The Devil's Dozen (15 page)

Levy, Harlan.
And the Blood Cried Out: A Prosecutor’s Spellbinding Account of the Power of DNA.
New York: Basic Books, 1996.

Lee, Henry, and Frank Tirnady.
Blood Evidence: How DNA Is Revolutionizing the Way We Solve Crimes.
Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003.

Newton, Giles. “Discovering DNA Fingerprinting,”
genome.wellcome.ac.uk
, retrieved December 4, 2007.

Wambaugh, Joseph.
The Blooding: The True Story of the Narborough Village Murders.
New York: William Morrow, 1989.

In the film
Citizen X
, a psychiatrist named Alexandr Bukhanovsky asks Andrei Chikatilo, recently arrested for numerous murders, to help him on some aspects of the profile about which he is not quite certain. In a quiet voice, he reads the relevant pages. Chikatilo listens, sometimes nodding, as if alert to the only person who seems to have understood him. He’s transfixed as the reading continues.

Outside, impatient police officials are aware that without a confession, they must release this alleged offender. They’ve held him for nearly the maximum number of days, without cracking him, and the psychiatrist’s profile is their last resort. The lead investigator, Viktor Burakov, has studied the FBI’s criminal profiling program and he’s convinced of its viability. Yet he, too, cannot be sure that Chikatilo will acknowledge any guilt.

Bukhanovsky’s description delves into the nature of Chikatilo’s mental illness and sexual perversions, suggesting reasons for it. As Chikatilo hears his secret life described so clearly, he begins to tremble. Tears come to his eyes. Finally he confirms what the psychiatrist is saying, breaks down, and admits that it’s all true. He has done these horrible things.

Chikatilo reads the statement of charges for thirty-six murders and admits his guilt. He offers to tell the truth about his life and these crimes. As investigators listen, they’re astonished to learn that their estimate of the number of his victims was far too low.

One of the most heinous serial killers in history, Andrei Chikatilo, eluded capture for decades.
AP/Worldwide Photos/Maxim Maxim Marmur

A man looking for wood in the
lesopolosa,
a forested strip of land planted to prevent erosion, found some skeletal remains of a corpse. He reported them to the
militsia,
the local authorities. They discovered that the corpse had had no identifying clothing and had been left on its back, its head turned to the left. The ears were still sufficiently intact to see tiny holes for earrings, which, along with the length of hair remnants, suggested that the victim had been female. It appeared that two ribs had been broken and closer inspection indicated numerous stab wounds into the bone. A knife had apparently cut into the eye sockets, too, as if to remove the eyes, and similar gouges were viewed in the pelvic region. Whoever had committed this crime, the police thought, had been a frenzied beast. They found a report about a missing thirteen-year-old girl, Lyubov Biryuk, from Novocherkassk, a village nearby. A few items of clothing in the area linked the remains to this girl.

Major Mikhail Fetisov arrived from
militsia
headquarters in Rostov-on-Don. He was the leading detective, or
syshchik,
for the entire region. He asked for a search for any other records of people reported missing and ordered military cadets to scrutinize the entire area. Despite a thorough search, no evidence was produced that could help to identify the killer.

The autopsy report showed that Lyubov had been attacked from behind and hit hard in the head with both the handle and the blade of a knife. She had been stabbed at least twenty-two separate times. As a result, the police looked for people in the region with a history of mental illness, juvenile delinquents, or offenders with a history of sex crimes. They tried to find out whom Lyubov had known and how she might have encountered this killer.

One man, convicted in another rape, learned that he was a suspect and promptly hanged himself. That seemed to put an end to the investigation, as there were no other viable suspects, but two months later another victim was discovered.

A railroad worker walking near the train station in Shakhty, a small industrial town twenty miles away, came across another set of skeletal remains, several weeks old, adult, and female. The body had been stripped, left facedown, with the legs pulled apart. Investigators spotted a key similarity with the murder of Lyubov: multiple stab wounds and lacerated eye sockets.

Only a month later, a soldier gathering wood about ten miles south of that spot came across more remains, also of a woman lying facedown. She had been covered with branches, but close inspection showed a pattern of knife wounds and damage to the eye sockets.

The link among the victims was obvious. They had a serial killer in the area, but the police were not admitting this, especially to the press. Police in the Soviet Union were careful about acknowledging the existence of serial killers, believing this was a symptom of the decadent Western cultures like that of the United States. Officially, they had three separate unsolved murders.

Major Fetisov organized a task force of ten men to start an investigation. Among them was a second lieutenant from the criminology laboratory, Viktor Burakov, age thirty-seven. He was the best man they had for the analysis of such physical evidence as fingerprints, footprints, and trace evidence, and he was an expert in both police science and martial arts. In January 1983, he was invited to join what was known as the Division of Especially Serious Crimes.

Around this time, a fourth victim was found. She appeared to have been killed six months earlier and her body was near the area where the second set of remains was discovered. It bore the familiar knife-wound patterns.

At this point police knew that the killer—the “Maniac,” as he was called—did not smoke (or he’d have taken the cigarettes found near Lyubov) and that he was male. He had an issue with eyes, and his gouging of them indicated that he spent time with the victims after they were dead, even in high-risk areas.

With no definite leads, the unit decided to look at older unsolved cases, but Burakov’s primary task was to head an investigation in Novoshakhtinsk, a farming and mining town in the general area. There, a ten-year-old girl had just been reported missing. Olga Stalmachenok had gone to a local conservancy for a piano lesson on December 10, 1982, and that was the last time anyone saw her. Burakov questioned her parents and learned that she got along with them and had no cause to run away. However, the parents had received a strange postcard that was signed “Sadist-Black Cat” telling them their daughter was in the woods and warning that there would be ten more victims that coming year.

On April 14, 1983, four months later, Olga was found in a field, along with some of her things buried apart from her body. Since she was killed during the winter, cold and snow had preserved her, so the pattern of knife wounds on her skull and chest was clearly visible on her bluish-white skin. The knife had been inserted dozens of times, as if in a frenzy, especially to the heart, lungs, and sexual organs.

Burakov knew he was looking for a vicious, sexually motivated serial killer who was attacking victims at an escalating rate, drawing no attention and leaving no evidence. But given the attitude of the regime in power, Burakov had few resources to help him find the killer. Men who killed in this manner were few and only top-ranking Soviet officials knew the details of the investigations of their crimes. It was like an unpleasant family secret known only to select relatives.

Burakov followed the three-mile route from the conservancy to the place where Olga’s body was left, deducing that the killer had a car. He was also certain the man did not frighten people when he approached. That would make him harder to find, though Burakov was sure the man had some kind of mental disorder that someone had noticed.

He and his team decided to focus on known sex offenders in the area, specifically on their whereabouts on December 11. Then they looked at released mental patients, as well as men who lived or worked around the conservancy who owned or used a car. Handwriting experts examined the Black Cat card against samples from the entire population of that town, but nothing of interest turned up.

Then in another wooded
lesopolosa
near Rostov-on-Don, a group of boys found bones in a gully. An examination of them linked this crime with the others. The next discovery was an eight-year-old male in a wooded area near Rostov’s airport, two miles from the sixth victim. Missing since August 9, the boy had been stabbed, like the others, including his eyes.

This new development puzzled everyone. Serial sex killers, it was assumed, always attacked the same type of victim, but this offender had killed grown women and young children, girls and boys. The investigators wondered if they might have more than one killer doing the same kind of perverse ritual. It seemed impossible, but so did the idea that so many victim types could trigger the same sexual violence from one person.

Through a tip, the police interrogated Yuri Kalenik, nineteen, who lived in a home for retarded children. At first he denied everything, but interrogators kept him for several days, believing that a guilty man would inevitably confess. They beat him, so he finally told them what they wanted to hear. He confessed to all seven murders, and added four more to his list. Yuri seemed a viable suspect, because he had a mental disorder and he used public transportation, as did many of the victims. At the time, there was little understanding of the psychology of false confessions. People of lower intelligence tend to be more susceptible to suggestion or coercion, especially when fatigued, and they may tell interrogators whatever pleases them—usually supplying items they hear from the interrogator.

When Burakov asked the boy to take them to a murder site, he saw that Kalenik did not go straight to the place, even when he was close, but appeared to wander around until he picked up clues from the police about where they expected him to go. Burakov did not consider this to be a good test. Upon examining the written confession, he was even less convinced. It was clear to him that Kalenik, intimidated, had been given most of the information he finally provided. He was soon cleared.

In another wooded area, the mutilated remains of a young woman were found. Her nipples had been removed—possibly with teeth—her abdomen was slashed open, and one eye socket was damaged. She had been there for months and her clothing was missing. Another victim found on October 20 bore wounds similar to those of the other victims, but though her eyes remained intact, this victim was entirely disemboweled and the missing organs were nowhere to be found. Perhaps the killer had changed his method.

Just after the start of 1984, a dead boy turned up near the railroad tracks—Sergei Markov, a fourteen-year-old, missing since December 27. For the first time, thanks to winter’s preservative effects, the detectives were able to see just what the killer did to these young people. He had stabbed the boy in the neck dozens of times—the final count would be seventy—and he had then cut into the boy’s genitals and removed everything from the pubic area. In addition, he had violated the victim anally. Then it appeared that he had gone to a spot nearby to have a bowel movement.

Fetisov decided to retrace the boy’s steps on the day he had disappeared. Beginning in a town called Gukovo, he’d boarded the
elechtrichka,
or local train. In the same town was a home for the mentally retarded and the teachers there reported that a former student had left around the same time as the boy and had taken the train. Once again, the police got a confession. Once again, they made a mistake.

Finally, though, they had their first piece of good evidence. The medical examiner found semen in Markov’s anus. When they did apprehend the killer, a secretor, they could compare the blood antigens. This would not afford a precise match, but could at least eliminate suspects. In fact, it eliminated all of the young men who had confessed thus far. (As yet, there was no DNA analysis available, but even when there was, the Soviet Union’s political instability during the late 1980s would preclude such analysis.)

In 1984, numerous victims were discovered in wooded areas, some of them quite close to where previous bodies had lain. Investigators acquired one more piece of evidence: a shoe print left in the mud, size thirteen. On the victim’s clothing were traces of semen and blood.

The killer struck that March in Novoshakhtinsk, grabbing ten-year-old Dmitri Ptashnikov, who was later found mutilated and stabbed. The tip of his tongue and his penis were missing. The semen on his shirt linked him to the previous two crimes, and this time, there were witnesses. The boy was seen following a tall, hollow-cheeked man with stiff knees and large feet, wearing glasses. No one had recognized him.