The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  Chikatilo left the room, locking the girl inside. But she escaped by climbing out a window. She told her parents about the incident. Her parents complained to the school's director.

  This was the first time that Chikatilo's perversion came to the attention of the Soviet authorities, and it was the first chance they had to do something about it. But the school's director, Aleksandr Sorochkin, chose to cover up the scandal rather than confront it. He asked Chikatilo to resign quietly. In return, Sorochkin said nothing to the militsia and did nothing to prevent Chikatilo from getting a job at another school. Vocational School No. 39 in Novoshakhtinsk. In 1978, he lost that job when the staff was reduced. But he quickly arranged yet another teaching position, this time at Technical School No. 33 in Shakhty, a training institution with a dormitory.

  There he lost control of himself again. In 1978, he entered the dormitory room of a boy named V. I. Shcherbakov while the boy was sleeping, and fellated him. According to Chikatilo's confessions, the boy woke up and Chikatilo fled in shame. The incident, he recalled, became a topic of gossip among the boys in the school, and he became an object of constant derision.

  Two years later, three girls, ranging in age from six to thirteen, came to the Chikatilo apartment in Shakhty to collect old newspapers for a communal bonfire. Andrei Chikatilo was the only one home. He grabbed them, pulled their panties down, and groped at their genitals. The children ran away.

  These children told their parents, but the reaction of the adults in the neighborhood spoke volumes about why Andrei Chikatilo was allowed to develop from a molester into a murderer. The idea that one of the men in the neighborhood could molest children was not something that the other men could cope with. Their instinct was to deny that such a thing could happen.

  Viktor Smirnov, a shop master at Technical School No. 33, lived in the same building with the Chikatilos. He considered Chikatilo a decent individual—not a fishing buddy, but someone whom he occasionally sat next to at teachers' meetings in the school. "He didn't have a vulgar streak. He wasn't a drinker," Smirnov recalled. Chikatilo had an unflattering nickname— "Goose." But that was a reference to his long neck and squinty eyes.

  There were rumors, Smirnov recalled in a 1992 interview, that Chikatilo had molested children. "The women talked about it, but I didn't believe it," he recalled. "I got angry at my [late] wife when she mentioned it. 'How could a man do that?' I said. I thought the children must have made the story up as a prank."

  A few members of Chikatilo's own family also had reason, in these years, to know of the aberrant tendencies beneath the facade. But they also kept silent.

  One of them was his niece, Marina Odnacheva, the daughter of Feodosia's brother Ivan Odnachev and his wife, Tayisia. In 1973, when Marina Odnacheva was six, her Uncle Andrei stuck his hands down her pants and groped at her genitals. He warned her to say nothing, and she didn't.

  Five years later, Marina was again visiting her cousins. In the middle of the night, she awoke to find her Uncle Andrei standing over her, his penis in his hand. He rubbed his sexual organ over the girl's skin and ejaculated. Again, he warned her not to tell anyone. She kept the secret for twelve years, until she heard that her uncle had been arrested. Only then did she tell her parents what he had done.

  It was not entirely a surprise to her mother, Tayisia Odnacheva. Tayisia believed her daughter because she herself had a painful memory of Andrei Chikatilo. "At about the same time, in 1978, he tried to force himself on me," she recalled in a 1992 interview. She resisted, and Chikatilo stopped short of raping her. Tayisia went to her mother-in-law, Matrena Odnacheva, who was also Feodosia Chikatilo's mother and the matriarch of the family. She told the old woman what had happened. But Matrena Odnacheva, to the best of Tayisia's knowledge, said and did nothing about it.

  Couldn't she have told her husband?

  Tayisia snorted. "What good would it have done? Men only think of themselves." Her voice quavered. "No one defends us women!" she wailed, and began to weep.

  If any of the molestation incidents that occurred between 1973 and 1978 had resulted in a criminal prosecution, Andrei Chikatilo probably would not have been able to commit the more than fifty murders he had confessed to. He would have been jailed, or at least confined in a mental institution. Thereafter, his name would have been on the list of sex offenders that the militsia always compiled when they investigated individual lesopolosa murders. Most likely, after one or two murders, he would have been caught. But his name never made it into the sex crime files, until his arrest in 1990.

  Soviet society, Dr. Tkachenko observed, was caught up in a syndrome of denial that inadvertently protected molesters and created favorable conditions for them to continue committing crimes.

  "You have a situation where mothers and others hide the perverse behavior of their husbands toward their children, even though they know it's child abuse. People don't trust authority and don't come forward. The knowledge of these things is restricted to gossip and rumor," he said.

  The failure of society to punish him severely for his early molestations, Tkachenko thought, emboldened Chikatilo.

  "He might have feared something would happen, but it didn't. He was fired from one job, and he got another one right away. He was never prosecuted. The point is, he got away with it."

  By 1978, occasional molestation was no longer satisfying him, and Andrei Chikatilo embarked in earnest on his secret life. His first step was the purchase of the hut on Mezhovoy Street in Shakhty, several miles from his family's apartment. Though state-owned high-rises were the preferred form of housing in the Soviet Union, there have always been privately owned houses. Often they are old peasant huts, some of which now stand in growing urban areas. Because of the shortage of building materials, these houses are hard to improve with conveniences like indoor plumbing, so they tend to be slum housing. The hut at 26 Mezhovoy Street certainly was. It was a miserable, one-room dwelling, with a sagging roof and a precarious set of steep, muddy steps hewn into the embankment that separated it from the unpaved street. It is in a neighborhood where, in 1992, Gypsies had begun to move in, signifying its status at the bottom of the Russian housing ladder.

  Chikatilo told the neighbors that he bought the house, which probably cost a few hundred rubles, with the idea of fixing it up as a retirement home for his father. Later, he told them that his father had decided not to occupy it because of the steep steps.

  Whatever Chikatilo's real intentions were when he bought the house, it soon became a hideaway where he could indulge in the kind of sex that appealed to him.

  "Two girls showed up one day in 1978 and said they were 'renting' the place from him," recalled a neighbor named Mariya Khorkina, a hefty old woman with rheumy eyes. "They were young, and dirty. Probably station tramps who didn't have anyplace else to go. After a while, they left, but others appeared. Girls. Boys. I'd hear things occasionally in the evening. It sounded like debauchery."

  She never called the militsia, in part because people in her neighborhood tried to have as little as possible to do with the militsia, and in part because Chikatilo had made a good first impression on her. "You'd have never suspected what he was. He was always clean, with pressed clothes. If I'd been younger, I might have gone over there myself if he'd asked. And he'd have killed me and sent me straight to hell!"

  Actually, in these years, Chikatilo was most often attempting to have some kind of sex with the people he lured into the hut. Generally, because of his inability to get an erection, he would offer to perform oral sex on a woman, Tkachenko said. In the course of this, he would ejaculate without penetrating her.

  Sometimes, the partner might be a boy. But Tkachenko did not conclude that Chikatilo had a homosexual tendency. He was, in effect, indifferent to the sex of his partner, as long as he could manipulate and dominate the partner in the way he desired. This manipulation and domination grew more and more violently sadistic over the years. But there was no indication that Chikatilo was ever attracted to an adult ma
le. "He was not a homosexual, but a sadist," Tkachenko concluded.

  Two of his partners during this time might have given Burakov and the syshchiki clues to the lesopolosa killer's identity, had they only known about them. One of them was Tatyana Petrosyan, the woman who was killed along with her daughter in the summer of 1984. She and Chikatilo had occasional contacts much earlier, although they were apparently confined to oral sex. Chikatilo had even visited the apartment where Tatyana lived with her mother. But he had identified himself as a teacher, though he was no longer teaching by the time Tatyana Petrosyan was killed. And, Tatyana had a lot of male visitors.

  Another of his partners during this period was an older sister of Irina Dunenkova, the girl with Down's syndrome who became a victim in the summer of 1983; Chikatilo had gotten to know Irina slightly during the time he had a sexual liaison with the older sister. Irina Dunenkova and Tatyana Petrosyan were the only victims whom Chikatilo knew before he killed them. But in neither instance were the investigators able to establish the connection.

  According to Pyotr Moryakov, Chikatilo's son-in-law, no one in the family knew what went on at 26 Mezhovoy Street. But there were indirect signs. According to Tkachenko, the frequency of Chikatilo's sexual relations with his wife dwindled to once every few months, beginning at around the time he bought the hut.

  Chikatilo's sexual relationship with his wife ended completely in 1984, according to Tkachenko. Chikatilo told the psychiatrist that in that year, his wife unexpectedly got pregnant. He wanted her to have the baby, but she insisted on an abortion. Whether this was true or not—Feodosia Chikatilo was forty-five that year—it does seem likely that he found his sexual satisfaction solely through his secret life after that year.

  As time passed, the facade of normalcy became increasingly difficult for Andrei Chikatilo to maintain. In March 1981, he decided to abandon his disastrous career as an educator. He found work as a snabzhenyets at an enterprise called Rostovnerud.

  Snabzhenyets means, literally, "provider," and it is a uniquely Soviet job category, reflecting the backwardness of the Soviet economy. Whereas the primary task of an enterprise in a market economy is to sell its output, the primary task for a Soviet enterprise often boiled down to buying its inputs. Rostovnerud, for instance, produced construction materials. To do that, it required raw materials ranging from sand to nails. Given the inefficiencies of the Soviet economy, suppliers often failed to fulfill their contracts, and a Rostovnerud production line for, say, concrete building slabs might shut down for lack of aggregate mix, or steel rods, or almost anything else. The job of the snabzhenyets was to minimize these problems by assuring the enterprise of a steady supply of raw materials. Informally, the snabzhenyets was also called a tolkach, or "pusher."

  It was difficult work, for several reasons. First, a snabzhenyets had to be on the road very often, visiting the factories that supplied his factory and pushing them to make deliveries. Life on the road in Russia is a hard one. The hotels and restaurants are miserable, the trains are slow, and the airplanes sometimes fail to fly at all. Pushing a factory to make deliveries often entailed bribing its directors, either with gifts like vodka and caviar or with cash. And whatever a snabzhenyets did, he was likely to fail often, resulting in reprimands from his superiors. As a result, virtually any large enterprise had trouble finding and keeping good snabzhenyetsy. Virtually anyone who wanted the job could have it.

  It was, however, not a bad job for someone who wanted to ride on lots of trains and buses, someone who didn't want to account for every hour of his working day.

  "Andrei Chikatilo came here looking for work in 1981," said Nina Nasacheva, the chief clerk in the personnel department at Rostovnerud. "I don't remember what he said the reason was." He was hired, she remembered, because he had a technical education and wanted the job. No one checked his past employers. He got a desk in the office next door to hers.

  Chikatilo did not fit in well among the fifty people who worked in Rostovnerud's administration office in the center of Shakhty. "He never looked people in the eye. He'd sit at his desk, lost in thought, and he'd constantiy tap his pen on some paper or doodle and pretend to work. If someone asked him a question, he might take a long time to answer. Or he might not answer at all. He had no close friends here. He was peculiar," Nasacheva recalled.

  He was sometimes the butt of practical jokes. Another personnel office worker, Rita Golovanova, remembered that co-workers began to notice that Chikatilo never went anywhere, even to the water fountain, without carrying his briefcase. ("And now I know why," she added in 1992.) One of his co-workers one day wrapped a brick in a newspaper and opened the briefcase while Chikatilo was distracted, during a staff meeting. Then he closed it, apparently seeing nothing unusual in it. Chikatilo left that afternoon on an errand in Rostov. He carried the briefcase and the surreptitiously placed brick with him. The next day, the jokers in the office expected that he would at least say something about finding a brick in his briefcase. But he returned to the office and said nothing. If he realized that his colleagues were mocking him, he suffered his humiliation in silence.

  Chikatilo's work performance, however, won him two promotions in his first couple of years on the job. He became a minor supervisor, with five underlings in the supply department. But in 1983 and 1984, years in which his killings became more frequent, his work performance deteriorated. "He'd take money to purchase things and come back without them," Nina Nasacheva recalled. "It got to where, at the Monday meetings, the director was constantly bawling him out. He'd just say nothing and hang his head and doodle."

  In the spring of 1984, Chikatilo finally gave his director, Pyotr Palagyn, an excuse to fire him. Chikatilo went to Moscow, charged with getting sixteen car batteries for the enterprise's car pool. (It was a measure of the inefficiency of the Soviet economy that he could not simply pick up the phone and order them from a distributor in Rostov oblast.) He came back and said he could get only fifteen batteries. But it was quickly determined that he had taken one battery for the car he owned jointly with one of Feodosia's brothers.

  Across the Soviet Union, millions of workers behaved exactly as Chikatilo had, supplying their private needs by chiseling from a state enterprise. Normally, enterprise directors looked the other way. But Palagyn seized on the incident. After investigating, he added a charge that Chikatilo had also stolen a bit of linoleum flooring for his apartment. The Party committee at Rostovnerud began proceedings to expel Chikatilo.

  But Chikatilo fought back. He wrote letters of complaint to Party officials in Shakhty and Rostov, saying that Palagyn was unfairly singling him out. According to Soviet practice, Palagyn had to answer to charges against him lodged with the Party. The director did not want the headache. He and Chikatilo reached a compromise not unlike the one Chikatilo had reached with Aleksandr Sorochkin at Vocational School No. 32 ten years earlier. He would resign quietly and find another job. The Party would expel him, but Palagyn would not press charges on the battery and linoleum thefts.

  At about this time, Nina Nasacheva needed Chikatilo's work history booklet, a document maintained by all Soviet workers, to record that he was resigning. Since he was not at work, she stopped by the Chikatilo apartment to get it and for the first time met Feodosia Chikatilo. Andrei was not home, Feodosia said. Wasn't he at work, she asked.

  Chikatilo, it turned out, had told her nothing of his problems at the office. That, presumably, would have skirted too close to his secret life.

  The theft charges were revived by the lesopolosa investigators when they decided to hold Chikatilo a little longer after his arrest in September 1984. He spent three months in jail, and he lost his new job, at a factory called Spetzenergoavtomatika. Ironically, the charges also permitted Andrei Chikatilo to keep his family in the dark about his real activities. According to his brother-in-law Ivan Odnachev, he told them that the case had been trumped up against him by a vengeful boss with whom he had a personality conflict. That was an easy story to believe. Why el
se would a man be charged with something so petty? The family never learned about the nocturnal activities in the bus and train stations that had in fact led to his arrest.

  Neither his conviction nor his expulsion from the Party prevented Chikatilo from getting still another job as a snabzhenyets when he was released from prison in January 1985. He found a place as a metals supplier at an enormous state enterprise, the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Construction Factory, known (because of its initials in Russian) as NEVZ. It employs eleven thousand workers, who turn out, if they are meeting their quotas, more than two hundred locomotives a year.

  "He was a bad worker," recalled his boss there, a heavyset man named Aleksei Rezhko. "I don't know why he was hired, but he was here when I got here."

  Chikatilo, Rezhko said, had trouble connecting with people. As his fellow teachers had done, his co-workers in the office called him "Goose" behind his back. Like the people at Rostovnerud, the people at NEVZ remembered him as a man who never looked them in the eye.

  "Whenever people got together, like for a drink on someone's birthday, he sat off' to one side by himself If you tried to talk to him, he'd smile a little and say something else. Like, if you talked about the prices in the stores, he'd say something about an illness. If you talked about cars, he'd say something about fishing. Some people felt sorry for him, but others didn't like him. He was an unattractive man," Rezhko said.

  They also learned, obliquely, that he was a man keeping secrets. One day, Feodosia Chikatilo called the office to ask when her husband would return from his business trip. He was, at the time, on vacation. The secretary who answered the phone did not tell her.