RedHanded - Episode 250 - Andrei Chikatilo: Impotent Rage - Part 1

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

For over thirty years, Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo eluded law enforcement as he slaughtered more than 50 women and children across the USSR. In the first of this two-part episode, we take you through Chikatilo’s early years, the horrors he lived through in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, and how the surrounding chaos turned him into one of the most prolific serial killers in history. Classic merch is out now: redhandedshop.com Become a patron: Patreon Order a copy of the book here (US & Canada): Order on Wellesley Books Order on Amazon.com Order a copy of the book here (UK, Ireland, Europe, NZ, Aus): Order on Amazon.co.uk Order on Foyles Follow us on social media: Instagram Twitter Visit our website: Website Contact us: Contact See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah.

I'm Saruti. And welcome to Red Handed. I have nothing to say. The end. The end. Thanks so much for coming. The red hot minute. No, we basically got down into the studio today and then just immediately were like,

nothing's working. I can't hear your voice through my headphones. Why is this not lighting up? Why are all the cables in a big snake nest of wires it's a been a tricky morning but we are now running 45 minutes behind schedule and everything's gone to pot but it's okay because we have got the queen's birthday this weekend no we don't no it's next weekend isn't it well i mean we get to celebrate this weekend. I think she likes having two. She does like having two.

Well, whatever. We get four days off this weekend. So there we go. And we'll have to pay for that next week. Anyway, never mind. We've got a tricky case for you. It's just been a tricky week. This is absolutely a big hitter.

You probably have heard it on other podcasts. Maybe you've watched a documentary or two. But the thing about this case is that it is so enormous. Telling the story in a succinct and listenable way is quite difficult. But we've done our absolute best. So let's take ourselves off to the USSR. In the mid-1980s, in the smallish mining town of Shakhty in then-Soviet Russia, a woman working in a factory looked over her

colleague's shoulder. He always carried a notebook with him and could often be seen scribbling away in it. She'd always wondered what he was doing in that little book. So one day, she took the chance and had a look. It's like you imagine he's going to be, you know, drawing romantic pictures of you, or writing love poems. Yeah, or, you know, copying out all of the communist leaders. He loved doing that too, but that's not what he was doing. When she did finally see the internal pages of her colleague's notebook, she saw that he hadn't been writing notes or love

letters or pictures of dogs. He hadn't even been writing words. All he had doodled was rows and rows of little crosses. And those images puzzled her for years. She wouldn't understand what those little crosses meant until 1993. Our story this week doesn't start in the mid-80s, however. It starts under the reign of Stalin. In Soviet Russia, where your dog walks you. The man who drew the crosses over and over again in that notebook started his life, as you might expect, as a little boy.

A boy called Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo. So, I've learned lots of Russian this week. Chikatilo is a Ukrainian name. Romanovich just means son of Roman, his father. So, you've probably heard him referred to as Andrei Chikatilo. And Chikatilo doesn't mean anything. He even says in interviews later, he's like, it's just a collection of letters. It literally doesn't mean anything, which makes me sad. I don't like it when names don't mean things. But it also is quite fitting for him, I think.

Yes, he is an empty vessel. Just this empty, meaningless vessel. Yep. Spoilers. Start as we mean to go on. Yes, precisely. So Chikatilo was born in 1936 in Yablo-Chenoy, near the Ukrainian border. It was once the breadbasket of the region, but by the time our cross-doodler was brought into the world, it was, much like his name, totally empty and pretty barren. So let's kick off with an extremely quick

history of the region for those of you who did not do GCSE history. 1917 saw the first Russian revolution. That's the one that got the Tsars out and Lenin in. But that revolution was very much an urban one. Life in places like Labrador-Chinoy really didn't change that much. The following civil war didn't really touch them either. The Bolshevik party promised to electrify every home, but that promise didn't bother the farmers either. The news probably didn't reach that many people in rural areas anyway. Very convenient to promise to electrify all homes when the people who don't have electricity in their homes can't hear you say that.

Yeah, I think the most important thing to remember is that Russia's fucking huge. And it was even huger when it was the USSR. Much to Putin's chagrin. Chagrin. Yeah, so it's actually very important for this story to remember that not only is it massive, communication is slight at best and everything is censored. Remember those things. You'll need them later on. But the countryside, disconnected from the rest of Russia or not, would be thrust into politics in the 1920s, whether they liked it or not. Because the 20s brought with it the grain crisis. The kulaks and the middle peasants were not handing over the grain

that they should have been and Stalin was not happy about it yeah a kulak is like someone who owns anything if you own more than eight acres you're a kulak because I was watching an interview with he's a comedian his family are Russian he was born in Russia and he was saying basically that his family were considered kulaks but he was like all they had was a horse all they had was a horse and they were like you're a kulak get in the fucking gulag i mean yes that does happen but technically speaking my understanding is that kulak is someone who has more than eight acres anything less than that you're a middle peasant so you're still owning something because stalin doesn't want anyone to own anything at all no no you got a horse you're the bourgeoisie get in the bin yeah

get in get in siberia yeah So yes, these people weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing under Stalin and he was pretty pissed. So on the 27th of December 1929, in celebration of the Man of Steel's 50th birthday, Big Joe announced the collectivisation of all farms, which we know from history always works out really well. Nothing ever goes wrong and millions of people definitely don't die of starvation. Basically, in case you don't know what we mean when we say collectivisation of all farms, it basically means that no one was allowed

to not play ball anymore. No one was going to be allowed to not hand over their grain because they don't own that land anymore. The people, the country, the state, Stalin, he owns the land, you work work the land we take the grain you can keep a bit of it but you're gonna starve no you can't keep any of it oh you can't keep any it all goes to the state and then the state decides what you get sure sure sure so previously before his like collectivization announcement the deal was that they could keep a bit but then they

were keeping too much they were keeping too much but by were keeping too much. And by too much, we mean, yeah. Enough to survive. Yeah. They were just hoarding all this grain. He just didn't really particularly hated private property, did Big Joe. Yes. I mean, as communists tend to do. So Big Joe went a step further because he also announced the obliteration of the Kulak class. Yeah, it wasn't a secret.

No. So he's basically like anyone who is an owner of private property, an owner of any kind of assets, we're going to completely obliterate that group of people. So the revolution was finally making itself known in the countryside and the kulaks were sent to Ukraine, the Urals, Siberia and Kazakhstan, which in many cases was, as you can imagine, just a death sentence. Many people died on their way there, and those who survived the journey found their destinations to be utterly uninhabitable. This is, it's a genocide, it's nothing else. Yeah, 100%.

Yeah. Farmers naturally didn't love this idea, so they started to kill their cattle in protest, which meant there was even less food to kill their cattle in protest which meant there was even less food to go around than before and apparently there's a Russian saying that in 1929 peasants only ate meat because they were just like if if I can't have it no one fucking can but obviously that meant there was not any food and then Stalin enforced his own famine in 1932 and that killed 10 million people. The Ukraine region was hit particularly hard, but Stalin didn't care because Ukraine had always been quite separatist.

And he was like, they're a problem. So if they all die, my life is easier. And famously, Stalin's opinion was one man's death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. And that's like pretty Leninist of him also, because Lenin always used to say the worse it is, the better it is for you. Because like the worse people's lives are, the more they're going to back a revolution so I feel like Lenin is often painted as the like quite nice older grandfather and then Stalin is the one that comes and fucks you up but like it was all they're all bad yeah bad I think Stalin killed 10 million people at least and also and the fucking rest yeah he is at the same time one of the most successful leaders of all time and the worst i was listening to a podcast about it last night actually every time my sister comes home she's like what are you listening to i'm like something about stalin he started his reign in russia with a wooden plow and he ended it in the space race all in 30 years and that is if you don't

care about millions of people dying very impressive i mean yes the main part being if you don't care about millions of people dying and also terrible terrible policies like collectivization and the destruction of any kind of private property or private ownership but did you know that and this number varies from place to place but there was a poll done in Russia very recently in 2021 what year is it now 2022 2021 2022 so last year it found that 56% of Russians support Stalin I mean I know he's not around to be supported but I'm trying to think of what the right word is. Approve of Stalin. Like, remember him fondly, whatever the word is. I mean, it depends on your ideology, right? Like, because you can look at it both ways, depending on where you're from and what you value.

Like, some people would argue that the change that he did make in Russia was impossible without all of these people dying. Same with, like, Mao Zedong, whatever. That's not how I would think about it. You can say that those changes weren't going to be possible without millions of people dying same with like Mao Zedong whatever that's not how I would think about it but you can say that those changes weren't going to be possible without millions of people dying but it's like but they were they were a bad idea and they killed millions of people yeah but if he achieved his goals you know so if you agree with the goals then you could argue that the ends justify the means I don't but some people do yeah but that's um but I think they are they are worthy of criticism because that's like being like oh oh, well, if you like Hitler's policies, he achieved his goals.

He got really close to the people. No, that's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know. If your ideology matches up with the Third Reich, then the Third Reich makes sense, you know? Of course, of course. But it's shocking to me that still today, well, maybe it shouldn't be shocking anymore, but still today that over half of Russians are like, yeah, pretty top bloke. Top bloke, Stalin. be shocking anymore but still today that over half of russians are like yeah pretty top look top looks darling i'm jake warren and in our first season of finding i set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mom's life you can listen to finding natasha right now

exclusively on wondery plus in season two i found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone i've never even met but a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me. And it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding.

And this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face-to-face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained

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Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you find your favourite podcasts. Once the Kulaks were out, the old ways were abolished in the rural areas as well as the city. And private property was replaced with total collectivism, mainly because everyone was dead. Yeah, they killed everyone who owned anything. And then they were like, well, now there's no one to own anything. So we'll own it. The miracle of communism.

I actually think this might have been one of the worst times in history. Geographically, politically, time-wise, everything. It was like a perfect storm of fucking nightmares. Yep. Yep. 100%. Because you had Stalin, you had the Nazis. Famines were so severe that children had to eat grass in order to survive. And of course, rumours of cannibalism ran rife through the farmlands. And I think I put

rumours in there just sort of like cover us. But in 1933, people are 100% eating people in Russia, 100%. Of course they were. We'll put rumours, not because some like, you know, fucking middle peasant from the past-o times is going to come back and sue us because like we say all the time on the show cannibalism is hard to prove but if you weren't dead then you were probably eating people because there wasn't anything else to eat a little human human steak with a side of grass and your dead horse yeah and your dead horse and of course you know is because hungry people do desperate things. And so little Andre Chikatilo, don't forget about him, knew this too, almost too well. All of his life, Andre was told that his brother, and in some sources it says his cousin,

had been kidnapped and eaten two years before Andre was born. The other thing about this story is everyone has about 17 different names, so it's very difficult to keep track. We've read two books, both translated from Russian, poorly, so it has been a bit of a struggle. There are many versions of this story. Andrei Tikitilo himself says that it was his brother. I've read in other books that it was his cousin.

Anyway, this kid is called Stefan, and Stefan, he never knows him. He dies, well, he disappears two years before he's born. But the most important thing to remember is that he grows up with the story of someone who is related to him being kidnapped, killed and eaten. Yeah, I mean, parents tell their kids

like the boogeyman will come get you if you don't eat your dinner. And they're like, your cousin slash brother Stefan actually got kidnapped by some people and got eaten. The end. Which was happening. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it's not even to get you to eat your grass, Andre. Like, obviously that is an incredibly traumatising thing to tell a child. But they were growing up in an incredibly fucked up and traumatising time. So, yeah, there was probably not much else to talk about. So, because of the fear of what happened or what he at least believed to have happened andre never strayed far from home terrified that he too would be snatched and this is of course also a major plot line in red dragon rising of course i didn't even think of that i will always think of that i will always think of the tacky ass horror movie that i can drag into this so allegedly andre had a totally normal relationship with his mother

and i know he hasn't exactly said this but it's not like it's a direct quote but i do think if anybody tells you i have a totally normal relationship with my mother red flag yeah so although we're not sure how normal any relationship that contains a child cannibalism story because it's presumably probably his mum that told him this horrendous story about Stefan can really be that is also what the books say it's an interesting angle to take because obviously it's not a secret Andre Cicatillo goes on to do horrendous things or we wouldn't be here talking about him it's not like and he lived happily ever after and got a cat. Like, it's not the situation. But there is really not that much about his relationship with his mother in any of the sources we can find. But I don't believe for

a second it was normal. We do know a little bit more about Andrei's father. He was enlisted in the Red Army when the Nazi forces were occupying what's now Ukraine. And he was captured during battle and he spent years either in a concentration camp or a POW camp, depending on which book you read. Either way, when he returned home after the war, he was treated with great suspicion by the Stalinist state. They loved to do that, didn't they? It was like, if you were a POW or you spent time being captured and behind enemy lines and you've gone to a concentration camp they weren't like welcome you home like a war hero and like oh my god you really you know took one for the team they're like what the fuck were you up to over there yeah 100% because he

had essentially worked for enemies of the state during the war even though he had no choice that didn't really matter that he was the enemy yeah it's almost like very like spartan in its beliefs like you should have just died instead of being caught. Yeah, you should have died rather than coming home without your shield. Yeah, yeah. With your shield on it. Andre's dad. Because being a literal prisoner forced into labour wasn't enough for the KGB. And it's pretty ironic that had his father died in battle, Andre Cicatillo would have been considered the son of a hero. But in reality, Cicatillo's father was considered the son of a hero. But in reality,

Cicatillo's father was treated with great suspicion and sent off to work in the mines. So Andre had an outcast father and a mother who told him that he was at constant risk of being eaten. What could possibly go wrong? Recipe for a happy time. You're fine. You're fine, kid. But shockingly, as you're about to find out, quite a lot could and did go wrong. Once Chikatilo was old enough to go to school, he immediately had a terrible time. He was shockingly short-sighted and too afraid to tell his teachers that he couldn't read the board.

That breaks my heart. Like, I know, I know he goes on to do really horrible things, but I just, like, it just strikes such a chord with me. Just, like, children just, like, being too scared to say they don't understand. Because it was me. No, I can get it. I think, again, it's the kind of society where you're being led by someone like Stalin, like the archetypal strongman.

And then you'll hear this kid of an outcast already. And then you're in class and you're being like, I also can't see. People just can be like, oh, you're a total fucking loser. Yeah, fuck you, specky four eyes. Precisely. Precisely. I don't know what that is in Russian. So Chikatilo taught himself to read at home

and he wouldn't actually get glasses until he was 30. I imagine there weren't that many optometrists kicking around in a Soviet bloc Ukraine. So Chikatilo, the eyes weren't the only problem. His body gave him other troubles as well. Later he would say the following, quote, during childhood I spent more time with female friends. Even now I relate better to women. When I was a child, boys became more attached to me as if I were a girl. I no longer know which sex I relate to. I like the attention of men. An adult Chikatilo would argue that he had larger breasts than his male classmates

and also that his foreskin was an odd shape, which attracted even more ridicule. But his peers remember him as being good-looking and well-built. His nickname was even Andre the Strong. But they did all agree that he was a little bit reclusive. Yeah, I mean, Andre paints this very tragic picture of himself. But then other contemporaries were like, like, yeah, sure, he was a dork, but like he wasn't, he wasn't feeble. And he makes himself out to be this like shadow of a boy and that's not what other people who were there say they actually said that he was tough but even if he was he was definitely shit with the ladies

that's something we know for sure after school he went on to do his military service but uncharacteristically for a young soldier one might argue he had absolutely no interest in sex and he gained a reputation amongst the other soldiers for being gay but he did manage during his national service to go on a date with one girl and he even managed to get a cuddle in. But the girl was not so keen after a few moments in his embrace she pulled away but remember he was Andre the Strong and he refused to let her go. He enjoyed that moment of struggle, and although he didn't know it yet, the pursuit of that feeling would shape the rest of his life, and eventually his death. In 1954, he had completed his service and was introduced to a girl called

Tanya Barla. Oh, hello. Hey, sis. That's so strange. I know. I feel like wherever we are in the world, it like randomly pops up the name Bala. I swear we did see it on places when we were in Indonesia. And now here in Ukraine, of all places. And there's a lake in Wales called Lake Bala. Oh, there you go. Don't know why. Can someone tell me why?

Why is there a lake in Wales called Lake Barla? So he gets introduced to Cerruti's friend, Tanya Barla, and to everyone's surprise, they got on. Tanya was like, you know what? He's a bit shy, but he's reasonably good looking. And he's so strong. And he's so strong. If you look at pictures of him before all of his teeth fall out,

it's not terrible. You know, it's not terrible. Andre Cicatillo Young? He's not terrible. You know, it's not terrible. Andre Chikatilo Young? He's not Young Stalin hot, but you know. No, he's, he's, he's all right. Hey, hi. On the topic of Young Stalin, I've got a better one. Young Benjamin Netanyahu, fucking smoke show, slamming hottie. Don't believe me, look it up. It's true. I can vouch for it so tanya tanya bala

seemed to like chikatilo and the pair were soon rolling around in fields together but they never made it to the main event because all it took was for chikatilo to climb on top of tanya fully clothed and he would come all in his pants. Oh, so no. He was so mortified by this that he swore never ever to touch another vagina except for his future wives. It's always the vagina's fault, isn't it? Always blame the vagene. It's nothing to do with you, Andre. It's those pesky vaginas.

He was also no longer going to pursue women and he decided that he was going to throw himself into his studies instead. Studying in Soviet Russia was exactly what you think it was. There were a select few elite colleges and then loads and loads and loads of technical ones. Chikatilo had done an excellent job of teaching himself every school subject and had his sights set firmly on Russia's top university, Moscow State. He made the most of his reclusive hyperfixation and passed all of the incredibly difficult exams, but found himself rejected on quote-unquote political grounds. One of the other, I don't know if myth is the right word, but one of the stories surrounding

Andrei Chikatilo is that he was incredibly intelligent and therefore frustrated by his Soviet life. I don't think that's true. I think he was average at best. I think there were just not that many opportunities for people to go on to further education. Yeah. And it's something we often see when we're talking about particularly serial killers, but generally I would say any type of violent criminal. There's always this sort of like noise in the background. If they're even reasonably intelligent, basically if they're not completely stupid, people are like, oh my God, he was a genius. And I'm like, was he?

He's actually got pretty average intelligence. Like he's not a genius. He just wasn't like, you know, stumbling around, like setting himself on fire by accident and doing all sorts of crazy things. Like he's not a genius he just wasn't like you know stumbling around like setting himself on fire by accident and doing all sorts of crazy things like he's not a genius no i really don't think he was i mean in the in the books and stuff they'll always play oh and he could recite all of the communist leaders and i'm like duh that's probably all it was in school yeah that's all he had to teach himself to read no i think it's just this idea again we talk about it in the book a

little bit but this sort of like fetishization you know that's not hot take this sort of fetishization of serial killers that we have in modern life and that kind of belief that we want to have that for someone to have killed as many people as andre chikatilo goes on to and you're going to find out it's loads it's because they must have been in some way omnipotent in some way super humanly intelligent they couldn't just have got away with it because of everything else we're about to tell you I couldn't agree more like he gets away with it because Russia's fucking massive the end exactly so he was rejected from Moscow State University on political grounds and that did

happen basically if they thought you were trouble you weren't getting in and Chikatilo was sure that this was because of his father and it may well have been but he never quite let it go and I think another reason this like idea of him being super intellectual pervades is because it's what he told everyone he really fancied himself an intellectual but he decided that if he wasn't going to Moscow State he wasn't going anywhere and he decided to get a communications degree from a technical college instead and went on to be a telephone engineer. And being a telephone engineer was excellent work if you could get it. Russia industrialised totally in the space of 30 years, which is an astonishing feat, and that meant that there were lots of phone lines that needed installing. And the city of Rostov, or Rostov-on-Don, depending on which Google map you're

looking at, is where Europe meets Asia, and it's also an industrial centre nearest to Shakti, which is where we will be focusing on a little bit later. But Rostov is bigger than Shakti, and it was starting to make an economic comeback. The actual work, the telephone engineering bit, Chikatilo had little problem with. Now he was in his 20s, he did have significant problems with his co-workers. Just like the kids at school. They thought he was weird. And this theory was confirmed one day when Chikatilo told his team that he was going for a wee

and he walked off the site into some woodland. He wasn't going for a wee. Uh-oh. Was he going for a dirty wee? He't going for a wee uh-oh was he going for a dirty wee he was going for a wank which a dirty wee is what they're calling it that's like what they're calling it in soviet russia and this oh this turns me inside out because he was so short-sighted no he didn't realize that the rest of his engineering team could see him as he was doing a wank in the woods yeah he was having a woody wank and everyone could see which uh awful awful so they all saw he died of embarrassment and they never ever let him forget

it oh dear but you wouldn't would you like hey why are you wanking at work and two we can see you no I mean if I did see you at work just disappear into a glass meeting room to have a dirty wee I'd probably never let it go can you imagine I mean I'm trying not to but I'm just really stressed we've got a puppy room and a wanking room which one do you want you can't mix the two that's not allowed that's not allowed never the two shall meet so obviously as you can imagine after this uh wood wank situation chikatilo withdrew even further constantly humiliated he retracted into a recluse. And to make things worse, he was just 27 at this point, and he was unmarried.

And if you think, that's not that bad, this is the 50s and the 60s in the USSR, baby, so he was basically over the fucking hill. Yeah, and everyone had died in the war. Not not that many men loads of women and they're still like weirdo wood wanker i don't want to marry him in the 50s in the ussr i think just any man who wasn't drunk all the time and wanting to beat you to death was probably like a catch but it's not all doom and gloom. I mean, it kind of is. But let's have a little moment of romance, shall we? Because in 1963, Andre Cicatillo finally caught a break. When he met Faina.

And she was capable and confident in all the ways that Andre Cicatillo was not. So they went out for a while, but never managed to have actual penetrative sex. Not for lack of trying. And Faina put all of this down just to nerves and was sure that Andre Cicatillo would be able to maintain an erection after they got married and after they were no longer living in sin.

So they got married the same year they met. But the nuptials did not solve chikatilo's penis problem that didn't stop them from having children though two in fact which were conceived manually and uh i know how they did this and there wasn't a turkey baster in the notes it says we'll leave you to figure it out but uh i'm just gonna say just a wood wank and then a hand insertion yeah yeah he's putting it in there with his hands yeah yeah which like i know obviously it makes sense that that could still work but it is shocking that she got pregnant that way twice Twice. That's unbelievable.

She must have been extremely fertile. Extremely fertile. Which again, like for people who were basically starving. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Surrounded by just like nuclear power plants. How? They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant.

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He didn't like the real one too much. And fantasy started to play a major role in Fayena Chikatilo's sex life too. She was so desperate to have any kind of sex life at all that she went along with whatever her husband wanted her to do. And the role play started out, as you might expect when it comes from the mind of a man who's been humiliated his whole life. Essentially, Cicatillo plays this kind of Nietzschean superman, this perfect, perfect being. But as time went on, Cicikatilo became more and more physically dominant over his wife. He was so insecure that it's easy to forget that physically he was overpowering.

And I think when you see pictures of Chikatilo, a lot of those pictures are towards the end. Yes, yes. When he's already, you know. Like wasting away. Yeah. And in a cage, in the courtroom, etc. But like, that's not what he looks like at this point. No, he looks like what he is, which is a big burly farmer. So outside the Cicatillo family bedroom, the world was changing. The great post-Stalinist Soviet thought had begun.

Khrushchev gave his famous speech in 1956, denouncing the abuses of Stalin and his cult of personality. And he had promised to bury the West of Stalin and his cult of personality. And he had promised to bury the West. It's called the secret speech. Go and look it up. It's fascinating. And, I mean, it's not a secret what he said because we just told you. But he was basically like, well, Stalin, that was a bit mental.

Let's move on. Let's move on, yeah. The USSR were kind of smashing it at this point. Industry was rapidly spreading across the land and Soviets were crushing the space race. They really were. I think because the US were the first to put a man on the moon, everyone forgets that the first country to put an actual person in space were the Soviets.

It was like neck and neck. And that's why, you know, we've talked about this a lot and under the Duvet particularly, is why when Putin starts talking about the fall of Russia from being a superpower, from being a czarist empire that ruled such a fucking massive portion of the world, to then being a genuine superpower in the 50s, to where they are now, which is if they didn't have oil and gas they would essentially be pretty irrelevant apart from being a massive fucking landmass but a landmass a lot of which is not

particularly habitable that's why he's so fucking angry about it all the time and i think this serves as an interesting reminder to everybody exactly how far they have fallen. So Chikatilo, he fucking loved all this. He loved the space race, the growth, the industrialisation. He was fucking mad for it. He was also a card-carrying member of the Communist Party

for 25 years. And in the 70s, he finally got the academic degree that he'd always wanted. So things are kind of you know better he's got a wife he's got two kids yeah yeah yeah at this stage it's kind of as good as it gets for him he finally gets to be the academic that he always wanted to be it starts going pretty steeply downhill in a minute but i think what i really want we'll come on to this a bit more next week. Spoilers, this is two parts.

But when communism fell, Andrei Chikatilo took it extremely personally. Yes, I would imagine so, because the start of things, in my opinion, not going very well, is that he studied Marx and Engels absolutely tirelessly, along with the Russian language and philology. While he was studying at the University of Rostov, he had a job in a sports centre and he told everyone he was studying for a doctorate. He wasn't. He had an undergraduate degree, but I think everyone assumes that he's some sort of mega genius

just because he told them that he was. Exactly. And I think, you know, none of this is like particularly shocking. This man is a fucking would-be, goes on to be serial killer. Of course he's a fucking narcissist. Of course he's a fucking megalomaniac. And everyone at the sports centre did pick up on that. They all thought he was a bit weird, but there were no major incidents recorded while he worked there. The same cannot be said for his next job. He began to teach. That seemed like an obvious move. He was well educated relatively and he liked young people. But he was absolutely terrible at it. He was a shockingly bad teacher. Of course he was. Can you imagine a job that requires more confidence than being a teacher? Standing in front of a group of children, all the way down from children to university, like post-grad,

the level of confidence you need to do that. And he is one of the most insecure men we've ever come across. Yep. He had absolutely no classroom management skills. And the children he taught had so little respect for him that they smoked in front of him in the classroom. So once again, he lived a life of ridicule, and this time it's coming from children, which is even worse.

He found his classroom experiences so emotionally bruising that he would often come close to fainting. Right, now strap up, because this is where things start to go from bad to much, much worse. Because the adults at the school didn't like Chikatilo either. He was constantly whining. He never socialised and preferred instead to read his beloved communism books. And it didn't help that he walked around with his hands in his pockets. Not in a kind of, I'm cool, blasé kind of way. How do you do, fellow kids?

Yeah. Definitely not that. No, no, no. In a much more of an, I'm obviously fondling myself kind of way. How do you do, fellow kids? Yeah. Definitely not that. No, no, no. In a much more of an I'm obviously fondling myself kind of way. Everyone knew, but they just ignored it. He was a good communist after all.

That saves his butt so many times. That's the thing. I feel like if you were a good communist at the time, they'd just be like, well, we'll just let that slide too. It's like last week. Yeah, you're a good singer. Well, the week before. You're a good singer, well we'll just let that slide too it's like last week yeah you're a good singer well the week before you're a good singer so we'll just let all this slide that's a great that's a banger but things with Chikatilo got quite difficult to ignore when in May 1973 he took his class on a trip to a river and And when the children were swimming, he pursued one of the girls.

She was just 15 and described in all the books about this case as being one of the more, quote-unquote, developed in the class. I think we can all guess what that means. So this girl tries to get away from Chikatilo, but he quickly caught up with her and grabbed her under the water.

For the next few moments, his hands clawed at the girl's breasts and hips. As she struggled, his body stiffened in climax. And then he let her go. And there was another incident at the same school. He had a female student in his classroom

and he locked the door. He attempted to grab her and she jumped out the window. Oh my god. So even Soviet parents, even communism loving parents are like, oh he's a party man. Even they couldn't stand for it. And so it was made abundantly clear to Andrei Chikatilo that he needed to leave the school quietly to avoid a scene. He dutifully did this, but apparently no one thought to pass on the molester message to any other schools in the region. And he quickly got another job at a boys' school,

which has the most Soviet name in the world, Technical School 33. Oh my God. Yes, and it was about 40 miles outside of Rostov, which is the city where Chikatilo had done his degree. The boys in this establishment were being trained as mining industry technicians and they were usually between 15 and 19 years old. And Cicatillo wasn't really teaching at this institute.

He was more like a den mother. He was looking after the part of the school that the boys slept in. Yeah. Worst place for him, really. This is definitely a theme that we'll come back to i know over the course of the next two episodes oh did we say this is a two-parter it's a two-parter but the idea was that definitely at this point in the soviet union obviously it was like fuck the west we hate the west all of the problems in the world are because of like western capitalism etc so the idea that

somebody was a child molester, at that point, the Soviet Union also saw that as like being a Western thing that couldn't possibly be happening here. So I think also, the reason they didn't tell other schools was because then they'd have to admit that this had happened. And they'd rather just be like, it's fine, it didn't really happen, just leave. So I'm sure you can imagine where we are going when we talk about, with concern, the idea that Cicatillo was a den mother looking after the boys as they slept at this school. By 1978, Andre Cicatillo was spending less and less time with his own children and making frequent visits to the technical school boys' dormitory in the middle of the night.

When he was there, he'd expose himself and molest the boys in their sleep. And unbelievably, yet again, he got away with this for quite a few years, for multiple reasons. Initially, the rest of the faculty turned a blind eye, as again, he was such a devout party member. But also because Chikatilo had a quality that doesn't quite translate into English. Blat. Yeah, so many things in Russian just don't, they just don't translate at all. Yeah. And I think like, we also have to understand and again, this is why when I try to understand like the war in Russia and things like that, I try to watch actual people who understand Russia and who are Russian talking about it because they are the only ones that can explain to us like the the psychology of Russia or the Russian

people or whatever it might be I think I was even watching something where they were like was it Ivan the Terrible and how Ivan the Terrible isn't called Ivan the Terrible he's called like Ivan the Wise because it's again it's like a completely different mentality and a different way of looking at things. And even thousands of people dying in a war, which may seem odd somewhere else for the reasons that are being proclaimed, may not seem that weird there because of the value system or whatever it might be. And I think it's fair to say like it is just a much more like brutal sensibility. And I think that coming back to Blatt though, essentially what Blatt is, is a combination of influence and connections that you either have or you don't. Essentially, it was the idea that Chikatilo was a jammy bastard. Yeah, it's not like someone with the gift of gab who's like charming.

It's someone who doesn't have to try and everything just works out. Interesting. And again, I think it is probably also yeah he's a party member but also because they're like we shouldn't really be talking about the fact that this is happening because don't we constantly get told that these kind of aversions don't happen in this country because everything's fine well I don't know that's quite often the like rhetoric that's attached this story, I don't know if I buy it. To be honest, I think people just had bigger things to worry about, like how they were going to feed their children.

And we'll come on to a bit later why I think, and everyone is very welcome to disagree with me, that I do think the authorities knew for a long time. Because the authorities were the only ones who knew anything. Because everything was so censored. Like no one had any information. There's actually a movie that I think is loosely based on Chikatilo's life. Child 33.

Child 33. Yeah, yeah. And it's like a serial killer who uses the trains or something. Yes, it is. Very loosely. Or might be Child 44 or something. Child number number. Yeah. Yes, it is very loosely or might be child 44 something child number number yeah yes it is based on chikatilo but in so much as that there are some people in a gulag and there are

trains and children go missing it's it's based on a series of books yes yes it is i only remember like i didn't actually know if it definitely was and i was going to just cut this out if i was wrong and i checked afterwards but i remember watching that film and thinking, this is Chikatilo. But yeah, it's worth a watch. It's worth a watch. While Chikatilo was working at the boys' technical school, he spent more time between Rostov and Shakhty,

which is where he was seen doodling miniature crosses. Quite a lot of this story happens in Rostov and Shakhty, and in between. I mean, his nickname was the Rostov Ripper. Yes. Actually, he spent so much time in Shakhty that he bought, under a false name and without his wife's knowledge, what can only be described as a hovel. It was 26 Mexivoy Lane. It's a shed. It's a shed. It's not a house.

Don't listen to anyone who says it's a house. And he would lure children and young people to his shack and molest them. Shakti is about two hours from Rostov on the train and it's now in modern-day Ukraine. The word Shakti quite literally means mines and the coal pits stretch all the way to the Donbass region. The Shakti mines are some of the most dangerous in the world. Hardly any of the miners live to see their pensions. The accident rate is so high that for every one million tonnes of coal the mines produce, someone loses their life. And it was in Shakti that Andrei Chikatilo

took his first life, or at least the first one that we know about. Her name was Lenkocha Zakharitonova, sometimes called Yelena, and she was just nine years old. was Lenkocha Zakatanova, sometimes called Yelena, and she was just nine years old. Yelena was last seen wearing a red coat with a fur hood on her way home from ice skating. The day before she went missing,

she told her friend about a man who gave her chewing gum, a rare delicacy in the USSR. She was spotted at a tram stop meeting her gum friend, a tall man wearing a long dark coat. Chikatilo, the gum dealer, took little Yelena to his little dugout shack and as soon as he got her inside he crushed her with his weight and he had every intention of raping the small girl but he discovered that he couldn't. And I don't mean that like he couldn't because he was sad. No.

He physically couldn't. His body wouldn't let him. Yes. And so this physical situation infuriated him. So much so that he stabbed the girl, orgasming as he did so. For the first time in his life, Andre Cicatillo had been freed of his impotence. This is the classic thing. He's like, so many serial killers, they don't just automatically know a lot of them exactly what's going to do it for them. They experiment and sometimes they

discover what turns them on by accident, which is obviously what's happened here. I think John Wengasey was very similar, that he, like, had a boy at his house, and then in the morning the boy was, like, making him breakfast, and he thought the boy was trying to stab him because he was holding a knife. So he killed him, and when he did, he came. And he was like, oh, that's it. Peter Curtin as well. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Sheepshagger. Yep. So after he had done this, after he'd stabbed the girl and he'd come, he didn't stop. Instead, he strangled the small girl, and before he knew it, she was dead. So now he had a body to get rid of, so he quickly collected himself, and the girl's bloody clothes, and her school backpack. He disposed of her body in a nearby river,

with the hopes that she would be taken far, far downstream, where no one would recognise her that didn't happen yeah i feel like that is a that is a bold expectation it's not the fucking sea she's just gonna get stuck on some branches or something exactly that's exactly what happened yelena was found in her red coat with the fur hood on the 24th of december washed up on the river's bank and chicotillo was immediately under suspicion because as he left his little shack to dispose of her body, he forgot to turn the light off. And this was unusual because he didn't live there. All of his neighbours noticed that the light had been left on for days. But his blat helped him out once again.

He escaped the long arm of the law and instead local 25-year-old Alexander Kravchenko paid the ultimate price for the little girl's death. Kravchenko had been known to the police for some time. He'd been convicted of a similar rape and murder years before, but because he was a minor when he did it, he escaped the death penalty. After he got out of prison, he was living in Shakhty,

keeping a low profile. But for the police, it seemed like an obvious connection he had for him. He was in the area. Even though his wife gave him a solid gold alibi, none of it mattered. Kravchenko was tortured by police and he eventually confessed. The only physical evidence, and I mean the only physical evidence that the police had, were nettle fibres found on his trousers that were similar to, not the same, similar to the nettles on the riverbank where Yelena's body was found on Christmas Eve. But the tenuousness of that doesn't matter and in March 1983, Kochenko was executed by firing squad. He was pardoned years later, but that doesn't really make a difference when you're

already dead. No one had paid attention to the blood smeared on the snow outside Chikatilo's hut. So Chikatilo had got away with it, his very first murder. He was relieved, but he was also afraid. He knew for a fact that if he ever found himself in the same position, he knew he would kill again. He was reviled with himself, but he knew that that wouldn't last. Neither would his jamminess at work, because in 1981, he was finally asked to leave the boys' technical school. And once again, he left quietly, without making a fuss. In fact, he left teaching behind altogether and took a job as a supply clerk for an industrial company. And that meant that he was going to be travelling a lot, which of course worked out very well for him. It meant that his wife had no reason to ask him where he was, and it meant

that he could spend a lot of his time in train stations. His next victim was 17-year-old Larissa Tuchinko. She was Moldovan and she, in all of the books that are very outdated, she's described as this sort of like bad student but like slept with soldiers and like smoked and drank and whatever. She's a stereotype is how she's portrayed but obviously she's much more than that. She was a human person. So one afternoon in early September 1981, Larissa was on her way to go and work at a collective farm with the rest of her friends from school, but she never made it. On her way, she bumped into Chikatilo, and he told her that they could go to a relaxation station along the river, which is like cafes, bars. A lot of bars like to play the Beatles, which you would

think seems super capitalist, but they did have that song back in the USSR. They were big fans of communism. So the Beatles were allowed. It's the Soviet idea of tourism. I have a picture in my head of just like grey buildings, grey rubber rings, grey water. Just grey and sad. Chikatilo told Larissa that they would be able to lie down together unnoticed at this relaxation station. And she willingly went with him. As soon

as they left the main road, Chikatilo realised two things. Number one, this young woman was willing to have sex with him and number two, he was not going to be able to get it up. As soon as they were out of sight, he pushed Larissa to the ground. He had struggled with his conscience for the past two and a half years but now all of that was up in smoke. He punched Larissa in the head and strangled her until she went limp, and as she lay there dying, he bit her nipple off. Once Larissa was dead, Chikatilo ran around her body screaming like a bird child. He threw her clothes up into the branches of the trees. Later, he admitted that he felt like a partisan. He was righting all of the wrongs that had been rained down upon him during his life. That's exactly what Peter Curtin said.

It's exactly what Karl Panzram said. It's such a classic rhetoric of the like, uber serial killer that's like, well, I have been so hard done by and I have been so damaged that it's only fair that I reap my revenge. These behaviours that we see in serial killers, you know, it's what draws us obviously to true crime as

all of us listening Hannah and I it's the kind of extremes of human behavior but it's interesting because obviously a lot of these behaviors exist on a spectrum in humanity and it's like we all know lots and lots of people who feel very hard done by by life and you're like why why are you so angry he is just an extreme version of that. Absolutely. He also, because of his insecurity, I think definitely because of his erectile dysfunction, all of these things coupled together and his, you know, being rejected from university, all of those things, he felt incredibly angry and powerless. And this is just his way of taking back that power.

Exactly. And he enjoyed the ecstasy of taking back that power after Larissa died for about half an hour. And then he realised that once again he had a body to dispose of. This time he didn't bother to move the body. He just covered it with some branches and rolled Larissa's clothes up into a ball. This murder felt different to the first one. He didn't feel guilty at all. Actually, he felt like Larissa had brought it on herself. He uses that idea, which we are still incredibly guilty of,

of like, oh, well, what was she doing walking off with a strange man? It's slightly different, and we'll go on to talk about this later. In the Soviet Union, it wasn't really like that, and I think that's the key thing of the completely censored press of no bad news. People genuinely thought that bad things didn't happen. And Larissa was found the next day. And Chikatilo would never be the same again. Until this point, one could argue that his kills were not premeditated.

But certainly we won't be able to say that after what happened next. Because he went on what can only be described as a rampage. One year after he killed Larissa, he spotted 13-year-old Liuba Buruk and he abducted her as she walked to buy some food for her mother. Again, Chikatilo attempted to rape her, but he couldn't. So in a fit of rage, he stabbed her repeatedly. He then covered her body with her clothes and left her in the woods. A pile of her bones were found two weeks later.

And although Liuba was Cicatillo's third victim, she would be the first one that the police connected to the series of murders in later years. Yeah, once the police figure out they've got a serial killer on their hands, they only connect some of them to him. And it's not until he confesses essentially that they can piece all of the other ones together. Which again, just tells you, I know he was moving around because of being able to travel and things like that. But it again tells you like what kind of a state the country was in at that time that just like all these bodies turning up around the same time they were just like we don't even know which one's the serial killer or which one's just like random oh totally because the murder rate was incredibly high especially in rostov and i apologize but the next bit is pretty relentless obviously he's a big hitter he killed a lot of people and he also

killed them all in extremely similar ways so here we go strap. On the 7th of August, the decomposed body of Lyubov Volodya, just 14, was discovered in an orchard near Krasnodar airport, which is four and a half hours drive south of Rostov. She had been lying there for over a month before she was discovered and she would not be connected to Chikatilo for decades. And neither would his next and first male victim. He was nine-year-old Oleg Pozhedev and he was reported missing on the 13th of August 1982. Oleg was never found. Sixteen-year-old Olga Koprinia was discovered decomposing in a field

naked in October by a soldier gathering wood. She had run away from school and just vanished. Irina Karabalanikova was found disfigured on the 16th of August. She was homeless and she'd been lured away from Shakti train station by Chikatilo. Another runaway, 15-year-old Sergei Kuzmin's body, was discovered in the woods close to Shakhty station. Chikatilo murdered him on 15 September 1982, just a week after he killed Irina. Sergei's remains were not discovered for a further four months.

Olya Stanmanchenko, 10 years old, was missing for four months before finally being found under an electric pylon. Runaway Laura Sarkissian's mutilated corpse was found by the train tracks in June 1983. She too had been murdered in the woodland near Shakti station. 13-year-old Irina Danenkova was found stabbed to death in the woods on the Rostov Road. Chikatilo had known her for years and Irina also had Down Syndrome. 24-year-old Lyudmila, which is his daughter's name by the way, Kutsuba, was a mother of two. She was found stabbed to death in the July of 83, again near Shakti bus station and yet again in the woodland. Seven-year-old Igor Gudkov was found dead in Aviators Park,

just outside Rostov Airport on the 9th of August 1983. Seven-year-old Igor was Chikatilo's youngest victim of all, and he was also the first male victim to be linked to the subsequent manhunt. The next month, an unidentifiable woman was found in the shelter belt, which is like the woods on the side of a train track, between Shakti and Rostov. All we know about her is that she was between 18 and 24

and she had the blood type B. Cicatillo claimed that she was a sex worker who was looking for a client with a car. Then, sometime after, on the 19th of September 1983, Valentina Cuccellina was killed in a wooded area near Kapitschinaia Station.

Kapitschinaia is about halfway between Rostov and Krasnodar. Basically, all of these murders, and we're not done, I'm afraid, they all happen in essentially a straight line along this one train track. Yeah, I was going to say, like in the way a train runs. Yeah, it is a lot of ground to cover. It's many, many hundreds of miles. Sorry, chaps, we are going to have to keep going.

In October of the same year, 19-year-old Vera Shevkin was found dead in a village near Shakti. In December, Sergei Markov was discovered dead with 70 stab wounds. He had been on his way home from work experience and was just 14 years old. On the 10th of January 1984, Natalia Shalapinia was found dead in Aviators Park. She had been a friend of previous victim Oya. She had actually been the one to put her on the bus the day she was abducted. On the 22nd of February 1984, the body of Marta Rybenko was found in the same park.

Her nipples and her uterus had been removed. She was 44 years old. I believe Aviators Park has now been rebranded as the Botanical Gardens. But why one would go to a botanical garden next to an airport is beyond me, I'm afraid. Killing some time before your next flight. Why not? Go and look at the Venus flytrap? Exactly. Go on a little horrible history walking tour of the Rostov Ripper's killing ground.

Yeah, I'm not surprised they changed the name. No, me either. And also, this is why you see him. I know he has other names. He's also called, like, the Red Ripper, I believe, and also the Butcher of Rostov. But you can see why the word Ripper creeps in, because the tearing out of uteruses was, of course, the OG Jack the Ripper's favourite

ever thing to do. So that horrible list of things that we just told you takes us up to 23 murders in the space of eight years. How had this gone unnoticed, you might be thinking? Well, like Hannah said earlier, the murder rate in Rostov was extremely high. To give you an idea, in the first five months of 1992, there were 8,364 premeditated murders committed in Russia, and Rostov, as an industrial centre, was vastly above average. Authorities couldn't deny the similarities between all of the murders that we just told you about. All of them were found between Shakti, Rostov and Krasnodar, usually, like we said, near the train line. Other similarities were, again, that they were all

kind of in a straight line and all of the victims had been stabbed, often in and around their eyes. Many of them also had missing organs and all of them had no witnesses and absolutely no evidence. So it's pretty impossible to ignore and that meant that Lieutenant Viktor Barakov headed up a task force to try and find the killer. This was called Operation Shelter Belt. So far, they had connected at least 10 murders between Rostov and Krasnodar that they

thought had been carried out by the same person. And we already know that they were more than right. The victim selection and spread out nature of Chikatilo's MO is perhaps more understandably bamboozling to the authorities. That's why serial killers, who don't care who they kill, are so difficult to track down. But you really have to ask what Andre Cicatillo's wife thought he was doing all this time. Faina knew that her husband had no interest in her. He never had, not sexually anyway. She had of course heard rumours that he was molesting children, but because she had never seen him maintain an erection, she was convinced that he had no sexual interest in anything at all.

On top of this, his job did mean that he had to travel a lot, like we said earlier, and she never felt like she could really question it. He was the breadwinner, and she did what she was told. Even when her husband returned home from his business trips covered in scratches, he just told her they had been helping load equipment into trucks and Faina chose to believe him. That's the key thing, she chooses to believe. She's not picking holes in any stories. Chikatilo may have been pulling the wool over Faina's eyes, but the police seem to be totally

blind. In March 1984, there was yet another murder and it really should have been enough to at least compile a suspect list. Dmitry Tyshenikov was just 10 years old. He was not a runaway, he wasn't homeless or a sex worker, he was very much the opposite of the less dead. He was gifted and from a prosperous family. He was an enthusiastic stamp collector and he was tempted away from a stamp kiosk by Cicatillo, who was pretending to be a philatelist. And we know this to be true because Cicatillo was spotted doing just that. One of Dimitri's neighbours had watched the boy walk off with a 5 foot 10 to 6 foot man, wearing glasses and carrying a briefcase. This man had one defining feature, a pronounced limp.

And during that time, Chikatilo had a blood vessel problem in his left leg, which caused him to drag it slightly as he walked. Dimitri's body was found with 54 stab wounds, and near the site of his undignified burial, police also discovered a footprint. It was big, clearly that of a man, with size 43 to 44 feet. Which doesn't seem like much, but considering there is literally no other forensic evidence at all, it's kind of a jackpot. So this is the first time they have sort of

physical evidence as well as a witness. Yes. So they're like, okay, this is it. But even still, the police didn't get any closer to Cicatillo, and he went on to kill again. During the summer of 1984, Cicatillo was killing more than one person a week, and he was also becoming a lot more confident. He started to go after people he knew. Cicatillo and 29-year-old Tania Petrosyan

had known each other for a few years, and they had actually been lovers. Chikatilo and 29-year-old Tanya Petrosyan had known each other for a few years. They had actually been lovers. They first met in 1978, when Tanya had been working at the Shakti station shop. Chikatilo was 20 years older than her, but she liked him. Admittedly, being screamed at all day by angry men late for their trains did mean that she had rather low standards. Their affair didn't last long, probably because of his erectile dysfunction. Tanya never even knew his last name.

All she knew was that he was married and that he was a teacher. And they reunited in the summer of 1984. Tanya was recently divorced and she agreed to a picnic in the woods with her old flame. And she also, to Chickadillo's delight, brought along her 10-year-old daughter Svetlana.

The trio walked into the familiar Shakti woods, and the adults soon got down to business. But, as usual, Chikatilo was not in full command of his body. As soon as Tanya realised that Chikatilo still couldn't get it up, all of these years later, she jeered at him, saying, call yourself a man. And just as it had all of those times before, this mocking enraged him. He wasted no time in stabbing her in the side of the head, and then he pounded Tanya to death with a hammer. It was over quickly, but then Chikatilo realised that for the first time ever, he had killed someone in front of a witness. Little Svetlana started to run as soon as she heard her mother's first scream,

but her ten-year-old legs were no match for the still-hulking Cicatillo. He's nearly 50 at this point, but he's still big. He caught her and killed her just like he had her mother, and he left both bodies in the woods. Tanya's mother reported the two missing a few days later. They weren't found until July. Svetlana's head had been totally severed from her body and was discovered five foot from the rest of her.

Chikatilo never killed in front of a witness again, but he sure as shit kept killing. Yelena Bakalina was next. She was 22, and her body was discovered in Rostov covered in branches. Then Dmitry Yelernov, who was just 13, vanished in Rostov on his way to collect a health certificate on the 10th of July. Just nine days later, so again you're seeing that kind of cooling off period between the kills getting shorter and shorter, because on the 19th of July, Anna Lemensheva disappeared on her way back from the dentist, killed near Kopechana station.

Anna was just 19. Then 20-year-old Samay Tanza. She was just 20 and she was killed in July and found in Aviators Park months later. And Samay was originally from Riga. On the 2nd of August 1984, Chikatilo met 16-year-old Natasha Golosovaska, again near a bus stop near Rostov airport. She was not his usual victim type. She was visiting her sister, so she would be missed. But he still managed to lead her away from the bus stop,

promising her a shortcut and a faster bus. She was from the country and she didn't know any better. Chikatilo took her deep into the forest where he stabbed her to death and then left. Natasha was found by a park keeper the next day but Chikatilo was long gone by then. He did exactly the same thing to 17 year old Luida Alexieva. She didn't know the city either so he led her into the forest. He prolonged her suffering as long as humanly possible, and she was found three days later. He didn't keep his killing inside the Russian border either. If Chikatilo's work took him to Uzbekistan, then he took his bloodlust with him. As soon as he landed in Tashkent, the first thing he did was buy a knife. He killed two women between the 8th and the 15th

of August. The first was found without her head and was never identified. The second victim was Akhmara Osayloeva. She was 10 years old. She'd run away from Kazakhstan. Naturally, these Uzbek murders would not be connected to Chikatilo for years. As soon as he was back in Russia, Chikatilo picked up 11-year-old Sasha Chepel at a bus stop. His body was later discovered on the banks of the River Dom. His corpse was so mangled that Sasha's father actually fainted when he saw it. Up until this point, for obvious Stalin-shaped reasons, not a single one of the murders carried out by Chikatilo or anyone else for that matter were being reported in the press.

Like we said earlier, there was no bad news in the USSR, only extremely productive people living the communist dream. But Sasha's murder was different. The story started to spread on its own. There were even rumours that he had been swept away in a black limo that had the registration SSO, which was recognised widely at the time for meaning death to Soviet children.

So Sasha's murder found its way into the local Communist Daily newspaper called Mollot, was not connected to any other murders at this point, but still it was in the press and that was a start. We've got one last murder for you. I wish I could say it was the last for Chikatilo, but it isn't. On the 6th of September 1984, 24-year-old Irina Luchinskaya was on her way to a steam bath with her friends. She was a librarian by day and steam enjoyer by night.

She told her mother that she would be home late, but she would not be home at all. She was intercepted by Chikatilo at a bus stop and walked with him to the nearby woods. As usual, he couldn't get an erection. She called him pathetic, so he killed her. He punched her and stabbed her to death, and then, being too far from home to return without being questioned,

he slept in his office that night. By September 1984, Berakov had his top man, Inspector Alexander Zanasovsky, on the case, and he had been staking out Rostov for some time. He was also sure that the Soviet Union had a serial killer on their hands, and he was going to be the one to bring this guy down. But on the 13th of September, he spotted a furtive man moving through the crowds, carrying a briefcase.

Inspector Alexander Zanulovsky followed this man for over nine hours as he moved from woman to woman, obviously chatting them up. Sometimes he would speak to as many as 12 women in an hour. Zenazovsky had seen this man before, doing the same thing in the same place. He had a feeling that this was the man he was looking for. Finally, the man he was watching managed to get a woman to stick around. She lay down with her head on his lap on a park bench and he covered her head with his jacket. I don't need to explain what's happening under there, you can figure it out on your own. And after that, they parted ways. And Zanisovsky easily cornered the man,

who he described as the sweatiest person he had ever seen. He said it was rolling off him. And Zanisovsky demanded to see the man's papers. And the man's name was, but of course, Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo. He was 48 years old. And inside his briefcase, he had a kitchen knife. It was bent, like it had been used to hack something hard, like bone. He also had eight inches of rope and a tube of Vaseline in his briefcase.

And Chikatilo matched the descriptions the police had been given. He also had the inches of rope and a tube of Vaseline in his briefcase. And Chikatilo matched the descriptions the police had been given. He also had the correct shoe size. So naturally, he was arrested. It was also easy for Zanazovsky to find out that not only was Chikatilo a member of the Communist Party, but that he had also been a child molester and that he had stolen from his place of work, which in Soviet language means he'd stolen from the state. So although the Soviet language was changing, there

was vast political change in 1983 and 1984. Brezhnev had died and he was replaced by former KGB chief Yuri Andropov. The Soviet economy had appeared to be on the brink of death for some time, but Andropov thought that he was the man to save it. The common saying amongst workers at the time was, quote, we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. Andropov wanted to obliterate this rhetoric and brought in harsh punishments and strict discipline for the workforce. Unsurprisingly, turning the USSR into a giant gulag didn't work.

And because Chikatilo was more of a solo operation, he remained his own master through most of the new rules. But eventually, he was in trouble and lost his job over some stolen lino. The story of Chikatilo and how he managed to kill so many people is often chalked up to the higher-ups in the Soviet Union not believing that serial killers could exist in socialist paradise,

that serial killing was a Western disease like corruption and unemployment. But I just don't think that's true. I think you're right in that it's not that the higher-ups didn't realise that this could be true. It's like they don't want the proles to know that this can be true. They're like, only good news. None of that happens here. We know it happens here. You don't know it happens exactly and that's what soviet tv propagated that crime only happened in the west and that meant that there was a carefree attitude among the population and i think that's the thing

that people don't realize is that if you're living in a world where you really don't think anything bad happens then it's easier to walk down the street with a man you don't know and also i thought this was very interesting people in the soviet union were much more likely to stop and speak to someone that they'd never met before than maybe we are in the west certainly in London because number one they were queuing all the time there are Russian correspondent told me there's like a very old Soviet joke that where everyone's standing in line and someone says to the other one they're like oh what what are we waiting for and they're like I don't know but the line's huge so it must be good yeah no I can absolutely see that and I also think just to come back to the idea of like,

they're constantly obviously being told by state propaganda that nothing bad happens. It's a great place to live. Everything is okay. Like we're in we're in communism. But obviously, people would have known that bad things or people would have talked about bad things happening amongst themselves. But it's that mindset, isn't it, of like how much faith and belief they had in the state and how powerful the state was. That like today, even with all the evidence of what's going on in Ukraine, so many people in Russia still like, well, no, our government's telling us that that's not what's happening. And I believe them. And it's that culture that Chikatilo took full advantage of. The higher ups and local police knew for a fact that murders happened.

The murder rates were sky-high. But they were the only ones that knew that because everything else was heavily censored. So yes, I think individually people would obviously have known that bad things happened because people are discovering these bodies. What they wouldn't have been able to do is connect them because nothing was being reported. So the police definitely knew

and the higher-ups in Moscow certainly knew that they had a serial killer on the loose. And that was bad Soviet Union PR. So that meant the pressure was on. Moscow needed a solution to this problem ASAP before any more of it made it into the heavily regulated press. And that was Zanisovsky's job. He'd been sitting on a hunch for quite some time. And if he was right, then there were innocent men in prison and another was dead. But on that September day in 1984, Zanazovsky let Andrei Chikatilo walk free to kill again.

And he would not catch up with Chikatilo again until the mid-90s. But to find out what happens, to find out where he goes next, to find out if he actually does get caught, you're going to have to come back next week because we can't possibly go on, I'll die. No, that was a lot. It's a big case, but if we're going to do it, we have to do it right, you know? And I think just to end on this, I think all the time when you think about Andre Chikatilo case, because you see kind of those black and white pasto pictures of him, you think it's a really pasto case. It's not. This all happened in the 50s and the 60s.

It actually really hit home for me when you said that one of his children was born in 1969. That's the year my mum was born. And she's like 53. Yeah. Like, it's not that long ago. The next time he's arrested, you and I were both alive. Yeah. So keep that in mind. And next time he's arrested, you and I were both alive. Yeah. So keep that in mind.

And we will see you next week. So if you would like to hear some more content from us, you can head on over, of course, as ever to patreon.com slash redhanded. Sign up at any day you like and get a bunch of extra content because you deserve it.

And we don't really have anything else to say this week. So we'll see you next time. Well, we will have stuff to say. Yes. For sure. Very importantly. Bye.

Bye. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime, and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On the Media. To listen, subscribe to On the Media wherever you get your podcasts.

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