The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

Kostoyev changed tacks and began asking Chikatilo questions about specific dates and places.

  Had he been at the Kirpichnaya station on the night of October 30—31? (This was the approximate time and place of the murder of Viktor Tishchenko.)

  No, he hadn't, Chikatilo said.

  How often had he visited the city beach in Novocherkassk (site of the murder of Ivan Fomin)?

  Never, Chikatilo replied.

  Where had he been between March 6 and March 8 of 1990 (when Yaroslav Makarov was killed)?

  He had been home with his wife in Novocherkassk, Chikatilo replied. There had been a long weekend because of International Women's Day, a holiday the Soviet Union observed on March 8.

  Where had he gotten the folding knife confiscated after his arrest?

  Sometime in 1987, Chikatilo replied. He had gone to Sverdlovsk on a business trip and bought it there. He carried it for everyday needs, like cutting sausage.

  Had he been in Moscow around the time of the World Youth Festival in 1985 (when Natalia Pokhlistova was killed)?

  Chikatilo, probably aware that there were records to show that he had made this trip, confirmed that he had indeed been in the capital on business at that time. He had traveled back and forth by train.

  Had he ever had occasion to go to Domodedovo Airport?

  Chikatilo said he didn't remember, and Kostoyev concluded the session.

  He had not wasted his time. Even if a suspect lied in response to such questions, the lies could be useful tools. If the syshchiki could subsequently find witnesses to put Chikatilo in places he had denied visiting, Kostoyev could confront Chikatilo with the refutation of his hes and, perhaps, persuade him that it was futile to lie about the larger question of the murders.

  But the next day, Chikatilo modified his posture of denial.

  He had thought the situation over, he said, and he wanted to talk about his criminal activity.

  Fine, Kostoyev replied. Talk about the murder on November 6, the last in the lesopolosa series, committed near the Donleskhoz station. The syshchiki had, by then, established the victim's identity. She was Svetlana Korostik, a twenty-four-year-old veteran of shelters for bomzhe and nights on the elektrichka.

  But Chikatilo did not have Svetlana Korostik on his mind. He did not know her and he did not kill her, he said. What he wanted to talk about was something that happened, as he recalled it, in 1977.

  He had been working then as an instructor of Russian language and literature at an intemat in Novoshakhtinsk, which taught students mining trades. One of his students, a girl named Gultseva, had aroused him. One day he gave her a make-up assignment and told her to do it after regular classes. When she was alone in the classroom with him, he had grabbed her and fondled her breasts and buttocks. When she screamed, he locked her in the classroom and left, but the frightened girl had jumped out a window (the classroom was on the first floor) and escaped. The school's director had found out and asked Chikatilo to resign.

  But that was not the only crime he had committed during those days, Chikatilo went on. He remembered another, earlier occasion, when he took a group of students swimming in a lake. He had grabbed and fondled another young girl, whose name was Lyubov Kostina. She also cried out.

  He had, he told Kostoyev, difficulty controlling his passions when he was around children.

  Did he have any other sex-related concerns, Kostoyev prompted.

  No, Chikatilo replied. Those were the only instances he could remember in which he had lost control.

  The next day, November 28, Chikatilo asked to write again.

  He had, he wrote, lived through years of insomnia and nightmares. He had tried to get help, but without success. He had even watched some of the charlatan healers who had made their way onto post-glasnost Soviet television and purported to cure ailments by sending out psychic energy through the airwaves. That hadn't helped him.

  "Everything irritates me, even conversations about the weather," he wrote. "I'd like to be treated if I'm abnormal."

  He wrote that, back in his cell, cut off from his work and family life, the rage would sometimes suddenly revisit him and he would tremble with it.

  "I've felt this during many crimes," he wrote. "I truly haven't wanted to hinder the investigation, but I couldn't tell everything I've done. It would throw me into trembling."

  And that was as far as he would go, no matter what approach Kostoyev tried.

  Nine days had passed since the arrest. Chikatilo had revealed a great deal about himself that suggested he was, in fact, the murderer. But, paradoxically, he had confessed only to two child molestations that had happened long ago. Clearly, he was a man racked by guilt and anxious, in some respects, to unburden himself But Isa Kostoyev had yet to find a way to use that guilt and anxiety to get the confession he needed.

  Viktor Burakov monitored the progress of the interrogation with growing concern. Officially, his role was confined to assisting while the investigation tried to uncover as many details as possible about the suspect. The day after the arrest, he led a team of syshchiki to Novocherkassk to search the one-bedroom apartment where Chikatilo lived with his wife. The investigators had confiscated everything that had the slightest potential to be useful in building their case: twenty-two knives from the kitchen, all the clothing from his closet, lengths of cord and strips of cloth, an attache case, some bus tickets. But the most remarkable thing they found they could not remove. Chikatilo's apartment, like most Russian apartments, had small, separate rooms, the size of stalls, for the toilet and the bathtub. Chikatilo had recently moved the bathtub from its stall into the kitchen, where it stood awkwardly, taking up space in an already cluttered room.

  Burakov, from the repair work he had done on his own apartment, knew how much time and effort would be required to find and buy the pipes and plaster Chikatilo had needed to relocate the bathtub and create, in effect, a small private room for himself where the bathtub had been. The little room had been empty and bare; it was a work in progress. But the man who was building it, Burakov thought, must have been obsessed by the desire to create a little sanctuary from which he could wall off his family and the rest of the world.

  The removal of the bathtub, like the papers Chikatilo was writing for Kostoyev, hinted at a mind that might belong to a serial killer. But what did this prove? Chikatilo could claim that he moved the bathtub to give him privacy to write or study.

  Similarly, the interrogation of Chikatilo's neighbors and family tantalized the investigators and proved nothing.

  Chikatilo seemed orderly but not very sociable, said a woman who lived upstairs, Irina Zakharenko. If she saw him on the staircase, he would smile and say hello, but nothing more.

  There was one thing, she added. She recalled that he seemed to spend a lot of time in the building's courtyard, watching the children play.

  Burakov did not handle the interrogation of Chikatilo's family; it was left to Kostoyev's deputies in the procurator's office. But the reports said that Chikatilo's wife, Feodosia, and his grown children, Yuri and Lyudmilla, denied knowing anything at all about any murders. They were insisting that Chikatilo was an upstanding family man.

  The investigators could not, Burakov knew, rely too much on the handful of witnesses they had found before arresting Chikatilo. The witnesses in Novoshakhtinsk who had reported seeing a man of Chikatilo's size walking in front of Dmitri Ptashnikov back in 1984 had conflicting recollections of what the man had been wearing. Their memories were not likely to have grown sharper after six years. And the boy in Ilovaisk had insisted that the man with Aleksei Voronko in 1988 had a mouth full of gold teeth. Chikatilo had normal teeth.

  The physical evidence would be helpful, Burakov thought. Dr. Gurtovaya had flown to Rostov the day after Chikatilo's arrest. She reported a few days later that tests of Chikatilo's saliva and semen had found a weak B antigen. He was, she declared, an example of her newly discovered phenomenon, which she called "paradoxical secretion." His blood type was A, and his secreti
ons were type AB. Burakov had no particular confidence in the laboratory's work, but he knew that Dr. Gurtovaya's testimony would probably be the only forensic expertise presented at the eventual trial. While the analysis of his semen samples would not prove Chikatilo guilty, it would at least not exclude the possibility.

  Still, they needed a confession badly, and from what Burakov was hearing, they might not get one. Kostoyev did not share the reports on the interrogation with Burakov. But the stukach in Chikatilo's cell gave Burakov daily reports of what Chikatilo said when he returned from his interrogations.

  According to the stukach, Kostoyev was badgering Chikatilo in ways that did not appear in the official protocols of the interrogation. He asked repeatedly about the grisliest aspects of the murders. He demanded to know why, for instance, Chikatilo had cut out the uteri of his female victims. This questioning, the stukach said, had made Chikatilo deeply ashamed and defensive. He might not open up to Kostoyev for a long time, if ever.

  And Burakov did not want to take a long time. Under Soviet law, the militsia and procurators could arrest and question a suspect for only ten days before they had to accuse him of a specific crime and inform him of the charges. The standard for evidence for making an accusation was not as strict as the standard for proving guilt in the eventual trial. It was roughly analogous to the "probable cause" standard that grand juries in Western legal systems use in deciding whether to indict a suspect. But if the procurator could not make an accusation after ten days, he was supposed to let the suspect go.

  Soviet investigators, of course, had ways of getting around this ten-day deadline when they wanted to. They could, as they had done numerous times during the lesopolosa investigation, find some petty accusation that served as a basis for keeping the suspect in jail and under interrogation.

  Alternatively, in Burakov's opinion, they could charge Chikatilo with the last murder in the series, that of Svetlana Korostik near the Donleskhoz station on November 6. It was the one case where they had an irrefutable witness to place Chikatilo at the scene of the crime. They could add the other murders to the accusation later, as they developed evidence.

  But all the investigators wanted badly to have a more solid basis for an accusation. They knew that everything they did with Chikatilo would be reviewed very carefully in Moscow. They did not want to provide anyone with yet another basis to criticize their performance.

  What they needed, Burakov thought, was a different interlocutor, someone who knew how to turn Chikatilo's obvious feelings of guilt and shame into a confession. He had a candidate in mind: Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky.

  He first broached the idea to Kostoyev on November 27. The procurator's initial reaction was negative. But Burakov kept pressing him on it. On November 29, with the ten-day deadline period on the eve of expiration, Kostoyev agreed. That morning, he sent a car to the Institute of Medicine to fetch Bukhanovsky to the interrogation room in the KGB building.

  Chikatilo's arrest had been kept secret from the media and the public; none of the investigators wanted to risk more embarrassment by announcing a premature end to the case. Bukhanovsky, until Kostoyev told him, had not heard about the arrest. The entire investigative staff, Kostoyev said, was certain that they had the right man. But the suspect, Kostoyev went on, had proved difficult to interrogate. He rambled on incoherently in response to some questions. He refused to answer others. The investigators still needed answers to a long list of critical questions. Had he committed the murders? How had he selected his victims? How had he lured them into the woods? What had he done with their missing clothes and their excised organs?

  Could Bukhanovsky help?

  He could and would, Bukhanovsky said, under one condition. He would talk to the suspect as a psychiatrist, not as an investigator. He would try to get the man to open up. But he would compile no protocol that could be used as evidence against Chikatilo in court.

  Kostoyev agreed. He put his copy of Bukhanovsky's 1987 profile on the table, then left the room. In a few minutes, a guard ushered Chikatilo into the room and then left Bukhanovsky and Chikatilo alone.

  Confronting the man he had so often theorized about, Bukhanovsky felt vindicated. Chikatilo's appearance and background were close enough to the parameters Bukhanovsky had sketched to make the psychiatrist feel that his profile would stand up to professional scrutiny not only in Russia, but anywhere in the world. He felt, as well, a surge of excitement at the opportunity to study such a uniquely aberrant mind.

  Bukhanovsky gave Chikatilo his visiting card and told him that he was a psychiatrist. He had, he said, been thinking about Chikatilo for a long time. And he opened the copy of the profile and began to show the suspect how thoroughly he already knew him.

  It took Bukhanovsky about two hours to establish rapport with Chikatilo and begin to elicit the confessions of murder that the investigators needed. In subsequent interviews, the psychiatrist refused to discuss the precise questions he had asked. It was a matter, he said, of understanding what Chikatilo wanted to talk about—the feelings of shame, humiliation, and rage that filled his essays. Once Bukhanovsky had established himself as a sympathetic man who understood those feelings, the confessions followed. They talked, according to Bukhanovsky's recollection, well into the evening. Then Chikatilo went back to his cell. Bukhanovsky reported to Kostoyev that Chikatilo was ready to confess.

  That night, armed with the handwritten notes that Bukhanovsky had made, Kostoyev prepared a formal accusation of murder, dated November 29, just before the expiration of the ten-day period since Chikatilo's arrest. In it, Chikatilo was accused of killing thirty-six people, beginning with Lyubov Biryuk and ending with Svetlana Korostik. These were all the murders the investigators knew of that bore the basic lesopolosa signature: dismembered victims left in wooded areas, with type AB semen, if any, found on the remains.

  Kostoyev also noted Bukhanovsky's success in his interrogation protocols.

  "In your declaration of November 28, you stated that psychological barriers prevent you from giving testimony," he quoted himself as saying to Chikatilo. He then noted that he offered Chikatilo a chance to talk alone with Bukhanovsky.

  "I don't know him, but I would like to be able to tell him about some psychological manifestations I've suffered. I indeed feel I can't explain some things I've done," he quoted Chikatilo in reply.

  "This request was granted," Kostoyev's protocol went on. "He talked alone with Bukhanovsky. After that, he said he would testify about the circumstances of crimes he had committed."

  In Room 24 of the militsia building, Viktor Burakov felt an enormous sense of relief when he heard what Bukhanovsky had accomplished. For the first time, he had a sense that the job was done. For the first time since Chikatilo's arrest on November 20, he felt safe to celebrate. He pulled out a bottle of vodka he had been saving for the occasion and poured a shot for each of the half dozen syshchiki still at work. Quietly, they toasted their success.

  But they were, in fact, only beginning to learn the extent of Andrei Chikatilo's activities.

  The next morning, Kostoyev resumed the interrogation. The protocol of the session depicts an abjectly contrite Andrei Chikatilo.

  "I have read and become familiar with the declaration of charges lodged against me on November 29," he said. "I fully acknowledge my guilt in the commission of the crimes listed. Now, deeply regretting what I have done, I want to truthfully tell about myself, and my life, and the circumstances leading me to these serious crimes."

  He talked for a while about his early life. He mentioned the molestations of the two girls while he was a teacher at the intemat in the 1970s. Then he revealed something that shocked and embarrassed the Rostov oblast procurators and militsia. His first murder victim was not Lyubov Biryuk, he said. It was a little girl named Yelena Zakotnova in 1978.

  If the admission was true, it was cause for a scandal. The authorities in Shakhty had convicted and executed another man, Aleksandr Kravchenko, for Zakotnova's murder.

>   According to Chikatilo's account, he had moved to Shakhty that year and begun teaching at Technical School No. 33, which trained workers for the mining industry. The school had given him an apartment on the first floor of a dormitory on a street named for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Communist Youth League. His family temporarily remained behind in Novoshakhtinsk, so for a few months he was free to spend his spare time as he pleased, virtually unobserved.

  "In that period, I was just overwhelmingly drawn to children, by the desire to see their naked bodies," he told Kostoyev. "I used to hang around the women's toilets downtown, and when no one was watching, look at the girls in there. I used to buy chewing gum for them in order to meet them."

  At about that time, Chikatilo bought a hut on one of the meanest streets in Shakhty, Mezhovoy Street, at the other end of the city from the school. The street, unpaved, dirty, and dark, was like a slice of a Third World slum transplanted to southern Russia. The huts along it generally had one room and no plumbing. A creek called Grushevka ran along a little ravine below the street. The poorest of Russians lived there. Chikatilo bought the hut at No. 26, ostensibly to fix up as a place to live for his aging father. (Soviet citizens were permitted to buy small dwellings in certain areas, but not the land they sat on.) In fact, Chikatilo used it not for his father's retirement, but for the secret life he was developing.

  "At the end of December 1978, in the evening—I don't remember the exact date—I took a streetcar from the center of town to the Grushevsky Bridge station and headed down Mezhovoy Street toward my hut," he said. "Completely unexpectedly, I saw that I was walking next to a girl about ten or twelve years old. [Yelena Zakotnova was in fact nine years old.] She was carrying a school bag. We walked together for a while, and I started to talk to her. I remember she said she was going either to a girlfriend's house or from it. When we got close to the creek and a bit farther away from the houses, I was seized by an irresistible urge to have sex with this girl. I don't know what happened to me, but I literally started to shake. I stopped the girl and shoved her into some high grass. She tried to get away, but I was literally like an animal.