Serial Killer Investigations (48 page)

In mid-December 1990, the Russian public finally learned that the Forest Path Killer had been caught when Kostoyev called a press conference. Before the coming of Gorbachev and glasnost, the news would have been kept secret. Now this horrific story of a Russian Jack the Ripper quickly made headlines all around the world. This was the world’s first intimation that the Soviet Union was not as crime-free as communist propaganda had insisted.

The trial of Andrei Chikatilo began in the Rostov courthouse on 14 April 1992. In any other country but Russia, it would have been regarded as a circus rather than an administration of justice. In any Western country, its conduct would certainly have formed grounds for an appeal that would have led to a second trial, and even possibly overturned the verdict.

Chikatilo, his head shaved and wearing a 1982 Olympics shirt, was placed in a large cage, to protect him from attacks by the public. This was a real possibility, since the court was packed with angry relatives, who frequently interrupted the proceedings with screams of ‘Bastard!’ ‘Murderer!’ ‘Sadist!’

Chikatilo confessed to all the crimes except the very first, that of the murder of Lena Zakhotnova. Kostoyev had no doubt that this was because pressure had been brought to bear; he had actually succeeded in obtaining a posthumous pardon for the executed murderer, Kravchenko, but the legal authorities obviously felt that it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie.

On 14 October 1982, as Chikatilo received individual sentences for 52 murders, the court was filled with shrieks that often drowned out the judge’s voice.

Sixteen months later, on 14 February 1994, Andrei Chikatilo was executed by a single shot in the back of the neck, fired from a small-calibre Makarov pistol.

Within two years of the execution of Andrei Chikatilo, the Ukraine was once again thrown into a panic by a killer who seemed even more violent and ruthless that the Forest Path Killer had been. Chikatilo killed individuals; the murderer who was labelled ‘the Terminator’ (after the Arnold Schwarzenegger film) killed whole families, including children. By the time of his arrest in April 1996, the Terminator had killed 40. Later, he would confess to another dozen murders in an earlier orgy of killing that started in 1989.

On the morning of Sunday 7 April 1996, police investigator Igor Khuney, in the Ukrainian town of Yavoriv, received a phone call from a man called Pyotr Onoprienko, complaining about his cousin Anatoly, who had until recently lived in his home. Pyotr had evicted him after finding a stock of firearms in his room, and Anatoly had threatened to ‘take care’ of Pyotr’s family at Easter—which happened to be that day. Would the police go and see Anatoly? He was, said Pyotr, living with a woman in nearby Zhitomirskaya.

This caught Khuney’s attention, for he had recently been informed of the theft of a 12-gauge, Russian-made Tos-34 shotgun in that area. And in recent months there had been an outbreak of appalling murders of entire families, most of them involving a rifle or shotgun. On intuition, Khuney’s superior Sergei Kryukov decided to interview Onoprienko. He took 20 policemen with him in squad cars.

They were taking no chances. When a small, balding man with piercing blue eyes opened the door, he was swiftly overpowered. Asked for identification, he led them to a closet. As a policeman opened the door, the man dived for a pistol, but failed to reach it.

When Onoprienko’s woman friend returned home from church with her two small children, Kryukov told her that they thought her lover might be the suspected mass murderer. She broke down and wept.

In the apartment, police located 122 items that belonged to numerous unsolved murder victims, but the police still needed a confession from their suspect. In police custody, Onoprienko refused to speak until he was questioned by a general. But when one was brought in—General Romanuk—Onoprienko confessed that he had used the stolen shotgun in a recent murder. Admissions to more than fifty murders then came pouring out.

The recent murders began on Christmas Eve 1995, in the small village of Garmarnia in central Ukraine, near the Polish border. A man entered the home of a forester, and killed him, his wife, and his two sons with a sawn-off double-barrelled hunting rifle. He stole a few items of jewellery and a bundle of clothes, before setting the house on fire.

Five nights later he slaughtered another family of four—a young man, his wife, and her twin sisters. It was in Bratkovychi, another remote village near the Polish border. Again the killer stole items of gold jewellery and an old jacket and set fire to the house.

During the next three months there were eight similar attacks in two villages; 28 people died, and one woman was raped. In Enerhodar, seven were killed. He returned to Bratkovychi on 17 January 1996 to kill a family of five. In Fastov, near Kiev, he murdered a family of four. In Olevsk, four women died. His usual method was to shoot the men, knife the women, and bludgeon children to death.

There was panic, and an army division was called in to patrol the villages. An intensive manhunt was mounted—even greater than for Chikatilo. Finally, in April 1996, police arrested Onoprienko near Lvov.

The 36-year-old ex-mental patient, was soon confessing to a total of 52 murders.

Born in 1959, Onoprienko began his career as a forestry student. He would confess: ‘The first time I killed I shot down a deer in the woods. I was in my early twenties, and I recall feeling very upset when I saw it dead. I couldn’t explain why I had done it, and I felt sorry about it. I never had that feeling again.’

Later he became a sailor on cruise liners. After giving up this well-paid job, he became a fireman. In 1989, he and an accomplice named Sergei Rogozin decided to commit a burglary, but were surprised by the householder, whom they then killed. Rogozin was his accomplice in eight additional murders motivated by theft.

It was during his later killing spree of 1995, he confessed, after a period in a mental hospital in Kiev when he was diagnosed schizophrenic, that he had raped a woman after shooting her in the face. During another spree, he had approached a young girl who had fallen on her knees to pray after seeing him kill her parents. He asked her to tell him where they kept the money, and she stared in his eyes and said defiantly, ‘No, I won’t.’ Onoprienko killed her by smashing her skull; but he admitted later that although he was impressed by her courage he nonetheless still felt nothing during the murders. ‘To me, killing people is like ripping up a duvet,’ he told journalist Mark Franchetti, in his tiny prison cell in Zhitomir, Ukraine, where his trial had been held.

In 1989, ‘driven by a rage at God and Satan’, he had killed a couple standing by their Lada car on a motorway. He also killed five people in a car, and then sat in the car for two hours, wondering what to do with the corpses, which quickly began to smell.

The act of killing, he insisted, gave him no pleasure. On the contrary, he felt oddly detached from it. ‘I watched all this as an animal would stare at a sheep,’ he told police in a confession videotaped in 1997. ‘I perceived it all as a kind of experiment. There can be no answer in this experiment to what you’re trying to learn.’ He said he felt like both perpetrator and spectator.

Onoprienko claimed that he was driven by some unknown force, and that voices ordered him to kill. ‘I’m not a maniac,’ he insisted to Franchetti, ‘I have been taken over by a higher force, something telepathic or cosmic, which drove me.’ But he had to wait for this force to give him orders. ‘For example, I wanted to kill my brother’s first wife, because I hated her. I really wanted to kill her, but I couldn’t, because I had to receive the order first. I waited for it, but it did not come.’

‘I am like a rabbit in a laboratory, a part of an experiment to prove that man is capable of murdering and learning to live with his crimes. It is to show that I can cope, that I can stand anything, forget anything.’

His trial began in Zhitomir in late November 1998. The delay was due to a lack of funds. The authorities could not afford to try him because his crimes had covered such a wide area. Eventually, after two years, his judges went on television to appeal for money, and the Ukrainian government contributed the $56, 000 for the trial.

Like Chikatilo, Onoprienko was confined in a metal cage in the courtroom. Sergei Rogozin, accused of being an accomplice in nine of the killings, stood trial with him. The trial ended four months later, on 31 March 1999, when Onoprienko was found guilty and sentenced to death. Rogozin received 13 years. Because there is a moratorium on capital punishment in Russia, Onoprienko is still alive and may never be executed. Leonid Kuchma, the Ukrainian president, however, spoke of temporarily lifting the moratorium in order to execute Onoprienko.

For his part, Onoprienko declared that he wished to die. ‘If I am not executed, I will escape and start killing again. I am being groomed to serve Satan.’ He believed that he was destined to kill a large number of people, perhaps 350, and that if his sentence is commuted to life

—which in Russia means at most 20 years—he would go on to fulfil his destiny after his release (by which time he would be 60).

The judge who sentenced him, Dmitri Lipski, said: ‘He is driven by extreme cruelty. He doesn’t care about anything—only about himself. He is egocentric, and has a very high opinion of himself.’

What motivated all of these murders?

Psychiatrists who examined Onoprienko stated that he was not insane. He was brought up without parents, and his elder brother allowed him to be taken into an orphanage. This, psychiatrists suggested, may be why he has chosen to kill whole families. His worst killing spree occurred at the time he moved in with his girlfriend and her children and it seems possible that this sight of a happy family triggered the resentment that is the key to virtually all serial killers.

Although he proposed to his girlfriend by offering her a ring he had just cut off the finger of a corpse, she insists that he was very tender and loving with the children. Here again we encounter the split personality that seems so typical of a certain type of serial killer.

I have left one of the most interesting profilers of the Behavioral Science Unit to the end. This is partly because Gregg McCrary was relatively a latecomer to the BSU, joining in 1990, but also because two of his three best known cases—the Toronto Rapist and the poet-killer Jack Unterweger—occurred outside the US, and are thus appropriate for this final chapter.

A high school teacher and wrestling coach who joined the FBI in 1969

—when he was 24—Gregg McCrary spent years working in Michigan, the Midwest, New York, and Buffalo before John Douglas recruited him for the NCAVC. But he proved to be oddly suited to the BSU because he had studied the Japanese martial art of Shorinji Kempo, which emphasises thinking past the present situation to future strategyn—excellent training for out-thinking the criminal mind. He liked what he had seen and heard of the Behavioral Science Unit, and two years before John Douglas became chief in 1990, he applied to join—one of thirty or so who were after the same job. McCrary landed it.

I became acquainted with Gregg in 1989, when a London publisher asked me to write a book about serial killers. I asked a friend who lived nearby, Donald Seaman, if he would like to collaborate with me. As an ex-reporter, the first thing he wanted to do was visit the FBI Academy at Quantico for himself. I rang there, explained I was writing a book about serial murder, and asked if I could speak to someone in the Behavioral Science Unit. A few minutes later, Agent Gregg McCrary was on the line, and when I explained what I wanted, he said that he would see what he could do to arrange it. His intervention was so effective that a few weeks later Don was in Virginia, being guided around the Academy by Gregg—to whom, in due course, we dedicated
The Serial Killers.
This is how Don describes Gregg in the book:

He stands some six feet in height, a spare, upright figure with a pale face, a carefully trimmed moustache, and brown hair flecked with grey. As with all personnel in the NCAVC he is smartly dressed, reflecting the evident high morale. Equally, this is the FBI at work; McCrary’s dark blue blazer reveals no sign of the Smith & Wesson 9mm semi-automatic below, fully loaded with twelve rounds in the magazine, plus one (for emergency) already in the chamber.

Gregg was kind enough to send me a copy of the useful FBI handbook
Criminal Investigative Analysis
(1989) by Ressler, Douglas, Anne Burgess and others. And Don passed on to me a letter from Gregg, in which he discusses my comment that there is a basic suicidal impulse in serial killers, which explains why so many of them make absurd mistakes that land them in the gas chamber. (I had pointed out that one third of all murderers commit suicide.)

In the letter, dated October 1989, Gregg commented that, being egocentric psychopaths, most serial killers are unfortunately not the suicidal type. ‘They don’t want to deprive the rest of us of the value of their company.’ He goes on:

The exception is the sexually sadistic serial killer. His crimes involve the infliction of physical and psychological terror on his victims. He may use weapons or instruments to torture the victims before death and be involved in experimental sexual activity. He abducts his victims and keeps them for hours, days, months, etc.

While they represent a minority of serial killers, they are the most horrific due the ante-mortem activity. Examples would be Christopher Wilder, Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, etc.

Most serial killers (Bundy, Gacy, Kemper, etc.) kill their victims quickly in a brutal blitz style of attack. Sexual assaults and dismemberment are post-mortem. These types of killers who do not inflict torture prior to death are far less inclined to be suicidal than are the sub group of sexually sadistic serial killers.

This is a point worth underlining. Killers such as Dean Corll and John Gacy are not remotely suicidal because they are so self-absorbed.

They remain lifelong adolescents. On the other hand, Henry Lee Lucas confessed because he was overtaken by a kind of religious conversion, and the Boston Strangler because he somehow ‘outgrew’ murder.