The Red Ripper: Inside the Mind of Russia's Most Brutal Serial Killer

Introduction by Colin Wilson

Peter Conradi has, I believe, produced one of the most interesting case histories of a serial killer since Dr Karl Berg published The Sadist—a study of the ‘Düsseldorf Monster’, Peter Kürlen—in 1932.

As the professor of forensic medicine in the Düsseldorf Medical Academy, Berg was naturally called in when, on 14 May 1930, the police finally arrested the killer who had terrorised Düsseldorf for fifteen months. During this time, the ‘Monster’ had killed eight people—a man, three women and four children—by methods that included stabbing, strangulation and hammer blows. Berg was surprised to find a mild, pleasant-looking man who proved to be charming and intelligent—and whose neighbours were at first convinced that the police had made some absurd mistake. Kürten seemed pleased to recount his strange sexual history to a doctor, and the result was the first detailed study of the development of a psychopathic killer.

Since then, there have been few equally detailed studies of such criminals. In America during the mid-1930s, a sadistic pervert named Albert Fish—sentenced to death for killing and partly eating ten-year-old Grace Budd—spoke frankly to psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, and told him of a lifetime of sadism and child murder; but Wertham chose to devote only one chapter of his book The Show of Violence to Fish. Since the Second World War, there has been a steady increase in cases of sex crime, and in the decades since 1970, a terrifying rise in the number of what used to be called mass murderers, and what are now called serial killers, but none have been studied with the thoroughness that Berg brought to Kürten.

The Chikatilo case is a welcome exception. Several psychiatrists, beginning with Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, have studied Chikatilo since his arrest in November 1990, and some of them have provided Peter Conradi with an amazingly detailed account of Chikatilo’s mental development. The result is that we have a more profound understanding of Chikatilo than of virtually any other serial killer since Kürten. It enables us to see just how many interesting parallels there are with other well-known cases of sex murder.

The one that immediately springs to mind is that of Reginald Christie, the Notting Hill murderer. Like Chikatilo, Christie was so paralysingly shy that it made him virtually impotent—as a teenager he was known as ‘Reggie-no-dick’ and ‘Can’t-do-it Christie’. Like Chikatilo, Christie was an intelligent depressive of low self-esteem, who tried to conceal himself behind an ‘official’ facade—Christie was a reserve constable, Chikatilo a minor Communist Party member. Both succeeded in finding a wife with whom they could overcome their shyness and impotence, but proved unenthusiastic husbands where sex was concerned.

The basic psychological pattern of the sex criminal is a slow development of sexual craving through fantasy. Peter Kürten was introduced to sadism at the age of nine by a dog-catcher who liked to torture animals. But it was in solitary confinement, in prison for burglary, that rape fantasies turned into dreams of blood. Christie’s fantasies were all about the violation of a passive, unresisting victim, and he put this into practice by luring women to sit in a deckchair and to inhale Friar’s Balsam, into which he introduced coal gas; when they were unconscious, he ceased to be impotent. Then, to prevent discovery, he had to kill them.

Unfortunately, Chikatilo’s work as a schoolteacher gave him the opportunity to develop his own sexual fantasies—sex with underage girls, with whom he felt less shy than adults. It was at this point that he diverged from Christie when he experienced orgasm as he was beating a pupil with a ruler. And when, in December 1978, he lured a nine-year-old girl into his house and tried to rape her, the impotence supervened, but the sign of her blood triggered sadistic violence. Conradi says accurately: ‘It was the most decisive moment of his life.’ As he stabbed her to death, the knife replaced his ineffective sexual organ, and he ceased to be a potential Christie, and became another Kürten, for whom stabbing and the sight of blood brought sexual release. From that moment on, he became one of the most dangerous men in Russia.

In Europe or America, his career would probably have come to an end shortly thereafter, when police came to question him. He already had a record as a child molestor, and neighbours had seen a stream of prostitutes entering his house. The number of stab wounds on the victim must have indicated that the room in which she had been killed would be full of traces of blood. The most cursory forensic examination of his sitting room would have revealed him as the killer. But luck was with him; the police switched their attention to a neighbour who already had one conviction for a sex murder, and Aleksandr Kravchenko was finally executed for Chikatilo’s crime.

And now, like Christie and Kürten, Chikatilo became an obsessive ‘repeat-killer’, a man for whom the act of murder brought release from his sense of inferiority and depression. In only one respect did he continue to resemble Christie rather than Kürten: he remained a ‘pathetic monster’ rather than a demonic sadist. Yet his crimes were demonic enough, and there is evidence that he tortured his victims before he killed them. He remained in the grip of his obsession for another twelve years, until the time of his arrest, and went on to kill more than fifty more victims.

Chikatilo’s incredible luck persisted. When arrested as a murder suspect in 1984, with a knife and rope in his bag, he was allowed to go free because he was one of those extremely rare freaks whose sperm-group differed from his blood group. So he was released to torture and kill another 21 victims. Unlike so many other serial killers he was not caught by carelessness—a carelessness that argues that they want to be caught—but by chance, when a policeman glanced at his identity papers and entered a report.

Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, the great ‘sexologist’ who devoted his life to studying sexual anomalies, believed firmly that all sex criminals should be regarded as mentally unbalanced. In the years since 1970, there have been a few cases that suggest he was not entirely correct—cases such as Ted Bundy, Dean Corll and John Gacey, in which there seems to have been a clear conscious choice to become a human predator. But of all serial killers I can call to mind, the case of Andrei Chikatilo seems the most powerful argument for Hirschfeld’s thesis. Chikatilo is a haunting example of a man in the grip of an obsession over which he has no control—an archetypal ‘pathetic monster’.

Chapter One

The hands of the bus station clock showed 8 p.m. through the cracked glass, but it was still warm outside, a typical summer’s evening in the south of Russia. He looked around him for a second: grim-faced workers hurrying home after their shifts, young couples lingering for a few moments, tramps settling down with their bottles of vodka for the evening. He had been on duty all day and his eyes were beginning to blur with the sheer mass of humanity. The calendar on the wall read 13 September 1984.

It was the way that the man moved which first caught his eye. Furtive yet nervous, a hunter stalking his prey. Inspector Aleksandr Zanasovski of the Rostov-on-Don police had been shadowing him for several hours now as he weaved his way through the crowd.

He had seen the man for the first time two weeks earlier across the other side of the main square, in the railway station. A tall, powerful man in thick glasses and a neat suit. In his late forties or early fifties perhaps, and carrying a bulky briefcase in his hand.

He had been trying to pick up women there as well. And with what persistence. Zanasovski had never seen anything like it. In the hour he spent watching him, the man must have spoken to a dozen or more; a few words here or a smile and he was off to the next one, almost immediately. Then, after an hour, he had gone outside and started to do the same at the bus stop. It was then that Zanasovski had challenged him and asked him to come to the small one-man police post inside the bus station for a routine document check. He could still remember the name: ‘Chikatilo, Andrei Romanovich’. A strange kind of name; Ukrainian, perhaps. It certainly wasn’t an Ivanov or a Yakovlyev. According to his passport, he was married with two kids and was head of the supply department in one of the city’s main factories. He was also a graduate of the philological faculty of the city’s university. Zanasovski had no cause to detain him. But that did not stop him from asking what he had been up to.

‘I was waiting to go home and was bored,’ the man had replied. ‘I wanted to talk to someone. And anyway, I like young people. I used to be a teacher. I’m interested in them: where they live, what they do, what their hobbies are.’

One of the girls Zanasovski had seen him trying to chat up confirmed the story. ‘He asked me things like where I studied and where I was going,’ she said.

Now, two weeks later, here was this man again, and he was behaving in exactly the same way.

In ordinary times, Zanasovski would probably have thought nothing more about it: a middle-aged married man out to cheat a little on his wife. That was all. But the summer of 1984 did not count as ordinary times in Rostov. Somewhere out there lurked a serial killer. The city was full of rumours and of fear. The pressure was on to find the killer before he struck again.

The more Zanasovski watched this man, the more suspicious his behaviour seemed. ‘This time we’re not going to let him go,’ he breathed to his young colleague who was standing watch with him.

It had been more than two years now since they had found the first body. The girl, Lyuba Biryuk, had been thirteen years old, a nice kid from a nice family. She was the niece of an officer from the local Criminal Investigation Department—it was almost like losing a member of the family. Her remains had been lying on a wooded path beside the road in Donskoi, a little village about twenty miles north of Rostov.

A murder was nothing out of the ordinary. The Rostov region had one of the highest crime rates in the country. It had always done; it was a matter of simple geography—a kind of frontier town, it attracted all sorts, good and bad. An average of three hundred people were killed every year in the region. That meant almost one a day. But Biryuk was different. She was a child. And then there were the injuries: more than thirty deep stab wounds, as well as horrible blows around the eyes. The policeman who was called to the scene had never seen anything like it.

Since then, the murders had continued and they seemed no closer to catching the culprit. The theories were many but the evidence was scanty. It had taken them two weeks to find Biryuk’s body. By then the trail was already cold. A body decomposes quickly under a southern sun which can easily send the temperature up to 95 degrees Fahrenheit or more. Others who had lain for months were already little more than skeletons. In many cases no one had noticed when they had gone missing; or, if they had, had bothered to report the fact to the police. Many of those murdered were down and outs, or drunks, or prostitutes, or kids who had run away from home. Even working out who they were was a nightmare. Some had to be sent to a specialist institute in Moscow where experts tried to remodel the faces.

There had been only one real sighting of the killer. In March that year, another child, Dima Ptashnikov had been murdered just outside the nearby town of Shakhti, and a woman claimed to have seen him going off with a strange man. But, if anything, it only added to the confusion. The police had already got a couple of suspects behind bars for early murders. Two young men from a local hostel for the mentally subnormal had been arrested and had confessed. So what to make of this latest killing? Was it part of the series, and if so what about the men they had already got? Whichever way you looked at it, the whole thing was a disaster. Worst of all, the bosses in Moscow were beginning to take notice.

It wasn’t meant to be like this in the Soviet Union. Crime was supposed to be decreasing. Or, rather, that was the official line. It was difficult to believe when you were out on the beat, particularly in Rostov. If you asked any ordinary policemen, they would say the opposite. People seemed more dishonest—and more violent. Even so, serial killings were something else—something that happened only in America, like unemployment and homelessness and corruption—the kind of things that they showed you on the television news or that you read about in the international pages of Pravda. Serial killers were not the kind of creatures that you would find in Rostov. But now, a serial killer was precisely what they seemed to have on their patch and Zanasovski felt that he might be just the man to catch him. The sun was already going down, though. It was going to be a long night. He could feel it.

After chatting up a couple of women in the bus station, the man walked outside, boarded one of the city’s rickety red and white trolley-­buses and headed out towards the airport. The vehicle was fairly full, but it was not packed and there was room to move between the passengers swinging from the frayed ceiling straps. The man wasn’t wasting a moment. As Zanasovski watched in fascination from the other side of the bus, the man moved around, trying to catch the eye of the female passengers.

Two stops later, the man got off, crossed the road and got on another bus going back towards the city. The two policemen followed. Then he got off that bus as well and boarded another. And so it went on. All the time he was trying to speak to women, but not in an aggressive way. You couldn’t really say that he was harassing them. He was smiling, a well-turned-out middle-aged man in a thick suit and tie despite the summer heat.

‘More and more I knew that this was the man,’ Zanasovski said later. He had already had that feeling two weeks before when he had first questioned him. Now it was even stronger. But still, it was too early to pounce. He had to stay with him for just a few more hours. Zanasovski stepped back into the shadows, using all the skills he had acquired in two years of catching pickpockets.

The man got off the bus at Voroshilovsky Street, and walked along Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, towards the Central Restaurant, a strange neo-Stalinist columned affair occupying the ground floor of the hotel of the same name. Inside, the usual live band was pumping out the Beatles. Couples gyrated on the dance floor, their tables piled high with the usual cold starters and the obligatory bottles of vodka and sweet champagne. The man didn’t make to go inside. He wasn’t interested in eating or drinking, let alone dancing.

Some women were hanging around outside the doorway—the type you could find there every night: slightly overweight, peroxide-blonde hair and already drunk by eight o’clock. The man approached them, then backed away but then tried again. Zanasovski could see that something was holding him back, probably the men who were also standing there.

The man was behaving very cautiously. He didn’t seem to want any trouble or to be noticed. It wasn’t his style. He gave up and walked towards a nearby café. It was a depressing place, and full of drunks. Not the kind of place you would imagine a normal middle-aged man going for an evening out. The man was inside for only a few minutes before coming out and setting off again.

By now it was 10 p.m. and the man was heading for Gorky Park. This bears little relation to its much larger and altogether grander namesake in Moscow. Just a stretch of grass and a few monuments to the usual Communist heroes. On sunny summer days, it can be a pleasant place to sit and watch the world go by. By night it is transformed into one of the city’s worst crime spots. The main pathways are not as dangerous, especially at the local cinema’s closing time when a stream of people walk through on their way home. But you have to be mad to stray on to one of the side paths.

The man sat for more than an hour on a bench watching women walk past. If watching was the right word for it. This was not a man idly admiring pretty girls. He looked ill at ease and agitated, his head turning this way and that as if he were trying to weigh up his chances. For all Zanasovski’s skill in keeping out of sight, perhaps the man realised that he was being watched. Maybe the whole thing was just a show, a game to string him along.

A few minutes later, they were on the move again, back towards the main station square, first to the small suburban terminus and then into the larger mainline station next door.

The dirt and the smell mugged Zanasovski’s senses as he followed the man into the hall. If Rostov itself marks the point where Europe meets Asia, then the dividing line runs through the station itself: the gateway to the Caucasus, they call it. All the trains travelling north to the great plains of Russia have to pass through here, as do those heading south towards Turkey. Every few minutes another one pulls in. Although it was late, people were everywhere: men in checked shirts and tight suits sat snoring on the benches; swarthy Caucasian women in headscarves tried to keep one eye on their children and the other on their bundles. And the vagrants, the bomzhhye as the Russians call them, the down-and-outs and the cheap prostitutes, were willing to go with anyone in return for a bite to eat or a couple of sips of vodka, or just to be able to get away from the station with its crumbling steps and urine-stained corridors.

The man went upstairs and sat down next to a girl on a bench and they began to talk. They sat there for about an hour before she stood up abruptly and walked away. Zanasovski slipped off after her. What had the man wanted, he asked. Nothing much, she replied, and went. Meanwhile, the man had moved on, wandering over to the bench opposite where another girl sat. She must have said something sharply to him because he stood up immediately and went.

It was already past 3 a.m., and Zanasovski was exhausted. But the man showed no sign of tiring at all. He looked as if he were driven by some great energy as he paced the building, searching. It was getting more difficult for him to find people to talk to. Most of them were now asleep, so he moved yet again, this time to the bus station.

The man had not committed any crime; it was clear to Zanasovski that he was searching for women, yet the hunt had already lasted for more than nine hours and he hadn’t found anyone. But with the patience and determination of a true hunter, he had not given up.

At last his persistence seemed to be rewarded. A girl in a brown tracksuit, aged just eighteen or nineteen, came in, sat down on a bench and then laid her head down. She looked young enough to be the man’s daughter, but it didn’t deter him. He went over and sat down on the bench, next to her head. Just like in a detective movie, the two policemen sat down a couple of benches away and pretended to go to sleep. This oddest of odd couples started to talk. The girl was lying down. The man was sitting up straight, and as he talked, he was keeping an eye on what was happening in the hall around him. They must have stayed like that for twenty minutes or more. Through his half-closed eyelids, Zanasovski could see the man’s gestures; he was obviously flirting with the girl and paying her compliments.

She stood up, said something to him and lay back down again. He took off his jacket, covered her head with it and edged closer to her. Her face was hidden but the man’s was not. His expression revealed what was happening under the jacket.

Just after 5 a.m. the girl stood up and walked out. The man followed. She went to the ladies’ toilet, he to the gents’. The two detectives lurked outside for about ten minutes. Then the man emerged, hurrying towards the exit which led back towards the main railway station. He went to the nearby tram stop and took the number 5 tram. It was the first tram of the day and there were only a few people aboard, bleary-eyed workers heading for the early shift. The man got off at the central market. Still he seemed to be searching.

Zanasovski had seen enough. The man’s behaviour was more than just suspicious. As for what he had done with the girl on the bench in the bus station, that was easily grounds enough for pulling him in and charging him.

He walked up behind the man and put his hand on his shoulder. As the man turned, his whole face broke into a sweat. Although Zanasovski was wearing different clothes, he immediately recognised him as the policeman who had checked his papers two weeks before.

‘I have arrested plenty of people in my time, but never seen anything like this,’ the detective said later. For the record, he showed the man his police identification card, and then led him to the small police post in the market.

By this time, the man’s shock had passed; he was angry now. He protested as they walked through the crowds of market traders beginning to set up their stalls in the watery early-morning sunshine. Why had he been arrested? What were the grounds? What did they want with him? But after all that Zanasovski had seen his convictions were firm enough simply to ignore him, and he told the duty officer to fill out the warrant giving him authority to carry out a search.

The man’s jacket contained some personal documents, papers connected with a business trip that he had just been on for his factory, and some receipts. So far, nothing. Then they made him open his briefcase. Zanasovski could scarcely believe his eyes. Inside was a kitchen knife with a plastic handle and an eight-inch blade, some lengths of rope and a jar of Vaseline. He noticed that the tip of the knife was bent as if it had been used for hacking through something hard—like bone.

Zanasovski felt vindicated. First the strange behaviour, then the briefcase—it all fitted into place. Plus there was the fact that the man was registered as living in the town of Shakhti, the scene of several of the murders. He could barely contain the excitement in his voice when he called the duty officer at his home station in the Pervomaisky district of the city.

‘I think I have found the man we are looking for,’ he said. A few minutes later a squad car arrived and took them both back to the station. It was already 7 a.m. and Zanasovski had been on duty all night. They told him to go home and get some rest.

After more than thirty murders of unparalleled cruelty, one of the world’s most prolific and yet unlikely serial killers had finally been arrested. It had taken more than six years to track him down as he criss-crossed the south of Russia leaving a trail of death behind him. Now, it was 14 September 1984 and it was all over. Andrei Chikatilo, a soft-spoken grandfather aged 48, and a former literature teacher, was under lock and key. And that, it seemed, was that.

Chapter Two

The village of Yablochnoye is a settlement like any of the tens of thousands of others scattered across the vast territory of the former Soviet Union: little more than a collection of wooden houses set around a communal well in the middle of rolling fields. The region of the Ukraine, in which it lies, was always rich. Ever since the Tsars added the territory to their empire at the end of the seventeenth century, it had been their breadbasket; its black, fertile earth and temperate climate were the dream of any farmer. Come harvest time, wagonload after wagonload of corn would head northwards to feed Moscow, St Petersburg and the other big cities of central Russia. The peasant farmers of Yablochnoye, which means ‘apple’, sent their share of grain, too, along with fruit from their orchards.

By the middle of the 1930s, however, this natural bounty had long since been replaced by misery. The countryside was in chaos, the granaries empty, and the pigs and cattle slaughtered. Everywhere there were soldiers and hated agents of the secret police, the NKVO—the blandly named Narodni Komissariat Vnutryenikh Del (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs). Worse than anything, there was famine, terrible famine the like of which the people had never seen before. Into this misery, on 16 October 1936, a baby boy was born: Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo.

The reason for the suffering was simple: Josef Stalin, and his headlong drive to bring Communism to the countryside. The two revolutions of 1917 had swept away the Tsar and brought Lenin and his cohorts of revolutionaries to power. But these essentially urban revolutions had left untouched vast areas of the old Russian empire. Even the years of civil war that had followed did little to change much of rural life. Reds and Whites came and went, but for much of the 1920s, the daily round of villages away from the capital continued much as it always had done. For most rural dwellers, the Bolsheviks’ bold promise of electrification remained little more than a dream; many probably did not even know that Nicholas II and the royal family had been driven from the throne and murdered. By the end of the 1920s, all this was to change.

The impulse came partly from the worsening situation in the cities, which were filling with the urban proletariat in whose proud name the revolution had been made. Several years of private enterprise under Lenin’s New Economic Policy had done much to repair the damage caused by the upheavals of the Civil War, but it was not enough. Although the harvests were good, the so-called middle peasants and their richer cousins, the kulaks, were handing over far less grain to the state than was needed. The fledgling Soviet Union was heading towards a serious grain crisis.

Stalin, who was by now manoeuvring himself into a position of absolute control, was angry. It was not just the lack of food that annoyed him, but also the attitude of the country dwellers. For a man who was used to seeing everything in black and white, the peasants, and the kulaks in particular, were a symbol of everything that he hated: rich, traditionalist and, worst of all, independent and continuing to live out their lives oblivious of the changes going on around them.

The first blow came on 27 December 1929, just a week after the Soviet Union had celebrated Stalin’s fiftieth birthday with the pomp that was to become typical of the ‘personality cult’ built around him. In a speech to a conference of ‘Marxist students of the agrarian question’, the Soviet leader launched a second revolution that was to be every bit as dramatic as the one twelve years before. ‘Either we go backward to capitalism or forward to socialism,’ he declared. This, he told his audience, would mean collectivisation: sweeping away the mass of individual peasant holdings that had existed for centuries and grouping their owners into collective or state farms. For Stalin, the process would solve two problems. First, the amount of food requisitioned from the