Why the Soviet police could not catch Chikatilo for 13 long years

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The most famous maniac, who operated for 13 years, and on his account 43 victims (those who managed to prove) Andrei Chikatilo frightened not only with his cruelty, but also elusiveness. Thousands of suspects, hundreds of suspects, several arrests (including Chikatilo himself) - and the crimes continue anyway. Accuracy and unsurpassed intelligence, incredible luck or negligence - what was the reason that the maniac, whose name became a household name, avoided the deserved punishment for so many years?

Biography of a respectable citizen and the reverse side of the medal

The future maniac was born in 1936 in the Kharkov region, his father was drafted to the front by the beginning of the war, but did not show much heroism, he even surrendered. Later, the Americans released him and extradited him to the USSR, and at home he was sent to a camp. This, perhaps, can be considered the only black spot in the biography of a lover of communist literature, teacher, supplier, engineer, quiet and calm husband and father.

One can guess that Andrei's military childhood was extremely difficult. For example, he believes that he had a brother, Stepan, who was eaten. It is quite possible that this story is an invention, it is possible that Stepan was, but his parents themselves ate him. There is no documentary evidence of the presence of a brother. Perhaps my mother came up with this story to save Andrey from roaming the streets, where in fact there are a lot of people who are obscured by hunger. Given the war years and the famine in Ukraine, the mother's fears could be justified.

The fact that the boy's psyche was shattered can be judged even by the fact that up to 12 years old he suffered from urinary incontinence, however, this also tormented his mother, who, apparently tired of endless washing, beat him for another puddle on the bed. Among his peers, he also regularly got it, of course - the son of a traitor. The boy could burst into tears for any trifling reason. In addition, since childhood, he wore glasses and this was also a reason for bullying.

After graduating from school, he tries to enter the law faculty of Moscow State University, but does not pass on points. But it was more convenient for him to blame his father for this, they say, his offense is costing him a career. Becomes a student at a communications school, then receives a higher education. Serves in the border troops in Central Asia, and then in Berlin. After the army, he moved to a small village near Rostov-on-Don, where he worked as an engineer at a telephone exchange. At the same time, he periodically writes to the regional newspaper.

He chose very serious topics for articles: education, population census, sports competitions, patriotic education of youth, labor exploits. In 1965, he became the head of the committee for physical education and sports, entered the philological faculty as a teacher of the Russian language. He had obvious philological inclinations, and he also loved to read.

Andrei met his wife through his sister, he was modest in dealing with girls and did not get to know anyone. His future wife Theodosia, too, could not boast of the attention of persons of the opposite sex, but she also gave the impression of a decent person, she worked as the head of a kindergarten. Literally a month and a half later, they got married. The wife was sure that she got married very successfully. Still, the husband does not drink, does not smoke, hard-working. There were no scandals in their family, they saved money and were able to acquire the object of universal envy - "Moskvich". In 1989, the couple divorced, but their divorce was fictitious, so they got another apartment.

Nothing unusual in the life of Comrade Chikatilo happened. Many Soviet citizens have similar facts in their biographies. But the brutal insides broke out and Andrei could no longer restrain him. In 1970, he got a job as a physical education teacher, and then the Russian language. The school was of a boarding type. Even then, those around him began to notice the oddities in his behavior. He was too soft, he could stroke the students, and then he began to go to the boarding school and for a suspiciously long time at the girls' rooms. But then no one began to inflate the scandal.

But his harassment became more overt and was eventually kicked out of school after two schoolgirls complained about the harassment. And even after that, he was not tried, imprisoned, not registered, but simply fired.

After that, he gets a job at the GPTU and gets himself a mistress. This, perhaps, was his only normal relationship. It is quite possible that if he had stayed with her, there would have been no subsequent events. But he was laid off and he moved to Shakhty. Here he again settles closer to the children, and again there were rumors that the new teacher is very fond of looking after sleeping boys. But even here the leadership of the educational institution does not take any measures, believing that this is how the guys take revenge on the teacher for being exacting.

The first unpunished crime untied his hands

The first crime, which is considered the beginning of the "career" of a maniac, happened in 1978. But, in fairness, it should be noted that the court excluded this incident from the list of Chikatilo cases due to lack of evidence. The victim was a 9-year-old girl and suspicions fell on the recently released pedophile Alexander Kravchenko. The logic of the investigators is quite transparent - there are no former pedophiles.

Meanwhile, Kravchenko's wife claims that her husband was at home that evening and did not go anywhere. He was released. But not even a month had passed when Kravchenko got into the police for another case - theft. It was then that they were able to put the squeeze on him, they put him in a cell with a repeat offender, from whom he constantly received beatings and threats, meanwhile, his wife was threatened that she would go for complicity in the murder. The woman signed all the necessary documents, Kravchenko was imprisoned for 15 years. But his relatives managed to get the case reviewed and he was executed. Seven years later, it turned out that Kravchenko was innocent.

Despite the fact that Chikatilo was able to escape punishment, he got scared and hid for three years. There were reasons to be scared, he literally walked along the edge. The case was assigned to an experienced investigator, who immediately interrogated the local residents with great care. They then told that the day before they saw him with a man, they even made a composite sketch, according to which the chief Chikatilo identified his subordinate. But then the situation with Kravchenko changed and they forgot about Chikatilo, because the accused in the case has already appeared, who writes a frank confession. A formal approach that cost the lives of fifty people.

Case of Fools

This is the nickname for the case that was conducted over the corpses that the maniac left behind, starting in 1981. Investigators combined the cases into one, realizing that all these monstrous deeds were committed by the same psychopath.

Investigators were sure that a normal person could not do this, so they checked persons who were registered with psychiatrists. So Shaburov and Kalenik were detained - both with psychiatric diagnoses, both of them were taken to the police on other charges, but soon became the main suspects in a series of murders. The confessions they gave were entered into huge volumes of the case.

The defendants in the case confused the sex of the children, the circumstances, the time of the commission, but they signed everything that the investigators slipped them into. They gave up on all these inconsistencies, they say, what to take from them, in fact, the case is about psychiatric patients.

Later it became clear that the investigators asked leading questions, and the suspects agreed with the proposed options. The interrogation was based on that. The two suspects were behind bars, and killings continued in nearby towns. Closed the "case of fools" only in 1985, at the same time the accused were released. By this time, the number of victims of this maniac exceeded one and a half dozen.

Traveling work - as the secret of elusiveness

If in 1984 the maniac had been appointed head of the supply department at one of the industries, then, most likely, he would have been caught earlier. But his work involved a traveling nature, so he committed crimes all over the country.

In September 1984, he falls into the hands of the Rostov police. Two police officers pay attention to him. The maniac behaved suspiciously and hung around all the time on the territory of the station, next to which 7 corpses had already been found. The police even set surveillance on him and found out that he was aimlessly driving along different routes, changing from one bus to another, and molesting girls. He was detained pending clarification, it turned out that in his briefcase there was a rope, a knife, a towel, soap, petroleum jelly. But the supplier was not at a loss, said that he was tying the box with a rope, he would cut off the excess rope with a knife, and he needed Vaseline for shaving.

Then they took a blood test from him and, after finding out that she was of the second group, and not the fourth, he was released. All biological fluids left on the corpses belonged to a person with the fourth blood group. It was then that the opinion began that Chikatilo possessed a rare feature - biological fluids by blood group differed from his real blood group. Later, it was believed that this myth was created in order to justify the laboratory error.

At the very beginning, the investigators did not have any biological traces of the criminal at all - the crime scenes were discovered too late, when all traces were erased by time. Only when the number of victims exceeded two dozen did it become known that the blood type of the offender was 2 or 4. A second study proved the 4th group. Even experienced investigators were perplexed that this modest and average person, who is afraid of his wife, and blushes, passing tests of biological fluids, can turn into a real beast.

Forest belt

After he was released, he killed 21 more people. This was a real challenge to the militia, the population was indignant, the leadership of the system was ready to rip off the shoulder straps. The decision was made to take extreme measures. In 1985, the operation "Lesopolosa" was announced, which took place under the control of the Central Committee of the CPSU. This operation is still called the most large-scale law enforcement of all that is in Soviet and Russian history.

200 thousand people were checked and more than a thousand crimes, including serious ones, were solved. We expanded the database of people with sexual disabilities by 50 thousand people, almost 6 thousand people with mental disorders. During the operation, constant patrolling of the railways and the forest that adjoins them was organized.

It was during this operation that psychiatrist Alexander Bukhanovsky joined the case. It was he who immediately put forward the opinion that the criminal is an average person and unremarkable, has no mental diagnoses. It got to the point that police officers, dressed in civilian clothes, were constantly driving on the electric trains, who were supposed to act as bait. Chikatilo could not help but see what was happening and hid, for the entire 1986 he did not commit a single murder, later he began to kill outside the region. In addition, business trips throughout the country allowed him to remain unnoticed for a long time.

Detention of Chikatilo

The new investigator Kostoev, appointed in this case, having studied the case materials, drew attention to Chikatilo, who had previously been involved in this case. I set up surveillance on him and realized that he still behaves suspiciously, every now and then sticks to children and girls. On November 20, he went to the hospital, for this he even had to take time off from work. He was worried about the finger that the last victim bit him.

After the hospital, he returned home, took a three-liter can and went to the stall for a beer. The police detained him near a beer stall, where he again tried to meet someone. It seemed to suspicious investigators that a tall, healthy man was carrying a three-liter can in a net, in which there was about half a liter of beer. At home, they found shoes that matched the size and imprint of the footprint with those in the file as found at the scene of the murder, a briefcase with the same contents and a hammer.

Soviet legislation implied a three-day period of detention, and there was no direct evidence against Chikatilo, he himself did not admit anything. Then the psychiatrist Bukhanovsky came to the rescue, who had already studied the personality of the alleged killer. The psychiatrist did not do anything special - he simply read to him some excerpts from his own psychological portrait. The maniac could not stand it, burst into tears and confessed everything. Bukhanovsky argued that Chikatilo wanted to hide his fantasies, because he was sure that only he was experiencing this, the doctor's words disappointed him.

The Chikatilo case consists of 220 volumes, he underwent three psychiatric examinations, and all of them recognized him as sane and giving an account of his actions. It is noteworthy that during the trial, Chikatilo was put in a cage for protection, there was a great risk that during the trial one of his relatives would deal with him. It took two days to read out the verdict, after the judge pronounced "shooting" the audience applauded.

Until recently, he did not believe that his fate was decided, even on death row, he did exercises, ate well. Nothing seemed to bother her. After all, he wrote one petition after another. Even President Boris Yeltsin. Given his eloquence and obvious writing talent, the letter is touching and with the right accents. He wrote that he spent 40 years of his life working for the good of the country, that all his life he lived in the interests of the Communist Party, and now he wants to live in a free and democratic country. The case is completely fabricated, and he himself has a psychiatric diagnosis.

After his pardon was rejected by the Russian president in early 1994, the sentence was carried out on February 14. In his farewell note, the man who, for his own pleasure, ruined fifty lives, tearfully asked to save his …