Chikatilo's reaction pleased Kolyesnikov. Innocent people, he believed, responded to the same approach in a different way. They might demand to know who he was, and why he wanted to know their name. But Chikatilo, he felt, acted like a man who had been waiting a long time for the moment of his arrest. He was calm and subdued, almost exhausted, it seemed. Pershikov handcuffed him, and Yevseev took the leather bag and the jar of beer. They bundled him into the car and headed back to Rostov.
Squeezed into the back seat between two militsionery, Chikatilo waited until they were on the Rostov highway before saying anything.
"Why am I being arrested?" he asked.
The militsionery did not reply. That was not their job.
Darkness had fallen by the time they returned to Rostov. The scene in Fetisov's office bordered on chaos. Kostoyev, Burakov, and a dozen others clustered around the suspect as they booked him.
With his coat and hat off, Chikatilo looked even more like an intellectual and less like a brutal killer. His graying hair was thin on top, but he wore it brushed straight back, revealing a broad forehead; the skin of his scalp shone through under the lights that Slava Vinokurov had set up. He had on blue trousers, a violet shirt, and a thin brown tie that seemed calculated to give his clothing a touch of dignity. His neck was long and thin, his nose beaky. He still seemed subdued, almost depressed.
He answered questions for the standard arrest form in a low monotone. He was born in Yablochnoye, Ukraine, in 1936. His education included a degree from the liberal arts school of Rostov State University, as well as a technical education in communications and electronics. He spoke German. He had a wife and two children. His wife was fifty-two. He recited the list of places where he had worked, and he began to sweat.
A physician took over the questioning. Did he have any diseases?
No, the suspect replied.
The doctor ordered him stripped to his white undershorts. Chikatilo suffered this in silence. He had a bony body with a middle-aged man's pot belly. Carefully, the doctor removed the bandage from the middle finger of Chikatilo's right hand, revealing an ugly cut, stained by green disinfectant. The middle joint was broken.
"How did you get this?"
It was an accident at work, Chikatilo replied. A box fell on his finger.
The doctor ordered him to strip completely. Humiliation etched on his face, Chikatilo complied. Carefully, the doctor examined his penis, focusing on a patch of irritated skin.
"What's this? How did it get there and when?" the doctor demanded.
Chikatilo mumbled that he did not know.
"When did you last have sex with your wife?" Kolyesnikov broke in.
"I don't remember," Chikatilo replied.
The doctor ordered Chikatilo to bend over so that his anus could be examined. Then he let him put on a pair of gray prison pants with an elastic waistband but no belt. A nurse took a blood sample.
Kolyesnikov stepped in front of the camera to display what he had found in Chikatilo's satchel—a folding knife.
Viktor Burakov watched the scene for a while, then walked back down the hall to his own office. He had occasionally daydreamed about the moment the lesopolosa killer was arrested, and he was fairly confident that this was that moment. But he had never imagined that he would feel nothing as he watched it. But nothing was in fact what he felt, or what he would allow himself to feel. There was no anger, no elation. The man, he found, barely interested him. Closing the case interested him. And that would depend on the success of the interrogation, which would begin the next day. If they failed to extract a confession, their case against Chikatilo would rest only on a flimsy chain of circumstantial evidence. Without a confession, even a Soviet court might acquit the man.
11
CONFESSION
As soon as everyone in Fetisov's office had had his chance to look the suspect in the eye, Isa Kostoyev decreed that he would handle the interrogation alone. No one else—not the militsia, not the other procurators, not any of the psychiatric experts—would participate until Kostoyev had cracked the suspect. Under the Russian legal system, as procurator he had the power to determine who questioned the suspect. Kostoyev was not a man unmindful of his own talents. Nor was he unaware of the spotlight that would inevitably fall on the lesopolosa case. He was determined that Andrei Chikatilo's confession would be his show.
They put Chikatilo in a cell in the KGB building, adjacent to the militsia headquarters on Engels Street. He had a cell mate—a stukach, or informer, named Vladimir Titorenko. Titorenko was, in Viktor Burakov's judgment, the most capable of the convicted con artists then in the Rostov prison system. His job was to engage Chikatilo in conversation as much as possible and elicit whatever information he could. In return, Burakov promised Titorenko he would receive whatever help the militsia could legally provide him, such as support for parole after serving the minimum time.
The next day, Kostoyev called the office of the local version of the bar association, the Rostov College of Lawyers, and asked it to send a defense attorney to witness the interrogation and represent the suspect. Under reforms enacted late in the Gorbachev era, criminal suspects had the right to counsel as soon as their interrogation began. If they could not pay, the local college of lawyers paid from a fund amassed by taking a percentage of the fees collected from solvent clients. This was a significant reform; in the old Soviet system, a suspect got a lawyer only after the procurator had compiled the evidence against him. Defense attorneys had generally confined themselves to arguing that, while the state's case was irrefutable, their clients regretted their mistakes and deserved mercy.
But the perestroika of criminal law had not gone so far as to produce an adversarial system. All the defense lawyers had been trained to believe that they served the state, not their clients. Even the most conscientious of them felt that their job was first to help the court get at the truth, then to help their clients. Their training told them it would be unethical to advise a guilty client to refuse to talk to investigators.
The Rostov bar association appointed a thirty-two-year-old criminal lawyer named Viktor Lyulichev to represent Chikatilo. Lyulichev already had some knowledge of the lesopolosa case. After completing the law school at Rostov State University, he had spent several years as a sledovatyel in the local procurator's office. He had worked on both the Lyudmilla Alekseyeva and Aleksandr Chepel investigations before resigning and going to work in a lawyers' kollektiv in the town of Aksai.
Lyulichev drove to Rostov and presented his identification to the guard at the entrance to the KGB building. Admitted, he made his way to the interrogation room, a harshly lit office, furnished with a desk and a table and a couple of wooden chairs. Kostoyev was already there.
They had, Kostoyev informed him, a suspect in the lesopolosa case. The first day's interrogation would be brief and general. Chikatilo came into the room, escorted by a guard, wearing the jailhouse clothing and the same subdued, humiliated expression caught by the video camera the night before. He looked, Lyulichev thought, about as he had expected the lesopolosa killer to look—ordinary and harmless. No one who looked more conventionally malevolent, he was certain, could have escaped detection for so long.
Kostoyev began his interrogation with rudimentary questions, reestablishing Chikatilo's name, address, and place of work.
Would he like to make a statement about the case?
Yes, he would, Chikatilo replied. The suspicion against him was a mistake. He had committed no crimes. Six years ago he had been detained and questioned about the same murders. That was an illegal detention and so was this. He suspected that the authorities were after him because of a dispute he was in over a construction project in Shakhty, at the apartment his son lived in. Someone had started to construct a garage in the courtyard, cutting off light to his son's apartment. He had been writing letters to bureaucrats from Shakhty to Moscow, protesting. He had accused some of them of taking bribes. That must be why they were after him.
How did he hurt his finger?
It was at work, Chikatilo replied. He'd been out on the loading dock, helping to pass along boxes. One of them had fallen on his finger.
And had he cut his face in the last fifteen days?
No, Chikatilo replied.
And where was he on November 6?
He had been, he insisted, at work nearly all day. Then he went home to his wife.
Why, then, had a militsioner at the Donleskhoz station reported seeing him on November 6, with what looked like an injury on his cheek?
Chikatilo said he didn't know.
That was enough, Kostoyev decided, for the first day. He handed Lyulichev and Chikatilo the written notes he had made of the questions and answers. These notes, called protocols, would be the basic record of the interrogation. Chikatilo and Lyulichev both signed, indicating that the record was accurate.
Lyulichev had said nothing during the interrogation. Now Kostoyev left the room and gave him a chance to talk to Chikatilo alone. Lyulichev introduced himself and told Chikatilo he had been assigned to his defense.
Did Chikatilo have any objections?
Chikatilo shook his head. He either had no objections or he didn't care enough to voice them.
They had a one-sided, ten-minute conference. Lyulichev told Chikatilo that he had to devise a defense strategy. It might, he suggested, be in his best interests to remain silent. But Lyulichev stopped short of advising him to stonewall, to refuse completely to cooperate with the interrogation. That would have been unethical.
Chikatilo did not reply.
After the conference, Lyulichev sought out Kostoyev.
Would the charges against Chikatilo involve the Alekseyeva or Chepel cases?
They well might, Kostoyev replied.
In that case, Lyulichev said, he would have to recuse himself from the case. He had a conflict of interest.
Kostoyev agreed. He said he would seek another attorney from the College of Lawyers. But the next day, Chikatilo signed a waiver of his right to counsel, prepared by Kostoyev. He would have no more legal advice for the next seven months.
The next afternoon, Chikatilo said he wanted to make a written statement. He was clearly a man burdened by something; it might have been guilt. Kostoyev decided to give him writing materials and see what he produced. Some two hours later, Chikatilo turned over a three-page essay, written in a cramped, nearly illegible hand. For the work of an educated man, the paper was a grammatical disaster, replete with incomplete sentences and missing punctuation. It betrayed the stress he was under.
TO: THE PROCURATOR OF THE RSFSR
FROM: CHIKATILO, ANDREI
DECLARATION
On 20 November I was arrested, and since that time I've been under guard. I want truthfully to tell about my feelings. I am in a difficult, depressed situation. I am conscious that I have committed, that I have unsettled sexual feelings. I earlier went to psychiatrists for my headaches, loss of memory, insomnia, sexual distress. But the treatment did no good.
I have a wife and two children, sexual weakness and helplessness. Because of my psyche, everyone laughs at me, that I don't remember anything, that I touch my sexual organs I didn't notice until they told me. I felt humiliated and I was subjected to laughter by my peers at work and in other companies. From childhood I have been subject to humiliation and always suffered. In my school years, with my belly swollen from hunger, dressed in rags, they laughed at me. I studied till I dropped and finished the university. I wanted to get work in production and I gave everything to work. I was appreciated but the administration suddenly because of my weak character demanded that I leave without a reason. And this frequently was repeated. I complained to higher organs. They chased me out shamefully. This, too, happened often. Now, with age, the sexual function isn't necessary, but the psychological distress manifests itself. Again I nervously write complaints to Moscow to vulgar boors, who decided to put garages and toilets in my son's courtyard. And as much as I can bear.
In perverted sexual manifestations, I feel a certain rage, out of control, and I can't control my actions.
Because since childhood I could not show myself as a man and a complete person, this (i.e., perverted sexual activity) gave me not sexual but psychic and spiritual calmness for an extended period. Particularly after looking at video films of any sexual—this shows where they show any perverted sexual activities and any violence or horror.
A. Chikatilo
The essay was tantalizing. Chikatilo admitted to a set of psychological symptoms remarkably consonant with those predicted years before in the psychiatric portrait drawn by Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky. He all but admitted that he was the murderer they were looking for. What else could he have meant when he wrote of his rage, of being out of control? Some of what he had written seemed to be self-serving. His suggestion that pornographic videos triggered his rages, for instance, was not in accord with the fact that nearly all the lesopolosa murders occurred when pornography was still banned and very scarce in the USSR. Pornographic videos had become widespread only in 1989 and 1990. But almost every criminal in the Soviet Union sought to shift the responsibility for what he did; it was expected. The real problem with Chikatilo's statement was that he had danced around specific admissions of murder.
After he read the statement, Kostoyev set out to get those admissions.
Do you want to talk about your first murder, he asked.
Chikatilo said he did not feel too well, and would prefer to wait until the next day. Kostoyev agreed.
But the next day, Chikatilo was once again in the mood to write. The essay he produced was again disjointed and confusing, but it revealed a few more of the convolutions in his mind.
In my difficult, depressed condition, I remember my life with all its suffering and humiliations. As it happened, my work was connected with movement and business trips to various cities around the Soviet Union. I had to be often in stations, trains, elektrichki, and buses. I saw the situation in the stations, on the trains. There are a lot of homeless, young and old. They demand and beg and take things. They're drunk by mid-morning, and they drink in kiosks, at the stations, beer and vodka, until late at night. We workers can't get this, or afford it, because we work.
These bums attract minors into their dark net. They head from the stations in different directions on the trains. I had to watch scenes from the sex life of these bums in the stations and on the trains. And I remembered my humiliation that I couldn't ever prove myself a complete man.
And a question arose. Do these rotten elements have a right to exist, in full view of the whole population? People are embarrassed by them. And I thought to myself, where were these bums earlier? They worked somewhere and lived somewhere. Why aren't they identified so they can live by themselves and work for themselves? Many of them are not mentally right, they're handicapped. But there are also probably normal people. The question arises, why do they get to freeload? And more than that, they are quickly multiplying, having lots of children. They use their children to give themselves a luxurious life by begging. And their children then fall into the same criminal world. Getting acquainted with these people is not hard. They themselves aren't shy, they ask for money or food, vodka, beer and offer themselves for sex. I saw how they walked away with partners into nooks and comers and groves of trees. I heard about people and in the press a lot of stories that corpses were found around cities and along highways and railroads. All these circumstances—humiliation, being laughed at all my life at work, working under various boors, I always had an internal battle because of my humiliation and this injustice. I felt that I was a professional, normal worker, but they humiliated me because of my weak memory. Therefore, I always walked around with a pen and pad and everyone laughed because I wrote everything down. In the most recent time, I had to deal with social injustice. I was depressed because my son's apartment was old, dark, and wet. The director decided to put toilets and garages right next to it.
I wrote complaints
and sought justice—to the city Party committee, to the oblast executive committee, and to President Gorbachev. In the end, they threatened me with legal action. This complaint was made in Shakhty against the procurator and the procurator of the Rostov oblast. All my failures, and, in health, a heart attack, I bore. My legs are arthritic. My sexual impotence, although in my old age that's not necessary, often brought me to think of suicide and attempt it. On Monday [this was only Thursday, but Chikatilo may have thought it was Friday] in the presence of my lawyer, I will give evidence about everything I've done.
A. Chikatilo
This essay, like the first one, lacked coherence. But it established a rationalizing motive for the murders. He was laying out why, in his own mind, he had killed, and how he justified those crimes to himself. He was only, he seemed to think, preventing the reproduction of the dregs of society.
But again, Chikatilo had danced away from a direct admission of guilt. And the next day—Friday, November 23—he renewed his written request that the critical interrogation be postponed until November 26. At that time, he promised, he would give a detailed and truthful account of both his own crimes and the crimes of others, which he did not specify.
Kostoyev's records indicate that he believed the suspect. He recorded no interrogations on November 24 or November 25.
On November 26, the protocols indicate Chikatilo forgot his interest in having a lawyer. Kostoyev did not remind him of his right to counsel, and Chikatilo's initial waiver remained in effect. Kostoyev asked Chikatilo if he was ready to make a detailed statement about his crimes. But Chikatilo abruptiy confounded his interrogator.
He had committed no crimes, Chikatilo replied. Yes, he had ridden on the elektrichka a lot, but he had committed no murders. Yes, he had written on November 23 that he would testify about his crimes, and no one had forced him to write that. But today, he was declaring that he had committed no crimes.
The Killer Department Page 20
