95 Facts About Andrei Chikatilo

Andrei Chikatilo was convicted and sentenced to death for fifty-two of these murders in October 1992, although the Supreme Court of Russia ruled in 1993 that insufficient evidence existed to prove his guilt in nine of those killings.

Andrei Chikatilo was known as "the Rostov Ripper" and "the Butcher of Rostov" because he committed most of his murders in the Rostov Oblast of the Russian SFSR.

Andrei Chikatilo's parents were both collective farm labourers who lived in a one-room hut.

Nonetheless, Andrei Chikatilo recalled his childhood as being blighted by poverty, ridicule, hunger, and war.

Between 1941 and 1944, Andrei Chikatilo witnessed some of the effects of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, which he described as "horrors", adding he witnessed bombings, fires, and shootings from which he and his mother would hide in cellars and ditches.

Andrei Chikatilo was a chronic bed wetter, and his mother berated and beat him for each offence.

In 1943, Andrei Chikatilo's mother gave birth to a baby girl, Tatyana.

Andrei Chikatilo's stomach was often swollen from hunger resulting from the post-war famine which plagued much of the Soviet Union.

Andrei Chikatilo often studied at home, both to increase his sense of self-worth and to compensate for his myopia, which often prevented him from reading the classroom blackboard.

Andrei Chikatilo was appointed editor of his school newspaper at age 14 and chairman of the pupils' Communist Party committee two years later.

At the onset of puberty, Andrei Chikatilo discovered that he had chronic impotence, worsening his social awkwardness and self-hatred.

Andrei Chikatilo was shy in the company of women; his first crush, at age 17, had been on a girl named Lilya Barysheva, with whom he had become acquainted through his school newspaper, yet he was chronically nervous in her company and never asked her for a date.

Andrei Chikatilo speculated his scholarship application was rejected due to his father's tainted war record but the truth was that other students had performed better in a highly competitive exam.

Andrei Chikatilo worked in the Urals for two years until he was drafted into the Soviet Army in 1957.

Andrei Chikatilo performed his compulsory military service between 1957 and 1960, assigned first to serve with border guards in Central Asia, then to a KGB communications unit in East Berlin.

Andrei Chikatilo relocated to the Russian SFSR in 1961, renting a small apartment close to his workplace.

In 1963, Andrei Chikatilo married a woman named Feodosia Odnacheva, to whom he had been introduced by his younger sister.

Andrei Chikatilo chose to enrol as a correspondence student at Rostov University in 1964, studying Russian literature and philology; he obtained his degree in these subjects in 1970.

Andrei Chikatilo remained in this position for one year, before beginning his career as a teacher of Russian language and literature at Vocational School No 32 in Novoshakhtinsk.

Andrei Chikatilo was largely ineffective as a teacher; although knowledgeable in the subjects he taught, he was seldom able to maintain discipline in his classes and was regularly subjected to mockery by his students who, he claimed, took advantage of his modest nature.

Andrei Chikatilo 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.

Andrei Chikatilo left his employment discreetly and found another job as a teacher at another school in Novoshakhtinsk in January 1974.

Andrei Chikatilo lost this job as a result of staff cutbacks in September 1978, before finding another teaching position at Technical School No 33 in Shakhty, a coal-mining town forty-seven miles north of Rostov.

Andrei Chikatilo purchased chewing gum which he gave to female children he encountered in efforts to initiate contact and gain their trust.

In September 1978, Andrei Chikatilo moved to Shakhty, where he committed his first documented murder.

Andrei Chikatilo's body was found beneath a nearby bridge two days later.

Nonetheless, Andrei Chikatilo did stress that, initially, he had struggled to resist these urges, often cutting short business trips to return home rather than face the temptation to search for a victim.

On 3 September 1981, Andrei Chikatilo encountered a 17-year-old boarding school student, Larisa Tkachenko, standing at a bus stop as he exited a public library in Rostov city centre.

Nine months after the murder of Tkachenko, on 12 June 1982, Andrei Chikatilo travelled by bus to the Bagayevsky District of Rostov to purchase vegetables.

Andrei Chikatilo established a pattern of approaching children, runaways, and young vagrants at bus or railway stations, enticing them to a nearby forest or other secluded area, and killing them, usually by stabbing, slashing and eviscerating the victim with a knife; although some victims, in addition to receiving a multitude of knife wounds, were strangled or battered to death.

Andrei Chikatilo would achieve orgasm only when he stabbed and slashed the victim to death.

On 11 December 1982, Andrei Chikatilo encountered a 10-year-old girl named Olga Stalmachenok riding a bus to her parents' home in Novoshakhtinsk and persuaded the child to leave the bus with him.

Andrei Chikatilo was last seen by a fellow passenger, who reported that a middle-aged man had led the girl away firmly by the hand.

Andrei Chikatilo lured the girl to a cornfield on the outskirts of the city, stabbed her in excess of fifty times around the head and body, ripped open her chest and excised her lower bowel and uterus.

Andrei Chikatilo did not kill again until June 1983, when he murdered a 15-year-old Armenian girl named Laura Sarkisyan; her body was found close to an unmarked railway platform near Shakhty.

In January and February 1984, Andrei Chikatilo killed two women in Rostov's Park of Aviators.

Alekseyeva suffered thirty-nine slash wounds to her body before Andrei Chikatilo mutilated and disembowelled her, intentionally inflicting wounds he knew would not be immediately fatal.

Andrei Chikatilo's body was found the following morning; her excised upper lip inside her mouth.

Hours after Alekseyeva's murder, Andrei Chikatilo flew to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent on a business trip to purchase electrical switches.

On 13 September 1984, Andrei Chikatilo was observed by two undercover detectives attempting to talk to young women at a Rostov bus station.

Andrei Chikatilo was discovered to be under investigation for minor theft at one of his former employers, which gave the investigators the legal right to hold him for a prolonged period of time.

Andrei Chikatilo's name was added to the card index file used by investigators; however, the results of his blood type analysis largely discounted him as being the unknown killer.

Andrei Chikatilo was found guilty of theft of property from his previous employer.

Andrei Chikatilo was released from custody on 12 December 1984 after serving three months.

Andrei Chikatilo did not kill again until 1 August 1985 when, on a business trip to Moscow, he encountered an 18-year-old woman, named Natalia Pokhlistova, standing on a railway platform near Domodedovo Airport.

On this occasion Andrei Chikatilo had travelled to Moscow by train and, accordingly, no documentation existed for investigators to research.

Andrei Chikatilo followed the investigation carefully, reading newspaper reports about the manhunt for the killer which had begun to appear in the press and keeping his homicidal urges under control.

Andrei Chikatilo's body had been slit open from the neck to the genitalia, with one breast removed and her eyes cut out.

In 1988, Andrei Chikatilo killed three times, murdering an unidentified woman in Krasny Sulin in April and two boys in May and July.

Andrei Chikatilo did not kill again until 28 February 1989, when he killed a 16-year-old girl, Tatyana Ryzhova, in his daughter's vacant apartment.

Andrei Chikatilo dismembered her body and hid the remains in a nearby sewer.

On 14 January 1990, Chikatilo encountered 11-year-old Andrei Kravchenko standing outside a Shakhty theatre.

Kravchenko was lured from the theatre on the pretext of being shown imported Western films Andrei Chikatilo claimed to have at his residence; his extensively stabbed, emasculated body was found in a secluded section of woodland the following month.

On 6 November 1990, Andrei Chikatilo killed and mutilated a 22-year-old woman, Svetlana Korostik, in woodland near Donleskhoz station.

The only reason people entered the woodland near Donleskhoz station at that time of year was to gather wild mushrooms, but Andrei Chikatilo was not dressed like a typical forest scavenger; he was wearing more formal attire.

Rybakov stopped Andrei Chikatilo and checked his papers, but had no formal reason to arrest him.

Andrei Chikatilo offered no resistance as he was handcuffed and placed inside an unmarked police car.

Andrei Chikatilo's penultimate victim, Viktor Tishchenko, was a physically strong youth.

The strategy chosen by the police to elicit a confession was to lead Andrei Chikatilo to believe that he was a very sick individual in need of medical help.

Police knew their case against Andrei Chikatilo was largely circumstantial, and under Soviet law, they had ten days in which they could legally hold a suspect before either charging or releasing him.

Andrei Chikatilo produced several written essays for Kostoyev which, although evasive regarding the actual murders, did reveal psychological symptoms consistent with those predicted by Dr Bukhanovsky in the 1985 profile he had written for the investigators.

Andrei Chikatilo gave a full, detailed description of each murder on the list of charges, all of which were consistent with known facts regarding each killing.

Additional details provided further proof of his guilt: one victim on the list of charges was a 19-year-old student named Anna Lemesheva, whom Andrei Chikatilo had killed on 19 July 1984 near Shakhty station.

Andrei Chikatilo recalled that as he had fought to overpower her, she had stated that a man named "Bars" would retaliate for his attacking her.

In describing his victims, Andrei Chikatilo falsely referred to them as "declasse elements" whom he would lure to secluded areas before killing.

In many instances, particularly with his male victims, Andrei Chikatilo stated he would bind the victims' hands behind their backs with a length of rope before he would proceed to kill them.

When questioned as to why most of his later victims' eyes had been stabbed or slashed, but not enucleated as his earlier victims' eyes had been, Andrei Chikatilo stated that he initially believed in an old Russian superstition that the image of a murderer is left imprinted upon the eyes of the victim.

Andrei Chikatilo informed Kostoyev that although he was not homosexual, a male victim offered the same arousing bloodletting as a female via his mutilations and that he had often tasted the blood of his victims, to which he stated he "felt chills" and "shook all over".

Andrei Chikatilo confessed to tearing at victims' genitalia, lips, nipples and tongues with his teeth.

Nonetheless, Andrei Chikatilo did confess to having swallowed the nipples and tongues of some of his victims.

On 30 November, Andrei Chikatilo was formally charged with each of the thirty-six murders he had confessed to, all of which had been committed between June 1982 and November 1990.

Andrei Chikatilo recalled that he had killed Volobuyeva in a millet field and that he had approached the girl as she sat in the waiting rooms at Krasnodar Airport.

Volobuyeva, Andrei Chikatilo stated, had informed him she lived in the Siberian city of Novokuznetsk, and was awaiting a connecting flight at the airport to visit relatives.

In December 1990, Andrei Chikatilo led police to the body of Aleksey Khobotov, a boy he had confessed to killing in August 1989 and whom he had buried on the outskirts of a Shakhty cemetery, proving unequivocally that he was the killer.

Andrei Chikatilo later led investigators to the bodies of two other victims he had confessed to killing.

Three of the fifty-six victims Andrei Chikatilo confessed to killing could not be found or identified, but he was charged with killing fifty-three women and children between 1978 and 1990.

On 20 August 1991, after police had completed their interrogation, including re-enactments of all the murders at each crime scene, Andrei Chikatilo was transferred to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow to undergo a 60-day psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he was mentally competent to stand trial.

Andrei Chikatilo was tried in Courtroom Number 5 of the Rostov Provincial Court, before Judge Leonid Akubzhanov.

Andrei Chikatilo's trial was the first major media event of post-Soviet Russia.

Shortly after his psychiatric evaluation at the Serbsky Institute, investigators had conducted a press conference in which a full list of Andrei Chikatilo's crimes was released to the press, alongside a 1984 identikit of the individual charged, but not the full name or a photograph of the accused.

Andrei Chikatilo complied, although this would prove to be one of the few civil exchanges between the judge and Andrei Chikatilo.

Andrei Chikatilo was initially questioned in detail about each charge upon the indictment.

Andrei Chikatilo would become indignant only when accused of stealing personal possessions from the victims, or to his retaining organs excised from the victims missing from the crime scenes.

On occasion, Andrei Chikatilo would expose himself to the court or sing socialist movement anthems throughout proceedings.

Andrei Chikatilo refused to answer any questions for three consecutive days before stating his presumption of innocence had been irredeemably violated by the judge and that he intended to give no further testimony.

Andrei Chikatilo himself repeated his earlier remarks as to the judge making numerous rash remarks prejudging his guilt.

Gerasimenko further contended that in his conducting an open trial, Andrei Chikatilo had already been effectively prejudged as being guilty by the press, before requesting that the judge be replaced.

Andrei Chikatilo questioned the judge's objectivity and harked back to the decision of the court not to allow the defence to present testimony from independent psychiatrists; emphasizing that crimes of this nature could not have been committed by an individual of sane mind.

Harking towards the earlier testimony of psychiatrists at the trial, Zadorozhny argued that Andrei Chikatilo fully understood the criminality of his actions, was able to resist his homicidal impulses, and had made numerous conscious efforts to avoid detection.

In reciting his findings, the judge read the list of murders again, before criticizing both the police and the prosecutor's department for various mistakes in the investigation which had allowed Andrei Chikatilo to remain free until 1990.

Andrei Chikatilo kicked his bench across his cage when he heard the verdict and began shouting abuse.

Andrei Chikatilo was taken from the courtroom to his cell at Novocherkassk prison to await execution.

Andrei Chikatilo did lodge an appeal against his conviction with the Supreme Court of Russia, but this appeal was rejected in the summer of 1993.

On 14 February 1994, Andrei Chikatilo was taken from his death row cell to a soundproofed room in Novocherkassk prison and executed with a single gunshot behind the right ear.

Andrei Chikatilo was buried in an unmarked grave within the prison cemetery.