The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  Rezhko quickly grew dissatisfied with Chikatilo's work. Often, he would have to send another man out to a supplier's office to procure something Chikatilo was supposed to have gotten. "He was ill suited to the work," Rezhko said. "I tried to explain things to him, and I docked his bonuses, but it didn't help. Eventually, I started to gather material for a dossier of complaints to use in firing him. He was the first man to be fired from that job in at least thirty years."

  Again, the dismissal was disguised. The trade union at the factory interceded for him, and he was allowed to resign voluntarily. He got another job, again as a snabzhenyets, at a Rostov plant that repaired locomotives, and he was employed there when he was arrested.

  Once, during the years he was killing people, Chikatilo sought help. In the summer of 1984, when his compulsion to kill was so intense that he was murdering at the rate of about once every two weeks, he went to the clinic in Shakhty, where he lived. According to Dr. Tkachenko, he wanted to consult a psychiatrist who worked there. But a militsioner happened to see him in the waiting room and recognized him.

  "Why are you here?" the man asked. "Alcohol?" It was the most common reason for a man of Chikatilo's age to go to the clinic.

  The sight of a militsioner apparendy unnerved Chikatilo. He left before ever speaking to the doctor.

  His family life, meanwhile, was slowly deteriorating. In 1988, Pyotr Moryakov, his son-in-law, was hospitalized for a mental illness. Moryakov and Lyudmilla Chikatilo soon divorced. In 1985, Chikatilo's teenaged son, Yuri, developed a habit of taking the car owned jointly by his father and uncle without their permission. He drank, drove around, and had a couple of accidents. Chikatilo was forced to sell the car. Eventually, he began working on the strange little room in the middle of his apartment, the place where he would be able to retreat, undisturbed, with his fantasies.

  Toward the end, he appeared to lose touch with reality. In 1989, Chikatilo began to be greatly agitated by the construction of the garage and the toilet in the courtyard by the apartment he was maintaining in Shakhty. It had been vacated by Lyudmilla when she remarried and moved to Kharkov, Ukraine. Feodosia wanted to keep it until Yuri got out of the army. Chikatilo wrote letters of protest to officials from Mikhail Gorbachev on down, complaining that the "Assyrian Mafia" (some Georgians believe they are descended from the biblical Assyrians) had bribed and corrupted the local government in an effort to despoil his living conditions. He traveled to Moscow and joined a protestors' encampment near Red Square. They were there to demand that the government do something to house Russian refugees from the growing ethnic conflicts in the Transcaucasus. That had nothing to do with Andrei Chikatilo's problems. Apparently, by that stage in his unfortunate life, Andrei Chikatilo just wanted to cry out.

  At home, he would later tell Dr. Tkachenko, he read the newspaper accounts that began to appear about the lesopolosa killings. "He was prepared for arrest for a long time," Tkachenko said. "He perfectly understood that sooner or later it would end." Tkachenko had the impression that Chikatilo was anxious to unburden himself—that when the three militsionery finally surrounded him outside the children's cafe in Novocherkassk, Andrei Chikatilo felt something like relief.

  13

  THE TRIAL

  The most prominent feature in the courtroom where Andrei Chikatilo was tried was his cage.

  The Rostov oblast courthouse is an ocher, Neoclassical building, set on a muddy lot a block from the city's central avenue, the name of which had been changed from Engels Street to Great Garden Street by the time the trial began on April 14, 1992. The courtroom, like nearly everything else in Russia, is a little threadbare. The stuffing is leaking out of the black leather padding on the door between the well of the court and the clerk's office. The clock in the back of the hall is stuck at 10:25. The seating for spectators and lawyers is a mishmash of old wooden chairs and metal benches that look like they might have been bought as surplus equipment from a Depression-era school. The presiding judge sits on a dais in a high-backed, carved wooden chair that still bears the hammer-and-sickle seal of the Soviet Union. Flanking him, in slightly smaller chairs, are the two citizens chosen as jurors for the trial. Though each has a vote under Russian law, the judge's opinion almost always determines the verdict.

  All eyes were on the cage on the morning of April 14. The news of Chikatilo's arrest and a summary of his crimes had been released to the press by Kostoyev and Fetisov in December 1991. The newly liberated newspapers, both in Rostov and Moscow, sensed a story that would build circulation. They had published frequent articles about the upcoming trial. All two hundred of the courtroom seats were filled with people waiting to get a glimpse of the man the newspapers were calling "the Maniac."

  A few minutes before ten o'clock, an escort of four uniformed soldiers from the Ministry of the Interior troops led Chikatilo up a stone staircase from a holding cell in the basement. The stairs led directly to the door of the cage, which is used for trials involving violent murders. The guards pushed Chikatilo into it, and he sat down on a bench. The cage door closed behind him.

  Eighteen months in captivity had changed Chikatilo. He was gaunt, and he no longer had the little necktie and the eyeglasses that used to distinguish him as an intellectual. Instead, he had been issued a baggy gray suit and a slightly ridiculous red-white-and-blue sport shirt, in a checkerboard pattern that commemorated the 1980 Moscow Olympics. He would wear these clothes every day of the trial. Also gone was the thinning brown hair he had when arrested. His hair had gone gray since his arrest, and what was left of it had been shaved away by a prison barber. His bare, pale skull gleamed under the lights, giving him a diabolical look.

  At the sight of him, an old woman in the spectators' section jumped up and screamed "Sadist! Murderer! What have you done?" She lunged dramatically toward the cage. A pair of militsionery gently restrained her, and she began pounding the chairs. Other spectators, many of them also relatives of the victims, joined in the wailing and screaming: "Murderer! Sadist!"

  Chikatilo stared vacantly around the room for a moment, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, looking drugged. His head lolled on his neck. Then he turned and looked silently at the woman for a moment, almost smiling. He pulled a copy of a Russian tabloid called Sobyesednik from a sheaf of papers he was carrying and opened it to a full-page pinup picture of a seminude woman. He held the picture up in front of him like a shield as the old woman lunged against the grip of the militsionery. Then he yawned, theatrically, as if to say that this woman's anger and grief meant nothing to him.

  Chikatilo's lawyer, Marat Khabibulin, had a table and chair in front of the cage. Khabibulin, who was thirty-seven as the trial opened, was a round-faced, amiable man. He had practiced law for fourteen years, and he had lost track of the number of accused murderers he had defended. He could, however, remember the number of his murder clients who had been found not guilty: two. He had, on the other hand, succeeded at getting judges to consider mitigating circumstances in his clients' cases and find them guilty of the Russian equivalent of second-degree murder. None of his clients had received the death sentence. They had gotten away with fifteen years in jail.

  Realistically, that was about the best Khabibulin could hope to do for Andrei Chikatilo. He knew that, barring some kind of miraculous development, Chikatilo would be judged guilty. Khabibulin hoped, however, to save his client from the death penalty by persuading the court that Chikatilo was insane.

  But Khabibulin faced handicaps that a Western defense lawyer would no doubt have considered intolerable. He had no right to call his own psychiatric experts, unless the court granted him special permission. He would have to content himself with cross-examining the state's psychiatric experts, led by Dr. Andrei Tkachenko. Nor could Khabibulin demand the right to call independent forensic science witnesses to challenge the state's explanation for the discrepancies between Chikatilo's blood type and the semen samples that had been typed AB. Unless the judge chose otherwise, the only evidence about the blood
and semen analyses would come from Dr. Svedana Gurtovaya.

  Most important, he would have to confront the evidence amassed in two thick volumes—the protocols of Andrei Chikatilo's confessions. The Rostov bar association had appointed Khabibulin to defend Chikatilo in July 1991, shortly after the procurator, Isa Kostoyev, had concluded the interrogation and the visits to the various murder scenes. Prior to that, the only legal representation Chikatilo had was his hasty conference with Viktor Lyulichev, the attorney who then recused himself because he had worked in the procurator's office during the lesopolosa investigation. During the rest of the interrogation, Chikatilo signed various protocols, indicating that he had waived his right to counsel.

  Not that Khabibulin's advice during the interrogation would necessarily have prevented Chikatilo from incriminating himself In an interview during a trial recess one day, Khabibulin said that he considered it unethical to advise a client not to answer the procurator's questions. That was the way Khabibulin had been trained. Now that the Soviet Union has disintegrated, Russia may develop a more adversarial legal system. But such a system did not exist when Chikatilo's trial began. His confessions were considered legal, and Khabibulin had no hope of preventing their being introduced in evidence.

  He also had little control over his client. The arrangement of the table and the cage prevented Khabibulin from seeing Chikatilo unless he turned around backward. It prevented any whispered conferences about responses to questions or restraining hands on the defendant's shoulder. To a much greater degree than a defendant in an American courtroom, Chikatilo was on his own.

  That seemed to matter little to Chikatilo, Khabibulin said in an interview outside the courtroom.

  "We first met in the cell at the KGB building. I introduced myself He was polite, but I didn't sense that he was particularly interested in mounting a defense," Khabibulin recalled. "Sometimes a client will be overjoyed finally to have a chance to talk to a defense lawyer. He'll have a lot of questions. But Chikatilo seemed indifferent. I asked him, of course, why he had given such a detailed confession. He didn't really explain. He just said, 'Well, uh . . .' He basically avoided concrete answers. I had the impression that he felt that the fewer people he had around him, the better."

  The cacophonous wailing and screaming that greeted Chikatilo's first appearance lasted about five minutes, until Judge Leonid Akubzhanov entered the courtroom. The clerk and the militsia restored some order as Akubzhanov and the two jurors strode to their places.

  Akubzhanov is a short, wiry, and intense man who often came to court with his necktie loosened and his shirtsleeves rolled up, revealing a tattoo on his left bicep. His manner was imperious and peremptory. If someone he didn't recognize showed up in the courtroom and began to take notes, he would stop the proceedings, summon the unknown individual to the bench, and check the person's credentials.

  In addition to presiding, he often took on himself the function of prosecutor. He read long excerpts from the indictment and confessions into the record. If the questions posed to witnesses by the prosecuting attorneys did not strike him as tough enough, he asked his own. Western trials tend to become contests between opposing lawyers. Akubzhanov clearly saw this trial as a contest between himself and the Maniac.

  The judge began by asking Chikatilo to stand and identify himself Chikatilo complied. But that would be one of the last civil exchanges between them.

  Over the next few weeks, Akubzhanov frequently hectored Chikatilo, who did not, of course, have the right to refuse to answer questions that might incriminate him. Akubzhanov's interrogations seemed to assume Chikatilo's guilt. They implied that the court's chief task was to understand how the crimes had occurred.

  Why, he demanded to know one day, had Chikatilo cut the sex organs from so many victims?

  Chikatilo stood mute for a moment. "I acknowledge what I signed [the confession protocols]," he finally mumbled.

  How did you manage to lead away children from good families who should have known better than to go with you, the judge demanded on another occasion.

  Chikatilo did not answer.

  In May, Khabibulin had seen enough. He rose and made a formal complaint, charging that Akubzhanov w^as biased and asking that he be replaced by another judge. Akubzhanov turned to the prosecuting attorney, Nikolai Gerasimenko, and asked if he agreed. To Akubzhanov's evident surprise, Gerasimenko backed Khabibulin.

  Akubzhanov rejected Khabibulin's complaint, and a few days later, he found a way to remove Gerasimenko. A relative of one of the victims stood up in court and protested that Gerasimenko was not being tough enough in prosecuting the case. Akubzhanov frequently tolerated this kind of spectator heckling during the trial. This time, he decided to take the remark seriously. He withdrew for a few moments, returned, and summarily dismissed Gerasimenko.

  During the interval before Gerasimenko was replaced by a new prosecutor, named Anatoly Zadorozhny, Akubzhanov handled the prosecutor's role himself

  By June, the third month of the trial, the number of daily spectators had dwindled to a handful. The daily procedure involved reading into the record hundreds of pages of evidence, and after a few weeks, the entertainment value had diminished for the merely curious.

  No one from Chikatilo's family ever showed up at the courthouse. After his name was published in the Russian press, Feodosia Chikatilo feared harassment from the families of the victims. She and her children changed their names and moved to an undisclosed city.

  The confrontation between Chikatilo and Akubzhanov had by then degenerated into a shouting match in which Chikatilo seemed to be losing touch with reality.

  On June 19, the defendant suggested that the judge might want to engage with him in homosexual sex. When Akubzhanov told him to be quiet, Chikatilo refused.

  "I'm the boss here," Chikatilo declared in a voice that was curiously both loud and indistinct. He spoke in a kind of deranged monotone that ran sentences together and lurched from one idea to another, with no apparent logical train of thought. "This is my funeral. Don't laugh at me. People have laughed at me all my life." He rambled on without pausing for breath, first talking about the death of his brother during the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s and then abruptly accusing Akubzhanov of being a member of the Assyrian Mafia that sided with the Communist Party's coup attempt of August 1991.

  Akubzhanov, enraged, shouted for Chikatilo to sit down and be quiet. Chikatilo did not.

  He had committed his murders in another life, on another planet, Chikatilo went on, shouting back. "This isn't a court. It's a farce!"

  Akubzhanov then ordered the guards to remove Chikatilo from the courtroom and continued the trial without his presence. But the next morning, the guards trundled the defendant up the stairs and into his cage, and the confrontation resumed.

  On June 24, Chikatilo stood up in his cage and began to unbutton his shirt. "It's time for me to give birth," he announced. Abruptly, he switched to another subject. Since he was Ukrainian by birth, he said he wanted a Ukrainian lawyer.

  The next day, he stood up, his shirt again unbuttoned, and again demanded a Ukrainian lawyer. Then he opened his trousers and let them fall to the ground, exposing his flaccid penis. All the while, he yelled at Akubzhanov in his loud monotone. "You're laughing at me for engaging in onanism for forty years," he said. He broke into Ukrainian and said he was not a khokhlushka, a slang term for a girl. He might, it seemed, have been reliving some tormenting memory from his youth. Then the guards opened the cage door, jerked his pants back up, and hustled him down the stairs.

  Opinions varied about the causes of Chikatilo's courtroom behavior. Marat Khabibulin said he warned Chikatilo several times, during conversations outside the courtroom, that his confrontation with the judge was not helping his case. Chikatilo responded by saying that he understood that, but was incapable of controlling his actions. The soldiers in Chikatilo's guard detachment said that the prisoner behaved calmly in his cell; they believed his outbursts were an effort to persuade Aku
bzhanov that he was insane and could not be held responsible for his crimes. Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, who observed many of the trial sessions, thought that Chikatilo's behavior was a response to the rough questioning by Akubzhanov. He believed Chikatilo had several distinct personalities. They included the submissive, incompetent husband and the enraged but calculating killer. Under the pressure of Akubzhanov's interrogation, he thought he had seen yet another emerge: the man of the incoherent monologues who exposed his penis to the court.

  Bukhanovsky was prepared to testify that Chikatilo was in fact legally insane and could not be held responsible for his crimes. But Akubzhanov refused to allow Bukhanovsky to testify about Chikatilo's psychiatric condition. Nor did he grant Khabibulin's request that Chikatilo be examined by an independent panel of psychiatrists. In Bukhanovsky's opinion, Akubzhanov missed a chance to conduct a trial that would have illuminated the causes of Chikatilo's murderous behavior and perhaps would have educated the Russian people about some of the psychopathologies in their midst.

  Instead, Akubzhanov relied entirely on the opinion of the official specialists at the Serbsky Institute and the Center for the Study of Sexual Pathology. Under Russian law, a criminal is legally responsible for his actions if the court reaches two conclusions: that the criminal understood what he was doing; and that he was capable of controlling his actions. Chikatilo, according to Dr. Tkachenko's testimony, met both conditions. He was legally sane and responsible for what he had done. Tkachenko made a special trip from Moscow to Rostov after the courtroom outbursts in June and examined Chikatilo again, for two hours. The doctor then repeated his judgment that Chikatilo was legally sane.

  Tkachenko and the other psychiatrists based this judgment not so much on their examination of Chikatilo but on the way he committed his murders. Chikatilo was damned by the same cunning that had made him so hard to catch. He had shown that he was able select his victims carefully. He had shown that he could stop killing for nearly a year after his 1984 arrest. He had shown that he could refrain from killing anyone in Rostov for a year after that. "He always displayed well thought-out, controlled behavior that he could change in response to circumstances," Tkachenko said in an interview after his testimony. "I think Chikatilo could have refrained from killing if he had forced himself to. Or if the danger was real and strong that he would be caught. That's why he was able to stop for a while after his 1984 arrest."