Andrei Chikatilo, Part 2 - The Rostov Ripper

Last week, we uncovered the chilling origins of Andrei Chikatilo, a boy who grew up surrounded by death and destruction in the post-World War II USSR. In Part 2, we delve deeper into the grim legacy of the Rostov Ripper, a man who hid his monstrous nature behind the facade of a respectable, well-educated family man.

As police scrambled to piece together the profile of this prolific serial killer, Chikatilo’s spree of murder and mutilation spanned decades, leaving behind dozens of victims—children, women, and young men. Join Heather, Bree, and Mike as they recount the missteps of law enforcement, the brilliant insights of Dr. Alexander Bukhanovsky, and the relentless hunt to bring justice to the families of Chikatilo’s victims.

From his haunting confessions to the courtroom chaos that followed his capture, this episode examines the horrifying details of one of history’s most infamous killers. If you haven’t listened to Part 1, we recommend starting there to fully understand the twisted mind of Andrei Chikatilo.

Subscribe now to the P.I.C. True Crime Podcast for more in-depth explorations of history's darkest cases.

Transcript

Andrei Part 2 (00:00)
Last week we looked into the harrowing life of a boy growing up in the USSR and what is now the Ukraine. Andrei Chikatilo saw firsthand his neighbors dying of starvation, the mangled corpses left behind after the bombs, and the soldiers of World War II destroyed his hometown on more than one occasion.

He saw the townsfolk rob fresh graves to eat the recently deceased so that they wouldn't starve themselves to death. Andrei was a boy who'd grown up surrounded by death and horror. But unlike other children of his era, he didn't walk away from it at all reasonably intact. Instead, his head was filled with the blank stares of the dead bodies that littered the streets and thoughts of vengeance for the girl who'd laughed at his attempted advances when he was a teenager.

It wouldn't take long before the seemingly respectful, well-educated family man began showing warning signs. He took out his frustrations at the school where he taught literature,

But instead of landing himself in jail for child molestation, Andrei was allowed to walk free and avoid a scandal. Now, with no authority to watch over him anymore and the freedom to travel all across Russia and the Ukraine, the Rostov Ripper was finally released into the world.

And this beast's hunger could only be satiated by the blood of those that need our protection most, the children.

When we last ended, 1983 had just come to an end and the police were trying everything they could to catch a killer that had been operating for five years already.

But police weren't aware of just how many victims there were or how long this killer had really been operating for. They suspected him of 10 murders when reality is it was closer to 20. And they weren't aware of the fact that he wasn't just targeting young girls. Andrei was unusual in many respects and his victim profile is no different.

If you haven't heard part one yet, do yourself a favor and go listen to that one first. There's a lot of history, trauma, and death that you need to know about before we jump into the rest of this horror show that is Andrei's life. But before we get into it, thanks for joining us here on the PIC True Crime Podcast. If you're new here, welcome. And to our regular listeners, welcome back. I'm Heather. I'm Bree And I'm Mike.

Are you ready for this? This case has been riding shotgun with me all week. I know what you mean. It took me a day or two to wind down from all the gore. And just when you think you're ready to eat without gagging, you see a bottle of ketchup and it all comes back to you again.

Geez, Bree that's a colorful picture you paint. Ick! Well, since you're already painting a picture with words, why don't you get us started today?

You got it, let's get into it. 84 started with a bang, if you can call a killing spree that, but it also brought some more insights. Police realized that the killer wasn't just targeting young girls, young boys, and women were on the victim profile too. This killer didn't care who he killed, as long as he thought that he could overpower them and there was an opportunity to get them alone.

They also had a shoe print and a general description from people who'd seen a tall man with some of the victims before they disappeared. Andrei was 6 feet 3 inches tall. Wow, he was tall. Yeah, I was surprised by that too. Given his years of starvation, a lot of kids in that era were stunted.

And when I talk about him being bullied, I always got the impression that he was of a slight build. But he was a damn giant of a man. Puberty went well once World War II came to an end and he got more food.

But that hike made it hard to gauge his age, and the police operated on the assumption that they were looking for a younger man who was just prematurely going gray, like Mom. Hey, it's you that's turning me gray. Cut the hijinks and leave my grays alone.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to upset the person making my food. Moving along! They were sure that they were going to find the killer any day now. But 84 came and went and Andrei killed 15 more people. Two women named in Natalia. Two boys named Dimitri. Yelana, Anna, Svetlana, Liudmila Akmaral Alexander, Irina

All of them were between the ages of 9 and 22, except for three of the victims. Martha Ryabenko was 45 and she was the oldest of all of Andrei's victims. There was an unidentified woman that was in her late 20s.

And I also want to mention a double murder that occurred in May of that year. Tatanya Petrosyan. A 32 year old who just happened to be acquainted with Andrei ran into him at a bus stop.

She and her 11 year old daughter Svetlana had no reservations about walking with him down a forested path, probably thinking it would be little safer to walk with a man that they knew. He killed their mother first, and when little Svetlana tried to run he beat her to death with a hammer.

Here's my assessment. I think that he preferred his female victims to be pre-adolescent. You know, between 9 and 14.

The male victims were all over the place. One of them was just seven, but some of the boys were 15 and 16.

I think the boys and the older women were taken when there weren't any his preferred victims around and the opportunity just happened to come by. The hammer throws me off though. He had been carrying it with the intention of using it. Why change the weapon of choice? Everyone was on the lookout. He sold construction equipment, so that would give him reason for carrying a hammer. Maybe that's why. Or he was just bored.

Andrei did have a habit of switching things up every now and then. There's nothing typical with this guy. Everything's out of the ordinary with him. That's also what the criminal psychiatrists, brought in thought.

That's also what the criminal psychiatrist they brought in thought. He was the first one to put it together that the killer was between the ages of 45 to 50.

Dr. Alexander Bukanofsky came to this conclusion by interviewing the serial killer Anatoly Slivko. And this guy's story reads almost exactly as Andreis did. Born in the 30s, he suffered hunger and was surrounded by war and death. He even had a sister who worried about him not having a girlfriend and introduced him to a friend of hers that he married as well. Slivko also had erectile dysfunction.

and he and his wife were only intimate for the purpose of procreation. They didn't touch each other again after the birth of their second child. Whoa, this is almost word for word like Andrei's life. That's nuts. And it gets even creepier. He targeted young boys and he was a necrophile too, often dismembering and mutilating the bodies of his victims after they died. Bukhanovsky saw that

the similarities in the murders and he was the one who first tied the trauma of war to the exceptionally gruesome nature of the killers that came out of that time. He theorized that the killer needed blood and suffering in order to reach sexual satisfaction. And since the seminal fluid was never inside the victims, he also came to the correct assumption that there must be some form of erectile dysfunction.

And his frequent interactions with death and the cannibalism of his neighbors and so many children suffered through was what influenced his need to eat and mutilate the corpse after the murder was committed.

He also thought that the killer traveled for work and that was why he targeted victims around public transport stops. Bukanofsky suggested that they bring in American experts. We've had our fair share of serial killers here in the US and the professionals who specialize in serial murders are much more experienced. And Bukanofsky doubted whether or not he had made the right assessment in his profile.

I mean, this guy should have really been a profiler. He should have never second guessed himself. This guy was spot on with his assessment. He got farther than any of the investigators did, and I think he understood it better.

But they didn't know that Bukhanovsky just had theories. Interesting theory, sure, and they definitely took it seriously, but asking the US to assist was going way too far for the Russian government.

They decided instead to tighten surveillance even more. Officers were spread out further and civilian volunteer brigades were doing patrols along the train stations so that more ground could be covered. This was a huge mistake, getting the public involved, because André signed up to patrol too. And this gave him access to the patrol schedules and he could easily avoid detection by choosing the places and times when he knew no authorities would be around.

Authorities also revisited the possibility that there might be more than one killer around, one targeting girls and women and the other going after young boys. Bukanofsky did not agree with this assessment, but you can understand why no one could be sure of anything. Half of the bodies were skeletons when they were discovered and identifying them was a nightmare.

Or they were so decomposed that there was no way to tell for sure what traumas were inflicted on their bodies.

You know, I'm so confused here. Why was it taken so long for the bodies to be discovered? It's not like he'd let them miles into the wilderness or some abandoned place. It was in the walking distance of bus stops and regular walking trails. Because Russia's cold, decomposition doesn't follow the normal route.

The body freezes masking the smell, even if it only freezes partially. The predators and scavengers there are adapted to the smell and find the frozen corpses. They could find a body even under a fresh layer of snow just hours after death. All of his victims, maybe 30 or 40 % of them, were found in time to really get a good look at what the killer was doing. At the end of 84,

He'd killed an estimated 36 victims.

Holy crap, that's a lot.

And that's the least estimated amount. Of the 36 victims, only six viable semen samples were found altogether. And that's 30 victims that were too decomposed, sometimes to the point of complete skeletal conditions, or they were ravaged by animals and left the elements too long to get any DNA from. Most of the victims we've named so far weren't identified until years after they died.

They brought in an artist that worked with the remains to make sketches of the victims. And I've got to tell you, I've never seen work this good.

Mikhail Avdeyev did masterful work. Seriously, his sketches look so much like the victims when they were alive that it's hard to tell if it was a photograph or not. His work managed to identify 10 victims in 84, and

One of them was Ludmilia Alekseyeva a 17-year-old high school girl whose cheeks were bitten off and partially eaten by her killer. Her eyes were missing. This girl was so disfigured that there was just no way to give a description of her outside of her hair color. Yet, Mikhail gave her life again. When his picture went out, it was virtually identical to Ludmilia when she was alive.

I cannot stress how brilliant this guy was and no one ever mentions him. And before we move on to 85, something else happened in 84 that we need to mention.

In September, Andrei was spotted by two policemen when he tried to lure away women and girls. He was arrested when they saw him fondling himself right there in the marketplace, in the middle of town, in full view of everyone. Ew.

Yeah, he did that a lot. It's a miracle that only the kids he used to teach ever reported him for it. They searched his bag and found rope, a knife, and a jar of Vaseline.

Anyway, his blood work predictably did not match the semen sample, so that got him off as a suspect for the killer again. But the detectives were sure that this guy was fishy and dangerous.

So they pinned an old theft charge on him. There are a lot of details around that charge, but he stole something from a former employee and it got him three months behind bars.

No one noticed that the murders practically stopped for a few months during the time he was caught, tried, and jailed. He killed a woman at the beginning of September, was arrested two weeks later for that theft charge, and released on December 12th. And he didn't go back out to kill until August of next year. I thought he soiled himself there for a second. When they took his blood, he must have been certain that he was caught.

Did he even know about his unusual condition where the blood and bodily fluids didn't match up? He had no idea.

Andrei Part 2 (14:01)
Confusion, fear, and especially the reality of what jail was like probably scared him straight for a little while. And his wife and kids? I mean, never mind the theft. Fayana must have heard about how her husband was groping himself in public.

No one close to him had any idea and from what little I can get from it is from police records. The family haven't made any public statements, but authorities believe that they really didn't know what their husband and father was doing.

He killed two women in August of 85, but then things went dead quiet for about two whole years. Sort of. What do you mean, sort of?

It was hard to tell which murders were regular crimes and which ones were a result of Ripper of Rostov. If Andrei was still killing, he was trying to change up his MO and avoid detection by mutilating the remains and burying them. In 85, the police finally allowed the media to fully report on the case and the police presence was huge.

There were roadblocks set up and just about every man over the age of 21 was searched and questioned around Rostov region at one point or another.

The two women he killed in August, Irina and Natalia, were identified as victims because they suffered trauma to their eyes and several factors that the police knew that the Rostov River was prone to doing.

Andrei tried to drop a concrete block on one of the women to try and hide the damage to her eyes and breast, but the attempt didn't work and they were able to reconstruct the skull and see that the nipples had been cut off.

though there were many other bodies found during this time too, they were in various states of decomposition and none of them fit the killer's MO exactly.

hard to tell which were stabbed but not mutilated. And he avoided Rostov completely because that's where the police main focus was centered. Andrei followed the case obsessively trying to stay ahead of the police.

I don't know about you, but I don't think he killed just two women over those two years.

I don't think so either. In his beginning years, he averaged one victim every month. And by the time he went to jail for the theft charge, he was killing someone every two weeks. The speed that he was going through victims is insane. There's no way someone who needs his fix this often could have gone cold turkey for two years. I don't buy it. I'm just surprised he managed to keep himself from exacting his usual methods on victims.

In that moment when the frenzy takes over, I wouldn't imagine that he'd have much control over his actions. Are there any theories as to the victims that he might have killed during that time? Nothing official, and since he traveled so much for work, the search radius is just too big to make any assumptions.

Many believe that if he was killing, then he was focused on vagrants, prostitutes, and the homeless for those two years. He'd done it before, but only if he couldn't find a younger victim in time to his compulsions. That would have gone almost unnoticed, especially if he steered clear of Rostov. Maybe he didn't remember them all after a while, one death every two weeks. Their faces are going to start to blur together after a certain point, I would think.

Wow, it's a little jarring to put into perspective just how many kids and women he killed. Damn. Imagine getting so used to it that you can't even pinpoint the time, person, or place anymore.

And he was going to change it up again when he kicked off in May of 87. By then, the police had withdrawn their roadblocks and patrols. They were sure that the killer had died or been imprisoned. It started with 13-year-old Oleg, who was found near a train station. His genitals were cut off and probably cannibalized because they were missing from the scene. The Rostov Ripper was back and Russia and Ukraine were thrown right back into a world of terror.

Andrei was trying to reel it in. It's estimated that he killed one more victim every two months or so, much less frequently than the rate he was going at before he went quiet. Two boys named Ivan and Yuri and an unknown woman were added to the list of victims in 87, bringing the total up to 42. And now the majority of his targets were young boys. There was no denial that the Ripper was back.

and post-mortem mutilation, signs of cannibalism, disembowelment, and dissection of the eyes made it crystal clear who this was.

In 88, things changed yet again. And this is one of the reasons I think he never really stopped killing for those two years. Andrei was not above changing his methods to get police off his scent,

proven by the murder of Tatyana Rgyzhova a 16-year-old runaway. He lured her to an empty apartment that his now-adult daughter was renting.

place was empty because she'd moved out with a month's worth of rent already paid for. He'd helped her move out himself. Inside, he killed Tatyana much in the same fashion that he did with his other victims.

But when he was done, he proceeded to dismember her and then scatter her limbs in the nearby sewer plantation. None of the Ripper's victims had been dismembered before. Disemboweled, cannibalized, stabbed, beaten. Couldn't he have left at least one thing out of this whole mess?

It's like he's trying to set up the most well-rounded portfolio for the World Serial Killer Convention. He definitely brought in his hunting grounds, too.

He started going to the movies, choosing late afternoon and early evening screenings when he knew kids, especially boys, like to hang out and spend their pocket money to see the latest screening of Beetlejuice and Die Hard. So even though the police were out patrolling again, they weren't out at the theater looking for suspicious characters.

Nine-year-old Alexey 15-year-old Yevgeniy and 16-year-old runaway Tatyana were definitely among Andrei's victims in 88. But those are the only ones we know for certain. 1989 also had...

Four definitive victims, eight-year-old Alexander, two boys, both 10 years old, and both named Alexey, and finally one female victim, 19-year-old Helena.

And it's not that Andrei only frequented cinemas. He still hunted around the train stations and bus stops, but he avoided them if there were any uniformed officers around. One victim was killed at a public botanical garden while there were other people visiting as the murder took place.

Another boy was lured away from a playground in front of a municipal beach while the place was full of people. Nowhere was safe anymore and the public were starting to become somewhat hysterical with fear and outrage. Their kids were dying and the police were no closer than they were when it all started more than a decade ago.

The entire task force investigating the Rostov Ripper was overhauled and the new officers assigned to the case brought some new eyes and ideas to the field.

In 1990, right as the new year dawned, 11-year-old Andrei Kravchenko disappeared from a cinema, and 10-year-old Yaroslav went missing from a train station. Finally, one detective got a brilliant idea. At the major train stations, they placed uniformed officers in full view of the killer, and in lesser stations, they placed undercover officers dressed in plain clothes.

The officers at the major stations were barely armed, and they were told to make a big show out of shaking people down so that the killer could avoid those places and go to the less traveled ones instead.

It would be easier to spot suspicious characters where there were less crowds, and it would be possible to be discreet about removing suspects who were talking to children to question them without making a scene that would draw attention to the fact that they were undercover officers around.

Since they were only keeping an eye out for men talking to children, a 31-year-old woman named Lyubov was taken from the train station where the undercover cops were stationed.

Still, they kept looking for men talking to kids.

Most of the victims were children and it was wiser to focus on one demographic of victims now that they had a plan in place. Next was Viktor Petrov, killed just yards away from where the body of a previous victim who had not been found yet lay rotting in the botanical gardens.

in August, 11-year-old Ivan was taken, then 16-year-old Vadim.

Vadim was older than the male victims usually were and he wasn't connected to the Ripper at first.

Andrei was trying to throw them off again, but his next victim scared him off from the older boys. 16-year-old Victor Tishchenko number 55, fought like a damn hero for his life. Victor was taken from a station that did have undercover officers stationed there, but they completely missed the abduction because they weren't watching out for older children.

During the attack, Victor clamped down on Andrei's finger, taking off the nail and breaking the bone inside. Andrei went insane. He left Victor with 40 stab wounds, more than any other victim.

Just six days later, on the 6th of November, 1990, Andrei lured a 22-year-old woman named Svetlana Korostik away from the train station.

She became his 56th official murder in the woods nearby. And when he walked out of the forest, he stopped at a water fountain to wash his shoes, hands, and face clean of blood. That's when an officer spotted him. I mean, can we finally get excited here? Please tell me that this time this maniac gets caught. Sort of. I hate it when you say it like that.

Well, the officer was far away and by the time he caught up to Andrei to demand that he hand over his papers, there was no more blood. From the distance, it could have been mud that Andrei was washing off for all that the officer knew.

There was still a faint smudge of blood on Andrei's cheek and officer Igor Rybakov took note of it, as well as the injured finger that Viktor Tishchenko had nearly bit off the week before. He sent Andrei on his way, but now they had an ID, a suspicious character, and a body that was going to be discovered just two days later. When they found Svetlana, the records of the suspicious six-foot tall man at the station were drawn up.

It was also discovered that he was arrested for suspicious behavior in 84. The notes of those arresting officers were probably the most convincing of all. Even back then, they were sure that there was more to Andrei Chikatilo than met the eye. Even if the blood work put him out of the suspect pool, they still believed he was very dangerous.

why they went ahead and arrested and jailed him for the small theft charge.

Police were in a sticky spot. They might just have their guy, but they couldn't risk him getting away. And what if they were mistaken and he wasn't the ripper at all?

They kept Svetlana's death as quiet as possible and put Andrei under surveillance. At 56 years old, Andrei fit the theorized age of the suspect

But they needed to be careful of arresting the wrong man. Yes, he was tall, but he walked with a manner that suggested he was shorter and gave the impression that he was older than he was, shy, stammering, and rather odd in an elderly chap sort of way. There was nothing suggestive of violence about him from a distance. He and his wife lived a quiet life. Their children were grown and had moved out of the house.

But as they watched him and started to unravel his employment and travel histories, they realized that he was in a lot of places when kids disappeared and bodies turned up. They discovered his previous occupation as a teacher and the reasons he'd been fired from two schools. The only outlier was the blood type.

On the 20th of November, after just six days of watching him, Andrei left his home one evening with the large jar that he filled with beer at a roadside stall near the town center. There, he loitered around a bus stop and tried to engage in conversations with young women and preteen girls. When he had no luck there, he walked to a local park and tried the same thing with the kids he met on the way.

When he entered a bar to refill his jar with more beer, police decided to arrest him once he exited the bar. They were afraid of losing him in the forested park. He was very clearly looking for a victim that he could talk into disappearing with him along one of the many deserted paths. And they couldn't risk the death of another child just because they

technically had no obvious reason to arrest him.

They could, however, legally detain him as a suspect for 10 days just for acting suspicious. Andrei was accosted by four police officers when he came out of a pub and he did not resist the arrest at all.

If anything, he was a bit of a whiny pain in the behind.

He complained that this was second time he'd been wrongfully arrested for the Ripper of Rostov case and implied that the police had made a complete circuit of all the men in Rostov until they reached the same ones again.

He pouted and moaned every chance he got, and honestly reading the transcripts and looking at his mugshots, he looks and sounds like a stuffy old man who'd be willing to complain about the bud singing in the morning. Just so he could have something to gripe about.

They searched him and found a knife and rope inside his pockets and they examined the wound on his finger. The kid had nearly bitten off the tip of his finger and that kind of wound leaves pretty clear tooth marks. The medical examiner they brought in on the same day of the arrest confirmed that the wound was most likely made by a human being.

Investigators were sure that Andrei Chikatilo was their man, but they'd learned their lesson from the horrendous interrogation techniques earlier in the investigation.

They had 10 days before they would legally be forced to let him go and they needed to move fast if they were going to make these 10 days count. Because they still had no physical evidence to link him to any crime, they took a blood sample from him to compare to their evidence samples and placed Andrei in a cell at the KGB headquarters with a cellmate that was a KGB informant. But the cellmate wasn't having any luck at all.

Between the friendly informant fishing for information and the hours of hard police interrogations, Andrei wasn't admitting to anything except for the inappropriate behavior when he was a teacher. The blood test came back and predictably it didn't match the A-B semen samples they had to work with.

But they were so sure that this unassuming old man was their guide that the lead investigator required that Andrei Siemen be tested against the evidence too.

jackpot. Ka-ching. They got a hit. The samples matched and they got a few medical professionals in to confirm that this oddity was indeed possible. But this isn't a slam dunk. It's just a blood type match. The entire case is based on circumstantial evidence.

So they brought in Dr. Bukanofsky. Bukanofsky didn't bother asking Andrei questions. Instead, he sat opposite him and began reading the profile he'd written on the Rostov Ripper all those years ago. Starting with what he had suspected about the killer's childhood. In just two hours, Andrei Chikatilo was crying, almost as hard as the dozens of child victims whose lives he'd taken.

In two hours, Dr. Bukanovsky did what the KGB and the police force had failed to do in the last 12 years.

Andrei Chikatilo was put in front of a camera where he introduced himself, gave his date of birth, and confessed to being the Rostov Ripper.

That confession was blasted across Russia and Ukraine, and finally there was a face to put to the beast that had been taking the children of the Soviet Union and the people could breathe a sigh of relief for the first time since the killings began. The Chickatillo family were immediately ostracized by the public. They barely had a chance to absorb the shock and horror before they were forced to flee from their homes for fear of being attacked.

The KGB interviewed each of them, but they might as well not have wasted their time. Fayana was absolutely devastated. She was sure that they'd made a terrible mistake. There was no way that her shy, withdrawn husband, who'd always provided for them so well, could possibly have been a murderer.

Lyudmilla was in her mid-20s and Yuri had just turned 21. They were dumbfounded and just like their mother, they were certain that this was all some terrible misunderstanding.

But Andrei Chikatilo was in another room confessing to the 34 murders that police suspected him of and then he admitted to 22 more, bringing the official total to 56 victims. Including his very first victim, that another man was executed for. Police were dumbfounded at the amount and they grilled him for information about the killings and where the victims bodies were.

but Andrei clamped up again.

So they brought the doctor back in again and Bukhanovsky again used an unusual tactic to get details out of Andrei. Instead of asking him questions and making him feel like he was being studied or prodded, the doctor came in pretending to want Andrei's opinions and views.

killers take from a scientific standpoint, if you will. Andrei Chikatilo was obviously a brilliant man and his insights would be invaluable to the scientific community. Never would there be another man liking with his unique insights.

Bukhanovsky is a genius to tickle Andrei's ego like that. He's the hero of this whole case. You know, I agree. He had an unusual progressive approach to tackling the case. The Russian authorities back then and now too aren't exactly known for their tactics.

They're a hard bunch and they use extreme force to get what they want, even so under the canopy of the Soviet Union. Buknovosky a breath of fresh air in all of this. And if it weren't for him, Andrei never would have agreed to show them where the bodies were.

He proved to be a bit of a wonder kid during his careers. His studies on sexual deviancy and psychopathy are still highly regarded to this very day. You'd think after all of those killings and the miles upon miles of wild woodlands,

You'd that after all of those killings and the miles upon miles of wild woodlands that they were committed in, that they'd be lucky to get a handful of locations that weren't too accurate.

Besides, the terrain being nearly impossible to remember, many years had passed between murders, and there were a hell of a lot of murders. Just remembering the victims, the dates, and the placement of the bodies was going to be impossible, right? Nope. Andrei's recall was nothing short of remarkable.

Even Bukanovsky was floored at how well Andrei remembered every single one of the victims that he admitted to killing. He'd point out a location on the map, they drive him there and Andrei led to them to each of the crime scenes he set out to find. Like his mind had imprinted a permanent video in his head of the event

of the 56 victims he admitted to only three could not be identified or definitely tied to him.

Andrei wasn't holding back anymore. He offered to act out of his crimes with life-sized dummies.

But he enjoyed this reenactment a little too much for those that witnessed it. In those reenactments, the glimmer of the beast was visible in the eyes of the seemingly timid old man.

For a moment, they got a front row ticket into seeing what the victims last saw, and it was terrifying thing to observe. Outside of his obvious delight with the reenactments, Andrei was always calm and well-spoken, and he never lost his temper or had any inclination of not being in control of his emotions or state of mind.

The psychiatric evaluations he received agreed that he was sane.

They diagnosed him with borderline personality disorder, sexual psychopathy, paranoid psychosis, and mixed personality disorder.

But none of these conditions altered his perception of morality and they were not so severe that he could be declared insane. He was perfectly capable of controlling himself and knowing the difference between right and wrong. He was fit to stand trial. But before that, Fayana divorced her husband of 29 years.

She had held out as long as she could, hoping that this was all a nightmare and her husband would be declared innocent.

The macabre treasure hunt for the bodies and the multiple evaluations took nine months to complete before the trial finally began on April 15th of 1992. And this whole thing was an absolute circus when it got to court.

The courtroom was built to seat 250 people and so many family members and press arrived there that there was never enough seating for everyone.

Hundreds of people gathered outside and when Andrei was led into the courtroom, there was a metal cage waiting for him.

This wasn't for dramatic effect, though the photographs of him in the cage are almost certainly the most memorable pictures of him. Nor did the judge order the cage for the audience safety. It was there to keep Andrei safe.

Besides that, the families were willing to kill him with their bare hands if they was given half a chance. The rest of Russia and Ukraine were just as willing to tear him apart like he had done to so many others.

A few of the family members tried to attack him, even if he was shielded by the metal bars. If the police tried to arrest the fathers and the brothers who tried to claw at the killer's face, the rest of the spectators used their bodies to shield the grieving family members from being arrested and the judge didn't push their arrest further either. Good. I don't disagree, but it's not conducive to an ordered courtroom. It's a s-

Downing that no one got killed or hurt during this whole ordeal. Andrei threw all of his sensibilities down the drain when the proceedings began. Gone was the steady talking man that investigators came to know and in his place was a roller coaster of a character.

He alternated between looking bored, then he'd laugh like a maniac, sing Soviet songs. He then shook the bars and screamed and hollered at the judge. And on two occasions, he dropped his pants, exposing himself to the courtroom, declaring that he was not a homosexual. Really? Of all the hills he chooses to die on, having people think he's gay is his biggest concern? This is Soviet Russia.

It was illegal to be gay until a year before the trial took place.

Even day, though you can't be sentenced to physical labor for being with someone of the same sex, it's still a very, very taboo subject. But that's besides the point. His behavior was almost certainly to boost his lawyer's argument that he was insane.

Not that it worked, they just marched him off to the cell and continued on with the proceedings, bringing him in the next day and then they just have to remove him all over again.

There's no question that Andrei could have kept up such a relatively normal facade for 56 years if he was truly insane.

There was no use arguing innocence. He'd already led police to bodies that they weren't aware of. On October 14th, 1992, right before they read the final verdict in sentencing, Andrei panicked.

He screamed at the court that all of his confessions were coerced and that the only people that he'd ever kill were members of the Assyrian mafia. But it was too late. They found him guilty of his inappropriate touching during his years as a teacher and guilty of 52 of his 56 confessed murders.

Each one of those 52 murders carried a sentence of death. For two years, Andrei waited in solitary confinement for his execution date. You'd think that that would be that, but the world was scrambling to keep him alive. What?

Scientists and doctors all over the world argued that they needed to study the world's fourth most prolific serial killer. Since then, he's dropped down to eleventh place or so, if you were wondering. What made Andrei Chikatilo unique was not just the amount of his victims, but the sheer level of his violence. There had never been a killer known to have committed the atrocities that he did. His victims were young and they were of both genders.

cannibalism, disembowelment, dismemberment, outside of arson, there isn't really anything he wouldn't do.

They'd never had a chance to study such a case and they were afraid that they never would again. There were rumors that some offered millions of dollars to get their hands on his brain after execution. So the KGB made sure that no one could profit off an animal that deserved to die with as little exposure as possible. On February the 14th, 1994, they put a bullet in the back of his head, blowing his brains all over the

the prison walls, making sure that no one got their hands on the physical mind of the Rostov Ripper. To make sure that he rotted away before the rest of him could be studied, they buried him in an unmarked grave and walked away without so much as a backward glance.

I'm not going to lie, from start to finish the police screwed this case up royally, but they handled his execution the right way at least. I agree, no one should have gotten their hands on any part of that monster. He was already given much more mercy during his death than he gave any of his victims. But what about the families? I mean, what happened to them?

They weren't given a funeral for him, but I don't think they wanted one. Fayana disappeared from the world and no one knows what happened to her or her daughter. But the son? Well, that's a different story. Yuri changed his surname after the trial, hoping to avoid public detection and harassment. But he went off the rails after his father was arrested. Convicted of extortion and fraud was just the beginning. Yuri and a friend

went into a restroom and while the guy was peeing, stabbed him three times with the obvious intention of killing him. The man managed to escape the bathroom and nearly died from his injuries. Yuri claimed that the guy stole his car, but the man stated the attack came out of nowhere.

He wasn't even aware of who Yuri was related to before the attack. What's become of him since then? We don't know, but he's probably still in prison.

The after effects of this case did overhaul the whole legal and investigative system in the USSR. If the authorities handled interrogations and investigative procedures more tactfully, Andrei would have never managed to go on the way he did for 12 years. They had two opportunities to catch him when he was in their custody.

They treated every mentally ill person across two countries so horribly that they contributed to more trauma than they did any good and wasted a great deal of resources and time in the process. The study of criminal behavior in general was no longer just some hippie-dippy new age practice. Entire departments funded by the state to study all criminals, not just murderers and sexual deviants, were set up.

This part of revitalizing the understanding of the criminal mind was spearheaded by Dr. Bukanowski and his previous work in the field.

You know, hearing that the good doctor had a hand in part of it actually gives me a great sense of satisfaction.

Bukanofsky was the real hero of this story.

And now I've got a question for you guys. Do you think he killed 56 people like he said he did? Or were there more or less than that? I would say definitely not less. Andrei gave details and locations to every one of those 56 deaths. Most of his confessions, reenactments, and the trips to the locations were filmed. So this isn't some lie the authorities made up to make it look like they solved a bunch of crimes overnight or anything.

Earlier we thought that when it looked like he wasn't killing as many people as he did during his heyday that there were deaths we didn't know about. He went from one every two weeks to one victim every two months. And that's after taking some time off killing when he got arrested for that theft.

But I'm not so sure that I think that anymore. During the confessions and reenactments, he didn't hold back on any of the details. So why would he hide 10 or 20 or even 100 more deaths? He'd already killed a ridiculously amount of people.

Nah, I think going to jail scared him straight for a little while, and the heavy police presence forced him to hold back a little after he went out hunting again. And the police pressure and people being overly alert and suspicious wouldn't have left him with a whole lot of willing victims. I think he'd hide it if there were men.

Now that's interesting. He was horrified at the idea that people would think he was gay. It's not like he had any reservations about gender or age really.

Sure, he preferred them young, but if pickings were slim, he'd toe over the line just to kill at least someone. Male victims wouldn't be linked to him because the mode of killing would be completely different. Men are physically stronger, even if he was tall, tackling a man down and starting to eat their face while they're alive wasn't gonna fly. He'd have chosen the wrong guy eventually and gotten his face smashed in.

So it was probably quick, jump a guy like his son did in restrooms while they were distracted and bounce the second they went down. I don't think that you're right on this one. For two reasons. One, he got off on overpowering someone smaller and weaker than he was.

Even his grown-up victims were smaller built women. The older boys, from what I can tell, were on the slight side too. Secondly, remember that kid who nearly bit off his finger? I can guarantee you that one adult man at least would have gotten the chance to get a punch in. There would have been rep...

of injuries or black eyes or something,

But I still think you're right that he killed others after he'd been in jail and got cold feet. He probably wasn't going through all of his usual motions, taking the time to mutilate the bodies and such, but I can't imagine a guy with these compulsions would go dormant because of fear of being caught.

His need to dominate and immerse himself in the depravity was too much. No way something like fear could curb that kind of madness. There are no reports that his life changed at all during this quiet time.

believed that he didn't kill if he took up golfing or something to take his mind off the intrusive thoughts. I just think he was more careful for a while, because if he stopped completely, I think he would have come apart at the seams.

Well, maybe that's why they classified him as sane. He had the ability to switch that part of himself if it became necessary. I think the number, 56 victims is pretty close to the truth. Maybe as many as 60, but the theories that he killed 100 people doesn't hold up. His MO was so outrageously vicious that the victims would have been identified as the Ripper's victims immediately.

except for those that were not found.

And again, he led the police to lots of victims that they didn't even know existed. Why even bother with the effort if he wanted to keep any of them a secret? My biggest disagreement with everybody's assessment is that the family knew absolutely nothing. Did they never notice blood on his clothes, changes in his behavior or anything? I actually believe the wife didn't know anything.

After so many years of accepting their strange marriage, accepting odd behavior every now and then, the idea that Fayana didn't have a clue doesn't feel like a stretch.

was lot of affection there, but she did resign herself to her fate. And in that resignation, there is love and devotion. That's a bleak way to live your life.

But it was a reality for many. Divorce would have been frowned upon. And besides, she had two children that she loved. And it really sounds like she made their house a home. Maybe it was adult life, but it's not the worst life. In Soviet Russia, after growing up in the conditions that they did, to have a husband with a job and two healthy kids, that's kind of like heaven.

Why destroy that bubble by asking too many questions that could rip that out from under you? Yuri's problems came after his father's arrest.

I can see him acting out and becoming unstable after his dad is labeled the worst child killer in history. I wouldn't have been okay. I could tell you that much. Going so far as to try to kill a man, I'm not saying what he did was right or anything, and thank goodness the guy survived. But he probably would have become a regular Joe with a regular job and a regular family if all this hadn't happened.

There's no murder gene passed down to Yuri from his father, like many try to suggest.

What about the hydrocephalus he was born with? Is there any connection to the condition and future violent behavior? Not that I could find. Hydrocephalus can cause damage to certain parts of the brain, but the parts that affect mood, fight or flight responses and such just aren't developed yet at birth.

but it can cause epilepsy and epilepsy, if left untreated, can cause damage to the developed brain.

as we learned from the Annalise Michel case. But Andrei did not have epilepsy. It's definitely the cause of his impotence,

That lack of sexual gratification, the shame and all of those horrific things he witnessed as a kid, his traumas, and something that was just uniquely Andrei. Those were the causes for his mental state, not the condition at birth.

So everything can be tied up to his childhood. mean, the cannibalism, the blood and the gore, seeing people blown up and probably with their organs spilled all over the sidewalk. Even his usual victim profile goes back to that first embarrassing sexual counter when the 10-year-old girl laughed at him. The only, only surprise about this was his victim profile included girls, boys, and women. Serial killers don't have this wide of a spectrum with their victims.

That's not totally true though.

Look at a serial killer like Israel Keys. His victim profile was all over the place, and he's not the only one.

I wouldn't say that Andrei was that unusual in that regard. I think we can wrap this up with the conclusion that Andrei Chikatilio was a psychopath who just happened to grow up with all of the worst ingredients to feed a potential serial killer's brain. He was going to end up killing somebody with or without hydrocephalus and the war and the cannibal neighbors. It's just a tragedy that he had to focus on kids and

that he was allowed to go on for this long. Yeah, I've had enough of dead kids and mutilated eyeballs for a lifetime. You might as well burn dinner and get it over with tonight, because I'm not eating. Neither am I. After this one, we might need to take on something a little lighter next time. Back to back eviscerations is going to ruin my appetite permanently if we keep going on this way.

Let's just walk away from this with the knowledge that it's probably a bad idea to walk into the woods with a strange man.

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.