The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  Zanasovsky shrugged and let him go. Then he talked to the girl in the waiting room. Had Chikatilo, he asked, suggested that she go anywhere with him.

  No, the girl said. He had asked where she was studying, and what. That was all.

  A couple of weeks later, on the evening of September 13, Zanasovsky saw the same man in the Rostov bus station, dressed as he had been in August, wearing a tie and carrying an attache case. Chikatilo could hardly have forgotten him, but Zanasovsky prided himself on his skills as an undercover observer. He knew how to watch without being seen.

  Chikatilo got on a bus. Zanasovsky and a colleague, a plain-clothesman named Akhmatyanov, got on after him. They rode for two and a half hours, switching buses at apparently random places around the city. Eight or ten times, Zanasovsky observed Chikatilo strike up a conversation with a young woman. Nothing untoward happened.

  Finally, Chikatilo got off a bus in the center of the city and walked into a restaurant. He sat down and started to talk with a woman whose body listed to one side, an evident drunk. Then he left her, and walked across the street to a cafe, where he chatted up more women. Then, still alone, he sat on a bench for a while in Maksim Gorky Park, the public garden in downtown Rostov. From there, Zanasovsky and Akhmatyanov followed him down Engels Street to the railroad station.

  It was by then past midnight, but Chikatilo's wandering continued. He went to the bus station again, chatting up women, all of whom talked for a while, then caught their buses. At about three o'clock, Chikatilo saw a young woman, perhaps nineteen, lie down on a bench. He walked over and sat down beside her.

  Zanasovsky could watch, but he could not get close enough to hear. He saw Chikatilo running his hand through the woman's hair. Then, suddenly, she stood up, and Zanasovsky thought she might be accusing him of trying to unbutton her blouse. But she had a flirtatious look on her face, and soon she lay down on the bench again. This time, Chikatilo took off^ his jacket and covered her head with it. Zanasovsky could see movement under the jacket, and he assumed her head was bobbing up and down as she fellated him in the nearly empty station.

  Then Chikatilo and the woman got up and walked, separately, to the toilets. Chikatilo, the first out, walked around impatientiy for a moment. Then, suddenly, he walked rapidly out of the station and got on a streetcar. Zanasovsky had seen such behavior in people he was tailing. It usually meant that they had spotted the surveillance.

  He cursed silendy. Akhmatyanov had worn a yellow shirt to work that night, which offended Zanasovsky's sense of proper dress. To him, plain clothes should be just that. He never wore bright colors on the job. He told Akhmatyanov to look for the woman, then got on the streetcar and stayed on Chikatilo's trail.

  It ended, a mile or so away, near the empty stalls of the Central Bazaar. Chikatilo got off the streetcar, and Zanasovsky decided to take him in. He could always charge him with committing a perverted act in a public place.

  He walked up behind Chikatilo. "Have you gotten where you were going?" he said.

  Chikatilo turned and recognized him. It was nearly dawn, and in the gray light Zanasovsky could see beads of sweat on the man's forehead. Chikatilo told him he had missed his bus to Shakhty and was just killing time until the next one left. But he offered no resistance when Zanasovsky told him he would have to go to the nearest militsia station.

  Before he went home, Zanasovsky helped open and catalog the contents of Chikatilo's briefcase. They found ajar of Vaseline, a dirty towel, some rope, and a kitchen knife about ten inches long. Zanasovsky left the station convinced that he had found and arrested the lesopolosa killer. Why else would the man be carrying a knife and trying so hard to pick up women?

  Yuri Moiseyev, the procurator who had been sent in as part of the team from outside Rostov, drew the duty of questioning Chikatilo. He reported the next day that Chikatilo was sticking by the story he had told Zanasovsky. He had missed his bus. He was killing time. He carried the knife because he often needed to cut things, like sausage, when he was traveling.

  Shortly afterward, the forensic laboratory reported the results of Chikatilo's blood test. He was type A. According to the analysis of the semen samples found at the scenes of nine murders, the killer had blood type AB.

  Chikatilo also, it turned out, was a member in good standing of the Communist Party. The investigators checked with the Party secretary at his workplace. The Party gave him a standard character reference—there was nothing unfavorable on him in its files. Being a Party member did not offer immunity against prosecution, but it added weight to a suspect's denial. Moiseyev was prepared to let Chikatilo go.

  But the background check turned up something else. Chikatilo had worked, until two months before his arrest, as a tolkach in an enterprise called Rostovnerud in Shakhty. The tolkach —a word that means "pusher"—is a key man in Russian industry. Because the state-run supply system worked so badly, every sizable factory had a staff of tolkachi. Their job was the reverse of a salesman's.

  They traveled around to the factory's suppliers, glad-handing and passing out gifts, to persuade the suppUer to sell what the factory needed to buy, when it needed to buy it. Chikatilo, some months previously, had gone off on a mission to buy automobile batteries for Rostovnerud. He had managed to get sixteen of them, and he had allegedly kept one for himself

  On the scale of theft and pilferage in the Soviet Union, this was almost too small to be noticed. And in fact, the case had never been prosecuted. Chikatilo had, however, changed jobs in July, going to work as a tolkach at Spetzenergoavtomatika. If one read between the lines, it was possible to see that he had left voluntarily in return for Rostovnerud's dropping the charges.

  The militsia in Novoshakhtinsk, still looking for a suspect in the Dmitri Ptashnikov case, asked to revive the theft charge and keep Chikatilo in their jail for a while. Along with their Rostov colleagues, they believed firmly in the persuasive powers of a jail cell, and they thought that time in jail, perhaps with a stukach as a cell mate, might get Chikatilo to reveal things he had not said to Moiseyev. Moiseyev agreed to their request.

  Once charges had been filed, the militsia had a legal right to search Chikatilo's apartment. Viktor Burakov was asked to supervise the search. He knew vaguely that Chikatilo had been detained in a station and that he had type A blood. He had not, however, questioned the suspect himself Burakov regarded the assignment as an unwelcome interruption of the work he was doing, finally to put an end to the Kalenik case. Moiseyev had already decided not to charge Chikatilo.

  But Burakov drove to Shakhty, to an apartment on a street named for the fiftieth anniversary of the Communist Youth League. Chikatilo lived in an apartment on the ground floor of a student dormitory; he had formerly been a teacher. Their search turned up nothing of interest—a fur hat, an overcoat, and a pair of large boots Burakov found under the stove. He turned the evidence over to Moiseev and went back to work on the Kalenik case.

  Chikatilo, in jail, continued to deny any involvement in the lesopolosa kiUings. He got a six-month sentence for the battery theft, and he was stripped of his membership in the Communist Party.

  Burakov found himself pondering more and more the character of the man he was seeking. Thanks to the muzzling effect of official censorship, the criminological literature available told him little or nothing about serial killers. In September, he took a major risk. Without permission from his superiors, he breached the secrecy that still surrounded the case by asking members of the psychiatric profession for advice. He sent information on the killings to psychiatric experts in Moscow. And he asked the rector at the Rostov Institute of Medicine to convene his psychiatrists and sexual pathologists so that he could tell them about the case.

  Burakov gave them a cautious, sketchy overview. Someone, he said, was killing girls, women, and boys. In a general way, he described the pattern of mutilation. Then he posed his questions. Could the same killer be interested in both sexes? Could a group of some kind be responsible? What kind of illness drove s
uch people, and how might it affect other aspects of their behavior?

  The response disappointed him. Most of the psychiatrists, he thought angrily, could not have cared less about catching the killer. (Given the history of repression in the Soviet Union, they perhaps had reason to be cautious with a militsioner who came around asking provocative questions.) Some of them appeared to pay little attention. What the others said was vague and contradictory. One thought the killer was a lone individual. Another said it might be a group.

  But after the lecture, one of the psychiatrists. Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, approached Burakov and invited him for a further talk in his office. Burakov had already heard about Bukhanovsky. A plump, swarthy man with a wavy black pompadour and long sideburns, Bukhanovsky stood out sharply against the low, gray ranks of Russian psychiatrists.

  Of all the sciences, psychiatry and genetics had suffered the most under Communism. Genetics, under Stalin, had been forbidden as a bourgeois fiction because it conflicted with the Party's dogmatic insistence that a new, socialist environment could change the very nature of man. The Communists repressed whole branches of psychiatry for similar reasons. They could not tolerate a view of man that stipulated the primacy of the individual and the motive power of his quest for personal pleasure. They could not tolerate a view of society that stressed the importance of childhood relationships, rather than economic class, in the formation of character. So they virtually banned Freud. Soviet psychiatrists practiced in intellectual and often physical isolation from their counterparts in the West. Their research emphasized things like the optimal conditions for increasing productivity in the workplace.

  Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, by origin and inclination, was different. He was born in 1944, the child of a wartime marriage between an Armenian woman and a Polish Jew who had been sent to Russia to fight the Germans. His father, as the war ended, made his way back to Poland and, eventually, to America. But the Iron Curtain closed on Bukhanovsky and his mother before his father could send for them. Eventually, his mother remarried and resigned herself to life as a Soviet citizen.

  Bukhanovsky became a Red Diploma student in the Rostov schools, meaning that he earned straight ^'s. He entered the Rostov Medical Institute and chose to study psychiatry because he had an aversion to blood and an inclination to chat with people.

  He received the standard Soviet psychiatric education, but then he broadened it. During his obligatory two years of army duty in the late 1960s, Bukhanovsky lived in Murmansk, near the Arctic Circle. There was little to do, especially during the long, dark winters when the sun never rose above the horizon and the mercury never rose to zero. The army tried to compensate by arranging for soldiers with an inclination to read to borrow books from the best Moscow libraries.

  Bukhanovsky read voluminously and unsystematically. He read about genetics, which had just been legalized by the Central Committee. He read the works of the Soviet psychiatrists of the 1920s, who wrote before Stalin completed the corruption of their discipline. He found that what he was reading not only contradicted much of what his textbooks had said. It made more sense.

  When he returned to Rostov and the institute, he started to study schizophrenia and sexual pathologies, an area that constantly bumped up against the puritan streak in Soviet ideology. The problem of transsexualism, men who wanted to become women, seized his interest. He became one of a handful of Russian psychiatrists who developed a program, in conjunction with institute surgeons, to guide patients through the process. In the early 1980s, he began a research program on homosexuality. At the age of forty, when Burakov met him, he was a maverick within his profession.

  Burakov followed Bukhanovsky and a few of his colleagues into Bukhanovsky's office and berated them for their indifference. He showed them a picture of one of the victims and let them see, rather than hear about, the wounds inflicted by the killer. If they failed to help him catch the criminal, he warned, there was no assurance that the next victim wouldn't be one of their own children. Bukhanovsky had a daughter, Olga, who was fifteen. He agreed to help.

  Two weeks later, he produced a seven-page report for Burakov. It cast aspersions on some of the theories the investigators were working with. The crimes, he said, were almost certainly caused by a sexual personality disorder. The killer was a sadist who could obtain sexual satisfaction only by causing another to suffer. There were, he reported to Burakov, instances in the psychiatric literature where sadists liked to use a knife or needle to inflict numerous superficial wounds.

  The killer was compulsive, Bukhanovsky wrote. When the need to kill arose, he could no more decide not to kill than a normal man could decide not to eat when he was hungry or not to drink when he was thirsty. He could make and follow a plan to find a victim, even a subtle and convoluted plan. But until he obtained the release that killing offered, he would be depressed and irritable; he might suffer from headaches or insomnia. His compulsion to kill could be triggered by periodic events like the phases of the moon or weather conditions.

  Most likely, Bukhanovsky wrote, the killer suffered from impotence when it came to normal sex. He needed to see suffering to arouse himself. He probably could not sustain a heterosexual relationship, although he might, occasionally, have sexual intercourse with women. He might, Bukhanovsky suggested, have seen a doctor about his sexual problems or tried to check out special literature from a medical library.

  Although the killer suffered from a mental illness, most likely schizophrenia, he was not crazy or retarded. He had an intellect sufficient to work out plans and avoid being caught. He probably lived in an internal world, with little social activity. If he ever had had close friends, he had probably lost them. It was extremely unlikely, Bukhanovsky concluded, that a group was involved. The chance that two or more such personalities could find each other and cooperate was extremely remote.

  The National Scientific Center for the Study of Sexual Pathology in Moscow weighed in with a somewhat different report, based on the information Burakov had provided. Its report, written by G. S. Vasilenko and I. L. Botneva, theorized that the killer might have a hormonal surge of some kind that occurred once or twice a month. Almost unconsciously, he would begin a period of passive searching for a victim. He would start by hanging out in train stations, bus stations, parks. Girls, women, or boys all might attract his attention. He would become garrulous with them.

  He had a knack, the report said, for sizing up victims. With adults, he could pick out the ones who needed food, or money, or a place to stay. He invited such people to have a drink or spend the night; he might just offer to show a woman the way to the next stage in her journey. With children, he was more impulsive. Something in a particular child's appearance might trigger his compulsion. When it did, he had the wits to make up a story to lure the child away.

  Once he had his victim in the woods, the killer's personality changed, and his rage burst from him. Like Bukhanovsky, the Moscow specialists believed that the killer could not get or maintain an erection during normal sexual intercourse. He aroused himself by stabbing and seeing blood. Then he ejaculated, either through masturbation or spontaneously. That explained why the semen turned up on the victims, rather than inside them. His need for sexual gratification was so intense, they suggested, that he might not even notice exactly when his victims died.

  The killer, they noted, had developed a ritual of mutilation. This probably occurred either after the victim's death or after his own sexual climax. If he had not achieved an orgasm by the time the victim died, they said, cutting off the sex organs might increase his excitement and permit him to do so.

  Afterward, they concluded, he might calmly clean himself up, wash the traces of blood from his clothes, and check to make sure he had left no fingerprints or other evidence at the scene of the crime. He might either throw away the body parts he had cut off or take them with him. But he would emerge from the woods calm and genial, capable of chatting casually with people he encountered or of driving a car.

  Lik
e Bukhanovsky, they thought it highly unlikely that a group was involved. And they believed that the same individual was killing both males and females.

  But Burakov got a third opinion, and it conflicted with the first two. A research specialist at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, V. E. Pelipas, said there were probably two killers involved. The first, a man between the ages of thirty-five and forty, killed boys. This murderer, Pelipas wrote, might work in a school or intemat. He had experience with children. He probably lived alone or with relatives. He had no relations with women and few, if any, friends. He probably had secret interests in pornography and fetishes, including the sexual organs removed from his victims. The second killer, Pelipas said, was responsible for the women and girls. He was probably younger than the first, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. He was no doubt stronger and more attractive than the boys' killer. He worked, perhaps, as a driver.

  Reading the reports, Burakov pondered. They confirmed some of his own opinions. They seemed to discount Kalenik and Tyapkin, for instance. They ruled out the notion of a gang. And they offered an explanation for the wounds inflicted on the victims.

  He could believe the descriptions of the killer's impotence and sadism.

  But as a practical matter, did they bring him closer to the killer? The psychiatrists could not even agree on whether there was one killer or two. Their vague descriptions of the killer's personality could fit any of thousands of men in Rostov oblast. If it was a single individual, Burakov could imagine him biding his time somewhere, laughing quietiy at the people who were trying to catch him, and waiting for his hormones to rise.