The Red Ripper - Interviews with Andrei Chikatilo - Serial Killer Documentary

The Red Ripper - Interviews with Andrei Chikatilo - Serial Killer Documentary

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Like anyone sentenced to death. He's nervous and he knock
at the door. Could be the last. His name, Andrei.

(00:28):
I'm nothing but an actor who's performed a role to
earn an oscar want to get into the Guinness Book
of Records. That's all. Not the person who's written the
scenario for all this. Explain it to the people. I musked,
describe how it all happened. But what can I explain
when they didn't show me the case file. They hid it.
They're hiding it all. They've put great things in there,

(00:50):
painting me as a beast, that's all. And now people
look at me. They must put up with me. Here
the city of Rostovan don Here, on April the fourteenth,
nineteen ninety two, began one of the most dramatic trials

(01:13):
in Russian legal history. Sadist a cursed killer. The voices
in the court are crying, son of a bitch, scum,

(01:34):
What have you done? Killer, vile creature? Hand him over
to us. We'll make a chord fit for him. Chikatillo,

(02:01):
a former school teacher and devout communist, was accused of
killing and mutilating fifty three women and children over a
period of twelve years. Leonid Akubjanov, the local judge who presided,

(02:23):
had the task of analyzing each of the murders for
six long months. Chikatillo described in detail how he picked
up his victims at railway stations, bus stops, and on
street corners and lured them to their death in the woods.

(02:45):
The case against him took prosecutors more than a year
to build up. It filled more than two hundred volumes.
The evidence was often too much to bear for those
who had lost their loved ones. Sometimes even his guards
couldn't stand it. Chikatillo's trail of death began here in

(03:20):
Shakti In nineteen seventy eight, aged forty two, he began
teaching at a technical school. He was married with two
children and lived in a hostel attached to the school.
To the people of this small mining town north of Rostov,
he was an upstanding member of society, one of the
small elite who belonged to the Communist Party. Unknown to

(03:44):
his wife, he bought himself a run down shack in
a little lane on the outskirts of town. Did you
look mesavoid Miservoy Lane number twenty six? Here on October
the twenty second, nineteen seventy eight, Chikatilo carried out his
first murder nine year old Lena Zakotnova. Chikatilo had met

(04:10):
the girl at a nearby tram stop and persuaded her
to come back with him to his house. After she
walked through the front door, he turned off the light,
forced her to the ground, and strangled her. Will be
your dear at school. After killing the girl in the
house and mutilating her body, he brought her here. He

(04:33):
threw her body, together with her bag and clothing, into
the rushes. Two days later, the body of Lena Zakotnova
was found one hundred and fifty meters from here in
that direction, near the bridge. Not far from here lived Krafchenko.

(04:59):
He was subsequently arrested in a connection with the murder,
and he was sentenced to death. Yes, Sir John Alexander Krafchenko,
then aged twenty five, was an obvious choice for police.
He'd already been convicted of one murder, but narrowly escaped execution.

(05:21):
He spent six years in jail instead. This time around,
he was not so fortunate. The fact that he lived
just a few doors away was an unhappy coincidence. He
was made to confess to the killing. Leonid Akubjanov, the
judge who convicted Chikatillo, calls it a tragedy. The police

(05:41):
and the prosecutors had good reason to suspect Chikatillo. That's
the most terrible thing. Chikatillo was seen with a girl.
They made an identicate picture which looked like him. If Kravchenko,
who was shot had not been convicted, then they might
have convicted Chikatillo instead, and there wouldn't have been all
those terrible murders which followed those fifty two Murdersst. Ducabis

(06:11):
Andrei Romanovitch Chikatillo was born in October sixteenth, nineteen thirty six,
into a family of peasants in the village of Yabloknoye
in the Ukraine, in the midst of the worst famine
the country had ever known. Millions of peasants died as
the Soviet dictator Stalin forced them out of their family
landholdings and into collective farms. There was worse to come.

(06:35):
In nineteen forty one, Hitler launched his Blitzkrieg against the
Soviet Union. Ukraine was one of the first areas to
be occupied by the invaders. Chikatillo's father was sent to
war and was soon taken prisoner. Conditions on the home
front were appalling, leaving an indelible mark on those who
lived through them. We were sitting in the cellar and

(07:03):
our hut was on fire. There were dead and wounded people,
and they were loading the dismembered bodies in front of me,
all those limbs. Then there was the famine, and the
whole time my mother used to say to me, don't
go anywhere outside the courtyard. They ate your brother Stepan,
and they will eat you. They took him and ate

(07:27):
him there. After his arrest in nineteen ninety, Chikatilo spent
two months undergoing tests at Moscow's Serbski Psychiatric Institute. The
senior psychiatrist who examined him was Andre Kachenko.

Speaker 2 (07:43):
Condition we mean jealous.

Speaker 1 (07:45):
Of course, with Chikatillo, we have a case of abnormal
development from childhood. His mother brought him up on her
own and material conditions were bad. Besides that, there were
those experience mariance is directly linked to the occupation, the
war and so on. For example, one of his most

(08:12):
vivid memories was of the bombing raids and the destruction
they called the bodies being carried on wagons. Then came
the post war years, the years of famine about which
so much has been written recently, where there really were
registered cases of cannibalism. After finishing his military service, Chikatillu

(08:37):
acrossed east from Ukraine to Russia and settled in the
little town of Rodyonovo Neva Taiskaya, thirty kilometers north of Rostov,
where he found work as a telephone engineer. Although tall
and fairly good looking, he was shy with girls and
convinced that he was sexually impotent. His family despaired that
he would ever find a wife. Then, in nineteen sixty three,

(09:00):
aged twenty seven, he met and married Fayina, a miner's daughter.
Despite his sexual problems, he fathered two children. Despite his
sexual problems, he fathered two children, daughter Ludmila and son Yuri.
Chikatilo was determined to better himself. His quest for self
improvement brought him to Rostov University, where he studied literature

(09:23):
as an external student. One of his classmates was Tamara Tolomayenko.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
There was a report on the radio that the trial
was beginning in Rostov of a fifty six year old
sex maniac named Andre Chikatillo. I immediately thought about the
name and remembered that I had studied with an Andre
Chikatillo at university. I knew that he was older than
I was. The rest of us were younger, so I

(09:51):
got out the photographs straight away. After taking it, I
looked at it for a long time. He had the
kind of eyes that it was unpleasant to look at,
even in a photograph. Maybe it was a kind of
magnetism in his eyes which made it possible for him
to kill so many people, to make them agree to

(10:12):
go with him when he asked them.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
Chikatillo moved into teaching immediately after graduating from university. As
he admitted at his trial, the killing of little Lena
Zakortnovna in nineteen seventy eight was the climax of an
escalating series of assaults on his pupils, both boys and girls.
The classrooms were full of rumors about his activities, but

(10:36):
his colleagues were not sure whether to believe them. The
school authorities did nothing. It wasn't until nineteen eighty one
that Chikatillo, then aged forty five, was finally drummed out
of teaching. No one reported him to the police.

Speaker 2 (10:53):
Demosal noticeable thing about him was that whenever he spoke
to anyone, whether to a child or an adult, he
never looked them straight in the eye. His eyes were
always wandering. There were rumors about him. The boys called
him queer. No, maybe the school authorities did take note

(11:14):
of it. It was all within their competence on their level.
As for us, we heard the rumors, but as they say,
boys will be boys, and they could have been saying
anything about him.

Speaker 1 (11:34):
By now, Chikatilo's terrible sexual obsession was beginning to take
hold of him. Long after he killed Lena Zakornova, he
was still relieving what he had done. Rostov's busy railway station,
with its crowds of young women, was like a magnet.
Chikatilo would spend hours walking the platforms in search of victims.

(12:00):
More and more he spent the night on benches in
the waiting room with the tramps and the prostitutes. We
were brought up to believe that all sex was harmful,
that we must only work in industry and build communism,
or the rest was unnecessary. It was useless, and I
was convinced that if it was unnecessary, it didn't matter.

(12:22):
If I couldn't get my thing to stand up, I
wasn't sorry. Put all this pressed down in my brain.
I didn't want to go there, but the people kept coming,
masses of them. You have to lie with beggars for
the whole night at railway stations when you go in
a business trip, because there are never any vacancies in
the hotels. So the people went there, and so did I.
I watched a couple of times, and then I became infected.

(12:45):
It's just like drugs. By autumn nineteen eighty one, Chikatillo
could resist no longer. Outside Rostov Public Library on the
evening of September third, he met Larissa kachink Age seventeen.
They made an unlikely couple. He had been in the

(13:07):
reading room catching up on the communist newspapers. She was
on her way to join a youth brigade working in
the fields, but when Chikatillo proposed going off together to
relax on the river beach, she agreed. They walked together
down Rostov's main street, chatting as they went. His years
spent as a teacher had given him the ability to

(13:28):
talk to young people. Kachenko appears to have suspected nothing
as Chikatilo led her down to the opposite bank of
the River Don, on the outskirts of the city. He
promised to buy her food and drink at the leisure
complex on the river beach, but they never got there. Well, Azark,

(13:54):
it was warm summer weather, and they walked through looking
for somewhere without peoples they could be alone. At that time,
the woods here were much thicker than the trees have
been cut down since, and he brought it to this
place where he tried to have sex. Because of his impotence,

(14:15):
he didn't succeed in finishing the sexual act, and after
that he killed her, and then he left. The killing
spree began. The unusual thing about Chicatillo's victims was their diversity.

(15:17):
Some were young, innocent children, others were tramps or cheap prostitutes.
They were so different from one another that police were
convinced they were dealing not with one but with several killers.
The problem was in those early years that as a rule,
beginning in nineteen eighty two, we were finding bodies which

(15:39):
were little more than skeletons, we couldn't establish the identity
of the deceased. It was only after the institute in
the Moscow made a reconstruction of the skull that we
were able to identify twelve people. We were unable to
start our work with the main thing, and that, of course,
was the deceased. One of them was eleven year old

(16:04):
Sasha Chappelle. It was a warm summer evening in August
nineteen eighty four, and he'd been out with a friend
to the cinema in Rostov. It was the last time
the two boys saw each other, as Sasha's grandmother remembers.

Speaker 2 (16:29):
After the film, they went to Voshilovsky Prospects, from where
the number ten tram left. Vasily was there with his
little brother, and Sasha said to him, there's your number
ten tram. You go and I'll wait here for mine.
That is what Vasily told the police, And.

Speaker 1 (16:47):
That was the last you saw of him.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
That was all. Then a man was cutting hay on
the banks of the dawn and they found him. His
mother was called to identify him. I was with the
younger one in the countryside. That was all. Afterwards we
were called back for the funeral.

Speaker 1 (17:18):
While Chikatillo continued to kill those around him still suspected nothing.
In nineteen eighty one, he had begun a new job
as a supply clerk at the Rostov Nehrud factory. Most
of his working time was spent roaming the region searching
for material and spare parts. He kept himself to himself.
A few hours a week he spent at his desk
at headquarters.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
I worked with Chatillo from nineteen eighty one to nineteen
eighty four. What is there to say about him? He
was a dull, straightforward man who didn't stand out here
in any way. Not good and not bad. I'd work.
None of us had anything to do with him. When

(18:04):
the newspapers reported what he had been up to, I
was completely taken by surprise. For a long time, I
couldn't believe it until they produced all the proof and
showed all this brutality.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
By the summer of nineteen eighty four, Chikatillo had killed
more than thirty women and children, fifteen of them within
that year alone. Although rumors were spreading, the official media
kept silent. No indication was given that a serial killer
was at large. It was typical of the way the
Soviet media focused exclusively on good news. In the days before,

(18:44):
glasnost I was working for the news and five times
a week the police would bring us photographs of victims found,
for instance, on the left bank of the dong No
Shakti or Shakti. They were disfigured. We used to show

(19:05):
them on the TV news and the hope that somebody
would identify them and report it to the militia. But
no one ever said that it was all one case,
at least not among the journalists. That came only Aftertillo
was caught. Local people were not informed at all, even

(19:27):
after Chikatillo had already committed tens of murders and they'd
been hunting him for years. Children were being killed, but
everyone remained silent. If it'd spoken out loud about this,
written on every street corner, that children had disappeared and
in what circumstances, then people would have been careful. People
would have been on the lookout at bus stops. No,

(19:49):
everyone was silent. If the public was badly informed, it
was partly because the local police themselves were in the dark.
In the summer of nineteen eighty three, a top investigator
was sent from the public Prosecutor's office in Moscow to
monitor their work. Vladimir Kasarkov was horrified at what he

(20:11):
found when he began to read the files. Despite strong
similarities between the various murders, the local police were convinced
that they were the work not of one man, but
of a group of killers, most of them homosexuals. One
of them, Eurok, was the first to be detained and

(20:32):
the first to confess to eleven killings. I began to
have very serious doubts about the truthfulness of his testimony. Later,
those doubts grew stronger and they were confirmed. And we
not only collected evidence that proved their innocence, but we

(20:53):
also found proof that the police had used certain methods
in their work with them, and well, to put it lightly,
these methods were not completely legal. The twelve years that
Chikatilo was at large, there was a serious problem identifying
the remains of the victims, which were often badly mutilated.

(21:17):
Pavel Chernik, a local artist, was called in to help
the local police. In August nineteen eighty four, a good
friend of mine, who's a police colonel and senior investigator,
came to see me. He brought me a picture of

(21:37):
a disfigured girl which couldn't be given to the media
for identification because it was mutilated. I was asked to
make a drawing of what she looked like when she
was alive. I made this drawing. As it turned out later,

(21:58):
it was Alexeeva, of the many victims of the well
known maniac Andre Chikatillo. Almost ten years later, her brother
Vladimir is still puzzling why she agreed to go off
with Chikatilo. It's terrible, but my sister. She was only

(22:20):
seventeen and she had her whole life in front of her.
She came to spend the holidays and then such a
terrible thing to happen to her. She was a friendly
and a decent person, but he managed to attract her.

(22:42):
Must have spun her some in fairy tale. He was
an elderly man, but he must have had a way
with the words. A month later, in September nineteen eighty four,
when the killings reached a peak, came a major breakthrough.

(23:03):
After a night spent trying to pick up women at
Rostov railway station, Chikatillo was followed by a policeman in
the early hours of the morning across the city here
to the central market, where he was arrested. He was
taken to the little police station and questioned. When they
searched his bag, they found it contained a knife, a

(23:26):
piece of rope, and a jar of vaseline. But there
was a problem. Laboratory tests had identified traces of sperm
found on the bodies of the victims as belonging to
group A B, but Chikatillo's blood was a different group.
According to Russian medical experts, all men had the same

(23:47):
blood as sperm groups. No one, not even Chikatillo himself,
could have known that he was a one in a
million exception. Although police began to probe him in connection
with the killing of Dma Tashnikov, a ten year old
boy found earlier that year, the medical evidence was against them.

(24:09):
The only excuse to hold him was on a minor
theft charge that was pending from the factory where he worked.
He was released because there was no evidence. There were
no grounds to hold him any longer. He was detained
and arrested for a theft which he had carried out earlier.
In fact, he was investigated in connection with this case.

(24:30):
There was not the slightest evidence we didn't have a
single witness who could identify him. The only case was
with DMA Tashnikov in Jakting's The identicate picture looked like him,
but we had tens of identicate pictures and they were
all different. That was the only evidence, plus a different

(24:50):
blood group. We didn't find any evidence about him, no
solid evidence. Accordingly, the decision was taken to close the
case him. Relating to this episode, jail calm Chikatillo, he

(25:13):
was frightened and for more than six months after his release,
he didn't kill again. Times were changing. Konstantin Chernenko, the
last of the old style Communist leaders, had died and
been replaced by the young Mikhail Gorbachev later in nineteen
eighty five. In August, Shikatillo came to Moscow on a
business trip, just outside Domodydovo, the city's major domestic airport.

(25:36):
He was ready to strike again. On August the first,
Chikatilo was traveling on the local train from Moscow in
the direction of the airport at Domodyidovo. On the platform
between the carriages, he met his next victim, Natalia Poklistova,
who was living almost as a tramp. Her appearance and

(25:58):
the fact that she was smoking gave him the desire
to commit another crime, this time against her. She knew
when invited the girl to go for a walk with
him into the woods. He set off in this direction.

(26:23):
M August the third, the body of an unknown young
girl was found here. It was completely naked and covered
with a large number of cuts and stab wounds. There
were signs on the palms that the hands had been tied,

(26:45):
and there was rope around the neck. The nipples had
been cut off. The next day, police identified the victim
as Natalia born in nineteen sixty seven. She lived literally

(27:05):
two hundred meters from the place where her body was found.
For Kristova's killing was the turning point. The case was
handed to Isa Kostoyev, Deputy in chief of the Investigative
Department of the Public Prosecutor's Office and one of their
best officers. Under Kostoyev's command, one of the largest police

(27:31):
operations in Soviet history was mounted. Over the next five years,
police were to check almost half a million people, a
figure equivalent to one in ten of the entire population
of the Rostov region. More than a thousand people were
convicted for other crimes. They solved along the way, but
not Chikatilo. He remained at large, always one step ahead

(27:55):
of them. In order to check all possible people involved
in the killing, we checked one hundred and sixty thousand
owners of private cards who lived in places near the killings.
We also checked two thousand, four hundred and seventy five

(28:18):
people with previous convictions for sexual crimes. With each of them,
it was possible to check where he was at the
time of the killing, what he was doing, what he
was like when he was released from custody, and how
he had behaved when he was in custody, whether he
was mentally normal or not, and which blood group he had.

(28:43):
Their names were filled out by hand and put into
this card index. There were more than twenty five thousand.
Chikatillo's name first appeared in our card index at the
time of his arrest on September thirteenth, nineteen eighty four.
He was detained at the main railway station, or rather

(29:04):
the main bus station, and handed over to the district
department of the police. Then he was handed to the
investigating operational group. From that moment he came into our
field of vision and we filled in his card it's
still here today. We have one, two, three, four, five,

(29:30):
six cards on him. These are all the cards that
were filled in on Chikatillo. The first was filled in
during nineteen eighty four, the main ones after examination of
the criminal and operational material. The last card was filled
in when he was arrested in nineteen ninety. It didn't help.

(29:51):
Again and again Chikatillo fell through the holes in the
police net. The shock of prison was beginning to fade.
His fiftieth birthday had come. When gone, he was already
a grandfather, but his horrific obsession was stronger than ever.
Unable to cope with normal sexual relations, he found the
only release through violence. He was spending more and more

(30:13):
time hunting for victims, yet still those closest to him
suspected nothing. Even wife Fayina, after twenty five years of marriage,
had no idea what her husband was really doing during
all those nights he spent away. She understood perfectly well

(30:34):
that he was impotent from her experience of their sex life. Later,
as he said himself, he used to come home after
committing these crimes with blood on him and with cuts.
Of course, his wife Fayena saw all of that but
at the time he committed the crimes, he was working
in the supply department, and he explained to her that

(30:56):
it was because he was loading barbed wire, metal and wood,
and that was supposedly why he cut himself and had
blood on it. I used to go there and take
off my trousers. I became completely shameless. I don't know why.

(31:19):
I used to take off my trousers. And the toilets
of railway stations the same way that other people shave
or comb their hair, they have water and soap there.
So I took off my trousers and started washing. Well,
it wasn't proper washing. It was just to clean off
the dirt that happened to be there. Well, not dirt,
but blood that was spilled. I didn't examine it closely.
I just washed it off with soap. A policeman who

(31:42):
saw me doing this washing at the station and asked
me what I was doing. I said, there was dirt
in the streets, so what They used to check documents
at the railway station almost every time I was there.
As the years passed, the killings were beginning to get
more and more grizzly. Some of the bodies bore dozens

(32:05):
of wounds. Others were decapitated or had the genitals cut off.
Like an addict, Chikatilu needed more and more suffering to
obtain his perverted sexual satisfaction. When I spoke to Chikatilo,

(32:26):
he said that by the end, the sex of the
victim didn't matter anymore. What was important were his own actions,
the power which he exercised when he was manipulating his victims,

(32:48):
and this feeling that he experienced didn't depend in any
way on the sex of his victim. It is true
that in a number of cases in the final stages
at homosexual and peterophilic victims prevailed. Unit of the sixteen

(33:11):
murders which Chikatillo committed between the beginning of nineteen eighty
eight and his arrest in nineteen ninety eleven were of boys.
One of those victims was ten year old Alyosha Kobotov,
whom Chikatillo met in nineteen eighty near a cinema in Shakti.

Speaker 2 (33:35):
It was Monday, August twenty eighth. We were redecorating our
apartment and he was helping me in the morning. At lunchtime,
he asked me for permission to go to the parks. Mum,
I'll go to the playground for a while to play there. Well,
I let him go, I said, don't belong Lyosha be

(33:58):
back soon. He left at about twelve or soon after
and didn't come back.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
For more than fifteen months. Lydia Robotova waited in vain
for news of her son. The police found nothing. More
and more desperate, she was ready to try anything.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
I learned there was a gypsy fortune teller in the
Rostov region who helped people, so I thought I would
go to her, Come what may. She took his photograph,
got out her cards and said, he is lying between
heaven and earth. I said, in what sense? He is dead.
He was killed by the hand of a sadistic murderer
and died a slow death.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
Then, at the end of nineteen ninety, Chikatilo came to
the quiet country station of les Cause. On the morning
of November sixth, he brought a woman called Korstik to
the next railway station, laser Step. I knew the aim

(35:08):
was the same as always, to take her to a
secluded place and murder her. The local policeman on duty
spotted a man coming out of the woods and washing
his hands. He demanded his papers, but found nothing and
let him go. The policeman didn't know that Chikatillo had

(35:30):
just killed Svedlana Korostik, his fifty second and last victim,
but Chikatillo's luck deserted him. A week later, when the
body was found, Police Chief Fetisov was passing and demanded
a list of people who had been recorded at the station.

(35:52):
He began to read the list, and there was Chikatillo,
and I said, listen. We checked him in nineteen eighty
four when he was to take At that time, I
was on holiday, and when I came back and they
showed me the case, they said that they detained him
and that he'd fitted almost one hundred percent, except for
the fact that the blood group didn't match. When the
investigators began to go through Chikatillo's movements over the previous

(36:15):
years and compared them with the murders, they found, their
astonishment that they fitted together perfectly. Then we started to
check his work record. I found that he got a
job here at this factory in nineteen eighty four. We
looked up the documents to find out where he was

(36:35):
at the moment the killings were committed. Did he leave
Rostov on a business trip, No, that means he was here.
Could he have committed the murder, Yes, he could, so
we put a big question mark on this. Later, he
found himself a job at a beer factory in nineteen

(36:55):
eighty four over in the west. When we checked the
documents from that day, the day of the killing of
Ilario Novo, we found that he was working there. Then
also very strange he was working there and the boy
was killed. And then when we put all these coincidents together,
we came to the conclusion that he was the murderer.

(37:21):
On the afternoon of November twentieth, a week after Svedlana
Korustic's body was found, police tracked Chikatillo to the town
of Novocherkask and arrested him. He came quietly without protest,

(37:49):
nor did he say anything as they drove him back
the forty kilometers to Rostov. Name Chikatillo Andrea Romanovitch. Year
of birth nineteen thirty six. Place of birth Sumskaya Region,
Akir District, village, Yabloknayi. What's your education? Higher education? Higher education.

(38:13):
The first few minutes already produced an interesting development, a
cut on Chikatilo's finger, But this was nothing compared to
the surprise that was in store for police when they
received the results of their blood and sperm samples. As
the tests six years before had shown, Chikatillo's blood was
Group A, but to the astonishment of police, his sperm

(38:38):
was of a different group A B. He could be
a B, he could be the killer. For more than
a week, Kostoyev sat face to face with Chikatillo. To
heighten the pressure, he was interrogated not in the police station,

(39:00):
but in the local headquarters of the Kigib. First he
said nothing, but gradually Kostoyev broke down his resistance. Chikatilov
finally confessed to thirty four of the thirty six murders
of which he was accused, stunning his captors. He then
admitted to nineteen more, which police until then had not

(39:21):
even linked with him. Among them was the murder of
nine year old Lena Zakotnova twelve years before, for which
Alexander Krafchenko had already been shot. When I went to
search his flat, it was in a mess. As usual.

(39:45):
I was interested in the murder weapon in so far
as all the crimes were committed with a sharp weapon
with a blade, in other words, a knife, if I
remember correctly, we found some twenty two or twenty four
of them. I've never seen a family with such a
quantity of knives. There was no possible justification for such

(40:07):
a large number. In the weeks that followed, Chikatilo took
his captors on a makamre tour of his killings, amazing
them with the accuracy of his memory. Even ten years
after he had killed, he was still able to pinpoint

(40:29):
the place down to a few meters. The biggest surprise
came with the case of Yosha Krbotov. Although it was

(40:51):
more than fourteen months since the boy had disappeared from
his home in Shakti, still nothing was known about his fate. Defendant,
Andre Romanovitch, it's now sixteen hundred Moscow time. Following your

(41:12):
suggestion made today in the Botanic gardens and the city
of Rostov, our group has accompanied you to the city
of Shakti and your suggestion. We have stopped at the cemetery,
the central cemetery of the city of Shakti. Can you
lead us from here and show us the place where

(41:33):
you committed a crime against the underage boy. It would
suggest was telling us where he killed the boy and
where he buried the body. The episode is fundamental to

(41:53):
the chain of investigation of this series of murders because
we did not know where the body was cool and
so it obviously constitutes very weighty proof of Chikatillo's involvement.
That business murder Chicatist.

Speaker 2 (42:37):
Nationally. When they found I was called to identify him.
They showed me the sneakers. Yes, I recognized them at once.
I had bought them myself, and he had them on
when he was leaving. The sneakers were covered with blood.

(43:15):
Later we went to Rostov to the mortuary. It was
late in the evening, already night. I caught sight of
a box on the experts. I asked, where is my
son over there in the box off folded, I said,

(43:41):
open it up. I want to see what is left
of him. There were just bones and the head was
a skull.

Speaker 1 (43:50):
Mh.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
It could only have been his skull because several teeth
had been extracted and they were missing. That completely convinced
me that it was my son.

Speaker 1 (44:06):
Not only Chikatilo's victims suffered so too did his wife, Fayena.
After threats to her life, she was rushed over the
border to Ukraine, where she was given a new identity.
Nadezna Tarasova met her again by chance just before the
trial started.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
When I saw her, I simply did not recognize her.
She had grown old and her face had gone dark.
She said she was being killed by grief. She was
going to the church when I met her, and she
didn't know where to look. She said, Nadya, until now,
I didn't want to see anybody. But now I've met you,

(44:44):
I can part my soul to you. It weighs very
heavily on me. She said, I never knew what he
was up to, And I said, how come you never
noticed anything? Like when he came home and had that
bag with him, those things. Couldn't you have just had
a look, She said, you know, I tried once. He
told me off so badly that I said, okay, they're

(45:07):
your things. I didn't try to touch them after that
and didn't touch his bag.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
On October fourteenth, nineteen ninety two, the trial in Rostov
moved into its last dramatic phase. Over the previous six months,
dozens of witnesses had come forward to confirm the case
that police and prosecutors had built up so painstakingly. When
Leonid Akubdjanov read the verdict, he had serious doubts about

(45:43):
one of the killings, that of a fifteen year old
Armenian girl whom Chikatilo was alleged to have killed in
nineteen eighty three, but apart from that he had no doubts.
Chikatillo appears to have confessed largely in the hope that
he would be found to be mentally ill. With that
hope gone now, rambling and incoherent, he withdrew his confession.

(46:06):
I didn't sign this list. I didn't admit anything I
signed where I said that. I didn't confess. I didn't
kill anyone apart from the mafia, the Assyrian mafia I killed.
Take me and I'll show you where the bodies are.
But it was too late. Chikatillo had already said too much.

(46:26):
Akubjanov found Chikatillo guilty of fifty two murders. The sentence
was set for the next afternoon. Why should I listen
to your rubbish Now you're trying to force another ten

(46:46):
killings on me. Taking into consideration the monstrous crimes which
he committed. The court has no alternative but to impose
the only sentence which he deserves. I therefore sentenced him
to death.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
He is not a man, He's an animal who should
not have a place on earth. Why can't her government
understand it? Why did they waste all this time with him?
The trial lasted four months. He said he was sick.
How could he be sick? It's me that's sick. I
couldn't fill out all the declarations but him. Look at
what letters he wrote and what declarations. Execution is too

(47:37):
good for him. They should rip him apart as a
warning to others.

Speaker 1 (47:53):
I don't have the slightest doubt about these killings. Otherwise
there would not have been fifty two of them. If
there had been doubts about any then they have been
left out. The fact that he's been convicted of fifty
two murders means that the court is completely convinced that
the monster Chikatillo killed all of these fifty two people.

(48:13):
Marat Kabibulin, the state lawyer who had the difficult job
of defending Chikatillo, is still in touch with his client.
He says the pressure of public opinion made the death
sentence inevitable. Although not claiming Chikatillo is innocent, he says
he is insane. Oh, I have no doubt at all

(48:37):
that this is an insane man who is not responsible
for his actions. Expert psychiatrists, doctors, and scientists and psychiatry
would be able to confirm this, many of them, even
on the basis of what they observe, if they were interested,

(49:00):
they could hardly doubt that this is a person who
is not in any way responsible for his actions. In
order to certify someone is mentally sick, you must clearly
determine the presence of some kind of psychiatric disorder which

(49:21):
is sufficiently pronounced and sufficiently serious to deprive them of
the ability to make a choice in a given situation.
Despite all his psychological abnormalities, this was not the case.
With retained this ability right up to the last. Do

(49:42):
you regret that you've committed such crimes? Have you at
last begun to repent? I don't know what to repent.
They framed me, They pinned more and more confessions on me,
dozens of them, seventy of them. The last question, what

(50:09):
do you think of the end of your life? Do
you think of death, I don't know. I mean the
other world already. I mean there a long time, already.
I was killed many times, cut off from this world.
Nothing is left in this world. Appealed against his sentence.

(50:42):
His case is currently under consideration by the Russian Supreme Court.
Mm hmmmmm