RedHanded - Episode 251 - Andrei Chikatilo: Doomed from the Womb - Part 2

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

With nothing but a vague suspect profile to go on, and with mutilated bodies piling up around the USSR, Soviet police were battling to bring the Rostov Ripper's reign of terror to an end.  All the while Andre Chikatilo tore through his victims, constantly changing who he went after. The police were stumped. But with a dogged detective hot on his tail, Chikatilo made a costly mistake. In this second and final instalment of the story of Andrei Chikatilo, we take you through the events that led to his downfall. >>>The “If RedHanded Wins the BPA Listeners' Choice Gold Award" Form<<< 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, where it is once again the most wonderful time of the year. Christmas? No. Yes. Summer Christmas. Podcast Christmas. Podcast Summer Christmas.

It is that time of year. It's British Podcast Awards season. And for reasons that we've gone through many times. But we never win. We never even are nominated in the true crime category. But what we did do last year is win the popular vote we are the people's princesses and we would like to continue that reign this year and we need your help to do it yes please so if you are a newbie an old bee doesn't matter listen

up so the british podcast awards comes around once a year in the listeners choice category that is the only category that we stand a chance of winning. And like Hannah said, last year we took home gold, but yours truly had the rona. So I did not go to the ceremony and I was very sad about it. So we would like to try our hand at maintaining the title into 2022. So what we would love you to do is please head on over right now immediately whoever you are because this is a question we get every year you do not have to be british to vote for us in the british podcast awards we need to be british and we are so that's fine you need to be anybody

doesn't matter don't even have to be a real life person you can be a russian robot you can be a shell of your former self precisely any of the above pick and mix but what you do need to do is head on over to britishpodcastawards.com slash vote the link will be in the episode description plus everywhere all over our social medias shoved in your face and down your throat please please please head to that link vote for red-handed and then click on the link directly below the vote for us link which will take you to a delightfully created google forms document there dear listener what you can do is insert your choice of episode that we will do a bonus episode if we win we won

last year so we will only give a bonus episode of your choice if we maintain. We've got to get gold again. So vote for the episode that you would like, submit the episode you would like and we'll pick the winner and cover it if we get gold. Then scroll down and feast your eyes on the next segment of that questionnaire where you can free type something you want Hannah and I to do. Because if you remember last year, Hannah agreed to get the name of a listener tattooed on her body if we won gold. And she said that rather cavalierly before we did win. And then we won and then she got it.

Yeah, I did think it was beyond the realms of human possibility. But it happened. It happened. It won and I am tattooed. Shout out Lily Makepeace. And you met her. And I have met her. She's very, and I've met her mum and her mum exactly so we tried to think of a way of topping it we couldn't so we're giving it to you power is in your hands power is in your evil little fingers listener so yes in there type in whatever you want us to do if we win we're not even going to give you any ideas because i don't

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got into the top 20 of the listeners choice of the British podcast then we got into the top 10 then we got silver then last year we got gold and honestly we could not believe it like on like tears tears galore if we can do it one more time it would just be incredible because it would just make the podcasting industry take a bit of notice of what we have achieved. And we can't tell you enough like how much A, it means to us that you guys always turn up for us when we ask you to do things like this, but also how many opportunities came our way because we won gold. Like that just meant that we got so many more options, so many more things, and it just means more red-handed for everybody. Exactly. So do the right thing, and we'll think of a more succinct way to talk about it next time.

But yes, please vote. And that's that. Exactly. So without further ado, welcome to part two of our Andre Cicatillo series. I can't remember the last time we did a two-parter, but it is just one of those overwhelmingly huge cases. So we didn't have an option and we hope that you're ready because if you thought last week was bad, I'm afraid it only gets more frustrating and more gruesome as we go along. So let's remind ourselves of where we left off last week. We left you just as Andrei Chikatilo slipped through the Soviet police's fingers after having killed 32 women and children in exactly the same way along exactly the same stretch of railroad. So let's pick up where we left off with Chikatilo sloping away in September 1984. Inspector Zanazoski knew that he had just let a serial killer free to kill again. You might remember at the tail end of last week,

we told you about the murder of little Sasha Chepel and how his murder was the only one so far to have made it into the press. This was significant because generally speaking, there was no bad news in the USSR. Press was heavily censored and regulated. So none of Andre Cicatillo's vicious murders were national knowledge, at least as far as the public were concerned. So while they might have known about like ones that happened in their area, the public couldn't connect the dots. No, I think that's, you know, it's very difficult to ignore a murder when you find a dismembered corpse outside your house or like in your garden or whatever. So those ones will have been knowledge in the local areas. I'm not saying no one had connected any dots,

but no one had the information to understand the scale of what was going on. In the public, not the authorities, obviously. So that meant that Inspector Zanazoski's serial killer theory was confirmed when more and more people turned up dead. The murder rate was high, of course, at the time, but Cicatillo's victims had very specific things in common. Like Hannah said, he killed them all in basically the same way. They'd all been stabbed multiple times, many of them were missing organs,

and none of the murders had any witnesses. And crucially, because none of these deaths had been reported publicly, there was also no possibility of a copycat being at large. It had to be the same man. But they needed more evidence to connect this one man to all of these murders. And unfortunately, the authorities hadn't even connected all of them yet. But they knew enough to at least know that they were in serious trouble. Ironically, I think if they had reported it in the press,

kind of would have got away with it for longer. It's because Zanazoski's like, I'm literally the only one that knows this, that all of these people are turning up in this very specific way. It has to be one person. So they were in trouble. They were in a spot of bother, and the Soviet police called a woman in

who knew what she was doing her name was svetlana gotova and she was the head of the criminal biological department at the russian ministry of health and she made her way down from moscow to rostov and took every piece of evidence that the police had and locked herself away in a lab for 10 days inside her soviet lab hole svetvetlana Gertova tested every single scrap of blood and semen-stained clothing at her disposal, and she discovered that whoever the killer was, they had the blood type AB. So by this point, several men were being held in prison on pain of death for Chikatilo's crimes, and on the 8th of October 1984, in the shadow of Svetlana's

discovery, they were set free. Firstly, because they had the wrong blood type. And secondly, because they all weren't one person. And thirdly, because the murders had continued whilst these men had been behind bars. Yeah, that's the kicker, I think. It's the hat trick. Wrong blood, not one man, and in jail while people being murdered. Physically incapable of carrying out the murders, yeah. So to make matters worse, a majority of these men had severe learning disabilities. Two of them actually lived in a psychiatric facility. But these men were pressured by investigators to confess.

And they kept confessing. The process of freeing these men was slow to start, as the Rostov police were naturally defensive of their investigative work and no one loves admitting that they were wrong. Especially when that involves people with disabilities going to prison for rapes and murders that they didn't commit. So once that wrong was righted, the task force were faced with the only problem they weren't expecting.

After September 1984, their killer stopped killing, which meant they had no more evidence to collect, and so they faced yet another brick wall. Until biologist extraordinaire Svetlana suggested that perhaps the killer had gone to prison for another crime. So what they should do is they should test the whole prison population and whittle down suspects to those in prison with AB blood. Less than 4% of people have AB blood,

so it's definitely giving you a smaller sample size to work with. And Andre Ticatillo did just so happen to be in prison at that particular moment in time. He was incarcerated in December 1984 for stealing from his place of work and therefore stealing from the state, which is serious business. He was sentenced to a year's hard labour and whilst inside, serving his time, he sent off a blood sample to Svetlana and her team. Amazing, you must be thinking.

But, Moshu, I'm afraid we have an extremely long way to go imagine if i just blue balled you this whole time and then i was like 17 minutes bam goodbye we have a long way to go andre chikatilo slipped through the floorboards like a sperm sample yet again because his blood sample that he sent off to svetlana was type a this is interesting some places will say that it was a sperm sample that got sent in some places will say it was a blood sample i'm in two minds about it because i'm like what's easier is getting every prisoner to just do a wank that's a lot less work than sending people into prisons to actually draw blood but i imagine making prisoners wank maybe is opening some doors that you don't want to open yes i don't know is it

like getting blood out of a stone or is it easier getting jizz out of a russian prisoner i don't know so i don't know i haven't been able to confirm it either way the most reliable source for this is one of the two books that i can't remember which one it was and they say it's a blood sample in there so I'm I'm thinking it's a blood sample either way what we need to know is it comes up as just a there's no b in his sample but of course he still definitely did all of the horrible murders the science doesn't really make sense but it will later on we just have to hold on to it because in this story, I think for the first time on this show, we have to wait for science to catch up with us. 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. Claudia and 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. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry.

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who would not be able to stop himself from killing. OK, Bukhanovsky, you've really earned your pesos there. But again, it is painfully accurate. Like, I know I'm scoffing at him, but he is right. It's just not very helpful. It's just not very helpful at all. Especially in Soviet Russia, where basically everybody was a relatively normal man who was probably married, who had a normal job. And just the last bit is the only thing that differentiates him, but that's the bit they already know, that he can't stop killing people. Yeah, exactly. Look for someone who looks like they love killing.

He fucking loves it. He's mad for it. So yeah, armed with this profile and not much else, the police are still looking for Chikatilo. But like we said he was in prison but he was soon released and after he got out Chikatilo got a very similar job and lived like a very normal person for the next six months although when he was sent on a business trip to a factory in Moscow he just couldn't help himself. Doing that thing that the psychiatrist predicted that he would love doing. But in a place he'd never done it before.

No, taking some risks. Maybe it was all that wanking into jars in prison that really did it for him. I mean, maybe. Or the fact that he came fucking within an inch of being arrested in Rostov. He was probably like, maybe you know that place I've been doing all of the murders. Maybe I should steer clear of that for a while. I think maybe he was like, you know what? I'm a new man. No more murders. No more murdering.

And then it's like when you're like, I'm not going to have a glass of wine tonight. And then by six o'clock, you're like, he's just like, well, if I do it in Moscow, they'll never be able to connect the dots. Because Moscow is fucking miles away from where he's from. It is. And that's exactly what he does. He goes to Moscow. And there he came across 18-year-old Natalia Pokhistova in August of 1985. And just like he had done to so many other girls before her,

Chikatilo led Natalia off the beaten track and into the woods, where he attempted to penetrate her and couldn't. Doesn't learn. No, I mean, he's like, maybe this time I will finally be able to do a rape. And he can't. Yeah. He later claimed that he did not intend to kill Natalia, but kill her he did. He stabbed Natalia 38 times, then covered her body in a green raincoat and left her in the woods.

Natalia was found the next day by a mushroom-picking man, just 200 metres from her home. Apparently, picking mushrooms, a very popular hobby in Russia. Every other person who's stumbled across one of these bodies is picking mushrooms. There's a lot of like, well, he wasn't dressed as if he was going to go and pick mushrooms in the forest. That's very suspicious. Like, I think it's quite a ubiquitous thing.

Maybe it's like how everybody now pretends to be a jogger when they find bodies, but they're actually just like dogging or something. Dogging, yeah. Or maybe, maybe they're to escape the Soviet drudgery, they're just looking for magic mushrooms. Maybe. Or to escape the Soviet drudgery, they're like, oh, I know, we'll go on a nice forage. A lovely forage. Maybe we'll find some chicken in the woods. To be honest, I'd rather do shrooms. Mushrooms aside, even though I do love them, I saw a very funny tweet yesterday.

It was like, every pizza is a mushroom pizza if you're patient enough. I did once accidentally eat a magic mushroom pizza and wash it down with a magic mushroom shake. Yeah, and then... Crash my motorbike and tear all the skin off my legs and get quite a lot of stitches in my head. So that was fun for me. Absolutely no connection between those two events. Thanks, Cambodia.

So let's leave mushrooms out of it for now. We're leaving them behind. The key difference for this murder compared to all of the 32 other ones that he has got away with thus far, the difference with this one was the location. It happened in Moscow, or at least the Moscow sort of greater area, which meant that the killer should have been easier to track.

And I say that because they would have had to get there somewhere that Moscow is a lot more regulated, the trains are searched more often, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they could have looked through hotel records. They have more options than somewhere like Shakhty, where it's people living in an actual shack. Moscow is a lot more built up. But even still, Chikatilo slipped away before the police knew he had even been there.

And on the 27th of August, he killed again, this time back in his old stomping ground of Shakti. He stabbed Irina Goliayeva near to the bus station. She was just 18. Her body was discovered the next day totally naked. Then, somewhat inexplicably, Chikatilo went quiet for over two years. Now, this can happen, obviously, with serial killers. They can find a reason for why they take a sort of hiatus from the killing. This could be, you know, a change in life circumstances. They meet somebody new, they have a baby, they get a new job, they move away, they end up with some sort of physical

injury or something that stops them from killing, or they end up back in jail. Various reasons this could possibly be. We don't know which one it is. Yes, we don't know which one it is. Take a pick. It does happen. It does happen, absolutely. But Operation Shelter Belt, the police investigative crack team that were hunting him, thought that Chikatilo had gone quiet for even longer than two years. Because Chikatilo's next three victims wouldn't be connected to the manhunt for years to come. And this is the thing, like, obviously, it's hard to sidestep the police mistakes. But we say all the time on the show, serial killers are the hardest criminals to catch in many ways. They're definitely some of the hardest investigations you'll do because none of these victims are connected to each other. So yes, difficult, especially in a country that had quite a high murder rate at the same time, to pick and choose the right victims. So coming to these three victims

that Operation Shelter Belt weren't able to immediately connect to Chikatilo, all three of those victims were male. The first was 12-year-old Oleg Marinkov, and Chikatilo lured him into a wooded area up in the Urals. Oleg's body wasn't found until the 1990s. Then there was another 12-year-old boy named Ivan Bilarovsky. On the 29th of July 1987, he wandered off with Chikatilo in the Ukrainian town of Zaporozhskia. Ivan was a good boy. He had never run off before, and his frantic mother searched for him for hours. The next day, his father discovered the worst. Years later, Ivan's mother would testify in court, and she said the following. The day I buried my son, I gave him my word that I would try live long enough to see his killer with my own eyes. I wanted to see the man who could rip

open my son's stomach and then stuff mud in his mouth so that he would not cry out. I wanted to know what he looked like. I know which mother could bear such an animal and now I see him. So don't worry guys, spoilers, they do get him in the end. Yeah, eventually there is a trial. And if you follow us on social media, or if you have access to the internet and have googled Andre Cicatillo, you will see what a fucking terrifying man he is. Don't worry, they do get him, but maybe worry a little bit, because we have quite a way to go before the long arm of the law

finally gets their hands on this slippery guy and puts him in a steel cage. So let's get back to the story. After that, Chikatilo abducted and killed another child, this time 16-year-old Yuri Tereshchonok. He was a vocational school student, just like the ones Chikatilo used to perv on in their dorms. Chikatilo lured Yuri off a train in Leningrad, and his mangled body, just like Oleg Merenkov,

wasn't discovered for years. There's a lot of very interesting theories, because up until this point, Chikatilo hasn't killed a male, right? It's only like towards the end of his murder spree that he starts going for, I mean, he's killed a couple, but not many, many, but this is lots in a row of like young boys. And the sort of pervasive theory is that because he went on killing for so long and because the devolution of serial killers is something that we you know we talk about all the time like how they'll get more violent or the space in between kills will get shorter but because he kept going for 30 years I think he like struggled to maintain the same level of excitement so he sort of switched up his victim a bit?

Quite possibly. I mean maybe there is some element for him of exactly like you said needing to step it up, needing to step up the excitement so that he could get the same gratification and thrill and maybe going after boys who possibly put up more of a fight perhaps before they went with him or when he was attacking them did that give him more of a thrill i don't know i don't know whether it's about fight because we'll go on to talk about later he was very specific with who he selected and if there was any pushback at all he was gone yeah he just moved on to someone else so in that way who he killed didn't matter to him at all it was just who would go with him yeah so i don't know i it's tricky i really don't know maybe he found a ruse that was easier to lure young boys away than luring young girls away we don't know but it is interesting that

there is that shifting point and you're right because if it was another killer who was killing over a shorter period of time i would be like it's devolution he's spiraling out of control mode and he is just going after who he can get. And possibly it's not a huge leap to say that maybe there are just more young boys on the streets who are wandering around than there were young girls. But then, yeah, he didn't seem to struggle before. But what we can say about Chikatilo

is that he is absolutely an opportunistic predator. Whoever he can get his hands on, he will go for. But it is interesting this very obvious shift to boys. So by 1988 Chikatilo was back in full swing. He was off his murdering holiday doing whatever he was doing we don't know and during that year he killed three times. First in April and the victim was an unknown unidentifiable woman who was found near Krasnyi Solin station, which is less than an hour's drive from Rostov. And again, she too wouldn't be connected to Chikatilo for years.

Then, on the 15th of May, Chikatilo killed Alexei Voronko, who he abducted during a business trip in Ukraine. His nine-year-old body was discovered two months later and was immediately added to the list of those who had been killed by the man that the police were looking for. As was 15-year-old Yevgeny Muratov, who was murdered in July 1988. And for the first time,

Chikatilo was brave enough to kill back in Rostov proper, the same city in which he'd been arrested just four years before. Yevgeny had been a chess champion, and like so many before him, he was lured off a train, and like so many before him he was lured off a train and eight months later he was found in the forest. All that was left of him was a pile of bones. So all of the victims that we just told you about they weren't connected to Chikatilo for years actually for another 10 years. Obviously people knew that these boys were missing

but they probably weren't added to the manhunt list, which is what they call the list of murders specifically linked to Chikatilo, because maybe they were male. So the police thought that that's not what they were looking for. Or maybe it was because Chikatilo had honed his skills. So kind of the bodies, even though they show up a long time after, so they're decomposed. He had got a lot more precise as the years went on. In his early killing career, he used to slice off more precise as the years went on. In his early killing career, he used to slice off huge chunks of flesh from his victims, but by the late 80s he was a lot more accurate. And also maybe he continued to get away with it because he'd got much better at dodging large spurts of blood, making it even more difficult to identify him as he fled the

scene of so many crimes. But 1988 did bring a pivotal moment for the hunt for Andre Cicatillo. Towards the end of the year, the public prosecutor's office received a game-changing scientific article all the way from Japan. This article stated that blood and sperm samples may not always show up as the same group. In fact, this article found that there is actually a one in 10,000 chance that samples from the same man could show up as different groups. For example, a man with AB sperm may have blood samples that show up as just A. And, you know, I'm guessing you've already figured out where we're going with this because, of course this story that one in a thousand man is of course Andrei Chikatilo. But the Soviet murder squad had no idea

that they were holding the missing piece of their puzzle and the article was filed away and paid very little attention to. It makes me think of, you know, in Guildford 4 and Maguire 7, like all of the documents are just sat in a folder somewhere and like that's like the key to the whole thing.

And in this one, it's this scientific article that they were like, oh, that's interesting. Nothing to do with what we're doing. Yeah. And it gets filed away. It's almost like,

I don't want to say they were willfully negligent of it, but it's almost like, I can't, I can't even. No, don't even fucking bring this to me, Svetlana. I will kill you. Yeah. Svetlana, she doesn't come back.

Get back in your fucking Soviet lab hole. So that was 1988. And what comes after 1988? The year I was born. Exactly, 1989, which was a good year to be Saruti Bala, a terrible year to be a communist, especially a very, very passionate one like Chikatilo.

He would later say that the fall of communism felt like a personal tragedy. He'd committed his life to an ideology that just hadn't worked. But as iron curtains and concrete walls were crumbling, Chikatilo didn't let the New World Order distract him. He kept right on killing. His next murder was really the one that should have ended with him in handcuffs. He broke almost every single one of his own rules. It was the first person he had killed inside since his first ever victim, Yelena Sakhotnova, all the way back in 1978. This girl's name was Tatiana Risova. She was 16 and

she'd run away from home. When Chikatilo spotted her, she'd had so much to drink that she could barely stand. So he pounced on her. He swept young Tatiana off to get some food and drink in Shakti, or so he said. What he actually did was take her off to a crumbling apartment building, where his own daughter had lived until only recently. Once Chikatilo got Tatiana inside his daughter's apartment, he pushed her to the floor, with the intention of raping her. But at this stage, we don't need to tell you

that there was no blood in the blood sausage, and he couldn't. Thanks so much for putting that in my bit. You're welcome. That's disgusting. There's only so many ways I can say he tried to rape her and then he couldn't get it up. Yeah. Thank you.

I've exhausted every avenue. No, quite. So when he failed to do this, as we've seen time and time again with Cicatillo, he started stabbing. And Tatiana started screaming. As you might imagine, the walls of this apartment building were particularly thin. And Ludmilla's neighbours, and remember Ludmilla is his daughter, heard every moment of Tatiana's murder. Cicatillo knew this and stabbed Tatiana in the mouth to silence her. No head mouth stabbings. He loves a head stab, this guy. And once she was dead,

he hacked her body into pieces so he could get rid of it. He wrapped Tatiana's remains in black bags and somehow found a sled. Then he dragged Tatiana's butchered corpse away from the apartment towards the pipes near his old favourite, the railway. On his way, a comrade stopped to offer help, as a good Soviet comrade should. And he even commented on just how heavy Chikatilo's cargo was. But he still helped him drag his murder sled to the train line and then just walked off into the night like some sort of murder elf. Yes, exactly. It's like Michael Alec's taxi driver. He's just like, what you got in here, a dead body?

Yeah, and they're like, no. I mean, no. Fucking hell. And also you see Hitcher Cotillo absolutely starting to take more risks, like the fact that he commits the murder inside an apartment where he would have known full well that the walls were incredibly thin and he would have known that there were people next door because if they can hear you, you can hear them.

And the fact that when he drags the body outside, he lets somebody else help him. 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 mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now, exclusively on Wondery+. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met.

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So Chikatilo waited until this stranger was out of sight before stuffing Tatiana's dismembered limbs into the sewage pipes. Tatiana's remains were found nine days later, and authorities were sure that this was the work of the serial killer they had been hunting for years. But they didn't manage to make the connection concerning his daughter. Come on. Like, obviously, it's very easy i know it's very easy for us to say this because a we're not living in soviet russia b we're not inspectors c you know we haven't just been through revolutions two wars and a famine but like i i mean do you know what of all of the cases we've covered where

we're like the police like this, this is fucking hard, man. It's fucking hard. Yeah, but they do finally figure out one thing. Finally, finally, finally, the police work out that their killer must be using the train to get around. Allah fucking Luya. Up until this point, amazingly, they thought that he had been in a car,

despite all of the murders pre-1984 being along the same stretch of railroad. Oh my God. Oh my God. Yeah. I don't know that much about the motorway system in and around Rostov, but I can't imagine it was super developed. Anyway, so that's where they are. Finally, finally, finally, they had connected the dots. So the police started a sting operation in all of the train stations in and around Rostov and Shakhty. They sent plainclothes officers to stake out terminals,

and even women in short skirts pretending to be drunk, so a sort of honey trap. But Chikatilo never took the bait. Maybe he had some sort of murder sixth sense. But the police maybe didn't even have five senses on this case. They were getting desperate, and Chikatilo was only growing in confidence. Once again, we see the gaps between his kills growing smaller and smaller. Perhaps getting away with such a high-risk kill like Tatiana

had steeled his nerves. On 11 May 1989, Chikatilo killed Alexander Duyanov. He was just a day over eight years old, and Alexander's body was found by a taxi driver in a thicket near Rostov city centre. The next month, Chikatilo murdered Alexei Moiseev, a 10-year-old boy from Cholunzhino, who Chikatilo lured away from a beach into his favourite, the forest. He then took July off, probably because he couldn't get away from his wife, but then he was back at it in August, when he lured young mother of one Yelena Vargov, who was just 19, from a bus and killed her in a village near Shakhty. On the 28th of August,

Chikatilo abducted 10-year-old Alexei Kovatov from the streets of Shakti. He killed him and buried him in a local cemetery, where his body was not discovered for years. Then, as the world entered, what Gen Z called the late 1900s... Kill me. I was born in the late 1900s.

I was born in fucking 1989. That's still the like name. Oh yeah, sure. That is true. That is true. This fucking killed me. So I recently bought a locket, right? 101 for ages, blah, blah, blah. I found one on Etsy. And they were like, vintage?

Blah, blah, blah. Do you know what vintage means now? Pre the year 2000. That's hilarious. Death to me. Why am I even still here? Yeah, but they call everything vintage on Etsy as well. But like it specifically said in the description, like vintage pre 2000.

Some 19 year old sold you that. I mean, probably because I'm a fucking antique, I'd fucking bought it. So yes, it was in the late 1900s when vintage lockets were brand spanking new. Chikatilo met 11-year-old Andrei Kravchenko. The young boy was standing outside a theatre in Shakti, and he was persuaded to wander off with Chikatilo because he promised Andrei that he didn't need to go to the cinema

to see Western films. Apparently, Chikatilo told him he had loads back at his house and you know what happened next. Little Andrei's emasculated body was discovered the following month. Meanwhile, Chikatilo had already struck again. On the 7th of March,

he lured 10-year-old Yaroslav Marikov from the train to Aviators Park in Rostov. Yaroslav had bunked off school. Chikatilo pulled all of the little boy's insides out and left him in the park to be discovered the next day. Chikatilo cut out the boy's tongue and cut off his genitals. Operation Shelterbelt were at crisis point. They had been on the hunt for their serial killer for seven years and had nothing to show for it. Less than nothing, in fact. All they have is, we know he's still out there

and we know how he does it and we know nothing else. In the time before, that wouldn't be quite so terrible because they could sort of keep it secret. But post-Stalinism, market reform and the softening of Soviet socialism brought with it a much freer press. Now in the 1990s, the serial murders happening up and down the train lines were very common knowledge and they were reported on extensively. And that meant pressure, pressure, pressure, under pressure.

It was mounting. The Rostov police needed a win, and they needed it soon. But it wouldn't happen just yet. Even with a brand new inspector, Fetisov at the helm, they wouldn't seal the deal for years. As the task force worked away, Chikatilo was feeling untouchable. And he kept killing and killing. And on the 4th of April, 31-year-old

Lyubov Zaeva was tempted off a train to Shakhty by Chikatilo. Her skeleton was found in the woods a few months later. In July, Chikatilo killed 13-year-old Viktor Petrov. He too was found mangled in Aviators Park in Rostov. In August, he killed and cut the genitals off 11-year-old Ivan Forman. Ivan was at the beach and headed into the bushes to change his clothes. He never made it out alive. On the 17th of October, Vadim Gromov, a 16-year-old with severe learning disabilities, vanished from a train. When authorities found Vadim's body, it was obvious he was the victim of their killer. He had been stabbed 27 times and castrated. His tongue had been cut out and he bore the victim of their killer. He had been stabbed 27 times and castrated.

His tongue had been cut out and he bore the mark of so many victims before him. Vadim had been stabbed in the eye. Then there was 16-year-old Viktor Tishenko, who was killed in Shakti on the 30th of October 1990. Viktor truly fought for his life. He bit Chikatilo's finger so hard that it broke, and his corpse showed significant signs of struggle. As of October 1990, all police were under strict instructions

to demand passport numbers from any adult man in the company of a child. But still this didn't stop Cicatillo. Not yet. But, friends, I am delighted to tell you that we are rapidly approaching the end of Chikatilo's Red Terror. His final victim was not a young boy. It was a 22-year-old woman called Svetlana Korostik. Chikatilo followed all of his old tricks. He picked her up at a train station and then led her into the woods where he killed her. But he didn't know that this time he was being watched.

After he killed Svetlana, Chikatilo returned to Don Lesko's railway platform, which is just outside of Rostov, and on the railway platform he washed his hands and his face. Officer Igor Rybakov watched him do this, and he also noticed that Chikatilo's coat had grass and soil stains, and one of Chikatilo's fingers was severely damaged. Andre Chikatilo had also done a pretty bad job of washing his face. I don't imagine there was a mirror because he missed a smear of blood on his cheek.

This and the sports bag that Andre Chikatilo was carrying made it look pretty unlikely that he had just entered the forest to frolic or collect mushrooms, literally what it says in the book. But even still, all Rybakov has is suspicion he doesn't have enough evidence to make an arrest. But he did make a report, and when Svetlana's body was found, records were reviewed and Chikatilo's name came up multiple times. After all, he had been questioned in relation to the serial murders

all the way back in 1984. Once the task force traced Chikatilo's employment and movements throughout the year, they found that he was in a lot of the right places at the right times, and all of his child molestation episodes were on record too. So finally, after 30 years, the police had their man, and they went to work on closing the net. Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was placed under 24-hour surveillance on the 14th of November 1990. As he was watched, he approached many women and children, attempting to engage them in trivial conversation. But the second he was met with even an atom of resistance,

he would withdraw. Then he would wait a few moments before locking in another target. The more vulnerable, the better. The close watch continued for six days, before finally, Chikatilo was arrested by plainclothes police officers in Novichorask, a city in the Rostov region, as he approached several young children. Sweatiest man alive, Chikatilo, told the police that they had the wrong man, that he'd been cleared of any involvement in these murders back in 84. But they searched him anyway, and they found that Robakov had been right.

One of Chikatilo's fingers was in a terrible way. He'd tried to treat it himself with iodine, but hadn't done a very good job. Medical examination quickly revealed that his finger had almost been split in two by human teeth, which apparently is a lot easier to do than you think. Apparently your fingers is only the consistency of a carrot. It's just your brain that stops you breaking it. You're welcome.

And that's not all the search turned up. Chikatilo had in his sports bag his favourites, a folding knife and two lengths of rope, just like he had had in 1984. Finally, Operation Shelter Belt had what they needed and Andre Cicatillo was squirrelled off to a cell by the KGB

and his interrogation began. Even still, I was quite surprised by this. Under the law at the time, they had 10 days to charge him what they had to let him go. Yeah, I'm surprised. So they law at the time, they had 10 days to charge him what they had to let him go. Yeah, I'm surprised. So they're on a time limit. So they have to pull out the big guns. On the 21st of November, Chikatilo's blood was tested again. And yet again, it was proven to be type A, not AB, as all of the crime scene evidence suggested. So they tested his semen.

And lo and behold, the Japanese had it right all along because Chikatilo's semen was AB but his blood and saliva were showing up as type A. But still Chikatilo denied any involvement at all in the murders. So Dr Bukhanovsky, the one who had written the character profile all those years before, was called into the secret KGB interrogation. He read extracts from a psychological evaluation of the man who he believed would be the killer, and we already know that it was pretty bland and unhelpful, but there are some highlights, such as he predicted that the man would be middle-aged, with a traumatic and isolated childhood. He'd be well educated but he would have terrible

luck with the ladies. Dr Bukhanovsky also said that this man would have work that meant he'd have to travel a lot but his pause in scheduling probably meant that he was tied to a production schedule and most importantly that this man would be impotent to the point that a knife became a substitute penis, and he achieved climax by stabbing along with watching the victim suffer. And that was all it took. After two hours of having his life and times laid out to him by a man who had never met him, brought the Red Ripper, Andre Cicatillo, to tears. Hysterical tears, in fact. And right there and then, he confessed to all of the murders that he was under suspicion of. And a great deal that Operation Shelterbelt had no idea

were connected to him at all. Like so many big-body count killers, a lot of the information we have about Cicatillo's murderous career comes from his lengthy confession, which they all give in the end. Serial killers, of course, are not the most trustworthy of narrators, but surprisingly, they often tell more of the truth than we may imagine. Cicatillo's confession in particular is generally believed to be a reasonably reliable one, because he told the police about murders that they had absolutely no idea that he was

responsible for. And in many cases, specifically the young boys in the late 80s, Chikatilo led Operation Shelterbelt straight to their bodies. He also sketched accurate depictions of the crime scenes and gave detailed accounts of each homicide. He added that he had often gouged or stabbed at his victims' eyes because he believed that the last thing a murder victim sees is burned into their eyes forever, and he didn't want someone to look into their eyes and get caught. The longer he kept killing and not getting caught, the less convinced he became of this myth. Chikatilo also told Operation Shelter Belts that he often tore the nipples, tongues and genitals off his victims with his teeth and tasted their blood. During his confession, he also found the time to write an autobiography, which he slickly entitled A Biography of the Defendant A.R. Chikatilo,

Citizen of the USSR, Victim of Famine and Cannibalism in 1933, and in 1947, Stalinist Refression, Station, and the crisis of perestroika. Rolls right off the tongue. Very, very, very catchy. Why do they all write books? I don't know. Why do they all write books with such shit fucking titles? I think it's because playing the victim is something that they all do in the end.

He's like, a victim of X, Y, Z. And I can't possibly just save it for the book. I've got to put it in the title. Exactly. So the argument always becomes that if anyone were in their shoes they would have turned out the same. Kemper did it Curtin did it, Pantherham did it, they all made the same

argument and there was one word in that title that you might have been like that's not an English word Perestrochia. Don't worry I'm going to explain it. Courtesy of our Russian consultants I now understand what Perestrochia means. The literal translation of our Russian consultants, I now understand what perestroika means. The literal translation of perestroika is rebuilding or reconstructing.

Politically speaking, it has a slightly different meaning. Perestroika is the term used to describe the ideological shift towards economic policies within the Communist Party that were not quite so Stalinist. And they were precipitated by the gradual understanding that there was no way for the Soviet economy to effectively compete against capitalism, especially those pesky Americans. So little by little, changes were implemented, private ownership made a comeback,

and free trade was accepted. In real life, outside of the economic whirlwind, pro-Strauchia sort of took on a life of its own as a term. It became a rallying cry for the young. Things that had been banned for decades, like Western music, for example, were suddenly allowed. And then in 1991, Perestroika took on a different meaning altogether. There was a military coup that attempted to overthrow Gorbachev, the one attempting to make the USSR more palatable to the West. And what this coup wanted was to get Gorbachev out and instill the real Communist Party to power how they saw it. So Gorbachev was the personification of the

demise of the Soviet Union for many because he had betrayed the communist ideology. It was his fault that the Union crumbled is the argument. And that's what Chikatilo thought. Essentially, Chikatilo was convinced that all of his murderings were Gorbachev's fault. But of course his murderous rampage wasn't Gorbachev's fault. It wasn't even the fault of the collapse of communism. After his lengthy confession was completed Chikatilo was sent off to the Sebsky Institute to undergo a 60-day psychiatric evaluation, during which it was determined that Chikatilo had sustained prenatal brain damage. So, I think it's safe to say, almost more than any other killer that we've come across, Chikatilo was kind of fucked from the start.

I really think he was. I really think he was. Obviously, he had an incredibly traumatic childhood. Well, it's a bingo-bango, isn't it? It's all sticking all together. That is number one, together. That is number one yeah. So I do think he was significantly in trouble even before he was born. It's like that Brazilian serial killer Pedro Rodriguez. His father was incredibly violent and abusive and he used to beat Pedro's mother when she was pregnant with him and apparently he beat her so hard in the stomach that Pedro had actually a dent in his skull when he was born from the physical abuse that his mother had suffered.

That's what we're talking like, you know, that prenatal damage was done, which is, you know, in this case, very bad news. And the diagnosis that Cicatillo received later confirmed that he also had legions on his brain. Couple all of that together with the extremely traumatic childhood that he had, you know, and this is the result. Cicatillo was formally charged with 36 murders committed between 1982 and 1990. That number was later changed to 53 between 1978 and 1990. He was pronounced fit to stand trial and stood before a judge in Rostov on the 14th of April 1992.

A full report of his crimes had been released to the press the previous year, so his trial was every inch the media circus that it would have been in the West. The public was so afraid of Chikatilo that a metal cage was specially constructed for him to sit in during the court proceedings.

Is that where it started? Because now, whenever you see, like, the people that were fighting in Ukraine who have been captured by the Russians and they're on trial, everyone's always in a cage. I don't know. I know that it was specially built, so that kind of implies that it hadn't happened before, maybe. And from his metal cage, Chikatilo regularly shouted over the judge. He got his dick out, he sang songs about socialism, obviously, and generally rambled his way through. He claimed that he was responsible for a further 20 murders and was intent on telling the court his life story. And he also threw in that he was more woman than man.

He also claimed that he worked for the KGB, which one of the books I read was like, well, we don't know that he didn't. I'm like, I think we do. I think that's a very odd argument to make. That was the point I stopped reading that book, and I was like, I don't think this is particularly reliable. Anyway, he also said that there were rats in his prison cell

that were trying to control his brain with radiation, so I think he really has lost the plot, or at least he's pretending to. He was removed from the courtroom multiple times and the trial continued without him. The poor bastard defending Chikatilo attempted to argue that he had been put on trial by media, which is true, but the judge was like, so? Which at this stage, I kind of understand. Yeah. Being put on trial by media implies that there was no other evidence and it's just the media like running roughshod over you. And it's like, it's being reported in the media about all of the horrible murders that he definitely, definitely committed. And so Andrzej Romanovic Csikotilo was found guilty of 52 of the 53 murders he was charged with

and sentenced to death for every single one. He was also found guilty on five counts of sexual assault carried out while he was a teacher in the 70s. All in all, he was sentenced to death and 86 years in prison. Once he heard his sentence, Cicatillo kicked off, screaming and shouting from his cage. But when he was given the opportunity to give a statement in response to the verdict, he kept his mouth shut. Cicatillo attempted an appeal,

but no surprises there, it was declined. He also appealed to Boris Yeltsin for clemency in 1994, but it didn't happen. Worth a shot. Yeah, Yeltsin had quite a lot on his plate. I don't think it would have helped his case any to let the Rostov Ripper out of prison. No, I don't think so.

I don't think that would be the popular move that he needed to win back the people's trust. No, but the amount of vodka that man drank, I'm surprised he didn't give it a go. But anyway, it failed. And so, on Valentine's Day 1994, Andre Cicatillo was taken into a soundproof room and shot in the head.

The Rostov Ripper was finally vanquished. And we're going to leave you, hopefully not too traumatised, but with Andre Cicatillo's own words, his reasoning for why he became who he was. This is a quote. I was a Communist Party member for 25 years. I graduated from four universities of Marxism and Leninism. I was an ardent fighter for the triumph of communism around the world. I'm very much distressed by the fact that I wasted my whole life on utopian ideals that

had nothing to do with reality. the collapse of communism was a personal tragedy was it i feel like you didn't really give a shit yeah i feel like you were busy raping and murdering people or not raping and murdering people trying to and then stabbing them in the head yeah there's just a very specific set of serial killers like him. They're like, woe is me. Like anyone would have turned out like me if they had gone through what I've gone through. But we know that there are people who have way worse lives that go on to do nothing of the sort. Yeah, like his fucking neighbors. They were all living in Soviet Russia.

Yeah, eating his fucking cousin. Yeah. But anyway, no, we had to get to him. We had to get to the Rostov Ripper, the Red Terror himself, second only to Stalin, Mr. Andrei Chikatilo. So there you go. We have done it. We have finally finished.

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