Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo didn’t kill again until the summer of 1983, but whilst he was on this break, the police were actually beginning to make a bit of headway in the investigation.
As we mentioned last week, serial killers were considered a foreign construct in the Soviet Union, but police finally had to admit that these murders showed so many similarities in both the level of brutality, the way they were carried out. Four of the murders were linked and in January 1983, a Moscow investigation team was drafted into Rostov-on-Don to help the local law enforcement. The team was headed by Mikhail Fetisov and the investigation eventually became known as Operation Forest Path. In March, Fetisov brought in a forensic analyst, Viktor Burakov, to lead the investigation.
The following month Olga’s body was finally discovered and linked to the other victims
Due to the sheer brutality of the murders and the way some of the internal organs were removed, police began to theorise that they were searching for either a group that was harvesting organs to sell on a black market for transplant, a satanic cult, a paedophile or a group of people with mental health issues. As we talked about last week, those with mental health problems weren’t treated kindly by authorities in the Soviet Union.
Law enforcement focused mostly on the theory that a paedophile, homosexual, or mental ill person or persons were responsible for the murders.
The investigation was actually quite thorough, even though they were looking in the wrong places.
Although this investigation didn’t find Chikatilo, they did manage to solve more than one thousand unrelated violent crimes including 95 murders and 245 rapes.
However, law enforcement’s heavy-handed tactics weren’t without their casualties.
In September 1983 a number of youths who were considered to be intellectually disabled were subjected to prolonged and brutal interrogations and ended up confessing to the murders – which fitted the police theory that it could be a group of disabled or mentally unwell people who committed the murders. But as the bodies of more and more young people were found after the confessions, law enforcement realised it couldn’t be these youths murdering them.
Three homosexual men, and at least one registered sex offender ended their own lives as a result of police interrogation.
While law enforcement were looking in all the wrong places, Chikatilo had been on another spree, between June and December 1983 he killed Laura Sarkisyan (15), Irina Dunenkova (13), Lyudmila Kutsyuba (24), Igor Gudkov (7), An unidentified woman (18-25), Valentina Chuchulina (22), Vera Shevkun (19) and Sergey Markov (14).
The murder of 15-year-old Laura Sarkisyan is contested as she is listed as one of Chikatilo’s victim, but he was ultimately cleared of her murder at his trial. The unidentified woman listed as one of Chikatilo’s victims was a woman he claimed to meet in Novoshakhtinsk, her body was found in October 1983, but she was never identified.
Chikatilo killed again in January and February 1984, murdering 17-year-old Natalya Shalapinina on January 9, and 44-year-old Marta Ryabenko on February 21, both were murdered in Aviators’ Park in the city of Rostov. Marta was the oldest of Chikatilo’s victims.
On March 24 he killed 10-year-old Dmitry Ptashnikov after luring him away from a stamp kiosk in Novoshakhtinsk. There were several witnesses who saw Chikatilo with Dmitry who were able to give a detailed description of the killer, and when the young boy’s body was found three days later police also found a footprint nearby. And semen and saliva samples were found on the boy’s clothing.
In late May, Chikatilo killed 29-year-old Tatyana Petrosyan and her 10-year-old daughter Svetlana in Shakhty, Tatyana had reportedly known Chikatilo since 1978 when he and his family lived in Shakhty.
In June and July Chikatilo killed four more times: Yelena Bakulina (21), Dmitriy Illarionov (13), Anna Lemesheva (19) and Sarmite Tsana (20).
In the summer of 1984 Chikatilo was fired from his job as a supply clerk for stealing a roll of linoleum. The accusations had been brought about in February and he had been asked to quietly resign, but he refused and so the company investigated him and then fired him in the summer. But on August 1 he found another supply clerk job at another factory in Rostov, which once again meant that he had to travel around the country.
Just one day after starting his new job Chikatilo killed Natalya Golosovskaya (16) in Aviators’ Park in Rostov, less than a week later he killed 17-year-old Lyudmila Alekseyeva after offering her directions to the Rostov bus terminal.
Days later another woman was murdered by Chikatilo whilst he was on a business trip to Soviet Uzbek – Uzbekistan today, but sadly although her body was found a few days after her murder, she has never been identified, she was estimated to be aged 20-25, and that’s all we know about her. He committed a second murder whilst on this business trip this time in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, Akmaral Seydaliyeva was a runaway from Kazahkstan, she was just 10 years old.
After returning to Rostov Chikatilo murdered 11-year-old Aleksandr Chepel on the bank of the River Don on August 28, and less than two weeks later on September 6 he murdered 24-year-old librarian Irina Luchinskaya, she disappeared on her way to a sauna and was found in Aviators’ Park.
Then Chikatilo went quiet for 11 months. But not entirely by his own choice.
On September 13 undercover detectives spotted him trying to talk to girls at the Rostov bus station.
These detectives followed him through the city and witnessed him trying to talk to numerous women and committing acts of frotteurism in public places. Frotteurism is the act of rubbing one’s pelvic area or erect penis against another person in a non-consensual act for sexual pleasure. He was arrested at Rostov’s central market, during a search of his belongings he was found to be in possession of an eight-inch (or 20cm) knife, several lengths of rope, and a jar of Vaseline.
When law enforcement officers discovered that he had been fired from his previous job for theft, they applied to hold him for longer than the usual period whilst they continued to investigate Chikatilo. They discovered his “chequered” history when it came to employment and he matched the eyewitness descriptions of the man seen leading Dmitry Ptashnikov away from the stamp kiosk.
A sample of Chikatilo’s blood was taken, although at this point in the 1980s they were only able to carry out blood group typing, not a full DNA profile, and his blood was type A. This didn’t match the type AB semen samples which had been recovered from six of the victims. This was because Chikatilo was a non-secretor, which means that his blood type didn’t match the typing found in other bodily fluids such as semen or saliva.
Chikatilo was largely discounted as being the unknown serial killer because the blood types didn’t match, although his name was added to the investigators’ files.
He was found guilty of the theft from his previous employer and sentenced to one year in prison, but he served just under three months and was released on December 12, 1984.
While he was in prison, the head of the Public Prosecutors Office formerly linked Chikatilo to the 23 murders which had so far been linked to the unknown serial killer, and all charges were dropped against the group of youths with intellectual difficulties on October 8. There were still 10 murders which hadn’t been linked to the serial killer.
Upon his release from prison Chikatilo found work, again as a supply clerk, at a locomotive factory in Novoshakhtinsk, and once again this job allowed him to travel across the Soviet Union. But Chikatilo kept a low profile for a few months and did not kill again until August 1, 1985. On a business trip to the Moscow Oblast Chikatilo met 18-year-old Natalia Pokhlistova at a railway station near Domodedovo Airport, which is about 25 miles southeast of Moscow. He lured her away from the station platform into a wooded area and stabbed her 38 times then strangled her and further mutilated her body.
Now, remember the team who were guiding the investigation in Rostov were originally from Moscow, so when they heard of Natalia’s murder, they linked it to the killer they were hunting in the Rostov Oblast.
Investigators theorised that – since the murder had taken place near the airport, and Natalia had last been seen at the station near the airport – the murderer must have flown from Rostov to Moscow. They checked flight manifests and all records that were available for passengers who had flown from Rostov to Moscow between late July and early August and ran down the names and leads that came from the passenger information, but nothing came of it.
On this particular occasion Chikatilo had travelled to Moscow by train and there were no passenger records for the trains like there were for airlines, and so investigators had no idea that Chikatilo had been in Moscow at the time of Natalia’s murder.
Four weeks later Chikatilo struck again, this time in the city of Shakhty when he lured 18-year-old Irina Gulyayeva from the bus station into a nearby wooded area where he brutally murdered her. The violent wounds found on Irina’s body linked her to the other victims of the unknown serial killer, who I think was still being referred to as the Forest Path Killer.
Following Irina’s murder Chikatilo would take another break and kept a low profile for almost two years. This might have been due to the fact that in November 1985 special procurator Issa Kostoyev was assigned to supervise the investigation. At this point in late 1985 29 detectives and 15 procurators were working exclusively on the case. All of the Forest Path murders were reinvestigated and once again registered sex offenders and known homosexuals were interrogated.
But that wasn’t the biggest change in the investigation, Viktor Burakov, the forensic investigator who had been brought in to lead the investigation originally, consulted a forensic psychologist, Dr Alexandr Bukhanovsky. This was the first time a serial killer investigation had consulted a psychiatrist in the Soviet Union.
All of the investigation files were made available to Dr Bukhanovsky, and he produced a 65-page psychological profile.
Obviously, we don’t have time to go through the entire 65 page profile, so we’ll give you the basics.
Dr Bukhanovsky’s profile proposed that the killer would be a reclusive man aged 45-50 years old, who had suffered a traumatic and isolated childhood. The man would be of average intelligence, and would likely be married with children, although he would have trouble communicating, flirting with, or dating women. His wife likely just lets him get on with his life, doesn’t interfere, and probably doesn’t know anything about the murders. He would be a sadist who suffered with impotence and could only achieve sexual arousal by inflicting suffering upon his victims. The murders were an analogue for the sexual intercourse the murderer was incapable of performing, and thus the use of a knife became a substitute for his penis which failed to function.
Dr Bukhanovsky also posited that as most of the murders in Rostov-on-Don had been committed on a weekend, and those elsewhere in the Rostov Oblast were often committed during the week near major transport hubs, the killer likely had a job which required him to travel.
Chikatilo followed the investigation closely. The police, who were called the militsiya in Soviet times, resumed surveillance of train stations around Rostov, and female officers in plain clothes would hang around stations in an attempt to attract the killer.
No murders were linked to the Forest Path killer for nearly two years. The murder of 33-year-old Lyubov Golovakha in Myasnikovsky District of Rostov on 23 July 1986 was tentatively linked, mainly because the semen type matched that found on the serial killer’s victims, but eventually discounted as her murder did not exhibit the same level of brutality that Chikatilo’s victims did.
In August 1986 the body of 18 year old Irina Pogoryelova was found in the city of Bataysk, which is just 10 miles away from Rostov-on-Don, we are not going to describe her injuries because they are horrific, they’re out there on the internet if you want to read about her but suffice it to say she was horrifically murdered. Her body bore all the injuries that were associated with the Forest Path killer, but despite this she is not listed as a confirmed victim due to the fact that Chikatilo confessed and retracted his confession to her murder multiple times, and it couldn’t be proven that he had killed her.
With no more murders in Rostov in 1986, investigators theorised that the murderer may have moved to another part of the Soviet Union. They sent bulletins to law enforcement all over the Soviet Union describing the murders, the injuries, victimology, and psychological profile, asking that the department contact them if there was a murder that matched the Forest Path killer. They received no responses.
Chikatilo began killing again in May 1987, but the three murders he committed in 1987 were all committed while away on business nowhere near Rostov.
12-year-old Oleg Makarenkov was murdered on May 16, he was a boarding school student in Revda in the Sverdlovsk Oblast, which is in the Urals, and is where the city of Yekaterinburg is, if that helps anyone. His body wasn’t found until years later when Chikatilo had been arrested and he led detectives to Oleg’s body.
On July 29 Chikatilo killed 12-year-old Ivan Bilovetsky in a wooded area by a railway line in the city of Zaporizhia in Soviet Ukraine, Ivan’s own father found his body the next day.
Six weeks later Chikatilo travelled to St Petersburg, or Leningrad as it was called in the 1980s, where he murdered 16-year-old vocational student Yuri Tereshonok after luring him off the train. Like Oleg, Yuri wasn’t found until years later when Chikatilo led law enforcement to the body following his arrest.
Chikatilo laid low for seven months following Yuri’s murder, but in April 1988 he murdered a woman who is still unidentified, she was estimated to be aged between 22 and 28 and was found outside a metals factory in Krasny Sulin in the Rostov Oblast. Investigators noted the similarities between her murder and the Forest Path victims, but there were significant differences in the way she was killed as she died from blunt force trauma to the head rather than stab wounds, and there was no disembowelment as was seen in most of the Forest Path victims. As a result, they weren’t sure whether or not to include her in the list of serial killer victims.
The next month he travelled to Soviet Ukraine with work and on May 15 he murdered 9-year-old Aleksey Voronko in Artemivsk, now known as Bakhmut. Some sources say it was the city of Ilovaisk, we’re not sure, both are in the Donetsk Oblast in Eastern Ukraine.
In July Chikatilo killed in the Rostov-on-Don area for the first time in three years – Krasny Sulin the town where the unidentified female’s body was found was about 100 miles away from the city of Rostov-on-Don, and it wasn’t definitely linked to the other murders.
On July 14 Chikatilo murdered 15-year-old Yevgeniy Muratov, near the Donleskhoz railway station. His body wouldn’t be found until the following April, by which time his remains were mostly skeletal, but he was still quickly linked to the Forest Path murders because of the extensive stab wounds which were evident on his bones.
Chikatilo didn’t kill again until March 1989, when he murdered 16-year-old Tatyana Ryzhova, she was a runaway from Krasny Sulin, but unlike his previous victims, Chikatilo this time killed in his daughter’s apartment rather than outside. He hid Tatyana’s body in a sewer, she was found eight days later on March 9, but police didn’t link her to the Forest Path killer.
On May 11 he killed eight-year-old Aleksandr Dyakonov in a wooded area of Rostov-on-Don. In July he murdered 10-year-old Aleksey Moiseyev, following his arrest Chikatilo described Aleksey as a boy from Kolchugino in the Vladimir Oblast, who he took from the beach into the forest. He was not linked to the Forest Path investigation.
The third victim of 1989 was 19-year-old student Yelena Varga, she was originally from Hungary, Chikatilo lured her off a bus and killed her in a village just outside of Rostov-on-Don on August 19.
On August 28 he murdered 10-year-old Aleksey Khobotov after meeting him near a theatre in Shakhty. He buried the boy in a shallow grave, and he was only found when Chikatilo confessed following his arrest and led police to the grave site.
With the re-emergence of the Forest Path killer in the Rostov area, police once again stepped up their surveillance operations now they knew the killer was active in the area again. Local trains were fitted with security cameras, and plain clothes officers travelled on the trains filming and photographing passengers in the hopes that if another victim turned up, they would have been seen in the company of the killer on the train.
Once again Chikatilo kept a low profile for a while when the investigation ramped up again.
That was until January 14, 1990 when he abducted 11-year-old Andrei Kravchenko from his home in Shakhty, his body was found a month later in a wooded area of Shakhty.
On March 8 10-year-old Yaroslav Makarov was playing truant from school when he met Chikatilo at a Rostov train station, Chikatilo lured the boy to the Rostov botanical gardens, and his body was found there the following day.
Just two days after Yaroslav’s body was discovered the leaders of the Forest Path investigation held a meeting to discuss the case. Head of the case, Mikhail Fetisov, was under enormous public pressure, and pressure from interior ministers in Moscow, the case had now been ongoing for six years and although 1000s of other cases had now been solved, they were seemingly no closer to finding the Forest Path killer.
In 1990 there was a much greater freedom of the press than there had been under previous Soviet leaders who had massively suppressed the media and what they could report on. And the Forest Path killer was the perfect fodder for this newly freed press.
Chikatilo killed three more times between March and August of 1990. In April he was travelling from Novocherkassk to Shakhty when he met 31-year-old Lyubov Zuyeva, her body was found in woodland near the Donleskhoz station. In July he lured 13-year-old Viktor Petrov from the Rostov-Glavny train station where his family were waiting for a train, and murdered him in Rostov Botanical Gardens, just meters from where he had killed Yaroslav Makarov in March of that year. In August he murdered 11-year-old Ivan Fomin at a municipal beach in Novocherkassk when the boy entered a thicket to change his clothes.
The discovery of these bodies sparked a huge police operation.
As many victims had been discovered along a single route through the Rostov Oblast Viktor Burakov who was leading the investigation alongside Mikhail Fetisov, suggested that they flood the main stations with uniformed officers, so much so that the killer couldn’t fail to notice the heavy police presence. The smaller, less popular stations would be surveilled by undercover, plain clothes officers, with the aim of forcing the murderer to the smaller stations where it would be easier to spot and apprehend him.
The operation began on October 27, 1990, 360 uniformed officers were deployed to the main stations, but only three of the smaller stations were surveilled by undercover officers: Kirpichnaya, Donleskhoz, and Lesostep, as these were in the areas where the killer had struck the most.
Three days later the body of 16-year-old Vadim Gromov was found near the Donleskhoz station, Vadim was a student from Shakhty who was travelling by train to Taganrog when Chikatilo had lured him off of the train. It was determined that he had been killed on October 17, ten days before the operation began.
The same day that Vadim’s body was found Chikatilo struck again. He lured 16-year-old Viktor Tishchenko from a train at Kirpichnaya station – which is in Shakhty, I just realised we haven’t actually named that station before, but it was one favoured by Chikatilo. Viktor left the station with Chikatilo, even though the station was under surveillance by undercover officers. Chikatilo murdered Viktor in the nearby forest, but Viktor fought hard for his life, breaking Chikatilo’s finger and biting him, he is the only victim we know of to injure Chikatilo. His body was found on November 3.
On November 6, 1990 Chikatilo murdered 22-year-old Svetlana Korostik in the woodland near Donleskhoz station – which was under surveillance. She was Chikatilo’s 53rd and final victim. When he returned to the station undercover officer Igor Rybakov spotted him and became suspicious. Chikatilo was approaching a well to wash his hands and face. Igor noticed that Chikatilo had a red smear on his cheek, a severe wound to his finger, he also had soil stains on his clothes and shoes. The only reason people usually went into the woods in this area was to pick mushrooms which was apparently a popular pastime in that area of the Soviet Union, but Chikatilo wasn’t dressed for walking and scavenging in the woods, nor did he have a suitable bag for collecting mushrooms.
Igor stopped Chikatilo and checked his papers, he didn’t really have any reason to detain Chikatilo so he let him go, but when he returned to his office he filled in a routine report saying he had stopped Chikatilo, noting the possible blood smear on his cheek and suspicious nature.
A week later on November 13, Svetlana’s body was found in the woodland near the Donleskhoz station, at that time she was the 36th victim to be linked to the Forest Path killer.
Police summoned Igor and the other officers who were manning that station and examined their reports of who they had stopped in the previous week, and would you know it, Andrei Chikatilo’s name came up. Many officers were already familiar with him after his arrest in 1984, he had also been placed on a suspect list in 1987 but there had never been anything to link him definitively to the murders.
Police began to interview Chikatilo’s former colleagues and employers and found out about his history of sexual assault while working schools. He was placed under surveillance the next day, November 14. He was followed for six days, on trains and buses he was frequently seen trying to engage children and young women in conversation, if they ignored him or brushed him off, he would wait a few minutes and then move onto a new target.
On November 20 he travelled to Novocherkassk, he had left his house with a large jar which he had filled at a small kiosk in a park. He wandered around the town attempting to make conversation with children. He spent some time in a cafe and upon leaving the cafe plainclothes officers arrested him.
Chikatilo protested his innocence. He was placed in a cell at the KGB headquarters in Rostov with a police informer who was tasked with engaging Chikatilo in conversation and reporting back anything he said.
His questioning began the next day, led by Issa Kostoyev, the special procurator who had been brought in to assist the investigation in 1985. The strategy chosen by investigators was to try and lead Chikatilo to believe he was a sick person in need of medical help and elicit a confession that way. They hoped that this would give Chikatilo hope that he would not be prosecuted by reason of insanity, and therefore more forthcoming with details and hopefully a confession.
The case was largely circumstantial at this point, and law enforcement knew that they had 10 days to hold Chikatilo before either charging or releasing him. When he was arrested a blood, sample had been taken again, but it came back Type A, as it had when he was first arrested six years earlier, but there was so much circumstantial evidence that it was Chikatilo that investigators weren’t letting him off that easily.
They managed to obtain a sample of his semen to test and this is when they found that his blood and saliva type didn’t match his semen type, because his semen type was AB, which matched that found on 14 of the Forest Path victims.
Throughout his questioning with Issa Kostoyev, Chikatilo denied the murders, although he did confess to sexually assaulting his students during his teaching career. He also wrote a number of essays, which didn’t really do anything in terms of a confession, but they did reveal psychological symptoms that were consistent with Dr Bukhanovsky’s profile.
On November 29 Mikhail Fetisov and Viktor Burakov invited Dr Bukhanovsky to help them question Chikatilo. It was reported that within two hours of Dr Bukhanovsky joining the questioning Chikatilo burst into tears and confessed to the murders for which he had been arrested. So that is the 36 Forest Path murders, there’s still 17 others who either hadn’t been linked, or hadn’t been found yet. The following morning Chikatilo confessed to 34 of the 36 murders when Issa Kostoyev resumed questioning. He denied murdering Lyubov Golovakha and Irina Pogoryelova in the summer of 1986.
Chikatilo gave a full account of each of the murders on the list (other than the two he denied), he drew some crime scenes, and described the positions of the victims’ bodies, he also recalled local landmarks near each murder site. Chikatilo also confessed to cannibalising some of his victims, but we’re not going to go into that because this is already a very heavy episode.
On November 30, 1990 Chikatilo was formally charged with the 34 murders he had confessed to, but in the days that followed he confessed to a further 22 murders which hadn’t been linked to the Forest Path murders. As with the Forest Path murders, he was able to recall details of each of the murders, and that month he was able to lead police to some of his undiscovered victims. Three of the victims couldn’t be located or identified, and so Chikatilo was charged with 53 murders between 1978 and 1990, he was held in his cell in the KGB building in Rostov to await his trial.
On December 26, 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and final leader of the USSR dissolved Soviet Union and the nations which had made up the Soviet Union were now independent, with Russia being recognised as the de facto successor to the Soviet Union.
Chikatilo’s trial would become the first major media event in post-Soviet Russia, and that is also why we know so much about Chikatilo because not only had the press in Russia gained a lot of freedom in the 1980s but the outside world was now able to access Russian media and keep up with current affairs in the country, and with Chikatilo’s trial scheduled for April 1992, the world’s media was captivated.
In the summer of 1991 Chikatilo had undergone a 60-day psychiatric evaluation, he was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder with sadistic features, and it was noted that he had physiological problems which were attributed to prenatal brain damage. But ultimately, he was found fit to stand trial.
On April 14, 1992 Chikatilo’s trial began in Courtroom number five of the Rostov Provincial Court, charged with 53 murders and five counts of sexual assault against minors from his teaching days.
The trial wasn’t without its controversies.
Chikatilo was held in a large cage throughout the trial, although this wasn’t to keep the general public safe, this was to keep Chikatilo safe from the public and the victims’ families.
Chikatilo repeatedly withdrew his confessions stating they were obtained under duress or weren’t included on the original indictment.
The trial lasted almost four months and on August 9 final arguments were heard. The judge set an initial date of September 15 for himself and two official jurors to review the evidence and pass sentence, although this was postponed to October 14.
When the court reconvened in October the judge announced Chikatilo was guilty of 52 of the 53 murders he had been charged with, and he was sentenced to death for each count. He was also found guilty of the five counts of sexual assault. The judge read out the list of victims and then launched an attack on law enforcement and their mistakes which allowed Chikatilo to remain free until 1990, although this was aimed mostly at special procuratorIssa Kostoyev rather than the local law enforcement. He claimed that Issa Kostoyev was negligent and dismissive after Chikatilo was placed on a suspect list in 1987.
The following day on October 15 Chikatilo was formally sentenced to death.
Chikatilo appealed but that was rejected and in late 1993 made a last-ditch attempt to avoid death by appealing to new Russian president Boris Yeltsin for clemency, but this too was rejected.
On February 14, 1994, Andrei Chikatilo was taken from his cell on death row in Novocherkassk prison into a soundproof room and executed with a single gunshot behind the right ear. He is buried in an unmarked grave in the prison cemetery.
FURTHER READING:
The Gruesome Murders Of Andrei Chikatilo, Russia’s “Red Ripper”
10 Disturbing Facts About The Rostov Ripper, Andrei Chikatilo
Andrei Chikatilo – Quotes, Childhood & Death
Andrei Chikatilo | Soviet serial killer
The Gruesome Murders Of Andrei Chikatilo, Russia’s “Red Ripper”
Andre Chikatilo: The Rostov Ripper
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