Andrei Chikatilo is remembered as one of the most prolific serial killers in history
A Soviet serial killer, whose reign of terror spanned over a decade, was deemed so dangerous that he was brought to his trial in a steel cage.
Andrei Chikatilo, known as ‘the Butcher of Rostov’, is remembered as one of the most lethal and prolific murderers in global history. In 1992, he was officially convicted of 52 murders over a 12-year period, with suspicions of several more.
Chikatilo was born to forced labourers during Stalin’s USSR era, amidst the ‘Holodomor’, a man-made famine in his native Ukraine that claimed the lives of over three million people in the 1930s.
He grew up hearing tales of an older brother, Stepan, who had been abducted by famished neighbours and killed, cannibalised to keep them alive.
Chikatilo later became a teacher but faced numerous reprimands for sexually and physically assaulting his students throughout his career, though he was never arrested or charged, reports the Mirror.
Despite being married, psychologists would later suggest that Chikatilo had been chronically impotent since puberty due to the childhood trauma of witnessing his mother being assaulted by a German soldier during the Nazi invasion of Ukraine.
This reportedly led him to contemplate suicide in his youth, with his mother once having to rescue him from a self-made noose. They lived in such severe poverty that they were forced to share a bed.
A chronic bed wetter, Chikatilo’s mother would scold and beat him after every incident.
In 1978, when Chikatilo was 42, he committed his first murder. He enticed a nine-year-old schoolgirl named Yelena Zakotnova to a rundown hut he had secretly bought.
Following this, he developed an obsession with sexual fantasies of murdering women and children. He claimed he attempted to resist these urges but ultimately couldn’t suppress them.
Chikatilo wouldn’t be apprehended for another six years, during which time he had killed an estimated 29 more victims, some as young as nine. Victims were discovered brutally stabbed.
By that time, the police had begun to suspect a serial killer was at large. However, due to the extreme violence of the crimes, it was suspected that a Satanic cult or organ harvester, perhaps an escaped psychiatric patient, was responsible.
They didn’t suspect a working professional like Chikatilo.
Chikatilo was initially arrested in 1984 when two undercover officers found him attempting to converse with and touch young women around Rostov.
Upon detaining him, they discovered a 20cm blade, rope, and a vat of Vaseline in his backpack. When they searched his name in their records, they found out he was already under investigation for workplace theft.
Suspicious, they explored the possibility that he was the serial killer on the loose since he also matched the visual descriptions. But DNA evidence, still in its infancy, cleared him.
Chikatilo was released after three months and, eight months later, resumed his killing spree.
By 1990, twelve years into the killing rampage, enormous public pressure was building. This came despite the Soviet government having consistently dismissed whispers of a serial killer, insisting such a phenomenon was impossible in a communist society.
However, an undercover police officer then spotted something peculiar at a railway station: a mud-stained and blood-covered man in a suit, cleaning his hands and face at a well. The officer approached the individual calmly and requested his identification.
The man responded: “Andrei Chikatilo.” No detention occurred. Instead, the encounter was recorded, and when a corpse was discovered in nearby woodland the following week, police began piecing together the evidence and examining the man’s background of inappropriate behaviour at schools, his identity having previously emerged as a potential suspect in earlier inquiries.
On November 14, 1990, Chikatilo was put under police observation. Officers watched as the man repeatedly targeted young women and children on the streets, striking up conversations with them.
The investigators, gripped by mounting alarm, swooped on Chikatilo as he stalked through a local park, restraining him with handcuffs and escorting him to an unmarked police vehicle.
Chikatilo put up no fight, simply informing the officers they had made an error. A check of his possessions uncovered a blade and cord.
Initially, he denied any involvement in the murders, with Soviet police frantically working to compile sufficient evidence before they were legally required to release him after ten days. However, Chikatilo then confessed whilst being read a psychological profile of the killer that police had assembled in 1985.
The profile suggested the killer would be a withdrawn man in his middle age who had endured a traumatic, lonely childhood and who struggled with severe impotence. Upon hearing the profile, Chikatilo burst into tears.
He provided police with a comprehensive account of each of the killings, including horrific details about how he would consume their blood and sometimes devour body parts.
Police officially charged Chikatilo with 36 counts of murder. He subsequently admitted to 20 additional murders, previously unlinked deaths. These included his first killing of Yelena.
Chikatilo’s trial commenced in April 1992. He was transported into the courtroom within a steel cage, designed to shield him from the victims’ families and would burst into song or screams during the proceedings.
In October, he was condemned to death. The judge declared it “the only sentence that he deserves.”
Chikatilo would spend fewer than two years on death row before being executed via a single gunshot behind the ear on Valentine’s Day 1994. He is interred in an unmarked grave.
