helicopters were even used to patrol the railroad tracks and adjacent forest belts. The search for the killer cost the state about 10 million rubles in 1990 prices.

The meeting held by the regional prosecutor's office on this case in Rostov-on-Don in April 1987 was attended by Deputy Head of the Investigation Department of the USSR Prosecutor's Office V. Nenashev and Deputy Prosecutor of the RSFSR Ivan Zemlyanushin. It opened with the words: “The case of the Forest Belt is under control in all higher authorities, as well as in the Central Committee of the CPSU. There is no more important matter in the country than the Forest Belt.

A special task force dealing with the case of the killer from the forest belt was headed by Viktor Burakov, who turned to psychiatrist Alexander Bukhanovsky with a request to draw up a psychological portrait of the criminal. Bukhanovsky immediately rejected the version that the killer was mentally ill, marginal or homosexual. In his opinion, the criminal was an ordinary, unremarkable Soviet citizen, with a family, children and work (one of the killer's nicknames was "Citizen X").

Police officers, dressed in civilian clothes, constantly traveled by electric trains as a bait. The Taganrog-Donetsk-Rostov-Salsk highway was controlled by police officers throughout. Chikatilo, being a vigilante, himself participated in this operation and was on duty at the stations, "helping" the police to catch himself. Feeling increased surveillance, he became more careful and in 1986 did not kill anyone.

The killings continued in 1987, when on May 16 he killed 13-year-old Oleg Makarenkov, whose remains were only discovered in 1990, after Chikatilo's arrest. The corpses of children were found regularly, even in the center of Rostov, in the Aviators' Park and the Botanical Garden. He also killed in other cities of the USSR, where he went on business trips - in Zaporozhye, Leningrad, Moscow. Issa Kostoev, who served as deputy head of the investigative unit of the RSFSR Prosecutor's Office, took charge of the investigation.

In September 1989, Kostoev visited serial killer Anatoly Slivko, sentenced to death, in the Novocherkassk prison in the hope that he would help the investigation. But Slivko, repeating the previous mistake of the investigation, only pointed out that the murders in the forest belts are most likely committed by two: one “specializes” in boys, the other in girls and women. “No use,” he said. - This is impossible to calculate. I know for myself." A few hours after the interview with Kostoev, Slivko was shot.

Andrei Chikatilo - a psychological portrait

The psychological portrait of the killer from the forest belt, compiled by Bukhanovsky, took 62 pages of typewritten text. Bukhanovsky himself called the portrait "prospective".

According to him, the offender did not suffer from psychosis or mental retardation. Outwardly and in behavior, he was quite an ordinary person: the victims trusted him. He considered himself talented, although he had no special abilities. He had a plan to hunt down and lure victims, but he often improvised.

He was heterosexual, and the boys for him acted as "symbolic objects" on which he may have vented the insults and humiliations suffered in childhood and adolescence. He was a necrosadist who needed to watch people die and suffer in order to get sexual satisfaction. To bring the victim into a helpless state, he first hit her on the head. He was physically well developed, tall. The numerous stab wounds he inflicted were a way for him to "penetrate" (in a sexual sense) into the victim.

The blade played the role of a penis, making reciprocating movements in the wound, but not leaving it completely. Therefore, most likely, he was impotent. He blinded his victims because he was afraid of their gaze. The severed body parts he kept as "trophies" or possibly ate them. By cutting off the genitals of boys, he tried to make them more like women or to vent his anger at his own sexual failure.

His age is between 25 and 50, but he was most likely between 45 and 50, the age at which sexual perversions most often develop. If he was married, then his wife was not particularly demanding of him and allowed him to be absent from home often and for long periods. Perhaps he had a personal vehicle ( Chikatilo did have a car, but he did not use it when he made killings), or his work involved travel. He could stop killing for a while if he sensed danger, but he wouldn't stop until he was caught or died.

Andrei Chikatilo - execution

In 1990, Andrei Chikatilo killed 8 more people. He committed his last murder on November 6th. The victim was 22-year-old prostitute Svetlana Korostik. After killing her, he left the forest, and near the Donleskhoz railway station he was stopped by police officer Igor Rybakov, who asked to show documents, due to the fact that in this area people usually went for mushrooms, and Chikatilo's clothes were not suitable for a mushroom picker. Since the policeman had no formal grounds for arrest, having fixed his last name, he released Chikatilo.

A few days later, Korostik's body was found near the same station. The medical examiner set the date of the murder to be about a week ago. After checking the report of the policemen on duty at that time, Kostoev drew attention to the name of Chikatilo, who had already been detained in 1984 on suspicion of involvement in the killings in the forest belts. On November 17, external surveillance was established for Chikatilo. He behaved suspiciously: he tried to get acquainted with boys and girls, appeared in places where corpses were found.

Chikatilo was arrested on November 20, 1990. On that day, after taking time off from work, he went to the clinic to have an X-ray of his finger, which one of the victims had bitten during the struggle. The finger was broken. Chikatilo returned home, then went to the kiosk for beer, taking a three-liter jar as a container, which he carried in a mesh bag for vegetables. On the way back from the beer stall, he was detained by operatives.

According to one of the detectives who took part in the operation to detain Chikatilo, everyone was surprised that "Chikatilo, it seems, is such a healthy man, and he bought a little beer - there was about half a liter in a 3-liter can." During a search of his house, 32 kitchen knives were found (it is still not known exactly whether they were used for the murders) and shoes, the print of which matched the print found near the corpse of one of the victims.

During a search, Andrey Chikatilo did not find the organs of the victims, which he took with him, perhaps he ate them. His wife said that when he went on a business trip, he took a saucepan with him. Chikatilo was interrogated for ten days, but he did not confess to anything. There was no direct evidence against him, and the term of his detention was already expiring. Then Kostoev turned to Bukhanovsky for help, and he agreed to talk with the killer. After talking with a psychiatrist on November 30, Chikatilo confessed to the murders and began to testify. He was accused of 36 murders, he confessed to 56. The investigation could not prove three murders.

His trial, which began on April 14, 1992, took place in the Rostov House of Justice. Chikatilo tried to portray madness: he shouted, insulted the judges and those present in the hall, exposed his genitals, claimed that he was pregnant and lactating. But a forensic psychiatric examination, conducted three times, showed his full sanity. On October 15, he was sentenced to death (the multi-page sentence began to be read on October 14 and was completed only the next day). The number included in the verdict is 52 murders, since the court considered the evidence base insufficient for one episode. In addition, Chikatilo was charged with several cases of molestation of minors.

While on death row, Chikatilo wrote numerous complaints and requests for pardon, took care of his health: did exercises, ate with appetite.

January 4, 1994 the last request for clemency in the name of Russian President Boris Yeltsin was rejected. On February 14, Chikatilo was executed in the Novocherkassk prison.

sexual abuse

Many specialists, even those who participated in the examination Chikatilo, claim that he never raped his victims, as he suffered from impotence. On the other hand, for example, Katherine Ramsland, who wrote a text about Chikatilo for crimelibrary.com, indicates that at least one of his victims was found with signs of rape, and semen was found in her anus (for the first time allowed to establish the blood type of the killer from the forest belt). During the first arrest of Chikatilo in 1984 and the last arrest in 1990, a can of vaseline was found in his briefcase, which, as Nikolai Modestov writes in his book “ Maniacs... Blind death”, along with a rope and a sharp knife, was “prepared for his victims.” When Chikatilo asked why he needed Vaseline, he replied that he used it as a shaving cream "on long business trips." Later, during interrogation, he admitted that he used it in the rape of the victims.

sanity

Three forensic psychiatric examinations unequivocally recognized Andrei Chikatilo as sane, that is, “who did not suffer from any mental illness and retained the ability to be aware of his actions and manage them.” However, Nikolai Modestov believes that the doctors' verdict was dictated by the desire to protect society from the killer. If Chikatilo had been recognized as insane, that is, mentally ill, he would have avoided execution and ended up in a special hospital. Therefore, theoretically, after some time, he could be free.

Alexander Bukhanovsky claims that, in his opinion, Andrei Chikatilo was ill, and after the adoption of the new Criminal Code, he could be recognized as "limitedly sane", which would also mean a special-purpose psychiatric hospital.

The recognition of Chikatilo as sane means that he was aware of the illegal nature of his actions and could purposefully control his behavior. But sanity does not mean recognizing a person as mentally healthy, and his behavior as normal.

"Paradoxical highlight"

Main article: Paradoxical highlighting

In the verdict of the Rostov Regional Court in the case Chikatilo his long non-exposure was explained not by the mistakes of experts and the flaws of investigators in general, but precisely by the “paradoxical isolation” of the perpetrator: a mismatch between his secretions (sperm) and blood according to the antigenic system AB0. Chikatilo's blood type was the second (A), but in his sperm, found on one of the victims, traces of antigen B were also found, which gave reason to believe that the killer from the forest belt had blood of the fourth group (AB). Chikatilo had the wrong blood type, and therefore, after his arrest in September 1984, he was released.

However, it has now been proven that no "paradoxical isolation" exists, since this phenomenon would contradict the genetic basis of the AB0 system. The phenomena of inconsistency in the group of excretions of the body and blood are due to bacterial contamination of the studied biological objects. The use of appropriate techniques and high-quality reagents would have avoided incorrect analysis results, but this was not done in the case of Chikatilo.

Yuri Dubyagin, a criminologist "with 27 years of experience in the internal affairs bodies", co-author of the book "School of Survival, or 56 Ways to Protect Your Child from Crime", believes that the "paradoxical emphasis" was invented in order to justify the negligence of the medical examiner, who conducted a blood test of Chikatilo in 1984.

Issa Kostoev directly says that "an inaccuracy was made in the analysis."

"Organized" or "disorganized" serial killer

The well-known classification developed by FBI special agents Robert Hazelwood and John Douglas (article "The Lust Murderer", 1980) divides all serial killers by the method of murder into two types: organized non-social and disorganized anti-social.

Organized killers characterized by the ability to control their desires, they have a clear plan to track down and seduce the victim. If the plan fails, then the killer is able to delay its implementation. Accordingly, the intelligence of an organized killer is normal or even above average, often they have a higher education.

Unlike organized serial killers, disorganized ones are not able to control their emotions and commit murders in a fit of rage (in a state of passion), often they kill literally the first person they meet. Their intelligence is usually reduced, up to mental retardation, or they have a mental illness. Unlike organized killers, they are socially maladjusted (have no job, no family, live alone, do not take care of themselves and their homes), that is, they do not wear a “mask of normality”. Chikatilo he committed his murders in a state of passion, but deliberately, systematically prepared the conditions for their commission (he could so lull the vigilance of his victims that some walked with him in the forest up to five kilometers). If the victim refused to go with him, then he never put pressure on her, afraid to attract witnesses, but immediately went in search of a new one.

The domestic textbook of forensic psychology Obraztsov and Bogomolova unequivocally classifies Chikatilo as a "disorganized asocial type." However, Andrei Chikatilo is not a pure representative of it. For example, according to the criteria of Hazelwood-Douglas, a disorganized killer usually lives near the sites of murders - Andrei Chikatilo carried out his murders throughout the Rostov region and throughout the Soviet Union. On the other hand, an organized killer tries not to leave evidence at the crime scene, tries to get rid of the corpse - Chikatilo left a “chaotic picture of the crime”, with a lot of evidence, and did not try to hide the body.

Andrey Chikatilo - all the victims

Number	Last name and first name	Floor	Age	Date and place of the murder	Notes
1	Elena Zakotnova	F	9	December 22, 1978 in Shakhty	The body was found on December 24, 1978 in the Grushevka River. For the first murder of Chikatilo on July 5, 1983, 29-year-old Alexander Kravchenko, who was not guilty of him, was shot.
2	Larisa Tkachenko	F	17	September 3, 1981, Rostov-on-Don, in a forest belt on the left bank of the Don	Body found on September 4, 1981. Tkachenko was a prostitute and usually dated soldiers. Chikatilo met her at a bus stop near the Rostov Public Library. Having led her into the forest belt, he tried to have sex with her, but he could not get excited. When Tkachenko began to ridicule him, he stabbed her several times and strangled her with his hands. He stuffed his mouth with earth and cut off his left nipple.
3	Lyubov Biryuk	F	13	June 12, 1982	The body was found on June 27, 1982. Chikatilo inflicted at least 40 knife wounds on her.
4	Lyubov Volobueva	F	14	July 25, 1982, Krasnodar	Body found August 7, 1982.
5	Oleg Pozhidaev	M	9	August 13, 1982	The body was never found. Chikatilo cut off his genitals and took him with him.
6	Olga Kuprina	F	16	August 16, 1982	The body was found on October 27, 1982 near the village of Cossack camps.
7	Irina Korabelnikova	F	19	September 8, 1982, a kilometer from the railway station "Shakhty"	The body was found on September 20, 1982 in a forest belt a kilometer from the Shakhty railway station. She left home after a scandal with her parents and did not return.
8	Sergey Kuzmin	M	15	September 15, 1982, forest belt between the railway stations "Shakhty" and "Kirpichnaya"	The body was found on January 12, 1983 in the forest belt between the Shakhty and Kirpichnaya railway stations. He escaped from the boarding school because of high school students bullying him and did not return.
9	Olga Stalmachenok	F	10	December 11, 1982, state farm field No. 6 near Novoshakhtinsk	The body was found on April 14, 1983, on the arable field of state farm No. 6 near Novoshakhtinsk. I went to music school and did not return home. Chikatilo cut out her heart and took it with him. It is from the scene of the tractor driver discovering a corpse on the field that the film "Citizen X" begins.
10	Laura (Laura) Sargsyan	F	15	after June 18, 1983	The body was not found.
11	Irina Dunenkova	F	13	Killed in July 1983	The body was found on August 8, 1983. She was the younger sister of Chikatilo's mistress, she suffered from mental retardation.
12	Ludmila Kushuba	F	24	July 1983	The body was found on March 12, 1984. She was a disabled child, a vagabond, a mother of two children.
13	Igor Gudkov	M	7	August 9, 1983	The body was found on August 28, 1983 in Rostov-on-Don. The youngest victim of Chikatilo.
14	Valentina Chuchulina	F	22	After September 19, 1983	Body found November 27, 1983.
15	unidentified woman	F	18-25	summer or autumn 1983	Body found October 28, 1983.
16	Vera Shevkun	F	19	October 27, 1983	The body was found on October 30, 1983 in a forest belt near the town of Shakhty. Chikatilo amputated both breasts from her.
17	Sergey Markov	M	14	December 27, 1983	The body was found on January 1, 1984. Chikatilo stabbed him up to 70 times and amputated his genitals. The sperm of the fourth group was found in Markov's anus.
18	Natalia Shalapinina	F	17	January 9, 1984	The body was found on January 10, 1984 in Rostov-on-Don. Chikatilo inflicted 28 stab wounds on her.
19	Marta Ryabenko	F	45	February 21, 1984, in the Rostov Aviators' Park	The body was found on February 22, 1984 in the Rostov Aviators' Park. The oldest victim of Chikatilo. She was a vagabond and an alcoholic.
20	Dmitry Ptashnikov	M	10	March 24, 1984	The body was found on March 27, 1984 in Novoshakhtinsk. Chikatilo bit off his tongue and penis. Near his body, the police for the first time found evidence - the print of the killer's shoes.
21	Tatyana Petrosyan	F	32	May 25, 1984	The body was found on July 27, 1984. She was a mistress (according to other sources, just an employee) of Chikatilo. Killed along with her daughter Svetlana.
22	Svetlana Petrosyan	F	11	May 25, 1984	The body was found on July 5, 1984. Chikatilo killed her by hitting her in the head with a hammer. She was killed along with her mother Tatyana Petrosyan.
23	Elena Bakulina	F	22	June 1984	Body found August 27, 1984.
24	Dmitry Illarionov	M	13	July 10, 1984, Rostov-on-Don	The body was found on August 12, 1984 in Rostov-on-Don.
25	Anna Lemesheva	F	19	July 19, 1984	Body found July 25, 1984.
26	Svetlana Tsana	F	20	July 1984	Body found September 9, 1984.
27	Natalia Golosovskaya	F	16	August 2, 1984
28	Ludmila Alekseeva	F	17	August 7, 1984, Rostov-on-Don	The body was found on August 10, 1984 in Rostov-on-Don. Chikatilo stabbed her 39 times.
29	unknown woman	F	20-25	between August 8 and 11, 1984, Tashkent	The date of discovery of the body is unknown.
30	Akmaral Seydaliyeva	F	12	August 13, 1984, Tashkent	The date of discovery of the body is unknown.
31	Alexander Chepel	M	11	August 28, 1984, Rostov-on-Don	The body was found on September 2, 1984 in Rostov-on-Don in a forest belt on the left bank of the Don. Chikatilo met him near the Burevestnik cinema on Voroshilovsky Prospekt and lured him into the forest with promises to "show a video film." Killed him by cutting open his stomach.
32	Irina Luchinskaya	F	24	September 6, 1984, Rostov-on-Don	The body was found on September 7, 1984 in Rostov-on-Don.
33	Natalya Pokhlistova	F	18	July 31, 1985, near the Domodedovo airport, Moscow region	The body was found on August 3, 1985 in a forest near Domodedovo Airport, Moscow Region.
34	Irina (Inessa) Gulyaeva	F	18	25 (according to other sources - 27) August 1985, forest belt near the town of Shakhty	The body was found on August 28, 1985 in a forest belt near the town of Shakhty. She was a tramp and an alcoholic. Red and blue threads were found under her nails, and gray hair between her fingers. Sweat was found on her body, which had the fourth group, while Gulyaeva herself had blood of the first group. Undigested food was found in her stomach - this could mean that the killer lured her into the forest belt by offering food.
35	Oleg Makarenkov	M	13	May 16, 1987	Chikatilo returned home for a shovel and buried the corpse of Makarenkov in a forest belt. The body was found only in 1991, after the arrest of Chikatilo.
36	Ivan Bilovetsky	M	12	July 29, 1987, Zaporozhye	The body was found on July 31, 1987 in Zaporozhye.
37	Yuri Tereshonok	M	16	September 15, 1987, Leningrad region	The remains were found in early 1991 near the floodplain of the Gruzinka River, Leningrad Region. From September 7 to September 27, 1987, Chikatilo was on a business trip in Leningrad. He met Tereshonok in the canteen of the Finland Station and offered to go to his "dacha" in Lembolovo. Naturally, Chikatilo did not have any dacha there, and he named Lembolovo because this settlement was the first on the board of departing trains. Arriving there with Tereshonok, Chikatilo walked with him only 200 meters deep into the forest, then pushed him off the path, hit him several times, knocked him to the ground, tied his hands with twine and began to beat him with a knife. The body was covered with earth. For details, see the newspaper "Moskovsky Komsomolets in St. Petersburg" No. 32/61 of August 10, 2005.
38	unidentified woman	F	18-25	April 1988, Krasny Sulin	The body was found on April 8, 1988 in a wasteland near the town of Krasny Sulin.
39	Alexey Voronko	M	9	May 15, 1988	The body was found on May 17, 1988 in a forest belt near Rostov-on-Don. I went to visit my grandmother and did not return. Chikatilo cut off his genitals and opened his stomach. Voronko's classmate told police that he had seen a tall, middle-aged man with a mustache, gold teeth, and a sports bag with him.
40	Evgeny Muratov	M	15	July 14, 1988	The body was found on April 11, 1989. He was a student at a technical school. Chikatilo cut off his genitals and took a pocket watch with a dedicatory inscription from his aunt and uncle.
41	Tatyana Ryzhova	F	16	March 8, 1989, Shakhty	The body was found on March 9, 1989 in a manhole in the city of Shakhty. Chikatilo brought her to his daughter's apartment (she was empty after her daughter's divorce from her husband). There he got Ryzhov drunk, killed her and dismembered the corpse, cutting off the legs and head with an ordinary kitchen knife. The remains were wrapped in Ryzhova's tracksuit and newspapers. On a sled, he transported the remains to a wasteland and dumped them into a sewer manhole. According to one version, he borrowed the sled from a neighbor, according to another, he simply took it from an elderly woman on the street. When Chikatilo was transporting sleds across the railroad tracks, a man offered to help him. At first, Chikatilo was frightened and confused, but agreed, and the man helped him transport the sled over the rails.
42	Alexander Dyakonov	M	8	May 11, 1989	Killed on his eighth birthday. The body was found on July 14, 1989. He went for a walk and did not return home.
43	Alexey Moiseev	M	10	June 20, 1989	Body found September 6, 1989.
44	Elena Varga	F	19	August 19, 1989	Body found September 1, 1989 She was a student from Hungary, the mother of a small child. Chikatilo met her at a bus stop and offered to carry her bags home. Leading her into a forest belt under the pretext of a "shortcut", he killed her, cut off her breasts, cut out her uterus, and cut off the soft tissues of her face. Wrapping his "trophies" in scraps of her clothes, he went with them straight to his father's birthday party.
45	Alexey Khobotov	M	10	August 28, 1989	The body was found on December 12, 1990 at the cemetery of the city of Shakhty. Chikatilo buried him in a grave that he dug for himself at the city cemetery of Shakhty in 1987 (allegedly he was plotting suicide). This was the first corpse shown by Chikatilo to the investigation. The mother of the victim, Lyudmila Khobotova, walked around Rostov stations and electric trains for almost a year, showing everyone a photo of Alexei in the hope that someone had seen him. Once she showed a photograph in the train ... to Chikatilo himself! During the investigation, she recognized him by the characteristic gesture with which he adjusted his glasses.
46	Andrey Kravchenko	M	11	January 14, 1990	Body found February 19, 1990.
47	Yaroslav Makarov	M	10	March 7, 1990	The body was found on March 8, 1990. Chikatilo tore out his rectum.
48	Lyubov Zueva	F	31	April 4, 1990	Body found August 24, 1990.
49	Viktor Petrov	M	13	July 28, 1990	The body was found at the end of July 1990 on the territory of the Rostov Botanical Garden. He was at the Rostov railway station with his mother, went to drink water and did not return.
50	Ivan Fomin	M	11	August 14, 1990, on the territory of the city beach in Novocherkassk	The body was found on August 17, 1990 on the territory of the city beach in Novocherkassk. Chikatilo inflicted 42 knife wounds on him and castrated him when he was still alive. A tuft of gray hair was found in Fomin's hand.
51	Vadim Gromov	M	16	October 16, 1990	The body was found on October 31, 1990. He suffered from mental retardation. Chikatilo inflicted 27 stab wounds on him, bit off his tongue and testicles.
52	Viktor Tishchenko	M	16	October 30, 1990	The body was found on November 3, 1990 in a forest belt near the town of Shakhty. Tishchenko bit Chikatilo's middle finger on his left hand.
53	Svetlana Korostik	F	22	November 6, 1990	The body was found on November 13, 1990 in a forest belt near the Donleskhoz railway station. Korostik was a prostitute. Chikatilo bit off her tongue, cut out her breasts and took them with him.

Directory of Criminalistics

The story of the sex maniac Andrei Chikatilo

While the investigation into the case of the "killer of the century" Andrei Chikatilo was underway, the detainee was kept in solitary confinement in the KGB detention center. Why? Firstly, the investigators explained, among the victims there was also an employee of the correctional labor institutions, and in this case it would be difficult to guarantee that they would not get to the prisoner in police custody. Secondly, they feared that cellmates could strangle this.

The name of Andrei Chikatilo over the past decade has become a household name: a maniac, a sadist, a cruel killer, a pervert. Scientists in a number of countries dreamed of studying this phenomenon, offering huge sums of money for the brain of a record-breaking maniac alone.

What was the path of a strong, conscientious village boy, whom his peers called "Andrei-Sila", to that monster that appeared before the court? Did he want to end his life behind bars, like an animal exhibited in a zoo? Of course no. Andrei Chikatilo was the son of a "traitor, traitor and coward", as his father was captured at the front. The family lived very poorly. But Chikatilo said later that it was precisely this poverty and indelible shame that gave rise to a stubborn dream of a high political career in him: "I firmly believed that I would not be the last person. My place is in the Kremlin ..."

He spoke about his childhood like this: "... In September 1944, he went to school. He was too shy, timid, shy, was the object of ridicule and could not defend himself. The teachers were surprised at my helplessness: if I did not have a pen or ink, I sat and cried. Due to congenital myopia, I could not see what was written on the board and was afraid to ask. There were no glasses at all then, besides, I was afraid of the nickname Bespectacled, I began to wear them only at the age of 30, when I got married ... Tears of resentment choked me all life.

In the spring of 1954, when I was already in the tenth grade, I once lost my temper. A thirteen-year-old girl came into our yard, blue trousers peeking out from under her dress ... I said that my sister was not at home, she did not leave. Then I pushed her, knocked her down and lay down on her. I didn't undress her and I didn't undress myself. But I immediately ejaculated. I was very worried about this weakness of mine, although no one saw it. After this misfortune of mine, I decided to tame my flesh, my base impulses, and vowed to myself not to touch anyone except my future wife.

According to psychiatrists, the maniac has some kind of exciting image and, perhaps, it is there, in the courtyard of an old house in the village of Yablochnoye, where Andryusha Chikatilo knocked a little girl to the ground, which brought him momentary relief, the origins of the transformation of a timid young man into a rapist who chose the object defenseless victim of violence. Attracted precisely by this exciting image, he, having a technical specialty, having already established himself in it, suddenly, for no reason at all, entered to study in absentia at the Rostov State University at the Faculty of Philology. And in the future, Andrei Chikatilo, a student of the philological faculty, decided to become a teacher only because the incident in the village of Yablochnoe was deposited in the subconscious and gave rise to a painful idea that even dictated to him the choice of profession.

"Andrey-Sila" did not choose this path himself - a maniac, a rapist and a murderer, it was that girl that ran like a living picture into his memory, and nature itself, which then received a detente, led him. Even as a mature man, husband and father, he himself, perhaps without realizing it, sought to study people like her, to penetrate into their psychology, to learn how to freely control them. To do this, he got a job as chairman of the district committee of physical education and sports, where, he knew for sure, he would need to communicate with teenagers in different situations, travel with them on business trips to competitions, sports days ... Then - a teacher of Russian language and literature, an educator in boarding school No. 32, later - in the city vocational school No. 39 in the city of Novoshakhtinsk, in the same school in the city of Shakhty.

Former students of the boarding school where Andrey Romanovich worked, already adults, recalled at the trial how a teacher, under the guise of helping with writing work, sat down next to them and "touched various parts of the body" ... Suddenly he entered the girls' rooms in that the moment they undressed to go to bed. When he was alone among the girls, he became crazy ... Chikatilo constantly engaged in masturbation through the pockets of his trousers, for which his students frankly teased ...

While already behind bars, Chikatilo recalled the events of his life, which later brought him closer to the murders. For example, how he once took the children to the pond: to relax, swim, sunbathe. One of the girls, with a rather well-formed feminine body, swam away from everyone and there, in the distance, splashed, basked. He swam towards her, pretending to be an angry teacher, called to keep order and, pretending to drive her to the shore, began to roughly feel her all over. She screamed.

“I felt,” he said at the trial, “that she screamed louder, and I would begin this ... pleasure ... I began to pinch her painfully ... She, escaping, screamed furiously ... And immediately I had everything began".

Soon, due to a scandal at the boarding school related to Chikatilo's rude harassment of a student, he had to change jobs. In the new place, the boys became the objects of his close attention. One of them, as he later testified, woke up one night and found that Andrei Romanovich was bending over him and touching his penis. This was repeated with him and with other boys, the students stopped respecting him and even noticed him, there was no discipline, there were steady conversations among the guys: Andrei Romanovich was a “faggot”, “anxious” and engaged in masturbation ... It was hard not to notice as a teacher through his pocket constantly fiddled with his penis in his hand.

Despite all his deviations, which he could not help but notice in himself, Chikatilo still continued to believe in his high destiny and in "this" life he tried to grow to the height intended for him. Overcame four faculties of the University of Marxism-Leninism. Read lectures. Collaborated with local newspapers: he wrote on moral topics. However, it was no longer possible without the intervention of a psychiatrist to stop the degeneration of a person into a monster. And it was a shame to ask for help - it would mean admitting one's failure as a man.

The terrible statistics of crimes began in 1982, when the dead were found every now and then in the Rostov region. But these were not just murders, these were the consequences of fanaticism. Even battered police officers shuddered when they got to the scene of the crime. There they found the corpses of people over whom someone cruelly scoffed: stabbed, cut. Almost without exception, the murders were distinguished by just such a "handwriting" - sadism, special cruelty.

The killer was represented as a monster, but he turned out to be a very peculiar person: he valued his family, was attached to his wife and children, modest and even shy, timid. It was downright hard to believe that this meek creature was capable of gouging out the eyes of its victims. But just this, as it turned out, is quite understandable: a maniac cannot withstand someone else's gaze.

The city was filled with fear. The suspense intensified the nightmare. Mothers accompanied their children to school and met them from school. However, more and more reports about the disappearance of children appeared in the newspapers and people found more and more corpses with the same sadistic "handwriting". The more time passed, the more victims appeared on the killer's account, the clearer a certain "route" loomed: the bodies were found in forest belts, not far from the route of the Rostov-Zverevo electric trains. This gave the operation to search for the criminal who terrified the population of the region, the name "Forest Belt". It was one of the longest, most difficult, but at the same time the most famous operations, during which a huge number of other crimes were uncovered along the way.

Naturally, the team investigating the case included the most experienced detectives. Almost fifty. Ten years of searching ... In recent years, they have been especially intensive. Every man with a teenager - a girl or a boy - wherever they saw, was recorded with a hidden photo or video camera, then they established: who is who? And in the future, in suspicious cases, this material was monitored: will the recorded one be caught again, with another child?

Many methods have been used to find the killer maniac. Hundreds of police officers, suitably dressed, pretended to work on the railway, fish, pick mushrooms, take care of grapes, work on household plots or just wait for the next train, in general, a huge number of options were worked out. Not without the participation of women policemen. They, disguised as homeless people, to whom the criminal had a special craving as the most accessible and least wanted category of people, also traveled in electric trains guarded by disguised colleagues in the hope that the maniac would not bypass them with his attention, “bite”.

The development of the investigation was complicated by the fact that the police did not have any testimonies. And yet there was one clue - on the body of a 9-year-old boy who died in the summer of 1982, the sperm of the fourth group was found. And this, according to all the classical laws of forensic science, meant that the blood of the criminal was also of the fourth group.

But as it turned out, these unshakable "classical laws of criminalistics" played a cruel joke with the investigation. Even at the beginning of operations, in 1984, one of the operational groups detained Chikatilo at the station, drawing attention to his suspicious behavior and hard-to-disguise interest in teenagers. At the same time, a blood sample was taken from him, but since the group turned out to be the second, the criminal was quietly released. Subsequently, it turned out that Chikatilo's physiology was abnormal - he had a different sperm group and blood type. The holy faith of those who conducted the investigation in forensic dogmas gave the sadist the opportunity to rape and kill people for another six years. Having reached a dead end, members of the task force went to consult with the same maniac-killer Anatoly Slivko, who at that time was awaiting the death penalty in the Stavropol prison.

The bomber turned out to be talkative. “Firstly,” he urged, “here you need to look for not one, but several murderers: one is not capable of this. Secondly, look for someone who has some kind of exciting image.” But the advice of the maniac did not help the investigation. A coincidence helped. Although, maybe those who claim that there are no accidents are right. Most likely this is a pattern - no matter how much the rope twists ...

The end of this bloody drama came in 1990. This year was especially "fruitful" for Chikatilo - six murders. He committed his last crime on October 6 near the Leskhoz station. On October 13, they discovered the corpse of a murdered woman with signs of the same characteristic "handwriting" of the criminal. When questioning possible witnesses, it turned out that on October 7, police sergeant Igor Rybakov drew attention to a man with a briefcase, who was wandering towards the station, and checked his documents. The documents were in order, but, fortunately, the sergeant remembered that the detainee's last name began with the letter C.

It was not difficult to find Chikatilo, but there was no point in taking him right away - what if it was a mistake? They began to follow him. Only after looking closely at his behavior and making sure that this elderly man was actively interested in boys, he was arrested.

"On the territory of the Rostov region in 1982-1990 more than 30 murders of children and women were committed with particular cruelty for sexual reasons. On November 20, 1990, in the process of carrying out operational search activities, citizen Chikatilo Andrey Romanovich, born in 1936, a native of Sumy regions of the Ukrainian SSR, Ukrainian, higher education, in 1970 he graduated from the philological faculty of Rostov State University, a member of the CPSU since 1960, in 1984 he was expelled from the ranks of the CPSU in connection with criminal prosecution for theft, married, has 2 adult children , lived with his family in the city of Shakhty, Novoshakhtinsk, and at the time of detention - in the city of Novocherkassk, Gvardeyskaya street ...

Chikatilo is arrested. He was charged with committing murders, including outside the region. The investigation into the case is ongoing.

At first, the arrested person denied his involvement in the crimes that he was charged with, and only on the tenth day after his arrest, Andrei Chikatilo began to testify. He argued that his crimes were the result of a mental disorder caused by sexual impotence. I convinced the investigator: I didn’t look for victims, I didn’t choose, I didn’t organize anything in advance.

And, of course, do not kill led away their victims. Usually everything started on a voluntary basis, on the basis of consent. But when, by virtue of his physiological potential, he turned out to be untenable, when he was insulted, some kind of rage found, and he, not realizing his actions, began to cut. Of course, everything worked out spontaneously. Can a person be blamed for this?

“At that time, I was simply irresistibly attracted to children. There was some desire to see their naked bodies ... I wanted to have sexual intercourse ...” he told the investigator.

In order for the children to somehow make contact with him, he had to come up with various baits. Often he bought them "chewing gum", treated them. It was on this basis that acquaintances with children arose. So there was an acquaintance with the very first victim of the maniac - Lena Z-howl. In the case of the murder of this girl, Alexander Kravchenko was convicted and shot, and the real killer then escaped with a summons to the investigator.

Chikatilo himself says this: "... The murder of this girl was my first crime, and I myself, without anyone's reminder, sincerely spoke about the circumstances of her murder. At the time of my arrest in this case, the investigating authorities could not know what it was the murder was committed by me. It was after this crime that I began to kill my other victims ... "

She was killed on December 22, 1978. After that, Lena's girlfriends told the operatives: "Lena had to go to her grandfather for gum on the way home," one said. The second: "Lena said that she agreed with her grandfather, who gives her imported gum, that after school she will go to him and that he lives along the way; she needs to "get off the tram one stop early".

"... We went into my hut," he said. "I turned on the light and as soon as I closed the door, I immediately fell on it, crushing it under myself, knocking it to the floor, began to tear off my clothes. The girl got scared, screamed, and I began to pinch her mouth with her hands ... Her cry aroused me even more ... I wanted to tear and touch everything. She wheezed, I choked her, and this brought me some relief. When I realized that I had killed the girl, I got up, get rid of the body..."

Talking about his first murder, Chikatilo himself notes the main thing: the girl’s cry was exciting. And the sight of blood led to indescribable excitement. He experienced a pronounced orgasm, which he had not known before ...

Family members, relatives and employees of Chikatilo, during the period that coincided with this murder, noticed changes in him. He suddenly caught himself, hurried somewhere, hurried. Then he came back, looked around as if he forgot something, ran again and came back again, as if he was out of his mind. Now we can assume that, most likely, in this way he fought with the one who called him, Chikatilo, who wanted a repetition of what so unexpectedly brought him the torment and blood of a small, weak victim.

Experienced impressions and sensations did not give rest, the whole being demanded repetition; the first crime of this kind deeply shocked, sunk into the soul, and, as Chikatilo himself notes, it called him somewhere.

On August 14, 1990, Chikatilo killed 11-year-old Ivan F-n. "... Vanya lay naked. They bent over him, who was closer, examined him.

What's up with his skin? Really riddled with a shotgun, - moaned one of the officers.

No, - concluded another, examining the boy, - Knife. All this with a knife ... "

Oleg F-n, Vanya's father, captain of the internal service, spoke in the courtroom on May 19, 1992. He could not speak; something seemed to choke him. Then he gathered his courage, evenly, distinctly said:

Tomorrow Vanya would have turned thirteen, it's his birthday... My wife and I have a girl. She is fourteen years old. The second boy is eight. The third child was born when Vanya was no more. We wanted to call him Ivan. But the old people said that it was impossible. Probably so, we named him Victor... Yes, I have a request to the court. No need to sentence him to death. No need. Let it be 15 years. Let less. But then from the KGB casemates, where he has been hidden for so long, he will come to us. Listen, Chikatilo, what will we do with you. We will repeat everything that you did with our children. Chikatilo, we will repeat everything. And you will feel everything, drop by drop... How painful it is."

According to the conclusion of the forensic medical examination, Ivan F-n died as a result of 42 stab wounds to the chest, abdomen, and left shoulder, which led to profuse blood loss. The boy was alive when the maniac cut off his testicles ... Chikatilo explains: he cut the genitals, taking out the evil for his impotence. He received not only sexual satisfaction, but also relieved tension, temporarily got rid of feelings of heaviness and inferiority.

Usually Chikatilo used the tried and tested method: so that the victim did not notice anything, did not feel anything, walked ahead. Then he suddenly pounced, struck, immobilized. Having fallen down with a blow, he began to act with a knife. He struck blows carefully so as not to kill immediately. After all, it was a pleasure to feel the resistance of the victim. At such moments, the knife played the role of a kind of penis: usually, experts found wounds in the upper body, in which the blade, without leaving the surface, made up to twenty reciprocating movements. Thus, a kind of imitation of sexual intercourse took place. And when it was all over, Chikatilo collected the clothes of the killed or killed, tore them apart, cut them into pieces, walked around and scattered them. Having finished, he took up shoes, with which he acted in the same way. An eerie ritual of death...

A huge number of victims on the conscience of this maniac, but did he have problems with their choice? He himself talks about it:

"... I often had to visit railway stations, trains, electric trains and buses ... There are a lot of all kinds of vagabonds, young and old. They ask, and demand, and take away. In the morning they get drunk somewhere ... These vagabonds also draw minors in. From the stations they crawl along the trains in different directions. One has to see scenes of the sex life of these vagabonds at the stations and in the trains. And I remembered my humiliation that I could never prove myself as a full-fledged man. The question arose: do they have the right to exist for these declassed elements?.. It is not difficult to get to know them, they themselves are not shy, climb into the soul, ask for money, food, vodka and offer themselves for sexual life... I saw how they went with partners to secluded places. .."

A professional teacher and psychologist, he found approaches to those who were then absorbed by the "forest belt". So, seeing the hungry, Chikatilo offered to feed. The sufferer promised a drink. An impatient woman - a bed. Chess lover - the secret of victory. Radiotelemaster - complained about a blown fuse. Fond of videos - sex or horror - offered both. Tired - rest. Lost on the way - a short way. He promised everyone what was most needed at that moment. Selflessly. And nearby, just go through that forest belt and immediately ... But on this forest belt, death awaited everyone without exception - cruel, painful, terrifying.

Who was this man, if even now, after his execution, you shudder at the mere thought of what he did? Devil? a seer? Probably neither. The reason for his criminal longevity and the huge number of those who succumbed to his tricks and persuasion lies in the fact that, unlike many, he was able to see individual people flashing in a common anthill, he was able to consider everyone, to penetrate, unravel, determine all his strengths and weaknesses. hand: assess whether the victim is suitable for "feeding" his passion.

The search for Chikatilo was carried out for almost a decade. How many victims does he have? The indictment spoke of 53, and he himself believed that there were over seventy of them.

Relatives of Chikatilo (wife and two adult children) were shocked when they learned about his arrest. Everyone was shocked and could not believe that their stooping, nondescript head of the family turned out to be a cruel killer. "After all, he was so soft, kind and sympathetic!"

Yes, I won’t believe you for anything, ”said Chikatilo’s wife, a bony, some kind of elongated woman, very similar to her husband. “He won’t hurt a fly, but here he’s killing people ...

Already in the pre-trial detention center, Chikatilo wrote to his wife: “The brightest thing in my life is my pure, beloved holy wife. Why did I disobey you, dear, when you said - work near the house, don’t go anywhere on business trips. under house arrest - after all, I always obeyed you. Now I would sit at home and pray on my knees for you, my sun.

How could I descend to brutality, to a primitive state, when everything around is so pure and sublime. I have already cried all the tears at night. And why did God send me to this earth - so affectionate, gentle, caring, but completely defenseless with my weaknesses ... "

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was sentenced to death under the criminal codes of three republics - Ukraine, Russia and Uzbekistan. The sentence was carried out.

The "Chikatilo case" does not end there. Continuation followed already in 1996, after the execution of Andrei Romanovich. We have already mentioned that some scientists (for example, the geneticist V. Kolpakov) believe that there are no non-inherited traits, and the "crime trait" is transmitted by one gene.

Perhaps it was this gene with the "sign of Crime" that played a role in the fate of the son of the "killer of the century" Andrei Chikatilo - Yuri Andreevich. After his arrest, he was charged with Articles 117, 108 and 126, that is, illegal imprisonment of the person he tortured, forgery of documents, rape...

As for rape, several of them are suspected: to one of his acquaintances, for example, in case of refusal, he promised to cut off her friend's ears. But the statement is one. From the twenty-year-old girlfriend of the owner of the apartment at Rostselmash, because of which Yura was severely beaten, and even the BMW was taken away, on which he arrived in the city. Having recovered, Yura "ran into" the owner of the apartment, demanding from him a receipt for 10 thousand green , otherwise threatened to cut out the family and scatter the pieces around the city.

In these threats, the "handwriting" of his terribly famous father is felt. Yuri Andreevich worked part-time in Rostov, choosing a very original method: he walked around the kiosks, allegedly on behalf of their owner, and allegedly took money as a cashier. From time to time, Yura worked as a "shuttle carrier", carrying leather and other consumer goods from Turkey. Once transporting such goods for him, the driver of the heavy truck Lesha almost lost his life. He loaded a car in Kursk and drove the cargo along the highway to its destination, in Rostov-on-Don. Then he did not imagine that this trip would turn into a nightmare, which neither he nor any of his colleagues could imagine. The loaded car suddenly stalled near Kamensk, Lesha could not fix the engine, he had to ask for help. Well, this happens to the most experienced of drivers. The owners, however, took the incident differently: he threw it! Where is the product?..

Soon Alex was already in the hands of his "customer". When they beat him, he thought that the worst had come. But the worst was yet to come. He came to himself from the pain, bound. And he felt that a knife was being slowly and tastefully inserted into his body.

Yuri Andreevich cut them skillfully, for a long time and with pleasure. He also beat day after day - cruelly and endlessly, when Lesha's broken ribs already perforated his lungs and blood, bubbling, burst out of them with air. “Check, all the goods are in place, I didn’t take anything,” Lyosha wheezed while he could speak. "Yes? Then write a receipt," Yury dictated. "To His Majesty Yury Andreevich. I undertake to give the money in dollars in the amount ... Did I write it? That's right. And now let's work on." But when it seemed that it could not be worse, Alexei experienced a new shock. The owner who beat him put his birth certificate under his nose. In the column "parents" Lesha read with horror: "Mother - Chikatilo Evdokia Semyonovna, Russian. Father - Chikatilo Andrey Romanovich, Ukrainian."

The new surname of the son, Yuri Andreevich, born in 1969, was also listed in the certificate shown to Lesha - it was changed on January 11, 1991 in the registry office of the Novocherkassk City Executive Committee of the Rostov Region, entry No. 3. There were few entries in that book for that period: it is not fashionable to rename now, and all concerned one surname - Chikatilo.

It was the police who then insisted on this measure in order to protect the family: there were too many who wanted to take revenge, if not on Andrei Romanovich himself, then at least on his relatives. Everything was done so that Yura would not bear, like a terrible cross, the name of his father and his deeds.

Yuri, just like his father once, requires a psychiatric examination. And he does it in the same pre-trial detention center where his father was before. Accident? Or a rule?

Who committed 53 proven murders (although the criminal himself confessed to 56 murders, and, according to operational information, more than 65 murders were committed by the maniac): 21 boys aged 7 to 16 years, 14 girls aged 9 to 17 years and 17 girls and women. Prior to his arrest, Alexander Kravchenko was shot for the murder committed by Chikatilo. Nicknames: "Mad Beast", "Rostov Ripper", "Red Ripper", "Woodland Killer", "Citizen X", "Satan", "Soviet Jack the Ripper"

Biography before 1978

In 1943, a sister was born to A. Chikatilo. His father, who was at the front at that time, could hardly be the girl's father. Therefore, it is possible that at the age of 6-7 he could have witnessed the rape of his mother by a German soldier, with whom he lived in the same room on the territory of Ukraine occupied by the Germans at that time.

After the army, he moved to the village of Rodionovo-Nesvetaiskaya, not far from Rostov-on-Don. There he got a job as an engineer at a telephone exchange.

December 24 The mines, and indeed the entire Rostov region, were shocked by a terrible find. Near the bridge across the Grushevka River, the body of a 9-year-old student of the 2nd grade of school No. 11, Elena Zakotnova, was found. As the examination showed, the unknown person committed sexual intercourse with the girl in the usual and perverted forms, causing her vaginal and rectal ruptures, and also inflicted three penetrating stab wounds to the stomach. The death of the girl, however, came from mechanical asphyxia - she was strangled. The expert suggested that Lena was killed on the day of her disappearance (her parents turned to the police on December 22), not earlier than 18.00.

The murder of a child, and even with the special cruelty associated with sexual violence, required immediate disclosure. One of the most experienced local detectives was thrown into the case - the senior investigator, the adviser of justice, Izhogin. Local residents were passed through a fine sieve. It is worth noting that the area where the murder took place is rather dysfunctional - the private sector, where workers of local enterprises, prone to drinking, lived.

As it turned out later, Chikatilo lured the girl into the "hut" with promises to give chewing gum. As he testified during the investigation, he only wanted to "play around with her." But when he tried to undress her, the girl began to scream and struggle. Fearing that the neighbors would hear her, Chikatilo fell on her and began to choke her. The victim's suffering aroused him and he experienced an orgasm.

Chikatilo threw the girl's body and her schoolbag into the Grushevka River. On December 24, the body was found and on the same day a suspect in the murder, Alexander Kravchenko, who had previously served 10 years in prison for raping and murdering his peer, was detained. Kravchenko's wife gave him an alibi for December 22, and on December 27 he was released. However, on January 23, 1979, Kravchenko stole from his neighbor. The next morning, the police detained him and found the stolen goods in the attic of his house. A murderer and a drug addict were planted in Kravchenko's cell, who beat him, forcing him to confess to the murder of Zakotnova. Kravchenko's wife was informed that her husband had already been in prison for the murder, and she was accused of complicity in the murder of Zakotnova. The frightened woman signed everything that was demanded of her.

The meeting held by the regional prosecutor's office on this case in Rostov-on-Don in April 1987 was attended by Deputy Head of the Investigation Department of the USSR Prosecutor's Office V. Nenashev and Deputy Prosecutor of the RSFSR Ivan Zemlyanushin. It opened with the words: “The case of the Forest Belt is under control in all higher authorities, as well as in the Central Committee of the CPSU. There is no more important matter in the country than the Forest Belt.

A special task force dealing with the case of the killer from the forest belt was headed by Viktor Burakov, who turned to psychiatrist Alexander Bukhanovsky with a request to draw up a psychological portrait of the criminal. Bukhanovsky immediately rejected versions that the killer was mentally ill, marginal or homosexual. In his opinion, the criminal was an ordinary, unremarkable Soviet citizen, with a family, children and work (one of the killer's nicknames was "Citizen X").

Photofit of the "Rostov Ripper"

Police officers, dressed in civilian clothes, constantly traveled by electric trains as a bait. The route Taganrog - Donetsk - Rostov - Salsk was controlled by police officers throughout. Chikatilo, being a vigilante, himself participated in this operation and was on duty at the stations, "helping" the police to catch himself. Feeling increased surveillance, he became more careful and in 1986 did not kill anyone.

A few days later, Korostik's body was found near the same station. The medical examiner set the date of the murder to be about a week ago. After checking the reports of the policemen on duty at that time, Kostoev drew attention to the name of Chikatilo, who had already been detained in 1984 on suspicion of involvement in the killings in the forest belts. On November 17, outside surveillance was established for Chikatilo. He behaved suspiciously: he tried to get acquainted with boys and girls, appeared in places where corpses were found.

While on death row, Chikatilo wrote numerous complaints and requests for pardon, took care of his health: did exercises, ate with appetite.

sexual abuse

Many experts, even those who participated in the examination of Chikatilo, argue that he never raped his victims, as he suffered from impotence. On the other hand, for example, Katherine Ramsland, who wrote a text about Chikatilo for crimelibrary.com, indicates that at least one of his victims was found with signs of rape and sperm was found in her anus ( for the first time allowed to establish the blood type of the killer from the forest belt). During the first arrest of Chikatilo in 1984 and the last arrest in 1990, a can of Vaseline was found in his briefcase, which, as Nikolai Modestov writes in his book "Maniacs ... Blind Death", along with a rope and a sharp knife, was "prepared for his victims ". When Chikatilo was asked why he needed Vaseline, he replied that he used it as a shaving cream "on long business trips." Later, during interrogation, he admitted that he used it in the rape of the victims.

sanity

Three forensic psychiatric examinations unequivocally recognized Chikatilo as sane, that is, "not suffering from any mental illness and retaining the ability to be aware of his actions and manage them." However, Nikolai Modestov believes that the doctors' verdict was dictated by the desire to protect society from the killer. If Chikatilo had been recognized as insane, that is, mentally ill, he would have avoided execution and ended up in a special hospital. Therefore, theoretically, after some time, he could be free.

"Organized" or "disorganized" serial killer

The well-known classification, developed by FBI special agents Robert Hazelwood and John Douglas (article "The Lust Murderer", 1980), divides all serial killers according to the method of murder into two types: organized non-social and disorganized anti-social.

Unlike organized serial killers, disorganized serial killers are not able to control their emotions and commit murders in a fit of rage (in a state of passion), often they kill literally the first person they meet. Their intelligence is usually reduced, up to mental retardation, or they have a mental illness. Unlike organized killers, they are socially maladjusted (have no job, no family, live alone, do not take care of themselves and their homes), that is, they do not wear a “mask of normality”. Chikatilo committed his murders in a state of passion, but deliberately, systematically prepared the conditions for their commission (he could so lull the vigilance of his victims that some walked with him in the forest up to five kilometers). If the victim refused to go with him, then he never put pressure on her, afraid to attract witnesses, but immediately went in search of a new one.

The domestic textbook of forensic psychology Obraztsov and Bogomolova unequivocally classifies Chikatilo as a "disorganized asocial type." However, Chikatilo is not a pure representative of it. For example, according to the criteria of Hazelwood - Douglas, a disorganized killer usually lives near the places of murders - Chikatilo carried out his murders throughout the Rostov region and throughout the Soviet Union. On the other hand, an organized killer tries not to leave evidence at the crime scene, tries to get rid of the corpse - Chikatilo left a “chaotic picture of the crime”, with a lot of evidence, and did not try to hide the body.

List of victims

Number	Last name and first name	Floor	Age	Date and place of the murder	Notes
1	Elena Zakotnova	F	9	December 22, 1978 in Shakhty	Body found December 24, 1978 in the Grushevka River For the first murder of Chikatilo on July 5, 1983, 29-year-old Alexander Kravchenko, who was not guilty of him, was shot.
2	Larisa Tkachenko	F	17	September 3, 1981, Rostov-on-Don	Body found September 4, 1981 Tkachenko was a prostitute and usually dated soldiers. Chikatilo met her at a bus stop near the Rostov Public Library. Having led her into the forest belt, he tried to have sex with her, but he could not get excited. When Tkachenko began to ridicule him, he stabbed her several times and strangled her with his hands. He stuffed his mouth with earth and cut off his left nipple
3	Lyubov Biryuk	F	13	June 12, 1982	Body found June 27, 1982 Chikatilo inflicted at least 40 knife wounds on her.
4	Lyubov Volobueva	F	14	July 25, 1982, Krasnodar	Body found August 7, 1982
5	Oleg Pozhidaev	M	9	August 13, 1982	The body was never found. Chikatilo cut off his genitals and took with him
6	Olga Kuprina	F	16	August 16, 1982	The body was found on October 27, 1982 near the village of Cossack camps
7	Irina Korabelnikova	F	19	September 8, 1982, a kilometer from the railway station "Shakhty"	The body was found on September 20, 1982 in a forest belt a kilometer from the Shakhty railway station She left home after a scandal with her parents and did not return.
8	Sergey Kuzmin	M	15	September 15, 1982, a forest belt between the Shakhty and Kirpichnaya railway stations.	The body was found on January 12, 1983 in the forest belt between the Shakhty and Kirpichnaya railway stations. He escaped from the boarding school because of bullying by high school students and did not return.
9	Olga Stalmachenok	F	10	December 11, 1982, state farm field No. 6 near Novoshakhtinsk	The body was found on April 14, 1983 in the arable field of state farm No. 6 near Novoshakhtinsk I went to music school and never returned home. Chikatilo cut out her heart and took it with him. It is from the scene of the discovery of a corpse on the field by a tractor driver that the film "Citizen X" begins.
10	Laura (Laura) Sargsyan	F	15	after June 18, 1983	body was not found
11	Irina Dunenkova	F	13	Killed in July 1983	Body found August 8, 1983 She was the younger sister of Chikatilo's mistress, she suffered from mental retardation.
12	Ludmila Kushuba	F	24	July 1983	Body found March 12, 1984 She was a disabled child, a vagabond, mother of two children.
13	Igor Gudkov	M	7	August 9, 1983	Body found August 28, 1983 in Rostov-on-Don The youngest victim of Chikatilo
14	Valentina Chuchulina	F	22	After September 19, 1983	Body found November 27, 1983
15	unidentified woman	F	18-25	summer or autumn 1983	Body found October 28, 1983
16	Vera Shevkun	F	19	October 27, 1983	The body was found on October 30, 1983 in a forest belt near the town of Shakhty Chikatilo amputated both her breasts
17	Sergey Markov	M	14	December 27, 1983	Body found January 1, 1984 Chikatilo stabbed him up to 70 times and amputated his genitals. The sperm of the fourth group was found in Markov's anus.
18	Natalia Shalapinina	F	17	January 9, 1984	Body found January 10, 1984 in Rostov-on-Don Chikatilo inflicted 28 stab wounds on her
19	Marta Ryabenko	F	45	February 21, 1984, in the Rostov Aviators' Park	The body was found on February 22, 1984 in the Rostov Aviators' Park The oldest victim of Chikatilo. She was a vagabond and an alcoholic.
20	Dmitry Ptashnikov	M	10	March 24, 1984	Body found March 27, 1984 in Novoshakhtinsk Chikatilo bit off his tongue and penis. Near his body, the police found evidence for the first time - the imprint of the killer's shoes.
21	Tatyana Petrosyan	F	32	May 25, 1984.	Body found July 27, 1984 She was a mistress (according to other sources, just an employee) of Chikatilo. Killed along with her daughter Svetlana.
22	Svetlana Petrosyan	F	11	May 25, 1984.	Body found July 5, 1984 Chikatilo killed her by stabbing her in the head with a hammer. She was killed along with her mother Tatyana Petrosyan.
23	Elena Bakulina	F	22	June 1984	Body found August 27, 1984
24	Dmitry Illarionov	M	13	July 10, 1984, Rostov-on-Don	Body found August 12, 1984 in Rostov-on-Don
25	Anna Lemesheva	F	19	July 19, 1984	Body found July 25, 1984
26	Svetlana Tsana	F	20	July 1984	Body found September 9, 1984
27	Natalia Golosovskaya	F	16	August 2, 1984
28	Ludmila Alekseeva	F	17	August 7, 1984, Rostov-on-Don	Body found August 10, 1984 in Rostov-on-Don Chikatilo stabbed her 39 times.
29	unknown woman	F	20-25	between 8 and 11 August 1984. Tashkent.	The date the body was found is unknown.
30	Akmaral Seydaliyeva	F	12	August 13, 1984, Tashkent	The date the body was found is unknown.
31	Alexander Chepel	M	11	August 28, 1984, Rostov-on-Don	The body was found on September 2, 1984 in Rostov-on-Don in a forest belt on the left bank of the Don Chikatilo met him near the Burevestnik cinema on Voroshilovsky Prospekt and lured him into the woods with promises to "show a video". Killed him by cutting open his stomach.
32	Irina Luchinskaya	F	24	September 6, 1984, Rostov-on-Don	Body found September 7, 1984 in Rostov-on-Don
33	Natalya Pokhlistova	F	18	July 31, 1985, near Domodedovo airport, Moscow region	Body found on August 3, 1985 in a forest near Domodedovo Airport, Moscow Region
34	Irina (Inessa) Gulyaeva	F	18	25 (according to other sources - 27) August 1985, forest belt near the town of Shakhty	The body was found on August 28, 1985 in a forest belt near the town of Shakhty She was a vagabond and an alcoholic. Red and blue threads were found under her nails, and gray hair between her fingers. Sweat was found on her body, which had the fourth group, while Gulyaeva herself had blood of the first group. Undigested food was found in her stomach - this could mean that the killer lured her into the forest belt by offering food.
35	Oleg Makarenkov	M	13	May 16, 1987	Chikatilo returned home for a shovel and buried the corpse of Makarenkov in a forest belt. The body was found only in 1991, after the arrest of Chikatilo.
36	Ivan Bilovetsky	M	12	July 29, 1987, Zaporozhye	Body found July 31, 1987 in Zaporozhye
37	Yuri Tereshonok	M	16	September 15, 1987, Leningrad region	The remains were found in early 1991 near the floodplain of the Gruzinka River, Leningrad Region From September 7 to 27, 1987, Chikatilo was on a business trip in Leningrad. He met Tereshonok in the buffet of the Finland Station and offered to go to his "cottage" in Lembolovo. Naturally, Chikatilo did not have any dacha there, and he named Lembolovo because this settlement was the first on the board of departing trains. Arriving there with Tereshonok, Chikatilo walked with him only 200 meters deep into the forest, then pushed him off the path, hit him several times, knocked him to the ground, tied his hands with twine and began to beat him with a knife. The body was covered with earth. For details, see the newspaper "Moskovsky Komsomolets in St. Petersburg" No. 32/61 of August 10, 2005.
38	unidentified woman	F	18-25	April 1988, Red Sulin	The body was found on April 8, 1988 in a wasteland near the town of Krasny Sulin
39	Alexey Voronko	M	9	May 15, 1988	The body was found on May 17, 1988 in a forest belt near Rostov-on-Don I went to visit my grandmother and did not return. Chikatilo cut off his genitals and opened his stomach. Voronko's classmate told police that he had seen a tall, middle-aged man with a mustache, gold teeth, and a sports bag with him.
40	Evgeny Muratov	M	15	July 14, 1988	Body found April 11, 1989
48	Lyubov Zueva	F	31	April 4, 1990	Body found August 24, 1990
49	Viktor Petrov	M	13	July 28, 1990	The body was found at the end of July 1990 on the territory of the Rostov Botanical Garden. He was at the Rostov railway station with his mother, went out to drink water and did not return.
50	Ivan Fomin	M	11	August 14, 1990, on the territory of the city beach in Novocherkassk	The body was found on August 17, 1990 on the territory of the city beach in Novocherkassk Chikatilo inflicted 42 knife wounds on him and castrated him when he was still alive. A tuft of gray hair was found in Fomin's hand.
51	Vadim Gromov	M	16	October 16, 1990	Body found October 21, 1990 He suffered from mental retardation. Chikatilo inflicted 27 stab wounds on him, bit off his tongue and testicles.
52	Viktor Tishchenko	M	16	October 30, 1990	The body was found on November 2, 1990 in a forest belt near the town of Shakhty. Tishchenko bit Chikatilo's middle finger on his left hand.

Rapist and murderer Andrei Chikatilo during a court session.

The life of Andrei Chikatilo before the first murder in 1978 was typical for a person born in 1936 in a village in the Kharkov region. Father Roman fought at the front, during the period of famine he did not leave the house, fearing to be eaten. Young Chikatilo received several higher educations, served in the army in the troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In 1964, the future maniac got married, and a few years later, he had a daughter and a son.

In one of the houses in the city of Shakhty, where Chikatilo moved with his wife and two children in 1978, he bought an apartment, which he used to meet with prostitutes. It was there, in house number 26 on Mezhevoy Lane, that the first cruel crime of Chikatilo was committed. So, even the future maniac lured 9-year-old Elena Zakontova into the house with a promise to give chewing gum. According to Chikatilo himself, he only wanted to “play around” with the child. However, when the girl screamed, the maniac began to choke the child and got great pleasure from it. As a result, 9-year-old Elena was found tormented under the bridge with numerous internal injuries, stab wounds.

For the first murder of Chikatilo, the murderer Alexander Kravchenko was mistakenly executed.

The next brutal crime was only three years later - on September 3, 1981. The second, and a landmark for a further series of murders, was the 17-year-old prostitute Larisa Tkachenko, who was killed in a forest belt on the left bank of the Don.

Almost a year later, on June 12, 1982, 12-year-old Lyubov Biryuk was killed, found with a large number of stab wounds. That year, Chikatilo killed and raped a total of seven children aged 9 to 19.

A doctor and a nurse who were constantly on duty in the courtroom at hearings in the case of the rapist and murderer Andrei Chikatilo, since there were frequent cases of fainting during the trial.

Leonid Akubzhanov, member of the Rostov Regional Court, presiding over the case of rapist and murderer Andrei Chikatilo.

Acquainted with a child at a stop or train station, the maniac offered to help show the way, give stamps, demonstrate a puppy or a tape recorder, thereby luring him into a forest belt, where he brutally abused boys and girls.

So, on July 25, 14-year-old Lyubov Volobuyeva was killed, and on August 13, 9-year-old Oleg Pozhidaev. Three days later, Chikatilo killed 16-year-old Olga Kuprina, and on September 8, 19-year-old Irina Korabelnikova, who had a fight with her parents. Chikatilo killed 15-year-old orphan Sergei Kuzmin, who escaped from the boarding school, on September 15. And the last murder in 1982 was committed against 10-year-old Olga Stalmachenok. The Rostov Ripper killed eight children in 1983.

A relative of the victim Andrei Chikatilo, a rapist and murderer, became ill in the courtroom during the meeting.

However, the bloodiest year for Andrei Chikatilo was 1984 - then he brutally killed 15 people. Among the 32 total victims were women, boys, girls who were mentally retarded, vagrants.

The first arrest of Chikatilo took place on September 14, 1984, the same year was marked for the maniac by the bloodiest (15 victims) and successful in his career - then he entered the position of head of the Spetsenergoavtomatika department.

The district inspector with his partner in the Rostov market detained an undisclosed maniac for "suspicious behavior" - he molested girls in public transport and persistently tried to get to know them, had oral sex at the bus station with a prostitute. Then the district police found in Chikatilo's briefcase a "universal set": a knife, a can of Vaseline, a bar of soap and two coils of rope. However, due to an error in the analysis of sperm found on one of the victims, and taken from the detained blood, the maniac was released.

After his first detention, Chikatilo killed 21 more people. Each crime captures the originality and sophistication of the perpetrator. Up to sixty stab wounds were found on the mutilated bodies, Chikatilo gouged out the eyes of many, bit off their noses, tongues, genitals, chest. In 1989, a maniac lured a 19-year-old student from Hungary into a forest belt, killed, cut off her chest, uterus, cut off the soft tissues of her face and, wrapping the “trophies” in scraps of the deceased girl, went to his father’s birthday. According to some reports, Chikatilo later ate the remains of the murdered woman as a dessert. And he buried 10-year-old Alexei Khobotov in a grave in the city cemetery, which Andrei Chikatilo dug for himself in 1987 with his own hands. The maniac committed some murders not only in Shakhta's hometown, but in the Leningrad region, near Rostov-on-Don, in Novocherkassk, Tashkent, and the Moscow region.

The last identified murder was committed on November 6, 1990 by 22-year-old prostitute Svetlana Korostik.

In December 1985, under the control of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the operation "Forest Belt" began, called the largest event of the Soviet and Russian law enforcement agencies. Approximately 10 million rubles were spent on the search for the Rostov Ripper. During this time, military helicopters were used, more than 200 thousand people were checked, 1062 crimes were solved, information was accumulated on 48 thousand people with sexual deviations, and 5845 people were put on special records.

As a result, on November 20, 1990, on the way from the beer stall, Chikatilo was detained by operatives. During a search of his house, shoes were found that matched a print found near the corpse of one of the victims, as well as 32 kitchen knives. Perhaps Chikatilo used the organs of the victims: the maniac's wife said that her husband usually took a saucepan on business trips.

With the help of a psychiatrist, on November 28, Chikatilo began to testify and confess to the murders. On October 15, he was sentenced to death (in total, the document of the sentence contains 232 pages).

On July 18, 1992, Andrei Chikatilo sent his last letter asking for pardon to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. There, Chikatilo calls himself a "victim and tool" of communism, calls himself a sick person with "psychopathy of the schizoid-mosaic circle with sexual perversions, headaches from craniocerebral pressure, insomnia, nightmares, cardiac arrhythmia." However, the request was canceled, and on February 14, 1994, Andrei Chikatilo was executed by a court verdict for 53 premeditated murders in the Novocherkassk prison.

The "Soviet Jack the Ripper" gained notoriety by committing fifty-three proven murders, predominantly in the Rostov region. The criminal confessed to fifty-six murders, and according to the investigation, he committed more than sixty-five fatal attacks.

Biography before 1978

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born in the Kharkov region of the USSR in 1936. Now the village belongs to the Sumy region of Ukraine. There is evidence that the offender was born with signs of hydrocephalus, that is, with excessive accumulation of fluid in the brain. Until the age of twelve he suffered from enuresis, for which his mother often raised her hand to him.

According to Chikatilo himself, his grandfather was a middle peasant, who was dispossessed during the years of collectivization. My father served as the commander of a partisan detachment during the war, but was captured, and later was recognized as a traitor and enemy of the people. The Americans freed Roman Chikatilo from captivity. In the USSR he was subject to repressions, worked in the forests of the Komi Republic.

In 1944, Chikatilo became a first grader, a year earlier he had a sister. During the famine in the USSR in 1946, Andrei was afraid to leave the house, because his mother said that his older brother Stepan was kidnapped and eaten during the Holodomor in Ukraine (1932-1933). But was it really? There is a version that Stepan was eaten by his father and mother during the famine.

Doubts have been raised about the veracity of this story. So the American forensic psychologist K. Ramsland believes that no documentary evidence of the birth and death of the elder brother was found. Russian writers paid attention to the fact that investigators and journalists followed the tracks, but found nothing. Information about Stepan was not preserved either in the papers or in the memory of fellow villagers. It is not possible today to establish whether the elder brother of Andrei Chikatilo existed at all.

The second persistent myth about the criminal is the information that he, along with other village boys, was present at the execution of some local residents of the village by the Germans during the war. The soldiers opened fire on the fleeing children. Six-year-old Andrei stumbled and hit his head, but he was mistaken for dead and, unconscious, was thrown into a pit with corpses. Chikatilo woke up and was able to get out of the pit, and returned home at dawn. This case had an extremely negative impact on the fragile psyche of the boy. The story has not been proven.

After graduating from high school, Andrei Chikatilo tried to enter the Faculty of Law in Moscow, but did not pass. He believed that the university refused him because of his father, "a traitor to the motherland." After a while, he graduated from the communications school. He worked near Nizhny Tagil on the laying of power lines. After he entered the correspondence course at the Moscow Institute as a railway engineer, but studied for only two years.

In his youth, Andrei Chikatilo served in the USSR border troops in Central Asia, and then worked as a signalman in Berlin. After the service, he moved to a small village near Rostov-on-Don, where he worked as an engineer at a telephone exchange. At the same time, he wrote notes about sports competitions, the exploits of workers, the population census and the beginning of the new academic year. He worked as a freelance correspondent for the newspapers Znamya and Znamya Miner.

At twenty-eight, he met Faina (Evdokia) Odnacheva, who became his wife a year later. After the marriage, Andrei entered the Faculty of Philology in Rostov (in absentia). He graduated from the university in 1970 (direction "Russian language and literature"). By this time, he already had two children: daughter Lyudmila was born in 1965, and son Yuri in 1969.

While still studying at the university, Andrei Chikatilo was appointed chairman of the district committee of physical culture and sports, and in 1970 he graduated in absentia from the University of Marxism-Leninism. In August 1970, immediately after graduating from a higher educational institution, he was hired as head teacher at a boarding school, but on September 1 of the same year he became a simple teacher in his specialty. Then he acted as director for some time. He was fired for sexual harassment of students with the wording "of his own free will."

In 1974, he began working as a foreman at a vocational school, but was fired during a layoff. In 1978, he moved with his family to the city of Shakhty, and from September he went to work at vocational school No. 33. Soon he began to harass the pupil, for which he was ridiculed by students. Andrei Chikatilo was called "blue" and "masturbator".

Later, psychiatrists concluded that during his teaching career, he began to experience sexual satisfaction from feeling and looking at girls and boys, and arousal increased with the resistance and cries of a partner. He had a weak erection and accelerated ejaculation, a tendency to sadism appeared. His actions were gradually freed from experiences, coldness grew emotionally.

The murder of Elena Zakotnova

The case of the murder of Elena Zakotnova, the first victim of the maniac Andrei Chikatilo, has become one of the most discussed and controversial in both Soviet and Russian criminalistics. The murder of a nine-year-old girl with particular cruelty took place at the end of December 1978 in the city of Shakhty. The body was found next to the bridge across the Grushevka River.

The examination showed that the killer had committed sexual intercourse in various forms, causing the girl severe ruptures of the rectum and vagina. Three stab wounds were inflicted, but death was due to mechanical strangulation. Lena was killed on the day of her disappearance (her parents turned to law enforcement on December 22) not earlier than eighteen hours. At the time of her death, the girl was in the second grade.

In hot pursuit, the investigation conducted a check of local residents. The killer Andrei Chikatilo had already come to the attention of the police. According to the testimony of a witness, a man was seen with a girl on the street. An identikit was promptly drawn up, in which the director of the vocational school identified Chikatilo. The development of this version of the crime was soon completed in connection with the detention of Aleksey Kravchenko. The investigation went the wrong way.

Alexander Kravchenko was first convicted of the crime, and only later, after all the circumstances and details of the criminal case were clarified, suspicion was brought against Andrei Chikatilo. Alexander Kravchenko was previously convicted of rape and murder of a ten-year-old child. He had an alibi for the day of the murder, but on December 23 he committed theft. Kravchenko was put in a cell with a drug addict and a murderer who beat him, forcing him to confess to the murder of Elena Zakotnova. On February 16, 1979, the man confessed to the murder. In July 1983 Alexander Kravchenko was shot.

As a result, both convictions were overturned. It is still unknown who exactly committed this crime. There may have been a miscarriage of justice.

There was another suspect in this case - Anatoly Grigoriev. A fifty-year-old native of the city of Shakhty hanged himself in 1979. On New Year's Eve, he boasted to his colleagues that he had raped "the girl who was written about in the newspapers." The hard workers knew that when he was drunk, his “fantasy wakes up”, so they did not take the story seriously.

Beginning of the killing spree

After his first murder, Andrei Chikatilo did not kill anyone for the next three years. He decided to return to criminal activity after the conviction of Alexander Kravchenko. In September 1981, Chikatilo strangled a seventeen-year-old prostitute after filling her mouth with dirt. The girl's body was found on the banks of the Don near the cafe "Nairi". Larisa Tkachenko had her nipples bitten off. The examination found that the rapist inserted a one and a half meter stick into the girl's vagina and anus.

A year later, Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo killed twelve-year-old L. Biruk. In 1982, a maniac killed a total of seven children aged nine to sixteen. He met the victims at bus stops and train stations. Under a plausible pretext, he lured children into the forest belt. He always walked with his victims a couple of kilometers, retiring to a secluded and deserted place.

The bodies were found with stab wounds. Many had parts of their bodies cut off or bitten off. Andrei Chikatilo blindfolded the first victim with a scarf and then gouged them out. He was afraid that his image would remain on the retina. In general, the man was afraid to look people in the eyes for a long time, in particular his victims.

Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, based on the materials of the case, found that the offender had a strong sexual attraction and a tendency to cruel manifestations of sadism. Pedophilia and masturbation no longer brought him the same satisfaction. Against this background, pronounced deviations were formed. The murders were committed with particular cruelty, manifestations of cannibalism, necrophilia, vampirism.

"A Matter of Fools"

In 1983, the investigation combined several murders of women into one proceeding. The initial version is that the crimes were committed by a mentally ill person. In this regard, a check was carried out on persons registered in psychiatric hospitals. In September of the same year, Shaburov, who suffered from mental retardation, was detained at the tram depot. The detainee said that, together with his friend, he had committed a car theft and several murders of children. The investigation received the conditional name "the case of fools."

The detainees testified about the alleged crimes, but were confused about the details, and also confessed to murders committed after their arrest. At the same time, the killings continued. In September 1983, Chikatilo killed an unknown woman near Novoshakhtinsk, and then four more people. On suspicion of committing these crimes, several more mentally ill people were detained. According to investigators, they were members of the same group. The detainees continued to confess, but the killings continued.

Peak criminal activity

The peak of the maniac's activity came in 1984. Then the victims of Andrei Chikatilo were fifteen people, and the total number of those killed reached thirty-two people. In July, he killed nineteen-year-old Anna Lemesheva. During the attack, the girl resisted, but the killer inflicted numerous wounds on her, including about ten blows to the area of ​​the mammary glands and pubis. Subsequently, the investigators found that the perpetrator took off the clothes from the victim, cut out the genitals and threw them away, and gnawed the uterus. Photos of the victims of Andrei Chikatilo appeared in all the newspapers.

In August of the same year, the man moved to the position of head of supply at Spetsenergoavtomatika. This work was associated with constant business trips. Andrei Chikatilo traveled around the country. During the first business trip to Tashkent, the criminal killed a young woman and a ten-year-old girl. The remaining murders were committed in Rostov-on-Don, mainly near the Quiet Don boarding house and in the Aviators' Park.

Arrest of Andrei Chikatilo

The maniac was detained in mid-September 1984 at the Central Market. On the evening of the previous day, the man attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies by his behavior at the Prigorodny railway station. By that time, the bodies of seven of his victims had been found in this place.

The police captain who carried out the arrest had already checked Chikatilo's documents at the same place a week earlier. He monitored the criminal, who was transferred from one transport to another, followed young girls and molested them, engaged in oral sex with a prostitute.

A knife, two coils of rope, vaseline, a dirty towel and a bar of soap were found in the detainee's briefcase. Andrey Chikatilo could explain the presence of these things by the work of the supplier. Vaseline, as he pointed out, was used by him for shaving on business trips. A fake ID of a police officer (out of state) was found in the briefcase.

Blood was taken from the detainee for analysis, but the group did not match the semen that was found on one of the corpses. This was later explained by "paradoxical isolation". Chikatilo was released.

He was later expelled from the CPSU and sentenced to a year of forced labor for stealing a battery. He was also charged with stealing linoleum, but this has not been proven. The killer was released three months later, in December 1984. After the first detention, Andrei Chikatilo killed twenty-one more people.

Operation "Woodland"

The killings in the forest belt continued. On this fact, under the control of the Central Committee of the CPSU, a major operation "Forest Belt" began. This is the largest event ever held by Soviet and Russian law enforcement agencies.

During the search operation, more than two hundred thousand people were checked for involvement in the murders, more than a thousand crimes were uncovered along the way, and information was accumulated about almost 50 thousand people with sexual deviations. Military helicopters were used to patrol the forest belts. The search for the killer cost the state about ten million rubles (1990 prices).

The head of the special group turned to a psychotherapist to draw up a psychological portrait of a maniac. The specialist concluded that the perpetrator was an ordinary Soviet citizen, and not a sick person. Most likely, he has a family and children. Versions that the maniac is mentally ill or homosexual were rejected. Then Andrey Chikatilo, whose biography (except for crimes) really was the life story of an ordinary Soviet person, received the nickname "Citizen X".

Police officers constantly traveled by electric trains. Law enforcement agencies completely controlled the Taganrog-Donetsk-Rostov-Salsk highway. Chikatilo participated in this operation, was on duty at suburban stations, because he was a combatant. In 1986, he became more cautious. Then the perpetrator did not kill anyone. The following year, he killed only outside the Rostov region. The killings continued. Andrei Chikatilo's victims were found in Zaporozhye, Domodedovo, Ilovaisk, in the Leningrad region, and so on.

Psychological picture

The psychological portrait of Chikatilo took up eighty-five typewritten pages. According to this document, the offender did not suffer from mental retardation or psychosis, but was an ordinary person who was trusted by the victims. He had a clear plan, which he strictly adhered to. Boys for the criminal acted as "symbolic objects" on which he took out humiliation and insults. To be satisfied, he needed to watch the death of his innocent victims.

According to the psychological portrait, Andrei Chikatilo's height was above average, he was in good physical shape. Most likely, he was impotent. Chikatilo kept the cut off parts of the body of his victims. The age of the offender was estimated at between 25 and 40 years. The investigation was inclined that the killer was from 45 to 50 - at this time, sexual disorders most often develop.

Second arrest and trial

In 1990, Chikatilo killed eight more people. One of the victims was the prostitute Svetlana Korostik. Immediately after the crime, he was noticed by a police officer who asked for documents. There was no formal reason for the arrest, so the policeman let the criminal go. A few days later, the body of a girl was found near that place.

They went to Chikatilo after checking the reports of law enforcement officers who were on duty that day nearby. The investigation drew attention to the name of the criminal, because he had previously been detained on suspicion of murder in a forest belt. Chikatilo was monitored, which established that he often appeared in places where corpses were found.

The killer was arrested in November 1990. He went to the clinic, and then to the kiosk for beer or kvass, and was arrested while trying to get acquainted with an underage boy.

Chikatilo was interrogated for ten days. There was no direct evidence, and he himself did not confess. Then the investigation turned to a psychiatrist, who agreed to talk with the detainee. After a long conversation with the doctor, Andrei Chikatilo burst into tears and immediately made a confession. The psychiatrist later noted that during the conversation he did not resort to hypnosis, and the maniac himself confessed to the crimes during the meeting.

The materials on the case of Andrei Chikatilo took up 220 volumes. He was accused of fifty-six murders, but only fifty-three of them were fully proven. Photos of the victims of Andrei Chikatilo were attached to the documents, and the investigation prepared a powerful evidence base. The lawyer tried to build a defense on the fact that his client is a sick person who needs help. All the newspapers wrote about Andrei Chikatilo then.

The criminal himself was placed in an iron cage, fearing lynching by the relatives of the victims. During the meetings, he tried to present himself as crazy: he shouted, insulted those present, exposed his genitals, claimed that he was expecting a baby and was breastfeeding. As a result of the consideration of the case, Andrei Chikatilo (photos from the court are presented in the article) was sentenced to death. The word "execution" caused applause in the courtroom.

The execution of Andrei Chikatilo

While awaiting execution in a prison cell, Chikatilo did exercises, ate well, and did not smoke. He wrote numerous complaints and petitions for clemency addressed to Boris Yeltsin. The criminal tried to present himself as a victim of the communist system. In February, Andrei Chikatilo (whose execution photo is not being exhibited for ethical reasons) was taken to Moscow for a new examination. On February 14, 1994, he was executed by a shot in the back of the head. He was buried as nameless at the prison cemetery in Novocherkassk. Photos of the execution of Andrei Chikatilo have survived, perhaps only in the internal archives.

After the execution, the psychotherapist who worked with the criminal and compiled his psychological portrait turned to law enforcement agencies in order to get the brain of a maniac for research. He hoped to find the origins of the Andrey Chikatilo effect, a mental disorder that motivated this man to commit atrocious crimes. The doctor was refused, because at that time the death penalty was carried out by a shot in the back of the head.

sexual abuse

At the first and last arrest, the same set of items was found in Chikatilo's briefcase. Later, the perpetrator admitted that he used these things to rape his victims. But many of the experts who were involved in the case claimed that he never raped the victims because he was impotent. Some Russian writers and journalists expressed the opinion that he was a necrophile, but this was not proven by the official investigation due to insufficient evidence.

The sanity of a maniac

Three examinations confirmed the sanity of Chikatilo (photos of the offender are presented in the article). However, this could be dictated by the desire of doctors to rid society of the killer, who (if recognized as mentally ill) would not be shot, but sent for compulsory treatment. After a while, he might be free again. The crimes of Andrei Chikatilo were atrocious, the investigation could not allow that a person would remain at large after treatment. At the same time, some witnesses said that the killer was clearly mentally deranged.

Paradoxical highlighting

In the verdict of the court, the long non-exposing of the maniac was explained by “paradoxical isolation”, and not by the errors of the investigation. So, according to the AB0 system, his sperm and blood did not match in the group. The blood type was the second, but traces of antigen A were found in the semen, which gave full reason to believe that the killer had the fourth group. For this reason, Chikatilo was released in 1984 without additional examination. Today it is proved that "paradoxical isolation" does not exist. This phenomenon would be contrary to the foundations of the AB0 system. The phenomenon is due to bacterial contamination of the objects under study.

Maniac family

Photos of Andrei Chikatilo show an ordinary Soviet citizen, not a sick person. There are many different opinions on this issue. On the advice of the investigation, all members of the Chikatilo family in 1991 applied to the registry office with applications for a change of surnames, and then moved to Kharkov. His wife Feodosia Semyonovna Odnacheva worked as the head of a kindergarten, but after everyone found out about her husband's crimes, she had to forget about her career. In order to obtain living space in 1989, the woman fictitiously separated from her husband. Later she worked as a distributor in the market.

Daughter Lyudmila first married in the ninetieth year, but gave birth to a daughter only in her second marriage. The son of Andrei Chikatilo served in Afghanistan, was wounded. Then he worked at a factory in Novocherkassk. In 1990, he took part in the looting of shuttles for 10 thousand dollars, for which he received a two-year suspended sentence. In 1996 he was engaged in racketeering. He was sentenced to two years in prison. He was convicted again in 1998. After he lived with his mother on the outskirts of Kharkov. He was convicted in 2009. He served a total of twelve years. He named his son Andrei after his grandfather.