The soviet union was dissolved in the year 1988 following hierarchical political controversies and internalizations. However, before the formation of Russia, the Soviets hardly faced huge crimes as a result of strong police forces and paramilitaries. Andrei Chikatilo though was an exception. Chikatilo terrorized the Soviets for months until he was finally executed in 1994.
The terror of serial killers is serious in society as no one has an idea when and who will be victimized by the killer. Andrei Chikatilo is one of the killers that terrorized society in one of the hardest times in the Soviet.
History of Andrei Chikatilo
Andrei Chikatilo was born on 16th October 1936, in Yabluchnyk, Ukraine SSR, Soviet Union. His family was one among the millions of poor families in the village as they were under severe famine attacks. He used to eat only bread and grass until he was 12 years old. Andrei’s father was taken by the Red Army as a prisoner during the second world war and was found dead after a month. He had a younger sister who was born after his mom was [email protected]. Their mom was abusive and domineering.
Andrei was not a regular child. He grew up to be a shy person and was extremely conscious of his body as he was very weak. Due to the lack of nutritious food, his stomach used to get bloated with gastric trouble, and he often fainted at school. This caused him to be bullied by other children.
During his teens, Chikatilo was both a model student and an ardent communist. He was appointed editor of his school newspaper at the age of 14 and chairman of the pupils’ Communist party committee two years later. An avid reader of communist literature, he has also delegated the task of organizing street marches.
Although Chikatilo claimed learning did not come easy to him due to headaches and poor memory, he was the only student from his collective farm to complete the final year of study, graduating with excellent grades in 1954.
At the onset of puberty, Chikatilo discovered that he suffered from chronic impotence, worsening his social awkwardness and self-hatred. He was shy in the company of women. In addition to suffering from poverty and hunger, from a very young age, Chikatilo suffered from hydrocephalus, the build-up of water in the brain.
Hydrocephalus is known to be caused by too much cerebrospinal fluid in the brain and can cause substantial damage to brain tissues, as well as impairments in brain function. He also had heavy damage to his urinary tract that caused him to wet his bed very often.
Profile and Mental Health of Andrei Chikatilo
Andrei Chikatilo started committing crimes in his late teens. He was also called Butcher of Rostov, Forest strip killer, and Red Ripper, as well as the Rostov Ripper. He once stated an incident to the psychologist who counseled him during the trial.
He had an elder brother who was eaten by his neighbors as they suffered extreme hunger due to the famine. After witnessing such horrors in his childhood, he got mentally disturbed.
Homicides Committed by Andrei Chikatilo
Andrei joined the high school as a teacher post his failure of finding a job. However, he was charged with sexual abuse and was thrown out of the school after he groped two teenage girls who were his students.
Chikatilo’s first-ever recorded murder was on December 22nd, 1978, when he killed a nine-year-old girl named Yelena and mutilated her body. However, during the occurrence of the crime, Andrei was not suspected. Her body was found after two days.
Pedestrians described Yelena talking to a man and this made the police arrest Aleksandr Kravchenko, a 25-year-old laborer who also served a previous [email protected] conviction.
On September 3rd, 1989, Larisa Tkachenko, a 17-year-old girl went missing. Two days after her body was found, it was discovered that she was mutilated in the same pattern in which Yelena’s body was tortured. But at this time Aleksandr was serving his prison days. This incident turned the angle of investigation. After Larisa, furthermore, bodies of young girls and boys surfaced in Yabluchnyk.
The death rates increased and infuriated the public, especially since all the corpses were heavily mutilated and the girl victims were severely [email protected]. Serial killers simply weren’t a thing in the Soviet Union, or at least they weren’t known to be a thing.
Reports from newspapers stated that evidence of child abuse or serial killing was often suppressed by the state-controlled media for public order. However, Chikatilo’s modus operandi of eye mutilation had caused so much commotion that Soviet authorities had to admit that they had a serial killer on the loose, which led to heightened fear in the area.
Modus Operandi of His Crimes
None of the death series could be connected with one particular method of killing. However, the common modus operandi in all the murders was that the victim’s eyeball from the right eye was scooped out followed by further mutilation around the cavity and slits throughout the body.
Andrei lured young boys and girls into nearby forests from railway stations or bus stops and would proceed to [email protected] (in the case of girls), murder, and mutilate their bodies.
He targeted kids who were usually in the process of escaping poverty. This probably could have been the aftermath of what he suffered as a child during the famine.
Investigation, Arrest, and Trial of Andrei Chikatilo
Major Mikhail Fetisov was assigned as the investigator in charge of the case. He acknowledged the fact that a serial killer is out there and immediately caught up with a forensic expert and started collecting potential crime scene dropouts with a deep investigation.
Not all the bodies could be found consecutively, however, among all the victims found, the major evidence obtained was a peculiar strand of grey hair and the $emen samples. The $emen sample post DNA analysis was found to match that of Andrei’s.
After the last mistake of arresting the wrong criminal, this time police ran a thorough background check. This led them to shocking revelations of how he had abused his students, co-workers, and killed many people from the area.
Chikatilo’s blood group was ‘A’ because his blood and saliva had a different blood type from his $emen. In genetics, Chikatilo is called a non-secretor, where his blood type differed between his red blood cells and secreting cells.
Since the police only had $emen samples, Andrei Chikatilo escaped suspicion initially due to the quality of DNA techniques at that time. He was arrested in August 1992 and he confessed to molesting pupils as a teacher but repeatedly denied the murders.
The trial went on for a short period as there was clear-cut evidence against him and he was finally stated guilty on October 15th, 1992. He was given the death sentence at the end of the trial and was shot in the head on February 14th, 1994.
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