The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  Burakov received orders to check out anyone named Fischer in Rostov oblast. It was a major undertaking. Centuries ago, Empress Catherine II, born a German princess, had invited thousands of German farmers to settle in the lower Volga area. Some of them were named Fischer, and many of their descendants lived in Rostov oblast.

  All the Fischers that the investigators found proved to have alibis that eliminated them as suspects. They found an intriguing non-Fischer in the person of a powerfully built man named Nikolai Popov, a man with a long criminal record. Popov had a tattoo on his left shoulder that said "Fischer," which he claimed honored the American chess grand master. But Popov had been in jail until July 1985.

  As if to confuse the issue, the killer struck again at the end of August 1985, back in Shakhty in a grove of trees not far from the bus station. The victim this time was an eighteen-year-old named Inessa Gulyaeva, another girl with no home, no job, and a weakness for vodka and worthless men. Her mother had raised her without a father. She had dropped out of school after the eighth grade. Her mother had not seen her, she told the syshchiki, since early April.

  The examination of Gulyaeva's body turned up several details that particularly piqued Burakov's interest. She had been dead only a day or so when her corpse was found on August 28. Her mouth, like the mouth of Natalia Pokhlistova in Moscow, had been stuffed with leaves. Apparently, the killer had now added this to his ritual. The examiners found sweat mixed with the blood coming from the wounds in her neck. They typed the sweat AB; her blood type was O. And Gulyaeva had two threads, one red and one blue, under her fingernails. Presumably, they came from the clothing of the man who had killed her. They also found a single gray hair between her fingers.

  The Shakhty militsia, it turned out, already knew a fair amount about Inessa Gulyaeva. A couple of days before she died, the militsia chief in the village of Konstantinovka, a river town about forty miles east of Shakhty, had arrested her as he walked to work. Her crime was lying drunk on the Don embankment at eight o'clock in the morning. When she sobered up enough to talk, she told the Konstantinovka militsia that she had no home they could send her to, that she was, in the Soviet parlance, a bomzhean acronym from the Russian words byez opredyelyennogo myesta zhityebtua, or "without a defined place of residence." The nearest place where the state dealt with such people was in Shakhty, and the militsia sent her there.

  Only a law enforcement bureaucrat could distinguish the Shakhty shelter for bomzhe from a jail. It is a two-story concrete building with a steel gate and bars on the windows. The guards are militsionery. The bomzhe live in large, dark rooms, crowded with iron bunks and scraps of bedding, and secured by cell doors with ancient steel padlocks.

  Soon after she arrived, Inessa Gulyaeva decided that she wanted to wash the dress in which she had been lying on the ground, so she went to the laundry room and took it off. She had no other clothes except for her panties, and no one offered her something to cover herself She was a homely girl, with a broad, flat face, a wide nose—and enormous breasts. Word of what she was doing spread instantly through the building, and the guards and those male inmates who were out of their cells to do chores soon gathered in the laundry room to gawk at her.

  While the men stared, the procurator in Shakhty was reviewing her case. As it happened, she still had her passport, the internal identification document that every Soviet citizen had to carry. And the passport showed that she was registered to live with her mother in Krasnodar, a city several hundred miles south of Shakhty. She was not, therefore, technically a bomzhe, and she was not, the procurator ruled, entitled to a month of free food and lodging at the expense of the Soviet people. He directed the guards at the shelter to let her go, and they did so on the afternoon of August 27. The next day, her body was found.

  The investigators could not immediately establish her identity. The body was, as usual, naked; they found neither clothing nor documents. The investigators showed a photograph of the corpse to, among others, the guards at the shelter, but all the guards said they had never seen the woman before. It took a week to identify the body from fingerprints and retrace her path to the shelter.

  The early investigation in Shakhty filled Burakov and Fetisov with both fear and eager anticipation. Rarely had the militsia managed to discover a lesopolosa victim so soon after his or her death. Rarely had the militsia been able to establish a victim's whereabouts before the murder so precisely. The strange inability of the shelter guards to identify the corpse's picture aroused suspicion, particularly in the context of the two threads, one red and one blue, found under the victim's fingernails. Both colors could be found in the summer uniform of the militsia, which included a blue cotton shirt and trousers with a red stripe. And that was the source of their fear.

  The investigators had already entertained the idea that a militsioner might be the killer. It explained how so many victims would trustingly follow him into the woods. It explained the killer's evident ability to leave little or no evidence at the murder scenes. But they hated the thought that this hypothesis might be the one that finally proved out.

  They had no choice but to press ahead with it. Once they had established Gulyaeva's presence at the shelter, they had little trouble finding witnesses who remembered the incident in the laundry room. Several of them mentioned that a militsioner named Sergei Kolchin had paid particular attention to Gulyaeva. They remembered seeing him talking to her.

  Kolchin had come to the attention of the lesopolosa investigation once before. He vaguely fit the description of the militsioner who had supposedly visited the priton where Vera Shevkun hung out on the night before she died in 1983. But he had denied any knowledge of the priton, and he never became a suspect.

  The more Burakov learned of Kolchin's personal life, the more it seemed that clearing him in 1983 had been a grave mistake. Kolchin worked as a chauffeur at the shelter, driving a militsia car on various errands, including trips to Rostov. That kind of work gave him unsupervised access to a car and lots of occasions when he could disappear from work without attracting attention. Kolchin was in his mid-twenties, strong, tall, with dark hair and eyes. He had been married, but his wife had divorced him after discovering that he had had an extramarital affair. Like so many of the lesopolosa victims, he had a disorderly sex life. But that was not all he had. He was asked to give a semen sample, and he complied. He had type AB blood and secretions.

  Both Burakov and Fetisov worked on Kolchin's interrogation. Over the course of ten days, they battered Kolchin for six to eight hours a day with the facts that were coming to light, particularly the type of secretion found on the body.

  Kolchin dug the hole he was in a little deeper. Naively, he sent a note to his mother, asking her to wash a particular shirt. The note was, of course, intercepted and read. The shirt was found. It had a bloodstain. The bloodstain was analyzed, and it proved to be type AB. That meant that it might be Kolchin's blood. It might have been someone else's blood, mixed with Kolchin's sweat. Why, they demanded, had he wanted his mother to wash it?

  On the tenth day, Kolchin broke down.

  He had arranged to meet Gulyaeva after she left the shelter. He had taken her into the woods. He had tried to have intercourse with her. She was willing, but for some reason, he could not get an erection. She had laughed at him. He had struck her on the head. He had killed her.

  Something about his answers did not ring true with Burakov. Like Yuri Kalenik, Kolchin did not know details he should have known, such as the type of wounds the killer had inflicted. And when they asked Kolchin to show them the place where he had killed her, he took them to a wooded spot several miles from the grove near the bus station where Gulyaeva's body had in fact been found. He had taken her there, tried to have sex with her, and hit her, he said. Then, when he was formally presented with the indictment the procurator was planning to present to the court, accusing him of Gulyaeva's murder, he partially recanted. He had not, he insisted, killed her.

  Burakov talked for hours w
ith Kolchin, trying to figure the man out. Was he just a weak-willed man who broke down once under pressure and confessed to something he didn't do? Or had he really killed Gulyaeva, then shown them the wrong spot to confuse them? Burakov didn't know.

  He had ordered the investigative staff in Rostov to find out as much as possible about Kolchin's whereabouts on the days of the other murders. The first results were inconclusive. No records existed to show exactly where Kolchin had been on the dates in question. During the days, the investigators established, he could well have been in Rostov and in the other places where murders had occurred. But at night, the car remained at the shelter. He could hardly, for instance, have used it to drive Olga Stalmachenok into the cornfield on the Sixth Collective Farm on the evening she died. Of course, they didn't know for certain that she had been driven there.

  Burakov and Fetisov made a quick decision, in conjunction with the procurators. They held off on formally charging Kolchin with murder. But they did, in October, accuse and convict him of something virtually all state-employed Soviet drivers were guilty of: siphoning state-owned gasoline out of the shelter's car and selling it on the black market. He got eighteen months. That would give them time to investigate further.

  By the autumn of 1985, the investigation had become badly mired down. There were still unidentified victims. Periodically, Chernyshev or Fetisov would call a meeting of the officers supervising work on the case and demand to know the progress of one or another line of inquiry. They seldom got a satisfactory response. The work on the list of Aeroflot passengers to Moscow in July 1985 threatened to drag out indefinitely. The syschiki in the field had barely made a dent in their assignment to check out all the enterprises and come up with a list of names of people sent to Moscow at that time on business trips. The records in the various factories were often a mess—scattered over many offices or incomplete. But it was also true that too many syshchiki went through the motions of checking the records, just as many of the laborers at Rostselmash went through the motions of assembling tractors, and just as many kolkhoz workers went through the motions of growing food. The problem was endemic in Soviet society.

  The pressure from Moscow to solve the murders intensified in November with the appointment, by the chief procurator of the Russian Republic, of a special procurator named Isa Kostoyev to supervise the investigation.

  Lieutenant Colonel Viktor V. Burakov in his dress uniform. As head of a special investigative unit, Burakov struggled against a decaying Soviet system, archaic attitudes toward sex crimes, and false confessions, as his determination to hunt down the real serial killer became an obsession.

  Major General Mikhail Fetisov, chief of the Rostov oblast militsia, who recognized Victor Burakov's investigative skills by appointing him to head the team that finally identified and trapped the most savage serial killer in Russian history: Andrei Chikatilo.

  Vladimir Kolyesnikov. Now head of the Criminal Apprehension Bureau of the Russian Ministr)' of the Interior, he was Fetisov's deputy during much of the eight-year-long investigation of the serial murders and drew the assignment of placing Chikatilo under formal arrest.

  Pelagea Petrova, mother of thirteen-year-old Lyubov Biryuk, who never returned from a trip to buy bread. The discovery of Lyubov's body in a wooded strip, in 1982, first suggested to Fetisov that a killer of unusual savagery was at large.

  The bus station in Donskoi, where the killer spotted and stalked Lyubov Biryuk.

  Some of Chikatilo's victims. At first he killed girls and young women. Later, young boys also became his prey. Top row, left to right: Lyubov Biryuk, Yelena Bakulina, Irina Luchinskaya, Lyudmilla Alekseyeva, Irina Karabelnikova; second row, left to right: Irina Pogoryelova, Lyubov Kutsyuba, Vera Shevkun, Olga Stalmachenok, Ivan Fomin; third row, left to right: Inessa Gulyaeva, Igor Gudkov, Sergei Markov, Svetlana Petrosyan, Tatyana Petrosyan; fourth row, left to right: Viktor Petrov, Yelena Varga, Dmitri Illaryonov, Yaroslav Makarov, Natalia Golosovskaya; fifth row, left to right: Viktor Tishchenko, Natalia Shalopinina, Aleksei Khobotov, Olga Kuprina, Aleksadr Chepel.

  Yuri Kalenik. As a result of a coerced confession in 1983, Kalenik became the prime suspect in the killings and spent five years in jail.

  A militsia artist's sketch of the man seen walking with Dmitri Ptashnikov on the night he disappeared.

  Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, a psychiatrist at the Rostov Institute of Medicine. When Burakov sought his advice in the midst of the investigation, Bukhanovsky wrote a psychological profile of the killer that proved remarkably accurate. In the end, at Burakov's request, Bukhanovsky was called in to the stalemated interrogation of Andrei Chikatilo, and convinced him to confess.

  Andrei Chikatilo on the night of his second, and final, arrest, November 20, 1990.

  Burakov (center) questioning Chikatilo (right) during a visit to a murder scene, where Chikatilo showed the location of the body and described how he had killed the victim.

  Chikatilo using a mannequin to show Burakov (background) and other detectives how he killed one of his victims.

  The Rostov courtroom, where the five-month-long trial of Andrei Chikatilo began in April 1992. Judge Leonid Akubzhanov presided, flanked by the two official jurors.

  Andrei Chikatilo at his trial. He sat in a cage designed for murder defendants, ostensibly to protect him from vengeful relatives of the victims.

  Kostoyev, though he worked in Moscow, was not a Russian. His roots were in the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, in the Caucasus Mountains to the south of Rostov. His people, who were originally Muslims, had been added forcibly to the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century. They had suffered terribly under Stalin's persecutions in World War II, when he accused them of collaborating with the Germans.

  Kostoyev was a man of less than average height, stocky and swarthy, with a bushy mustache and a receding hairline. He had risen through the ranks of Russian procurators and had participated in the solution of a serial killer case, involving far fewer victims, in Smolensk, a city in western Russia.

  Burakov and Fetisov reacted ambivalently to Kostoyev's appointment. They had expected the appointment of a procurator from Moscow, especially after the Pokhlistova killing made it clear that the lesopolosa case spanned more than one jurisdiction. They were disappointed to learn that Kostoyev did not plan to take up residence in Rostov. He would make periodic visits, staying for a week or a month, holding meetings, then heading off to other work. Burakov felt that as long as Moscow was going to send a special procurator, he ought to devote full time to the case.

  Burakov and Fetisov were not free of the standard Russian prejudice against Caucasians. Though the Soviet Union was officially a land of tolerant and friendly relations among its numerous nationalities, ethnic tensions were never far from the surface in southern Russia. The region had more than a dozen minority nationalities from the Caucasus—Armenian, Ossetian, Georgian, Chechen, Ingush, Kabardinian, and others. Though these Caucasian people had lived under Russian rule for centuries, they had long memories. They still saw the Russians as imperialists who would, if they let down their guards, impose the Russian language and culture on them.

  The Russians, for their part, knew the Caucasian people largely from the bazaars, or farmers' markets, where they brought the produce they grew on their small plots of personal land to sell at free prices. Many Russians felt that the Caucasians were altogether too clannish, greedy, and criminal, and that they conspired to inflate prices. The word "Mafia" fell easily from their lips when they talked of one or another Caucasian nationality—as in "Georgian Mafia" or "Chechen Mafia."

  Burakov felt that Caucasians were excessively self-aggrandizing, that they would do anything to advance their own careers. He had heard disconcerting rumors to the effect that Kostoyev had tried to claim all the credit for cases in which he was just part of a collective effort. But Burakov was a Communist. That implied a willingness to go along, formally, at least, with the Party line that ethnic differences counted for not
hing in relations among Soviet citizens. It certainly meant that he accepted discipline and commands from the center. So he set out to work with Kostoyev as amiably as possible.

  The lesopolosa working group by then had become huge. It included fifteen procurators and twenty-nine syshchiki. They had at their disposal as many automobiles and regular militsionery as they needed to watch the train and bus stations and the parks where they thought the killer might strike next. On some days, that meant as many as two hundred fifty people. They had an undercover team of men and women called Project Decoy, which worked in the evenings at the stations. The women hung around until a man approached them. Then the man was questioned. If he did not satisfy his questioners, his blood was checked.

  Kostoyev, after reviewing the case files, upbraided the group for its slow work. Why, he demanded, had they not finished working through the lists of gay men, mental patients, and taxi drivers? Why had they identified and checked out only eighty-one people from Rostov who had been in Moscow in July 1985, when there must have been hundreds in the capital at that time? He was certain, he said, that the killer had at some point already been in their hands, and they had erroneously let him go. That had happened in his previous serial murder case in Smolensk. The killer's inactivity from September 1984 to July 1985 suggested that something had stopped or frightened him. Had they checked out all the people who had been in jail since August 1984? Why hadn't they finished collecting handwriting samples from Novoshakhtinsk that might match the handwriting on the Black Cat postcard?