Soviet Union was terrorised by a serial-killer schoolteacher for 12 years who drank his victims’ blood
A Soviet serial killer whose reign of terror lasted for more than a decade was thought to be so dangerous that he was wheeled into his trial in a steel cage.
Andrei Chikatilo is remembered as ‘the Butcher of Rostov’, one of the deadliest and most prolific murderers in world history. He was formally convicted in 1992 of 52 deaths over a 12-year period and is suspected of several more.
Chikatilo was born to forced labourers in Stalin’s USSR during the ‘Holodomor’, a forced famine in his native Ukraine that killed more than three million people in the 1930s.
He was raised on stories of an older brother, Stepan, who had been kidnapped by starving neighbours and killed, cannibalised so that they could stay alive.
Chikatilo grew up to become a teacher, but was repeatedly reprimanded for sexually and physically assaulting his students during his career, although he was never arrested or charged.
Although he did marry, psychologists would later claim that Chikatilo had been chronically impotent since puberty due to childhood trauma of watching his mother being assaulted by a German soldier during the Nazi invasion of Ukraine.
This reportedly made him suicidal in his youth, with his mother once having to pull him off a self-made noose. They lived in such extreme poverty that the two were also forced to share a bed together. A chronic bed wetter, Chikatilo’s mother would beat and berate the child after every incident.
It was 1978, when Chikatilo was 42, that he first killed. He lured a nine-year-old schoolgirl named Yelena Zakotnova to a dilapidated hut he had secretly purchased.
After this, he became obsessed with sexual fantasies of stabbing women and children to death. He claimed he tried to resist these urges but ultimately couldn’t fight them.
Chikatilo wouldn’t be arrested for another six years, by which point he had killed an estimated 29 more, some aged as young as nine. Victims were found viciously stabbed.
The police, by that point, had started to suspect a serial killer. But due to the extreme violence of the crimes, it was suspected that a Satanic cult or organ harvester, perhaps an escaped psychiatric patient. They didn’t suspect a working professional like Chikatilo.
Chikatilo was first arrested in 1984 when two undercover officers found him trying to talk to and touch young women around Rostov.
Upon apprehending him, they found a 20cm blade, rope, and a vat of Vaseline in his backpack. When they searched his name in their files, they learnt he was already under investigation for workplace theft.
Suspicious, they examined the possibility that he was the at-large serial killer since he also matched visual descriptions. But DNA evidence, still in its early days, exonerated him. Chikatilo was released after three months and, eight months later, started killing again.
By 1990, 12 years into the murder spree, intense public pressure was mounting. This was despite the Soviet government having repeatedly denied rumours of a serial killer, claiming such a thing could not happen in a communist society.
But then an undercover police officer noticed something strange at a train station: a muddied and bloodied man in a suit, washing his hands and face in a well. The officer approached the man calmly and asked for his name. The man replied: “Andrei Chikatilo.”
No arrest was made. Rather, the incident was logged, and when, the following week, a body was found in the woods near the train station, police started connecting the dots and digging into the man’s history of lewd offences at schools, his name having already been floated as a suspect in earlier investigations.
On November 14, 1990, Chikatilo was placed under police surveillance. Investigators observed the man repeatedly approaching young women and children in the streets, engaging them in conversation. The investigators, filled with a growing sense of dread, descended on Chikatilo as he prowled a local park, handcuffing him and taking him to an unmarked police car.
Chikatilo offered no resistance, just told the police they were mistaken. A search of his belongings revealed a knife and rope.
At first, he denied any knowledge of the murders, with Soviet police racing to gather enough evidence before they were legally obliged to release him after ten days. But then Chikatilo confessed while being read a psychological profile of the killer the police put together in 1985.
The profile believed the killer would be a reclusive man in his middle age who had suffered a painful, isolated childhood and who suffered from extreme impotence. Upon hearing the profile, Chikatilo broke into tears.
He gave the police a detailed description of each of the killings, including grotesque details about how he would drink their blood and occasionally eat body parts.
Police formally charged Chikatilo with 36 counts of murder. He soon confessed to 20 more murders, previously unconnected deaths. These included his first murder of Yelena.
Chikatilo’s trial began in April 1992. He was wheeled into the courtroom in a steel cage, designed to protect him from the families of victims and would break into song or screams throughout the trial.
In October, he was sentenced to death. The judge called it “the only sentence that he deserves.” Chikatilo would spend less than two years on death row before being executed via a single gunshot behind the ear on Valentine’s Day 1994. He is buried in an unmarked grave.
