Killer Stories with Harvey Guillén - “The Butcher of Rostov” Pt. 2 - Andrei Chikatilo

Episode Date: November 20, 2017

Andrei Chikatilo killed with increasing frequency over twelve years. Greg and Vanessa explain how the Soviet system of criminal profiling allowed a monster like Chikatilo to evade the police, even as his killing became more frequent, and more gruesome. They examine how a psychiatrist helped crack the case, Chikatilo’s attempt to plea insanity, and the horror of tracking down a killer who’s victim profile is “anyone they can get their hands on”.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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discussions of murder and assault that some people may find offensive. We advise extreme caution for children under 13. It's December 11, 1982, in the town of Novosakhtinsk, and 10-year-old Augusta-Machinok is missing. She'd been on her way home from piano lessons, walking the path she'd taken twice a week since age six, but she'd never arrived. As any parents would, Mr. and Mrs. Dalmachanok held out hope that the the daughter would turn up alive and well. They didn't know what the police knew. The police had already found the mutilated corpses of four other missing girls. A few weeks later,

a postcard arrived, written in shaky child's script filled with grammatical and spelling errors. This note would forever change the lives of Olga's parents. Quote, Parents of the missing child. Greetings, parents. Don't get upset. She is not the first, First and not the last. Before New Year, we need another ten. If you want to find her, then search among the leaves on the Vitarovsky Posudki. And below the message, a signature by someone who called himself sadist, black cat. Of course, the note was nonsense. First of all, our listeners from last week know that Andres Chiquatillo, Olga's true killer, wasn't one for bragging to the police, and he certainly

didn't call himself black cat. Second, the writer refers to himself as we, implying that multiple people were behind the killing, again, not true. And third, There was no body among the leaves of Vyterovsky-Posadki, otherwise

known as Daryevsky Woods. Olga would be dug up four months later by an unwitting tractor driver on a collective farm. Her chest had been ripped open. Her heart removed. Bowels and uterus cut out. And as we know from last week, eyes carved out of the sockets.

But it begs the question, who would try to steal credit for doing that to a 10-year-old? As it turns out, plenty of people. Victor Budakov, the case's lead investigator, immediately doubted Black Cat's note. Someone who could barely construct a sentence wasn't capable of murdering five children. But over his eight years on the case, Burakov would encounter thousands of false suspects far more convincing than Black Cat. And someone like Black Cat, unstable, daring, and provocative, certainly fit the popular image of a serial killer. For this episode, we're going to continue our study of Chiquatillo through the eyes of the detectives who arrested him. How they caught him. And why it took so long. Gives us yet another perspective into this horrific killer and leads us to

the most important question of all. Was Chiquetillo psychologically fit to stand trial for his crimes. I'm Greg Polson, and this is serial killers. Today we're going to continue our dive into the life of André Chiquitillo, the butcher of Rostov. I'm here with my co-hosto, Vanessa Richardson. Hi, everyone. We'd like to ask a quick favor. Would you leave a five-star review of serial killers on your favorite podcast directory? It seems so simple, but it really helps us out. And don't forget to subscribe while you're there, because a new episode comes out every Monday. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram at Parcast. And on Twitter at Parcast Network.

For those just joining us this week, let's do a little recap. Andre Chiquatillo's problem started at a young age. Born into war-torn Ukraine, he grew up with deep emasculation issues, manifesting as sexual impotence. This caused decades of severe depression until, in his 40s, he took a job teaching. There, he began to molest his younger students. Vanessa is going to take over the discussion of Chiquatillo's psychology. Vanessa's not a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist, but she's done a lot of research for the show. Thanks, Greg.

Molesting his students gave Chiquatillo his first true satisfaction in his life. He realized that dominance and abuse were his stimulus and that he was powerless to resist them. His advances were random, ill-planned. He had yet to become a practiced predator. The school found out about his abuses and quietly fired him, but that was just the beginning. On December 22nd, 1978, Chichotillo lured nine-year-old Yelena Zakotnava to a shack with the intent of molesting her. When he failed to sustain an erection, impulse took hold of Chiquetilo, and he stabbed Yelena to death. The act gave Chiquetillo a release beyond his wildest dreams.

It was the ultimate form of sexual gratification, what he'd been searching for. for since puberty. For three years, he resisted the urge to kill again, but he was fighting his deepest, most intimate instincts. It was only a matter of time. On September 3rd, 1981, Chiquotillo struck again, murdering and mutilating 17-year-old Larissa Cacchenko. It was the beginning of a spree, and over his next few killings, he'd establish a ritual for his killings. He'd find down-and-out kids or young adults, lure them to the woods with promises of food, then attack them. He used a knife and rope to torture them, though he sometimes bludgeoned or suffocated his victims. He enjoyed cutting out their sexual organs, either castrating the

boys or excising the uterus of the girl. Much of this happened while the victims were still alive. In fact, Chiquotillo disfigured the bodies so horribly that police often struggled to identify them. But who were these officers? And how did they come to this case? Before we return to our butcher of Rostov. Let's learn a little more about one of the investigation's most prominent figures, Detective Victor Burekov. Bukov was born just after World War II, to a peasant family in the Russian countryside on a poor collective farm called Bolshevik. Bammons left his family hungry. Winters brought disease, killing two of his sisters via scarlet fever and Woping cough. Bukov contracted both diseases, but somehow he survived.

While Chiquatilo folded under his childhood trauma, Budakov seemed tempered by it. His chores gave him discipline. His mind proved sharper than his fellow peasants, and he was big enough and proud enough to fight when threatened. In many ways, Budakov grew into the ideal Soviet male by embodying grit through perseverance. Like all Soviet men, Budakov served two years in the army, after which he worked his way to Rostov, where he rose to a coveted job as a factory force. foreman. He never wanted to be a policeman. It paid less than the factory and required longer hours.

But in 1972, the government issued a directive to recruit young men to the militia, the Soviet police force, and Budakov's name wound up on the list. Had Budakov refused, he knew that his string of promotions would have quickly dried up. In Soviet Russia, you go where the system tells you, so he reluctantly switched over to walking the streets as a beat cop. One good thing about the Soviet system. There was plenty of room for promotion. Budikov's brains got him off the streets and into the Criminology Academy at Volgarad.

His superiors liked his peasant fortitude. Given a task, Budakov would not stop until finished. The militia were years away from their first computer system, so most work was conducted through long, tedious searches by hand. In other words, discipline solved cases. He was assigned to Rostov, a city of, a city, known for its sky-high crime rates and took his seat in the forensics library. There he would have remained had not Major Mikhail Fedizov come to him in December of 1982 with a particularly

grisly case. The killer was known among police as the Lesopolis a killer, Russian for Forced Path. They had four victims already, and young August al-Machanak had been reported missing. But with so little evidence that Lesopolis a killer, who we now know to be Andre Chiquitillo, was much more of a hunch than an actual case. Why so little evidence? Let's talk a bit about police procedure. A typical Soviet police investigation begins far away from the crime itself. Officers cordon off the scene, then walk in tighter and tighter circles towards the body. This is in hopes of finding evidence left on the ground. Unfortunately, Chiquotillo often left his victims in fields absolutely littered with trash. Searching for clues was like finding a needle in a garbage dump.

And the average officer wasn't exactly Sherlock Holmes. A case consisted of two teams, the militia, beat cops who do the groundwork, and procurators, lawyers who tailor the case for trial. No love was lost between the two. Procurators were constantly complaining about lazy or stupid militia ruining evidence, which made the militia hate them in turn. So Burtakov was gathering questionable evidence from incompetent handlers through a chain of command that disliked itself. And of course, they couldn't learn anything without fresh bodies. On December 27, 1983, police discovered the body of 14-year-old Sergei Markov with 70 stab wounds, a castrated penis, and samples of dried semen around his rectum.

Soviet technology couldn't narrow this to a DNA fingerprint, but they could determine that the killer semen was type A-B. Two weeks later, the police found the body of 17-year-old Natalia Shalapinina, with her breasts, nose, and lips bitten off. They also found a size 43 shoe print in the mud next to her body. This suggested a large man, even by Soviet standards. And over his first year on the case, Budakov noticed one more detail.

Many of the victims tended to have some sort of mental disability. This was unsurprising, as a disabled child would be. be easier to lure away than a fully cognizant one. But was it possible that the killer was also mentally disabled? This was a common assumption in the police force. Any crime with perverse or bizarre details was immediately blamed on the mentally ill. Unfortunately, Soviet Russia didn't know how to handle mental disability. Parents of a child with any sort of mental irregularity, down syndrome, retardation, etc., would often ship them off to an internati, a boarding school for disabled kids, and it's difficult to express how awful these schools could be. Most were unsanitary,

unsupervised, and in many ways unfit for human habitation. With that upbringing, many graduated from school ill-adjusted to society. Some turned to drinking, prostitution, or extreme violence. Of course, many others graduated to perfectly normal lives, but an unfair bias took hold. To many, internazzi students could be synonymous with criminal. be a recurring theme through our episode. No one in the department, certainly not Murakov, had much experience with serial killers. To them, insanity looked, functioned, and behaved a certain way. They weren't looking for a quiet old supply clerk like Chiquatillo. They were looking for someone like Yuri Kalanek. Yuri was a young graduate from the Internati School, who frequently

traveled the rails with his Internati friends. One night in September of 1983, Two of them found an abandoned trolley bus and began to play inside. Police arrested them for trying to steal the trolley, and seeing that they were into Nati, started to grill them on the Lesser Pulasa killings. Within days, Kalenik confessed. Suspects often gave false confessions under interrogation, especially if torture is involved. Abuse could range from keeping prisoners awake for days to physical attacks.

Years later, Kalenik would remember how the guards treated him. Quote, they don't leave traces. They know where to hit you. Around the kidneys, for instance. They cover their hands with towels, so there's no blood. They'd show me three photographs, one of which was the victim. At first, I might point to an entirely different person. And then they'd say, think hard, you understand? They'd help me. So I'd point to another one. Budakov immediately doubted Kalenik's confession. As a teenager, he'd once been mistaken. He'd once been mistakenly arrested and kept awake in his cell for three days. He knew that a suspect would say anything for a few hours of sleep. But the upper brass was happier with a closed case than an

open one. To disagree with them, Budikov would have to prove outright that clinic couldn't be the killer. This, of course, would only take time. After all, Chiquatilo was still out there. We'll return to our story in just a moment. Now the story continues. On October 8, 1983, an unknown woman's body turned up in the woods near the town of Nova Shaktinsk. Her breastplate split open and her left eye missing. A few weeks later, the body of 19-year-old Verda Shevkoumns surfaced. Someone had bashed in her skull, strangled her, and removed her sexual organs. Yuri Kalenek had still been in his cell.

The police brought in another Intenatni student who soon confirmed, and when another body turned up, they brought in someone else. They decided that all these suspects were in a gang of internaudi students raping and killing girls. From his limited understanding of serial killers, Budakov knew this was ridiculous. The intimate nature of the killings suggested one murderer. Multiple killers would have left different methods, techniques, or improvisations from murder to murder. These killings had the consistency of a ritual. Besides, if the gang members were getting caught, the killings should have been slowing down.

Instead, they were speeding up. In 1982, the year the case started, Chiquotillo took seven victims. In 1983, he took eight. The year was now 1984, and the Lessa Polis a killer would take 15 victims by September. At one point, he was killing once every two weeks. Why the sudden increase? Well, Chiquatillo's life hadn't been going well. His wife, Fena, was becoming passive-aggressive about their bedroom activities, or lack thereof.

His son, Yuri, began to act out and disrespect him. And at the beginning of 84, work took a turn for the worse. It started with a missing car engine on one of Chiquotillo's orders. When his boss accused him of stealing it, Chiquatilla denied the charge vehemently. For a guy who murdered children in the woods, he had a strong. strong disdain for thievery. Nearly everyone in the Soviet economy skimmed off the top. Normally, this would have gotten only a slap on the wrist.

But Chiquatillo was disliked in his office. He was cagy and antisocial. His receipts from his travels were strange, and he'd stay out of town much longer than he had to. His boss had been trying to get rid of him for a while. So in February 22nd of 1984, Chiquotillo's boss fired him and filed criminal charges against him.

Chiquotillo knew that the local court was too backed up to actually try the case, but it reaffirmed his personal motto. The world was unfair, specifically to him. All that resentment drove him with increasing frequency to the forest paths. Chiquotila was also getting more proficient at killing. He would revisit special killing spots hidden away from the public. He learned where to stab to limit the blood spray and prolong the suffering. And other than the interrogation,

after his first killing, police seemed completely unaware of his existence. That was until September 13, 1984. It had only been a week since Chiquatilo had killed his latest victim. A 24-year-old librarian named Irina Luchinskaya. He was stalking prostitutes in a Rostov bus station when a police officer demanded to see inside his briefcase. In it, Chiquotillo had a rope, a knife, and a tube of lubrication. The cop was sure he found the killer.

But we know from history that this wasn't the end for the butcher of Rostov. How did Budakov mess up such an obvious catch? In one word? Blood. When a new body appeared, Budakov had a process to find witnesses. Check those nearby. Check the trains. Check the porno stores. Check the civilist clinics.

Check the internati. Check the local gay men. And most importantly, check the children. Check the children. The goal was to establish a list of suspects as long as possible. Next, the police would narrow those suspects down to all those who had type A-B blood. Everyone on that list would be interrogated. It was a very Russian strategy, simple, methodical, and work-intensive.

But it didn't work on Chiquito. Because Andrei Romanovich Chiquitilo had type A blood. See, the AB samples that the militia had found at the crime scene were semen, not blood. But to the police's knowledge, blood and semen types were always the same. This came in handy because, let's face it, getting an involuntary semen sample poses some obvious difficulties. But it turns out that a small percentage of people, and we're talking astronomically small, have different blood and semen types. No one in the world, not KGB or FBI, knew this yet. But as luck would have it, Chiquotilo was one of those cases.

Budakov had only one true piece of evidence against the killer, the A-B. Seaman type. It was the filter through which every suspect passed. And, like we said, the suspect list was insanely long, spanning thousands of names at this point. When Budakoff heard Chichatilo's blood type didn't match, he mentally checked out. Normally, the Soviet police can only hold a suspect for 10 days without charging him. Chiquotillo was going to walk off Scott Free. Then someone found the engine theft. It wasn't a serious crime, but it gave procurators a reason to hold on to Chiquotillo,

just in case new information appeared. He was found guilty and held in jail until December of that year. So remember, Chichotillo's deadliest year was also the one where he spent three months in prison. Think of how high the number could have been. With Chiquotillo in jail, Well, Budakov found himself against a wall. The body count had increased, then suddenly cut off. He had a list of open murders and no new evidence coming in. And Budakov must have sensed that his vision of the killer was misaligned.

After all, how could an Intadnati student lure away children or stump crime scene investigators? He wanted to learn more about who this man was and how he thought. He needed to access the killer's mind. So we turned to two of the most unlike. likely allies a Soviet police officer could possibly find. A psychiatrist and a gay man. Let's start with a psychiatrist. Stalin didn't like psychiatry.

After all, a dictator obsessed with control wouldn't love the idea of a more self-conscious public. That's why Alexander Bukanovsky, 20th century Russian psychiatrist, is kind of the badass of the case. He studied gay and transgender sexuality, a controversial focus in homo-of-euro. For the time and place, Bukanovsky was incredibly progressive.

Remember, this was a closed-minded society that viewed being gay as immoral. But Bukanovsky championed the idea that being gay was genetic, not moral. He saw gay men as an unfairly persecuted demographic, demonized by a prejudiced society. And if gay and transgender people were inclined toward crime, and they were, statistically speaking, it was by nurture, not nature. Of course, those above Burakov would never bring a psychiatrist onto a police case. Budakov actually had to go in secret to Bukonovsky to ask him questions. His request was simple.

From the information they gathered, construct a psychiatric profile of the killer. Bukanovsky responded with a 65-page thesis. Some of the finer points compressed are as follows. Quote, His sexual perversions are fully developed. so he's older, 45, maybe 50. He likely has problems with impotence that can only be satisfied by his killings, but that doesn't mean he's alone.

He can have a wife, children even. He doesn't appear to be crazy or retarded, and yet he's mentally deranged. When the urge to kill comes, he can no more resist it than a hungry man resists food, end quote. Sound familiar? Yeah, it's a little freaky how spot-on Bukanovsky was. Mm-hmm. Budakov agreed that his killer wouldn't be apparently psychotic or mentally challenged, but he moved straight from internati students to another demographic, the gay community.

Gay men in the Soviet Union lived in deep secrecy and shame, finding partners in other closeted men or young prostitutes. The logic went that shameful sex leads to self-loathing, and self-loathing can turn dangerous. Budikov suspected that his killer might be a gay man. man who had turned to a new sexual thrill. He arrested a closeted gay man named Valerie Ivanyenko and threatened to charge him. And more importantly, publicly out him, which would have lost him his government-issued apartment and job. If Ivanyenko didn't turn informant. The case shocked

Ivanyenko so much that Budakov didn't need to threaten him. Ivanov wanted to help stop the killer in any way he could and began suggesting persons of interest. All told, he brought over 400 gay men to Budakov. But of course, all of the men were innocent. When Bukanovsky heard Boudikov was centering his investigation on gay men, he chided Boudacov for his homophobic theory. The killer didn't attack young boys because he was gay. He attacked young boys because they were available to him.

After nearly a year of interrogations, all Boudikov had found were 400 lonely men terrified of losing their families. And as a level of respect grew between Buccove. Budakov and Ivanyenko, Budakov admitted his theory was wrong. Seems like a lot of wasted time, doesn't it? It was, but it also marked a crucial turning point for Budakov. Up to this point, Budakov had focused on men who fit the prejudiced Soviet idea of a pervert, mentally handicapped, possibly gay, perpetually criminal.

Ivanyenko and Bukonovsky were painting a different portrait. Maybe the killer looked like an everyday citizen. Maybe he had a family, a child. job, a normal life, but beneath that perfectly manicured surface lurked the monster. Our story will continue in a moment after a brief message. Now, our story continues. My present visit to the United States is a confirmation that Soviet-U. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev took office as the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev hoped to take Russia in a more progressive, capital,

ballistic direction than it had ever seen. Instead, he would see the end of the regime. And as Gorbachev stepped onto the world stage, Chiquatillo stepped out of his short stint in prison on December 12, 1984. Still, it was long enough to rattle him. No one on the outside knew the real reason for Chiquatillo's incarceration. Even Chiquetillo's wife, Fena, thought the arrest had just been over the engine theft. But even if a single procurator had noticed his interrogation. After the Yelena's Zaccoten of a murder, and Chichotillo might never have come out of the jail. And just as with Yelena, fear temporarily overwhelmed his bloodlust.

For the first eight months of freedom, Chiquotillo stayed away from the forest paths. Ironically, this hiatus would be one of the most damning pieces of evidence against Chichotillo when he tried to plead insanity. The Soviet court determined insanity by whether the accused, A, couldn't comprehend the morality of his crime, or B, couldn't physically stop himself from committing it. This eight-month hiatus suggested that neither of these applied to Chiquitillo. He knew what he was doing. And if he was in danger of being caught, he knew how to stop.

But only for so long. In August, 1985, on a trip to Moscow, 18-year-old Natalia Poclistova approached Chiquetillo near the airport, asking for a cigarette. Her body would be found only days later. Chiquotilo abstained from murder for another year and nine months. Then in 1987, return to killing in earnest. But this time, circumstances would be different. One of Gorbachev's new policies was the Glasnost, or greater freedom of the press.

For the first time, Rostov civilians could read about the Lesopolisa killer in full. Even Chikatilo followed his own case in the morning newspaper. Before, rumors of secret government bureaus or Caucasian gangs, not white people, but migrants from the Caucasus, dominated the kidnappings. Now, young girls receive lectures from their parents, not to wander off as single older men. But not so for the young boys. While it might have seemed natural to warn daughters against predators, the idea of a man raping and killing boys proved a difficult concept for parents to discuss. Also, let's face it, young boys in any part of the world aren't known for their sense of caution. So Chikatilo adjusted his strategy.

Before his 1984 arrest, he trended heavily toward female victims. But from 1987 to 1989 alone, Chiquotillo killed eight young boys compared to only three girls. This is what Bukonovsky was getting at. The change in Chiquitillo wasn't a reflection of Chiquetillo's sexuality. In fact, it was the opposite. When choosing his victims, Chiquotillo was purely opportunistic. If girls became harder to convince, he focused on boys. If adults could overpower him, he prayed on children.

From drunken prostitutes to the kindergartners, Chikatillo always sought out the most vulnerable targets, regardless of gender. Once they were under his knife, anyone would do. Unfortunately, this left Budikov with little to go on. The case had entered its fifth year and was widely considered an embarrassment in the department. Budikov had investigated 5,845 criminals, 10,000 mentally ill patients, 416 gay men, and a whopping 163,000 car owners. This is on a hunch that the killer would have needed an automobile. A quick aside, the automobile wasn't as silly as it sounds.

Unlike the Ford-saturated United States, very few Soviets could afford the luxury of their own car. And as a byproduct, police were able to close 162 unrelated cases, including 95 murders and 245 rapes. But no measurable progress had been made on the killer. Fedesov and Budakov were able to keep their jobs, mostly thanks to their superiors constantly getting sacked by Gorbachev. But their newest boss, hot-shot person. prosecutor Issa Kostoyev wasn't their first pick. His strategy was to double down on two demographics he saw as the most likely culprits, automobile owners and gay men. For Budikov, it was a step backward. By the late 90s, Chiquotilo's life had developed a comfortable routine. His daughter gave birth to a boy

who Chikatilo adored. He repaired his relationship with his son, and he also found a stable job as an engineer, one that still allowed his excursions into the woods. In a way, it seemed the most stable time of his life, but a serial killer can never have total stability. And as Chiquatillo's regular life calmed, his secret one raged. Take the murder of Tatiana Rizjova. In March 1989, Chiquatillo met the 16-year-old Tatiana the same way he met most of his victims. She was a runaway teen who'd exchanged sex. for liquor. But for whatever reason, he didn't take her into the woods. Instead, he suggested using his daughter's nearby vacant apartment. Why'd he deviate from the norm? Possibly to

spice up his routine, possibly because it was convenient, but Chiquetillo would later claim that he'd always approached victims hoping only to have sex with them, then would become enraged when he failed. Yes, most men looking for sex don't pack a knife and a rope, but this was part the ritual. Even while he prepared his weapons, Chiquotillo needed to start the fantasy with the thoughts of sex, not murder. He knew it would end in blood, and yet he didn't. It was textbook serial killer compartmentalization, and because of this delusion, he might have thought the apartment was a fine idea. It wasn't. When Chiquatillo failed to perform, as he always did, Tatiana began to shout and scream. Chiquatillo silenced her by stabbing her in the cheek.

He gruesomely murdered Tatiana just like his other victims. But this time, the body wasn't in the woods. It was in an apartment with Chiquatilo's name on the lease. Chiquotillo knew he had to dispose of the body, so he decided to hack the body into pieces with a kitchen knife to move them easier. He loaded the pieces onto a sled he found downstairs, covered the mess with a tarp, and began to drag it into the night. Chiquatillo had never been more exposed.

Any of the neighbors could have seen him with the stolen sled, let alone the body parts. He managed to make it out of the courtyard across the sidewalk. Then a stranger approached him. Without a word, the man took hold of the sled rope and helped him pull it the rest of the way across the street. After thanking the Good Samaritan, Chiquatillo dragged the sled the rest of the way to a sewage drain and dumped Tatiana into it. It had been a decade since Chiquatillo had started killing. maybe these slip-ups were signs of overconfidence, or maybe part of him was waiting to be caught. There were other signs of strain.

Chiquotillo became obsessive about an illegal sewage drain running through his son's yard and sent a constant barrage of letters to the local magistrate. It drew unnecessary attention to him, and even Fennia told him to give it up. But something in Chiquitillo was slipping. He had long kept his two worlds separate, his ordinary daily life, and his grotesque crimes in the woods. Whenever his resentment rose, Chiquotillo could stay calm so long as he found a victim.

He knew that his straight life needed to be as safe and quiet as possible to avoid drawing attention to his secret one. But the animal in one world was bleeding into the other. He couldn't be safe and quiet any longer. For the first time, he was making stupid mistakes. But his investigators were facing yet another setback. The only real evidence, Budakov had ever had was the blood type. With a single facts, he lost that as well.

In December 1988, Dr. Svetlana Guttvaia, head of the biolab at the Ministry of Health in Moscow, sent a message to all Soviet police departments. In it, she cited new studies that suggested semen and blood types didn't always match. Though cases were rare, police could no longer use blood as a reliable test for a suspect's semen type. Translation, the third Thousands of men Budakov had already tested were once again suspects, and all of their progress was obsolete. It seemed to be the death blow for the investigation. It was actually the saving grace. Without the blood type, Budikov knew he had no chance of tracking down the killer. He'd have to catch him in the act, or not at all. It was then that Budikov noticed a single trend among the killings.

Many had taken place close to the Elyktritska rail. The Electritschka, a network of commuter train rails throughout the empire, was vastly important for citizens. It was the cheapest way to get from city to city, and Budakov was right. Chiquatilo used it frequently, both for transportation and scouting out victims. Unfortunately, the Electrishka had far too many stations and far too many passengers to guard reliably. Budakov would have to know which station that Lesopulisa would strike to have a chance at catching him. Which wasn't impossible. We mentioned before that Chiquatillo had a few favorite locations to bring victims, spots out of the way where a child's screams wouldn't attract attention.

Such a place was right near the Donleshkov station, a little used platform. In October 1990, Britochov and the case's head investigators developed a trap. They would put conspicuous policemen at all the major thoroughfares on the Electritschka line, hoping to nudge the killer onward. Then a small number of plainclosed police officers would guard three lesser stations, Don Leshkov included, and wait. It required a significant bump in manpower. 360 new officers, one of the largest single militia operations of all time. So you could imagine the frustration when a fresh body appeared in the woods outside the Don Leshlovak platform,

just past the plainclothes officers. Her name was Svetlana Korostik. She'd suffered multiple states. stab wounds, amputated genitals, and her tongue and nipples were missing. The autopsy dated the killing back to November 6th, a few weeks after the trap had been set. The officer on guard had taken a lunch break, and theoretically he told Kostoev he could have missed Vettlana while he was gone. However, he did remember seeing something on his return, an older man drinking water from the well.

His clothes muddied, and a small smear of blood on his cheek. The guard had taken down his name, André Chiquotillo. The name meant nothing to Kostoev. He hadn't even been on the case for Chiquotillo's 1984 arrest, but for once, luck was on the side of the law. Vetsuzov had been driving past Don Leshkov when the news hit and drove to the station to yell at the guards responsible when he heard Chiquetillo's name, everything clicked. On November 20, 1990, Chiquotillo tried to proposition.

a young boy outside of a beer stand. As soon as the boy left, Fedizov and a group of policemen stepped out and handcuffed him. He didn't put up a fight, nor did he say anything on the way to the station. Those around him described him as calm, tired even.

It had been 12 years since Chiquatillo's first murder, he was ready to be caught. That didn't mean he was ready to confess. For the first few days of interrogation, Chiquatillo seemed to be on the edge of broken. He'd write long, rambling letters hinting at a darkness within him. In one such letter, he discussed the vagrants he would seek his targets. Quote, these bums attract miners in their dark net.

They head from the stations in different directions on the trains. I had to watch scenes from the sex life of these bums in the stations and on the trains, and I remembered my humiliation that I couldn't ever prove myself a complete man. And a question arose. Do these rotten elements have a right to exist? End quote. But Chiquotillo never directly referenced the murders. He'd end each session promising to confess the next day,

only to return with the same vague self-hatred. It's unlikely that Chiquotillo was playing coy for the sake of it. Since childhood, his world of reality and fantasy had been kept rigidly separate. He'd never told anyone, even his wife, a portion of his misdeeds. The department only had 10 days. to obtain a confession, and their window was closing. On the ninth, Kostoev allowed Burakov to bring in the only person who truly understood Chiquito,

Alexander Bukanovsky. Bukonovsky agreed to talk with Chiketilo, but only on three conditions. He would speak with him alone, without any recording. The conversation would only be used to loosen Chiquetillo. They could not submit it as evidence. And Bukonovsky would speak to Chiketilo as a psychiatrist, not an investigator. He wouldn't try to steer Chichikatilo. He would just listen.

Chichotillo agreed to speak to him, saying, quote, I don't know him, but I would be able to tell him about some psychological manifestations I've suffered. I feel I can't explain some of the things I've done, end quote. We'll never know exactly what Bukonovsky said to Chiketilo, but within two hours, the Lessa-Polosa killer began to confess. Following the talk, Bukonovsky demonstrated, sympathy toward Chiquotillo, he saw a man who had lived a deeply unhappy life and had become

addicted to his one source of relief. He suggested that Chiquotillo was insane and deserved treatment, not execution. But the state psychiatrist, Dr. Andre Kachenko, had the final word on Chiquotillo. After days of interviewing, Kachenko admitted that Chiquotillo's violence stemmed from childhood. There was even evidence that Chiquotillo had sustained bruising on his brain as a fetus, which could have damaged his ability to empathize. But most important to Kachenko was Chikotilo's ability to stop killing. Quote, despite a lengthy investigation, one cannot be sure that everything has been clarified down to the last detail. Nobody knows everything except Chiquotillo himself. Yet these winter periods are evidence that he was

still perfectly in control of the situation. He was still able to restrain his impulses, end quote. Why did Bukinovsky's opinion that Chikotilla was mentally ill and therefore wasn't fit for trial went out? Well, that has to do with how Soviet law functions. In America, the prosecution and defense are seen as competitors. Each side can bring in experts whose perspective helps their case. But in Soviet courts, there are no sides. Defense, prosecution, and judge are all working together to find the truth. So when the state psychiatrist says a prisoner is fit for trial, that's the final word. Bukonowski was never even called to testify. In another court, such as the American justice system, Bukinovsky might have been able to determine that Chiquotillo was

insane and unfit for trial. But it's a bit poetic, isn't it? Only the Soviet Union could create the specific type of monster that was André Chiquatilo, and only the Soviet Union could destroy him. Though it was hardly the Soviet Union anymore, on August 21st, 1991, facing a rebellion across the regime, Gorbachev dissolved the government and resigned. The Soviet Union was over. And the first major media event for post-communist Russia was the Chiquetillo trial. And it was a circus. Over the six-month process, Chiquatillo became more and more unhinged within his metal cage. At one point, in an argument with the judge,

He turned to the crowd and exposed his penis, shouting, What could I do with this useless thing? Throughout the trial, Chichotilla continued to expose himself, rant nonsensically, and at one point claimed to the judge that he was pregnant. This was all probably an act to boost his incredibly unlikely insanity plea. Chiquatillo's guards noted that his attitude in his cell was somber, quiet, and reserved. Only in front of the court cameras did he begin to rant and rant. But Judge Leonid Akubzanov wasn't stirred.

On October 14, 1992, he sentenced Chiquatilo to death for 52 of the 53 murders for which he had been tried. It would be another year and a half of appeals before the sentence was carried out. But on February 14, 1994, Valentine's Day, Chiquitila was taken back to his cell and executed for his crimes. The butcher of Rostov was finally dead. But not everyone saw reason to celebrate. In his final statement, Judge Akubzanov laid plenty of blame on the police for their mistakes. As Kostoev took to attacking the other investigators in the press, Budokov and Fetizov retreated, bitter and exhausted.

But Akubzanov also had much to say about Soviet society. In his mind, they all bore some responsibility for Chiquetil's killings. Quote, in our Soviet Union, there was no banditry, No killing of children, nothing bad. We lived in a barrack socialism, where the word of an adult was law. I was raised that way. If we had a normal system of upbringing, none of these children would have taken up with this stranger. Thank you for joining us over the last two weeks as we traced the life of André Chiquatillo, the butcher of Rostov.

Don't forget to subscribe to serial killers on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, or any other pod. podcast directory or through our website, Parchast.com. That's P-A-R-C-A-S-T-com. A new episode of Serial Killers comes out every Monday. Please let us know what you think and join the conversation on our Parcast Facebook page. You can tweet us at Parcast Network. That's P-A-R-C-A-S-T network. As always, we thank you for listening. Have a killer week. Serial Killers was created by Max Cutler and developed by Ron Cutler. It is a production Cutler Media and is part of the Parcast Network. It is produced by Max and Ron Cutler, sound design by Ron Shapiro, with production assistance by Carrie Murphy. Additional production assistance by

Carly Madden and Maggie Admire. Serial Killers is written by Connor Fitzgerald and stars Greg Polson and Vanessa Richardson. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors, where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag. And there was a fool of blood. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 is out now with new episodes every Thursday. Listen on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A beloved 75-year-old man washing up getting ready for bed is brutally beaten and killed. Despite an exhaustive investigation, the killer avoids arrest. and then strikes again. I'm Global News crime reporter Nancy Hicks. You might listen to a lot of true crime podcasts this year, but they're not crime beat. Search for and follow the award-winning podcast Crime Beat on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts.