The Red Ripper Unleashed: The Horrors of Andrei Chikatilo, Part 1

Brace yourselves as we delve into the disturbing life and heinous crimes of Andrei Chikatilo, infamously known as the "Butcher of Rostov." In this harrowing first installment, we trace Chikatilo's journey from a childhood mired in Soviet-era horrors—witnessing famine, cannibalism, and extreme deprivation—to becoming one of history's most depraved killers. With a predatory focus on society’s most vulnerable, including young children, Chikatilo’s escalating brutality took Soviet Russia by storm, leaving a path of nightmarish atrocities that shook the public to its core. Warning: this episode confronts deeply disturbing themes of violence, starvation, and loss of innocence that are not for the faint-hearted.

Transcript

Andrei Chikatilo Part One (00:00)
I think I speak for us all here at the PIC studio when I say that we thought we'd explored the worst, sickest, most vile human beings last week with the Matamoros case, but I think we found an even worse candidate this time, though I didn't think that was possible. Our subject today is Andrei Chikatilo, a boy born in the darkest time of Soviet rule.

A boy who saw cannibalism, starvation, and more atrocities than any human should have seen in their lifetime. But unlike the other boys and girls of this time, Andrei did not come out of it broken, but hopeful and grateful for a better life than they had seen before. No, this boy grew up to become the very embodiment of evil. He absorbed every ounce of that error and exacted that horror

out into the world with such a vengeance

that there is none to this very day that can compare to his complete and utter evil. And to make matters worse, Chikatilo didn't just kill anyone, he took the lives of the most innocent, the most undeserving. Chikatilo is the murderer of children. We have to add the disclaimer here. This content is going to be dark.

Cannibalism, necropsy, the assault and murder of children, people dying of starvation. Think every atrocity that can befall man and Andrei Chikatilos life and crimes sums it up in one bloody vicious package.

If these are subjects that disturb you, or if you've had trouble getting through the Matamoros case, well, this is not one for you. You've been warned.

But if that isn't enough to put you off of the subject of the matter, then welcome to all of our new listeners and to the old hats. Welcome back. It's good to have you here again.

This is the PIC True Crime Podcast where we delve into the dark, the mysterious, and the very limits of human depravity. I'm Bree I'm Mike. And I'm Heather.

Now, before we get into the beginnings of this hideous excuse for a human being, we need to apologize for our pronunciations here. We're talking about Russia and the surrounding countries that fell under USSR rule.

And Russian is one of the most difficult languages to learn and pronounce.

But I'm sure our listeners will be lenient with any mistakes on our part, though you're welcome to have a laugh at our expense. We sure did when we tried saying some of these names earlier.

And we also have to set the scene of what life was like in Ukraine in the 30s when Chikatilo was born.

Because saying things were rough is a bit of an understatement. Normally we'd refer to the subject by their last name, but Chikatilo is a mouthful, so we're going to call him by his first name.

even though we usually dislike giving a monster of this enormity a first name. Make no mistake, Andrei Chikatilo was no human, he was an animal. We'll also avoid the politics of war and royal families, but let's just say things were not ideal, even before World War II.

To sum things up in a nutshell, Ukraine was and is the biggest producer of wheat in all of Europe. So you'd think that the breadbasket of the north would have well-fed children growing up in middle-class homes at the very least. But that's far from the case. Under communist rule, almost none of those crops ever reached Ukrainian households. It was divided between all of the countries

who did not have the fertile growing soils and harsher climates.

Peasants and highlords and everyone in between suffered in the cold winters with many dying of starvation It got so bad that those who were brave enough to venture out in the hopes of stealing food from the farms were punished with death for stealing from the empire.

Look, just trust us when we say, people were dying of starvation in the streets at such an alarming rate that anyone who wasn't underweight was recognized instantly as a cannibal. Because eating the deceased was the only way that some got to eat at all, and the ones willing to commit that ultimate atrocity were the only ones who had any meat on their bones. Pun intended.

And when Russia later entered into the Second World War, things just got worse. All in all, estimated 6 million people died of starvation, or conditions and circumstances, exacerbated by the famine under Stalin's rule. But we're in the 30s now, a good decade before the Great War. Let's just say life was grim long before the Nazis marched into Ukraine for little Andrei.

He was born with hydrocephalus, which back in the day was called water on the brain. It's when there's a buildup of fluid in the ventricles of the brain and it can cause a great deal of damage if it's not treated early enough.

Anything from causing lifelong tremors, problem swallowing, or causing a child to never develop the ability to control their bowels, epilepsy, and even damage so severe that children born with the condition just never mentally develop at all. Please understand that not every child who's diagnosed with this condition is doomed to a life of care. The after effects vary greatly in severity, depending on what part of the brain is affected and how early it's treated.

Most children born with it today are immediately treated and suffer no ill effects later in lives. But Andrei did have lasting effects that most agree are traced back to his complicated birth.

He wet the bed until he was well into his teens. As soon as he fell asleep, there was no control over his bladder anymore, no matter how much his mother beat him for his wet sheets. And as we'll discover later, there were some other lasting, let's just say, problems that Andrei might have had because of the hydrocephalus.

Anna was a hard woman as many people of the day had to be. Living with the constant fear of the oppressive regime and the never ending worry of whether or not you were going to eat it all that day.

You kind of had to be made of stone not to lose your mind. But Anna took it to another level. It sounds like she enjoyed berating and humiliating her son. He was never good enough, never smart enough, and Andrei was always too soft and too disappointing. Anna never praised him, but she certainly spared no opportunity to criticize and punish him for every misstep. It's not like Andrei had

any place to escape from her overbearing and strict and sometimes humiliating parenting. They lived in a one-bedroom house that more closely resembled a stone shack than a home, and he was not allowed to go beyond their front gate.

The only place where he was not under his mother's constant scrutiny was at school. And there things were even worse. Shy, awkward, and completely out of place in social settings. He was a predictable target for bullies.

Never mind that everyone was starving and barely scraping by. Kids can be mean under any circumstances, especially to an underdeveloped scrawny boy that stammered if he was spoken directly to.

Despite the harassment at home and at school, Andrei was a good student. When he was five, Andrei's father, Roman, was drafted into the Red Army when Germany invaded the Ukraine in 1941. But Roman was injured and captured just months later. He'd spend the next five years as a prisoner of war.

When his father left, Andrei was kept even closer to home than before.

The constant bombings in the area would have made any mother want to protect her children. But Anna had a, let's just say an interesting way to keep her son inside the confines of their yard. She had told him that he used to have an older brother named Stepan, who had been lured out of the yard by their own starving neighbors when he was only four years old. They took him to the woods and ate him.

This grisly story was enough to keep the boy close to home, and it obviously struck a deep nerve with him, because this terrible fate that befell his brother would be the blueprint that would later become Andrei Chikatilos M.O.

Chances are that Anna never had another son and that this was totally made up story to keep Andrei from wandering. But we'll never know for sure. It's not like the 1930s and a famine swept Ukraine had any birth records or enough survivors of that time to corroborate whether or not the Chikatilos had another son.

Andrei and his mother scraped by alone. Sometimes they were forced to forage for leaves and insects so that they could eat. But they made it, despite their dire circumstances.

Between the ages of five and 10, Andrei was no stranger to seeing the backdoor human meat trading going on in the neighborhood. He saw the mass graves and he definitely experienced his fair share of bombings.

But this last traumatizing experience was one that he found fascinating. When the bombs came and the people of the town would run for cover into the woods and hide among the rubble, when it was finally safe to venture out, Andrei looked forward to seeing those torn and broken bodies of soldiers and townsfolk strewn across the streets. The sight fascinated him, and if it were up to little Andrei, he'd have liked to go closer to see the corpses up close.

In 1946, Anna gave birth to a daughter. This was while her husband was still being held captive.

Unfortunately, the most likely reason for her daughter's conception was not that Anna found love somewhere else. Tatyana's birth was the result of assault, probably from a German soldier. There is a chance that Andrei witnessed the rape, given that the family lived in a one-bedroom shack and shared that single room with each other. He never discussed witnessing any assault on his mother later in his life. So that is just a theory.

In 1949, when Andrei was 13, his father was released from the camp he was being held at by the American soldiers. He did not return home a hero or a man for whom there was any sympathy for suffering in inhumane conditions for half a decade. Instead, the townspeople and the government, for that matter, saw Roman as a traitor for being captured by the enemy.

What was he supposed to do, fall on his sword instead of staying alive? He was a hostage, not a traitor. Roman probably wished he had died, given how terribly the people he'd grown up with treated them after he finally returned home after all those years of suffering.

The Chickatillos were ostracized. No one would talk to them except if they were shouting obscenities at the family. And at school, Andrei didn't have his parents to shield him. There, the kids made it crystal clear that he was the son of a traitor and a weakling. And apparently his scum father's genes were strong in Andrei too.

What his relationship with his father was like was never really mentioned anywhere. And in all of the interviews, Andrei never really talks about his father much. The most accepted assumption is that he resented his father for being a traitor just because everybody else did. And he needed someone to blame for the venom he in the household was receiving from all sides. I got the idea that he avoided talking about his father. Andrei liked to paint a picture with his stories.

I give him that much, but not when it came to Roman. There, he always stuck to the facts and not much more. But he spoke pretty openly about all of the other traumas he'd endured. So it could just be that he saw Roman as a stranger and nothing more than just someone that made his life more difficult than it already was. But Roman did raise Tatyana as his own child and her place in the home was never questioned.

And before you hate Anna too much for her harsh treatment of her son, you need to remember the times and what this woman had to endure to keep her children alive. If I had to traumatize my kids with horror stories to keep them from getting killed by invading soldiers, I'd probably do it too.

She risked her life on many occasions to steal bread from Soviet grain silos. If she ever caught, they'd have killed her or sent her away to a gulag camp in Siberia. I think Anna was cold and maybe even a little cruel, but she did what she had to do to keep them alive. There were a million other ways that Ukrainian children were traumatized every day. Andrei was wired to seek out the deepest, darkest parts of his war-torn upbringing.

What I'm trying to say is that it's not all Anna's fault. I don't think so anyway. As you can imagine, Andrei was a dark, miserable boy by the time he reached his teens.

The only ones who ever gave him praise and maybe some semblance of joy were his teachers. Andrei was promoted to school editor at only 14 years old, beating out much older children for the position. But at least World War II was now over, and although Soviet Union and all of the other countries under that umbrella weren't free of political oppression and strife, there was at least a great deal of improvement.

It's around this time that Andrei began to notice girls, but he had an unusual approach to his curiosities. Girls in school weren't exactly interested in him. The teachers liked him well enough, but he was still gawky and awkward and still the target of the bigger boys. So he didn't bother making any advancements towards girls his own age because he knew he'd be rebuffed. Instead, he cornered a 10-year-old girl in the neighborhood.

and tried to force her to the ground. The struggle excited him so much that he ejaculated before he could even get her into a submissive position to do, well, let's not mince words here. He had every intention of raping this child. The struggle itself just excited him too much to actually go through with it to the end.

And he was 14? Yeah. And instead of running for help or raising the alarm, the little girl laughed and ridiculed him for his fumbled attempt at an assault. She made no secret of what Andrei tried to do to her and how incompetent he'd been at it.

That's wild.

cannot show how I feel about this. Andrei should have been taken to the cops, sure, but it's the go that shocks me. I know, I can't decide if this kid had a hell of a lot of tough guts or her mockery of the entire ordeal is concerning.

Like, what must that kid have seen in her life to laugh it off like a bad sitcom? Well, it definitely changed Andrei at a core level. He never approached girls during his high school years again, age appropriate or not. And that thrill of fighting with someone smaller and weaker than him was a fantasy that he started to obsess about.

In 1954, when Andrei graduated high school, the Greater Soviet Union saw a boom in economic and technological growth that extended to the education sector.

Since he was such a good student, the options for his future in education were seemingly endless. Given the unpredictable times during the war, most kids of that time didn't graduate high school at 19 like they should have. So, graduating at 20 wasn't out of the ordinary. But before he could go to university,

he had to enter into his mandatory military service, which was expected of every able-bodied young man and served three years.

His record was unproblematic and his academic prowess sent him into the KGB communications. The KGB was the main security agency for the Soviet Union and was at the time only rivaled by U.S. intelligence agencies. Unfortunately, there's no James Bond level hijinks that happened here. Andrei served his time, never saw any combat.

and did as he was told without complaint until he was free to leave and go and pursue his studies at the age of 25.

Initially, he wanted to study law, but to everyone's surprise, he failed the entrance exam. Andrei felt that this failure was not due to him lacking the skills or the brains to attend law school, but instead it was all because of the massive conspiracy.

He believed that because his father was considered a traitor, that this status had somehow gotten him blacklisted from the prestigious Moscow State University. And don't think that Andrei was some paranoid nut here. The Soviet Union had a history of doing things like this, especially to the Ukrainians. It's not that they were necessarily denied entrance to certain universities and fields.

It's just that those from mother Russia were given a much higher status and consideration before everyone else.

There was the belief that a lot of those prisoners captured during the war or who had come in contact for any long period of time with people outside the Soviet Union came back corrupted that they were spies.

Remember, this was just before the Cold War between Russia and America. Things were already heating up between the two countries, and no one was more paranoid than the Russian government. The fact that Roman was released by American soldiers of all people makes it almost certain that they were keeping tabs on the family after they settled back into post-war life.

Seriously, this is the era from where all the spy movies get their inspiration. It really was that bad. mean, can you imagine, though, returning from hell and being shunned by your own people, by your government, and now even your own son? And the wife and kids you left behind had suffered just as much. It's a miracle that that time didn't produce more serial killers. Actually, the 50s.

all the way into the 80s produced more serial killers than any other era in human history. It's sort of like the serial decades if you look back at that time, and it's all because of World War II.

What do you mean? There were lots of other major wars before and after that.

Not like this, there wasn't. More than 85 million people died in World War II, probably well above 100 million if you take the after effects into account. The men who came back home were traumatized and broken and they inflicted every ounce of horror they'd lived out on their wives and children. The kids growing up during and after the war were raised in incredibly harrowing conditions, starvation, witnessing death, destruction,

constant fear and when daddy finally comes home he's a raging alcoholic to deal with the things he's seen

Or he's got severe PTSD that's going untreated and he's taking out all that out on his family. No wonder the kids from that time produced almost 2000 serial killers worldwide. Seriously, it's called the golden age of serial killers.

Like it's a phenomena that has been studied because of the psychos that the second world war produced.

Back to Andrei. He was forced to seek another field of study,

went on to pursue her degree in Russian language and literature.

He didn't finish it all in the usual four years though. He did half of his courses, then went on to enroll in a vocational school in 1955 and began working as a telephone engineer in 1960. He did briefly work as a farmhand during this time too.

But why give up his university degree in literature? He wasn't giving it up completely. The information is still a little sketchy here, but it looks like he needed to move closer to his family. Remember, his parents were farm workers and they were barely scraping by.

It's possible he did this to be closer to support them.

Or it could have been an abysmal experience with his first girlfriend that made him want to avoid her for a few years. He asked the girl out and things were going all right. But when it finally came to doing the deed, Andrei couldn't get the soldier to salute. No. Unlikely, they tried to have sex a few times and he could never get an erection, but he could ejaculate. This is an unusual combination and would indicate a medical issue, not a psychological one.

The general consensus is that it was probably a result of being born with hydrocephalus and that the fluid buildup caused some neurological damage after all. wet his bed well into adolescence and it's possible that sensation or a miscommunication between the brain and his nether regions just wasn't working as it should.

Andrei studied in Russia, not in the Ukraine where his parents were. So I think he was humiliated and wanted to get as far away from that experience as possible.

While working as an engineer, his sister Tatyana moved in with him for six months while she prepared for her wedding to a young man in the same city. Tatyana worried about her brother's shyness and made it her mission to find him a good wife.

She set him up on a date with a friend named Feodosia Odnacheva, whom everyone just called Fayana and the two were married less than a month after meeting each other.

Maybe he wanted to get a ring on it before she could run away after she found out he was impotent. Probably, but he still couldn't have asked for a better wife considering his... problems with self-esteem around women in the bedroom. Fayana was devoted to her husband, and even though they could never officially have sex like a regular couple, they made the best of a bad situation.

Andrei couldn't sustain an erection, but he could ejaculate. So they got creative and artificially inseminated Fayyana by manual means.

So, Feyona gave birth to their daughter in 65, two years after getting married.

It couldn't have helped his already fragile mental state though. I mean his sex life is one embarrassment after another. That's what's so tragic about this. Fayana sounds like a damn angel. If she was frustrated or unhappy, she never made an issue of his ineptitudes. She carried her lot with as much grace as a woman in her position could.

She was patient and kind with her husband and never spoke publicly about any marital problems.

Shortly after Lyudmila's birth, Andrei returned to school to finish his degree in Russian language and literature. Their son Yuri was born in 1969, and Andrei graduated the next year.

The little family looked like any other from the outside, caring, devoted wife, hardworking husband with two happy and thriving children. The students that shared classes with Andrei when he finished up his degree noticed him immediately. Not surprising since Andrei was a decade older than anyone else in his class. They described him as quiet and usually in the background. That's until anyone tried to engage in conversation with him.

Andrei had an air of superiority about him and he definitely considered their company beneath him.

It's not that he was outwardly mean or openly condescending, just that he had a bit of an ego. Most dismissed it as stemming from his much older age and the fact that he was married with children and that he'd been an engineer before completing his studies in literature. If anything, they looked up to him a little. No one liked him, don't get me wrong, but he was an engineer and now qualified teacher too.

Back then, teaching was still held in high regard and anyone who was in charge of teaching anything of worth to any child, no matter what the age, was respected.

Secretly, however, Andrei wasn't coping as well as his wife with his sexual dissatisfaction.

The frustration and lack of a satisfying outlet was starting to weigh on him and his feelings of inadequacy that started when he tried to assault that young girl when he was just 14 years old was about to reach its peak when he was hired to teach middle school in let's just say the Rostov Oblast region of Russia because there's no way on earth. Anyone of us can pronounce the city's name. yeah. Let me see.

Nova Shantz Tint Note Nov Note You know what? Nevermind. The Rostov Oblast region, it is. Let's not embarrass ourselves here.

That was hilarious. Say it again. shush you, or I'll make you say it. Andrei was a terrible teacher. Once he got in front of a classroom full of boisterous 11 and 12 year olds, he was a shy and nervous wreck. All that cockiness he'd had with his uni classmates shattered when he was put up to actually teaching the subject that he thought he was so much better than anyone else at.

But when the kids were separated from the main group, they were individually exactly like the little girl he'd assaulted when he was 14.

no, I forgot, he's teaching middle schoolers. It started with overly sexual and inappropriate comments and then moved on to touching. It's not clear how far his perversions went with his students because the school never officially reported him to the authorities.

How long did this go on for? Between 1971 and 1973, so two years. The school got reports of his unusual behaviors almost as soon as he started, but they ignored it for as long as they possibly could. No kidding, two years? Finally, after he was spotted fondling himself in front of students by another teacher, the school took some action. Though it wasn't exactly a big deal for them,

He wasn't even outright fired, just sort of asked to leave as quietly as he possibly could to avoid a scandal for the school, for himself, and the reputation of his family. Wow, how did his family react?

They didn't know that he was dismissed or what the circumstances were. He just quietly went on to another school for a few more years before settling in a mining town not far away from his original post. Every school he worked at had boarding schools attached to them, and he and the other teachers would make their rounds to ensure that the kids were in bed or in study hall, that sort of thing. Obviously, he'd...

time his visits to try to catch the girls undressing,

But it was when he discovered that some of the teenagers were sexually active that the real resentment started brewing. Why could these kids, who never took him seriously in class, have what he never could in all of his years on Earth? He wanted to possess them, but he also resented them.

And the early 70s paved the perfect practice field for Andrei to see just how close he could get to these kids. He started carrying chewing gum on him to hand out to children at playgrounds, and he hung around public toilets hoping to get a sneak peek when the kids went in. It wasn't hard to gain their trust.

It was a relatively small place. Everyone knew that he was a teacher, and well, it shouldn't be surprising that he molested at least three girls during this time. The middle schoolers were easy to control, so that's where his main focus was.

The teenagers were naturally more distrusting, but most likely the age range had more to do with that first experience he'd had as a teenager with a 10-year-old girl.

Andrei Chikatilo Part One (29:53)
Finally, on December 22, 1978, when Andrei was 42 years old, an opportunity arose that he just couldn't resist.

One night at a bus stop, he spotted nine-year-old Yelena Zakhatanova. He lured her to a property he'd bought a year previously, and there he attempted to assault her. But he failed to get an erection, and she struggled. Andrei stabbed her three times in the abdomen before strangling her to death. Somewhere between this brutal struggle, he'd ejaculated. The thrill of death and suffering was all he needed after all. And poor Yelena was

the first one to satiate this year's worth of pent-up aggression and frustration. Andrei Chikatilo had finally found what he was looking for, but the murder was sloppy and he nearly got caught.

Why do they always get lucky? Well, someone else was going to suffer for this crime instead. You see, he threw her body in the river and even though the DNA was no longer on Yelena's body after being in the water for two days, they did find the scene of the murder. It wasn't hard. Witnesses saw her talking to a man fitting Andrei's description before they left the bus stop together, heading towards the property that he had bought.

On the grounds was a dilapidated house. And inside was Yelena's blood, her school backpack, and her clothes. The blood sample could only be matched to a blood type, not a DNA sequence.

Yelena's blood type was extracted, but the police had two suspects. They brought in Andrei, but his wife gave him an alibi saying that he was home that night. and since he had no official previous record, they let him go without pushing the matter further.

But there was another man who did have a record. 25-year-old Aleksandr Kravchenko assaulted a teenager a few years before, and his wife just happened to have the same blood type as the victim. They found a shirt of Kravchenko's that had blood on it, which he said belonged to his wife, probably from the last time he'd beaten her during a domestic dispute.

The blood on the shirt matched both the wife and the victim's blood types, type AB. He was brutally interrogated, and so was his wife and the friend who lived with him. After days of beatings and threats, they all retracted their testimony that Kravchenko was home on that night. He gave a confession, and his wife and friend said they'd never seen him return home that night from work.

Cold War interrogation, how bad was it? Bad enough that Kravchenko was willing to face the firing squad just to get the interrogations to stop. I don't know how I feel about the guy who got sentenced to death for the crime either. He was a convicted rapist and he really did commit a terrible crime against a teenager. He was a monster too. But he never killed anyone. He didn't deserve to die for the death of Elena.

or the torture he endured at the hands of the police. And why did Fayyana cover for him? She must have known something was up.

I just think that the possibility that your husband could be a killer was inconceivable for her. Not only because she was devoted to him completely, but also because Andrei couldn't have sex. It was physically impossible for him. They had no intimacy at all outside of managing to have children. There was no attempt or initiation from him at all after their kids were born. He was shy and timid on the outside too.

The only time after college the ego ever showed up for him was when he had a child singled out from the pack. I can totally see how she couldn't believe him to be capable of something like this, physically and personally. Whatever mind games Fayana was playing to convince herself that everything was well and good would turn into mental gymnastics when three girls came forward two years later, accusing Andrei of molesting them. Again,

No official charges were made, but it did bring his teaching career to an end. Unfortunately, we can't get too excited about him finally being taken away from all those children. His new job gave him all the opportunity to travel across Russia, making him virtually invisible. damn.

His new job was as a supply clerk at an industrial complex that sold building supplies. That meant that he got to get as close to being transient, undetectable drifter as a family man with a reputation to cultivate could hope to have. Andrei tried to avoid children after that first murder, not because he felt guilty or because he didn't want to do it again. It's because the treatment of

Kravchenko scared him and the amount of mistakes he made.

For three years, Andrei kept it together.

But trains in Russia at that time were the main form of public transportation. He kept coming into contact with kids. It was just inevitable that he'd go back to the only true form of sexual satisfaction he'd ever gotten in his life. The second murder, in my opinion, is what opened the floodgates. The assault on Yelena finally put the pieces together for Andrei. Blood and suffering, like he'd seen so many times in his childhood.

Combined with the lifeless stare that the starving people in his childhood had in their eyes was the same. But only these young victims couldn't laugh at him or look at him with pity like his wife did. When their eyes went blank, they'd served their purpose. They'd given him a glimpse into his violent childhood, all while serving his desires. But his second murder was the one that showed him that he could get away with it.

that he had nothing to fear. His job and his brilliant mind were going to keep him hidden.

The second victim wasn't planned ahead of time. He just struck up a conversation with a teenager waiting at a bus stop and found her trusting enough to convince her to go to a secluded area with him. She was a 17-year-old girl who he'd talked into going for a drink of vodka down by the river nearby.

pounced on Larissa Tkachenko when they were out of sight and tried to assault her But just like before he couldn't physically rape her but the struggle was enough to get him off

When he finished prematurely, Larissa began to scream, so he stuffed mud inside of her mouth and started beating and strangling her until she died. And here's where things take a very sick turn. With Yelena, he'd come prepared with a knife, but Larissa was a crime of opportunity, and he had no weapon with him at this time. Andrei wasn't quite satisfied with just using his fists. Maybe there wasn't enough blood, or...

He just threw all caution to the wind and decided to enact all of the fantasies he'd ever had inside that sick head of his.

Whatever the case, he continued to mutilate Larissa for hours after she died. I have to warn you, this is going to get gruesome. But I'd rather get through it now and avoid going through it again with all of his other victims. It's important to understand just how depraved his compulsions were and how it almost certainly tied to his childhood experiences.

And this is where the groundwork for his MO was laid. At this point, he truly gave into everything he'd ever wanted to do since he was 14. Andrei took a six-foot-long stick and proceeded to assault the body further. He tore at her skin with his teeth, severing a nipple. He then used a stick to stab through the abdomen several times before covering the body with leaves, sticks, and newspaper. They never found the nipple.

Later we learned that Andrei didn't swallow it by accident in the heat of the moment. No, he took a few minutes to chew it before swallowing.

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

This is going to get worse, isn't it? He's just getting started. Definitely. You might want to save some of those contents of your stomach or you'll have nothing left to throw up as he escalates. Now, there are a lot of victims and we just can't focus on each one of them individually. So we're going to move through these fast. For nine months, Andrei's demons were satiated until June of 82.

He was out buying groceries for his wife in the city and it was in the middle of transitioning between buses when he decided not to take the last bus home, instead opting to walk the rest of the way. This wasn't because he wanted fresh air. Andrei came armed with a knife and had been walking around with it, hoping to find an opportunity to stumble on a new victim for months.

Lyubov Biryuk was 13 years old and she was on her way home after going to the store for her mother. It went as you'd expect. The two struck up a conversation and when they turned a bend where some bushes hid them from view, Andrei forced her to the ground, simulating the sex act until he ejaculated all while alternating between stabbing the victim and strangling her.

When Lyubov finally breathed her last breath, the maiming continued. He stabbed her 22 times and tried to cut out her eyes because he wanted to erase the image of him from them.

Was he delusional?

Not exactly. It's a common superstition in many countries around the world that the last thing the eyes see is burned into them. But honestly, at this point, Andrei was just beginning to experiment, fully immersed in his fantasies. So there's probably some level of delusion in there somewhere. The next three months, he killed five more victims.

Another girl named Lyubov, aged 14, Oleg, 9, Olga, 16,

Irina 19, and Sergey, 15. You might have noticed that Andrei was adding boys to his list of victims. Oleg was his first male victim and his body was never found. So we can't say exactly what happened to him, but judging by the male victims that followed, the sequence of attack and eventual murder doesn't differ much from the girls.

He'd lure the children with candy, chewing gum, or by keeping them company on their way home after getting off the bus or train, and overpower them once they were secluded enough that he was sure they wouldn't be seen. If the victims were in their late teens or early twenties, he usually chose runaways or prostitutes, either by luring them with food, alcohol, or offering to solicit their services.

All of the victims had bite marks and multiple stab wounds. His ninth victim was Olga, a 10-year-old walking back from her piano lesson on the 11th of September, 1982. With Olga, things changed a little again. He went through his usual methods, but after her eyes were removed, he cut open her stomach because he wanted to know what it felt like to put his hands into the warm organs and pull them out. By the time she was found two months later,

vultures had stripped the corpse clean and left behind only bones. Why do you always have to paint the most gruesome picture possible? Mom does have a way with words, doesn't she? I know. It's a hideous talent. That's where you get it from. These kids were so young. Has no one noticed that someone's killing and biting kids yet? It's nine people already.

Police were starting to suspect the serial killer and in January of 83 they put together a task force to investigate their suspicions. They kept it quiet for a month or two but the news trickled down into the public nonetheless. From these first murders, the police were able to tie them together for a few reasons.

All of them had their eyes removed, have trauma to their bodies inflicted after death. If they were children, they were lured away from public transport or they were runways. From the killer, they got grey hairs from many of the bodies as well as plenty of semen. All of the semen came back as the blood type, type AB. At 46 years old, Andrei was almost completely grey.

so it was definitely his hailer.

We're going to get back to the blood a bit later because there's a little snag with Andrei's blood in particular. And don't get it confused with his first victim, Elena's blood. It's purely coincidental that they happened to share the same blood type. Since the papers were being forbidden from covering the story, people were left to make up their own theories. The rumors were running wild.

Everything from multiple killers to werewolves and foreign motor plots ran amok in the public. But the police were sure from the start that this was only one man. All the physical evidence proved that.

Since the search radius was huge, going from the city of Rostov, close to where the Chickatillos lived, to St. Petersburg, and then all the way to Moscow, they decided that it would be more effective if they focused in on those with criminal records that involved sex crimes and the mentally ill.

Unfortunately, the amount of false confessions that their brutal interrogation tactics caused were astronomical. Not to mention half of the people they brought in were mentally ill. They were violent, unpredictable characters that saw little green men running up and down the wall.

It was crystal clear they were in over their heads. The Soviet Union as a whole had only once been up against a serial killer of this magnitude in their history.

Come on, Russia, Ukraine and all of the other countries couldn't have never had any serial killers in their history at all? Well, actually, the people of that era were told by the government that serial killers were wholly a Western issue. It did not exist in Russia. That that was caused by the decadent lifestyle of the Americans, so to say.

sure, always the Americans fault.

With this kind of oppressive regime, two things happen. First, the government has complete control of what gets out to the media, so they probably hid a lot of information too.

How can you sell an idea of paradise state if there are killers running around? Andrei was just so brutal and the fact that he killed kids was highly unusual, so even the censorship couldn't keep a lid on it. And secondly, the police were brutal. Even today, Russian prisons are some of the worst in the world.

The only silver lining to this governance is that a lot of potential killers are too afraid to act on their desires for fear of dying in the prison system. They surveyed every bus stop and train station, taking in every man that was acting suspicious.

The men they questioned were brought in and their blood was tested. And thanks to the resources they were pouring into this investigation, they solved more than a hundred murders, hundreds of rapes and assaults, and many, many cold cases were finally closed. Andrei was nearly caught once when he tried to lure away a little girl. He was seen by officers stationed at the train station and brought in for questioning, but he was let go when his blood type came back.

as A. Was there a mistake in the testing? Nope. There's that snag I was talking about. Andrei has an unusual condition. You mean besides being a child killing animal? There's no medicine for that kind of sickness. And his other condition wasn't exactly a sickness. He was a part of a small percentage of the world's population known as non-secretors, meaning they're

bodily fluids, and bloods don't coincide with one another. There's a whole lot of science to this, so I won't bore you to death,

But long story short, his blood type was A, but his bodily fluids came out as AB during the standard testing.

Must be all that werewolf blood the public was talking about. Well, that werewolf blood bought him another yield

By the end of 83, he'd racked up 17 bodies in total,

with no one noticing that there weren't more murders during his time behind bars. As we said before, we can't go into the details of them all, but I do want to read you guys their names. With so many victims, we forgot that these were kids. Kids with names and lives, and not just some grisly numbers for murder porn.

Irina, Igor, is just seven years old, Valentina, Vera, Sergey,

and an unidentified woman in her late teens or early twenties. Unfortunately, the surnames are impossible for me to pronounce, so I won't butcher it more than it needs to. Poor choice of words there. I mean, wasn't he known as the Butcher of Rostov?

geez. I didn't even realize. My bad.

But yeah, he was called the Butcher of Rostov. The Rostov Ripper, the Red Ripper, and the Forest Strip Killer. But the police were in over their heads. At the start of 84, they thought that the toll was around 10 victims. Andrei wasn't always consistent. One victim, Vera, did not have her eyes removed. So she wasn't connected to Andrei until many years later.

And sometimes the bodies weren't found right away, and the animals go for the eyes and soft tissues first. It was also hard to tell if the damage to the victim's extremities were from a human or an animal after even the slightest amount of decomposition. Andrei focused his ravaging around the sexual organs, but sometimes he'd bite an ear off, a tongue, cut off a nose,

sometimes fingers, and like the scavengers, he was eating the body parts. He also removed the gentelias of his male victims and the uteruses of his female victims. The body parts were never found and it's all but certain that he ate them there, inside the forest, next to his victim. And here is where we need to end the day, I'm afraid.

Next week, we'll look at the years between 84 and 94 because as much as I hate to say it, there's still a decade left of this horrendous animal breathing in air that should be reserved for actual human beings. At the end of 84, the victim count was somewhere between 32 and 34 victims,

most of them children, and all of them more brutally murdered than any serial killer the world's ever seen before. And trust me when I say, things are going to get even worse.

So tune in next week for the long overdue into Andrei Chikatilo Reign of Terror. Personally, I think we stopped for the day at just the right time. I'm not gonna lie. I'm not feeling too good after all that.

Yeah, this one's getting under my skin too. Thank you for joining me and my PICs. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And we will see you next time with more True Crime.