Today we’re looking at the early life and early crimes of serial Killer Andrei Chikatilo.
Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born to a family of collective farmers in Yablochnoye, a rural farming village in eastern Soviet Ukraine, on October 16 1936. Life in Soviet Ukraine was pretty rough. Ukraine was known as the Breadbasket of Europe because of its nutrient rich soil and ideal climate which made it perfect for wheat farming. The Soviet government saw private farming as a gateway to capitalism because it was mostly tenant farming, and the government had to pay for its grain, and Stalin argued that Collectivism would free poor peasant farmers from economic servitude under the farm owners known as Kulkas.
So in 1928 Stalin implemented a policy of Agricultural Collectivisation throughout the Soviet Union. The goal of Collectivisation was to increase grain production throughout the Union, this in turn would increase food supplies to the growing urban areas, provide more grain for export and trade, as well as provide raw materials to power the processing industries. Farmers were not paid, but they were allowed to cultivate a small patch of land for themselves, essentially they had a vegetable garden in exchange for their crops.
Needless to say, Stalin’s five year plan didn’t work. Grain supply fell massively due to successive bad harvests, and because all of the harvested crops were collected to be redistributed by the state, mass starvation throughout the Soviet Union followed, and Central and Eastern Ukraine were the worst affected areas.
The worst of this famine was 1932-33 and is known as the Holodomor in Ukraine, and an estimated 3.5 million ethnic Ukrainians died in this two year period. It wasn’t until 1940, 12 years after its implementation, that Collective farming in the Soviet Union finally surpassed pre-collectivism production levels. The death toll is contested as you would expect, but it is estimated that as many as 12 million people died across the Soviet Union as a result of famines in the 1930. And it was the aftermath of this into which Andrei Chikatilo was born.
One thing that we see time and again throughout history in times of widespread famines and massive food shortages is cannibalism. The bodies of the dead were just piled up on the roadside and people would literally go and cut up the bodies for food, not only that, people would regularly go missing, and of course there was a black market for human meat too. Children growing up in this era of Soviet rule were all told that if they saw a healthy looking person they were to run away from them because this person was most likely a cannibal.
Chikatilo was told by his mother Anna that he had an elder brother named Stepan who at the age of four had been kidnapped and eaten by cannibals. However, there was no record that Stepan had ever existed, and it has largely been accepted that it was a story Anna made up to really drive home the danger of cannibalism, because of course this period of famine was immediately followed by the Second World War and more widespread devastation, and food shortages, across Europe.
Chikatilo’s childhood was horrendous. In 1941 his father Roman was conscripted into the Red Army to fight in the second world war. In 1943 his younger sister Tatiana was born. Even those of us who aren’t great at maths know that two years is far too long for a human pregnancy, and that is because Tatyana was only Chikatilo’s half sister. Chikatilo’s mother was repeatedly sexually assaulted by Nazi soldiers during this time period, leading to Tatiana’s birth. Chikatilo witnessed all of this in the family’s one room hut.
Chikatilo witnessed other horrors of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, bombings, shootings, and fires, the family tried to hide in cellars, ditches and wooded areas, but one night they were forced to watch as their hut was burned to the ground by soldiers.
Chikatilo was a chronic bedwetter, the family all slept in the same bed and his mother would berate and beat him each time he wet the bed.
School offered him no reprieve either. Chikatilo was a studious child. To his teachers he was a good student who regularly praised his schoolwork. But he was physically weak, wore homemade clothes, and frequently fainted from lack of food thanks to the Soviet Union’s famines and food shortages in the post war era. The food shortages were so bad that
He was shy and very short sighted, wore huge jam jar glasses which, along with his small stature made him a target for bullies. Not only this, when his father was drafted into the Red Army he was captured and held as a prisoner of war, and this was seen as failure and shameful, and as an act of cowardice that brought shame to his family.
Into his teen years Chikatilo’s torment continued, after the onset of puberty he discovered that he was impotent and was unable to maintain an erection. This obviously added to his awkwardness and a sense of self-hatred he’d developed after all the years of bullying and humiliation at home. During his teenage years he developed an interest in the communist party. By the age of 16 he was chairman of the Student Communist Party.
At the age of 17 he had his first crush on a girl, a fellow student, also 17, but he was so shy and so worried about his impotence that he never asked her out. Later that year, he attacked an 11 year old girl, a friend of his sister’s, and while she struggled and wrestled to get away from him, he ejaculated.
In 1954 Chikatilo graduated from school with good-excellent grades, he was the only student in his year to finish school, and applied to the Moscow State University, but he was rejected. So he moved to the city of Kursk in Western Russia, near the Ukrainian/Russian border, where he worked as a labourer for a few months before enrolling in vocational college with the aim of becoming a telephone engineer.
During his time in Kursk he met a local woman and began his first serious relationship, she was two years younger than him, so 17 when they met, and the relationship lasted 18 months before she broke it off. The couple attempted sex on three occassions but each time he was unable to sustain an erection.
After completing his two year vocational training Chikatilo was transferred to the industrial city of Nizhny Tagil in the Urals, 16 miles east of the virtual Europe-Asia border, known for its steel and iron production. While working there he began a correspondence course in Engineering with Moscow Electrotechnical Institute of Communication.
In 1957 Chikatilo was called up for compulsory military service. He was first stationed with the border guards in Central Asia – which is the now-independent republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
He was later reassigned to the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) communications unit in Berlin. Chikatilo’s service record was immaculate and he was discharged at the end of his compulsory service in 1960. Just before his discharge he joined the Communist Party. After leaving the military, Chikatilo returned to his parents’ home in Yablochnoye, and he began a brief relationship with a woman from the village. The relationship lasted only three months because of Chikatilo’s impotence. The woman had asked her friends for advice and as a result the villagers had begun to gossip about Chikatilo and his impotence. Chikatilo was so ashamed that he attempted to take his own life, but the neighbours found him and saved his life. But, in the Soviet Union, as with most places at the time, suicide and mental health problems were seen as very shameful. The family were completely shamed, the father’s war record and “cowardice” and now Chikatilo’s suicide attempt made them social outsiders.
In 1961 Chikatilo found a job as a communications engineer near the Russian city of Rostov-On-Don, his sister Tatyana moved to Rostov when she finished her studies a few months later and their parents also relocated to the Rostov Oblast soon after.
Tatyana lived with her brother for a few months but she soon met a local man and the two got married and so she moved in with her in-laws, but when she moved out she resolved to help her brother get over his shyness and find a wife. She set him up with a few different friends of hers, including one who was also called Tatyana, but none of these relationships worked out.
That was until 1963 when she set him up with a friend of hers called Feodosia, known as Fayina. Within a month of being set up by Tatyana, the couple married.
Now, unlike the women Chikatilo had dated before, Fayina understood his impotence and it seemed that she wasn’t that bothered by it. Despite this the couple did manage to have two children. And the family settled down into a normal family life, from the outside, as with almost all serial killers, nobody had any idea of what was about to happen.
In the late 1960s Chikatilo completed a second correspondence degree, this time in Russian Literature and Language, completing his degree in 1970. A year later he took up his first teaching post at a school in the mining city of Novoshakhtinsk in the Rostov region. Although Chikatilo was knowledgeable about his subject, he wasn’t particularly good at teaching, he was regularly mocked by his students, and he failed to maintain control over his class or discipline his students in any way.
It was at this school in Novoshakhtinsk that Chikatilo committed his first known sexual assault on a student. In 1973 while in a swimming pool he swam up to a 15 year old student and groped her breasts, and as with the young girl in his village, Chikatilo ejaculated as this girl struggled to get away from him. Just months later he locked another student in a classroom and sexually assaulted them. But complaints were dismissed by the school, and in some cases by parents too. Chikatilo was also observed by other teachers fondling himself whilst watching female students, and on more than one occasion he let himself into the female dormitory to watch them undress.
Eventually the school could no longer ignore the complaints against Chikatilo, and in January 1974 he was told to leave or he would be fired. So he left, and immediately took up another teaching job at another school in Novoshakhtinsk. He kept this second teaching job for four years until cutbacks in 1978 made him redundant. The same month he found another teaching job at a school at the nearby coal mining city of Shakhty, and the family moved there. It was in Shakhty just months aftermoving there, that Chikatilo committed his first murder.
On December 22 1978 Chikatilo lured nine year old Yelena Zakotnova to a small second house that he had secretly purchased in Shakhty as she was walking home from an ice skating rink. First he attempted to rape the girl, but then when he couldn’t get an erection he instead decided to stab Yelena repeatedly in the stomach. But Yelena didn’t die immediately, and when she spoke Chikatilo strangled her until she passed out, he then carried her body to the Grushevka River at the end of the street and threw her into the icy water. Some reports claim that she was still alive, just unconscious, when he threw her into the river. Yelena’s body was found two days later, on Christmas Eve.
There were numerous pieces of evidence which pointed to Chikatilo. There was blood in the snow outside his second home, and he had been seen by neighbours in and around the property on the day Yelena disappeared. Another witness reported seeing a man matching Chikatilo’s description at a bus stop with the young girl. Yelena’s backpack was found on the riverbank at the end of the street, indicating that she had been placed in the river there.
Despite all this evidence pointing towards Chikatilo, he was not a suspect, after all he was a regular family man, he couldn’t have been a murderer.
Instead 25-year-old labourer Aleksandr Kravchenko was arrested. Kravchenko already had a conviction for the rape and murder of a teenage girl. Despite having an airtight alibi, Kravchenko was charged, tried, and convicted of the murder. He received a sentence of death initially that was commuted to 15 years in December 1980. But Yelena’s family and the local community weren’t happy with this sentence, and after pressure from the family, Kravchenko was retried and once again found guilty and sentenced to death, and in July 1983 he was executed by firing squad.
Chikatilo had gotten away with murder.
He continued to teach in Shakhty until 1981 when he was fired after numerous complaints of sexual assaults and molestation. He managed to get a job as a supply clerk at a factory in the city of Rostov-on-Don which produced construction materials, and this job required him to travel all over the Soviet Union, visiting other factories to purchase raw materials or to fulfill production quotas, and to negotiate contracts.
On September 3 1981 he took his second victim. He convinced 17 year old Larisa Tkachenko to accompany him to the forest by the River Don on the pretext of Vodka and relaxing. Larisa was actually quite sexually experienced despite being only 17, and she allegedly was known for exchanging sexual favours for alcohol and/or food, which was actually quite common during Soviet times because people were poor and they were starving and they turned to sex work so that they could eat. So Larisa followed Chikatilo out into the forest, expecting to have sex for alcohol, maybe some food. But, as we know, Chikatilo was impotent, and Larisa decided she wanted to leave, so Chikatilo decided to kill her. He shoved mud into her mouth and then beat her to death, he didn’t have a knife or any other kind of weapon with him so he mutilated her by biting her and tearing skin from her body with his teeth. He covered her body with leaves, twigs and shredded newspapers, and she was found the following day.
His third victim came just nine months later. He was travelling for work, as he did and one day he met 13 year old Lyubov Biryuk near a bus stop in a small village in rural Rostov on June 12 1982, she was on her way home from the shops. He followed her until they were out of view of the main road, and he dragged her into a wooded area and attempted to rape her, but when he couldn’t get an erection he killed her instead. Her body wasn’t found until June 27, she had been beaten and stabbed repeatedly, but the medical examiner also found slashes to her eye sockets, and this would become Chikatilo’s signature.
Usually if a killer mutilates a victim’s eyes it is because they know them personally in some way. But for many, many years it was, wrongly, believed that a dead person’s eyes captured the image of the last thing they saw. Obviously we now know that to be totally wrong, but at the time it was believed that a murder victim’s eyes held the image of their murderer.
After murdering his third victim Lyubov Biryuk, Chikatilo killed a further five young people between July and September 1982. He refined his method, he would typically prey on children, runaways, young sex workers and homeless youths. If they were lonely looking children he would try to befriend and impress them by pretending to be a stamp collector or coin collector and lure them away. If they were sex workers or homeless he would try to entice them with the promise of food or alcohol. When he had them alone, usually in a wooded area, he would assault them, usually beating them and then either strangling or stabbing them to death. He would then mutilate their eyes after they had died.
His victims during these two months were Lyubov Volobuyeva (14), Oleg Pozhidayev (9), Olga Kuprina (16), Irina Karabelnikova (18) and Sergey Kuzmin (15). The last three Olga, Irina and Sergey were all runaways.
Chikatilo’s final victim of 1982 was 10 year old Olga Stalmachenok, who he met on a bus in Novoshakhtinsk when she was on her way home after a piano lesson on December 11. He persuaded her to leave the bus with him and he lured her to a field on the outskirts of the city where he stabbed her 50 times and mutilated her body.