The Butcher of Rostov, The Red Ripper, and The Rostov Ripper are all titles that belong to the same man that terrorized the Rostov area of Soviet Ukraine from 1978 until 1990. Listen to the story of how Andrei Chikatilo murdered fifty-six women and children until he was finally stopped.
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Andrei Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936, in Yablochnoye during the midst of mass famine in the Ukrainian SSR.
As a child, he grew up in deprivation where famine ran rampant. Things worsened during WWII when Ukraine endured repeated bombing raids from Germany. His parents were farm laborers that received no wages due to the agricultural collectivization going on in the USSR.
His father was drafted into the war and as a soldier was captured and held as a POW. Back home Andrei Chikatilo dealt with German attacks including shootings. Their small hut was even burned to the ground. In 1943 Andrei’s mother gave birth to a baby girl, Tatyana. Because Andrei’s father had been conscripted in 1941, he could not have been the father.
When his father returned home he was ridiculed in the village for having been captured. This trickled down and made Andrei a focus for bullying. On top of this that he was small and somewhat frail in comparison to other boys.
Sexual Frustration
Andrei Chikatilo was painfully shy and because of this, his only sexual experience during adolescence occurred at the age of 15. He is reported to have overpowered an 11-year-old girl who was a friend of his sister. He ejaculated immediately during the brief struggle, which made things even worse.
**I did see some sources saying he had a girlfriend as a teen but couldn’t hold together a relationship because he had trouble maintaining an erection. One source said that he had “water on the brain” which caused this partial impotence.
However, he was a very bright student and graduated at the top of his class.
Post Graduation
After school, he attempted to gain admittance to Moscow State University, but he didn’t score highly enough on the entrance exam. Instead, he went to vocational school to try to become a communications technician.
In 1957, at 21 he was drafted into the Soviet Army. He served his time with no issues and came out as a member of the Communist party. He then moved to a town close to Rostov and became a telephone engineer.
His younger sister moved in with him and set him up with a friend, Fayina, whom he would marry in 1963. Despite his sexual issues, they had two children, a son, and a daughter. Their family life was normal. Andrei even began taking literature courses at Rostov University and in 1971 he started teaching at a local boarding school.
First Sexual Assault
In May 1973, Chikatilo committed his first known sexual assault upon one of his pupils. In this incident, he swam toward a 15-year-old girl and groped her breasts and genitals. He ejaculated as the girl struggled against his grasp.
Months later, Chikatilo sexually assaulted and beat another teenage girl that he had locked in his classroom. He was not disciplined for either of these incidents nor for the occasions in which fellow teachers observed Chikatilo fondling himself in the presence of his students. He didn’t receive any punishment for the assault and continued his duties which included patrolling the girl’s dorms.
Over time more complaints surfaced and Andrei Chikatilo was allowed to resign. He subsequently moved on to other schools.
A 9-Year-Old Girl is Found Murdered
In December of 1978, the body of a 9-year-old girl, Yelena Zakotnova was discovered in a river.
During the investigation spots of her blood were found near Andrei’s home. Her backpack was found by a riverbank down at the end of his street. Witnesses described a man matching Andrei’s description as being seen with the girl at the bus stop shortly before she died. Andrei’s wife, however, provided him with an alibi. Police soon turned their attention to Alexsandr Kravchenko, a 25-year-old with a previous rape conviction.
Kravchenko had a watertight alibi for the afternoon of December 22, 1978. He had been at home with his wife and a friend of hers the entire afternoon. Neighbors of the couple were able to verify this. Police threatened Kravchenko’s wife with being an accomplice to murder and her friend with perjury. They obtained new statements in which the women claimed Kravchenko had not returned home until late in the evening on the day of the murder.
Confronted with the altered testimonies, Kravchenko confessed to the killing. He was tried for the murder in 1979. At his trial, Kravchenko retracted his confession and maintained his innocence, stating his confession had been obtained under extreme duress. Despite his retraction, Kravchenko was convicted of the murder and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to 15 years in 1980, but he was retried and convicted. This time to be executed by firing squad in 1983.
Andrei Chikatilo Becomes a Serial Killer
By 1981 Andrei ran out of schools willing to hire him and took a job as a clerk for a materials factory in Rostov. His new position required a lot of travel.
On September 3rd, 1981, 17 -year old Larisa Tkanchenko was standing at a bus stop. Andrei spotted her as he exited a public library in Rostov city center. He lured her to some nearby woods by telling her he had vodka. When he got there he threw her down and began attacking her. When he couldn’t get an erection, he strangled her and gagged with dirt and leaves to muffle her cries.
As he walked away from a bus station on June 12, 1982, he encountered a 13-year-old girl, Lyubov Biryuk, who was walking home from a shopping trip. They walked together until they came to a secluded area where he dragged her into bushes and attacked her. She was found on the 27th with 22 knife wounds including wounds to her eyes.
Did Andrei Chikatilo Have An Unusual Appetite?
Between July and September 1982, he killed five more victims between the ages of 9 and 18. Andrei befriended them at train stations and bus stops, before luring them into nearby forest areas. There he would attack them, attempt to rape them, and use his knife to mutilate them. In a number of cases, he ate the sexual organs or removed other body parts such as the tips of their noses or tongues. In the earliest cases, the common pattern was to inflict damage to the eye area, slashing across the sockets. He also removed the eyeballs in many cases.
On December 11, 1982, Chikatilo encountered a 10-year-old girl named Olga Stalmachenok riding a bus to her parents’ home. She was found on the outskirts of town with 50 stab wounds. Her abdomen had also been completely sliced open.
Detectives Start to Investigate
At this time in the Soviet Union, serial killers were not a known phenomenon. The media was very tightly controlled so there was no coverage of the murders. As cases come up with such a distinct pattern the Soviet authorities began to recognize what was happening.
In 1983 Moscow detective Major Mikhail Fetisov assumed control of the investigation. He realized that a serial killer might be on the loose, and assigned a specialist forensic analyst, Victor Burakov, to head the investigation in the Shakhty area.
They focused on sex offenders and those with a history of mental illness. The detectives had to deal with the fact when local police would interrogate people, they would often obtain false confessions.
Each time a body was found they continued to build their forensic evidence. Based on the semen found at the crime scenes, they were able to determine that the killer was an AB blood type. The detectives also found samples of grey hairs.
On October 30, 1983, the eviscerated body of a 19-year-old prostitute, Vera Shevkun, was found in Shakhty. Two months later, on December 27th, 14-year-old Sergey Markov, was lured off a train and murdered at a rural station. He was found with a variety of wounds including having his genitals removed.
Police Step Up Their Efforts As More Victims Pile Up
Fifteen victims were added to the killer’s tally in 1984 alone. This forced police efforts to be drastically increased. A massive surveillance operation was started that canvassed most local transport hubs.
Chikatilo was arrested for behaving suspiciously at a bus station. He was approaching women and committing acts of frotteurism in public places. Yet again he avoided suspicion on the murder charges since his blood type did not match the suspect profile.
He did serve 3 months for other minor charges (theft from an employer) that were outstanding.
What police did not realize at the time was that Chikatilo’s actual blood type, type A, was different from the type found in his other bodily fluids (type AB). He was a member of a minority group known as “non-secretors.” Their blood type cannot be inferred by anything other than a blood sample. Since police only had a sample of semen, and not blood, from the crime scenes, Chikatilo was able to escape suspicion of murder.
Burakov brought in Alexandr Bukhanovsky, a psychiatrist to try to refine the existing profile since they were not making any progress on the case.
Bukhanovsky described the killer as a “necro-sadist”, or someone who achieves sexual gratification from the suffering and death of others. Bukhanovsky also placed the killer’s age as between 45 and 50, which was significantly older than what police had believed up to that point. Desperate to catch the killer, Burakov even interviewed a serial killer, Anatoly Slivko, shortly before his execution, to gain some insight into his elusive serial killer.
Did the Killings Stop?
After his release from prison, Andrei Chikatilo took a job as a traveling buyer for a train company and kept a pretty low profile.
Around the same time as the creation of the profile, the attacks seemed to stop. Police thought that either the killer had stopped, or he had been arrested for something else and was incarcerated.
The lull was soon over. In 1988, Andrei Chikatilo killed three times. He murdered an unidentified woman in Krasny Sulin in April and two boys in May and July.
He did not kill again until February 28, 1989. This time he killed a 16-year-old girl, Tatyana Ryzhova, in his daughter’s vacant apartment. He dismembered her body and hid the remains in a sewer. Since the remains were dismembered, they were not linked to the same killer. Between May and August, Chikatilo killed four more victims but only 2 of them were linked to the serial murders.
On January 14, 1990, Chikatilo encountered 11-year-old Andrei Kravchenko standing outside a Shakhty theater. His extensively stabbed, emasculated body was found in a secluded section of woodland the following month. Seven weeks later, on March 7th, Chikatilo lured a 10-year-old boy, Yaroslav Makarov, from a Rostov train station to Rostov’s Botanical Gardens. His eviscerated body was found the following day.
Chikatilo killed three more victims by August 1990. On April 4th, he lured a 31-year-old woman, Lyubov Zuyeva, off a train and killed her in a wooded area near Donleskhoz station. Her body was not found until August 24th. On July 28th, he lured a 13-year-old boy, Viktor Petrov, away from a Rostov railway station and killed him in Rostov’s Botanical Gardens. Finally, on August 14th, he killed an 11-year-old boy, Ivan Fomin, in the reeds near Novocherkassk beach.
Police Are Desperate to Find the Killer
Police surveillance was again increased and undercover officers tried to flush out the killer. On Oct 27th a plan was launched including the allocation of 360 officers to train stations.
On October 30th, police found the body of a 16-year-old boy, Vadim Gromov, at Donleskhoz station. He had been killed 20 days earlier. The same day that Gromov’s body was found, Chikatilo lured another 16-year-old boy, Viktor Tishchenko, off a train at Kirpichnaya station. He killed him in a nearby forest. The station was under surveillance by undercover police.
On November 6, 1990, Andrei Chikatilo killed and mutilated a 22-year-old woman, Svetlana Korostik, in the woodland near Donleskhoz station. When he returned to the railway platform, he was observed by an undercover officer named Igor Rybakov. The officer watched Chikatilo approach a well and wash his hands and face. When he approached the station, Rybakov noted that Chikatilo’s coat had grass and soil stains on the elbows. Chikatilo also had a small red smear on his cheek and what appeared to be a severe wound on one of his fingers. To Rybakov, he looked suspicious.
Rybakov stopped Chikatilo and checked his papers, but had no formal reason to arrest him. When Svetlana’s body was found 7 days later, police went back through everyone that had been stopped that day and found Andrei’s name. While they didn’t have any evidence to arrest him, he was placed under surveillance.
Andrei Chikatilo is Finally Arrested
On November 20th, after six days of surveillance, Andrei Chikatilo left his house with a large jar. He filled it with beer at a small kiosk in a local park before he wandered around Novocherkassk. There he attempted to make contact with children he met on his way. Upon exiting a cafe, Chikatilo was arrested by four plainclothes police officers.
He was brought in and interrogated but refused to confess to any of the killings. Burakov decided to allow the psychiatrist, Bukhanovski, who had prepared the original profile, to talk to Chikatilo. The talk was under the guise of trying to understand the mind of a killer from a scientific context. Chikatilo was clearly flattered by this approach and opened up to the psychiatrist. He provided extensive details of all of his killings. Andrei even leads police to the sites of previously undiscovered bodies.
He claimed to have taken the lives of 56 victims, although only 53 of these could be independently verified. This figure was far in excess of the 36 cases that the police had initially attributed to their serial killer.
The Trial of Andrei Chikatilo
Having been declared sane and fit to stand trial, Andrei Chikatilo went on trial on April 14, 1992. Throughout the trial, he was held in an iron cage designed to keep him apart from the relatives of his many victims.
Referred to in the media as “The Maniac,” his behavior in court ranged from bored to manic, singing and talking gibberish. At one point it was even reported that he dropped his trousers and waved his genitals at the assembled crowd.
The verdict was delivered 2 months after the trial concluded. Andrei Chikatilo was found guilty of 52 of the 53 murder charges. A death sentence was tied to each one. He attempted to appeal by stating that the evaluation that declared he was fit to stand trial was biased. The appeal was unsuccessful. On Feb 14, 1994, he was executed by being shot in the back of the head.
Resources
- Andrei Chikatilo | Soviet serial killer | Britannica
- Andrei Chikatilo – Quotes, Childhood & Death – Biography
- The Gruesome Murders Of Andrei Chikatilo, Russia’s “Red Ripper”
- Andrei Chikatilo: The bloodcurdling tale of the Butcher of Rostov – Film Daily
- How Serial Killer Andrei Chikatilo Was Finally Caught
- Andrei Chikatilo: the true story of the Rostov Ripper that inspired Evilenko – Auralcrave
- Andrei Chikatilo, photo, biography
- Pure Evil: Andrei Chikatilo – The Red Ripper of Rostov (Serial Killer Documentary)