The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  Procurator Isa Kostoyev, in a series of interviews in Moscow, told journalists that it was not his fault that it took so long to catch Chikatilo. He blamed the Rostov militsia for failing to follow up on his theory that the killer was someone who had already been under suspicion, as Chikatilo had been in 1984. In some interviews, he suggested that the militsia had all but hidden the file on Chikatilo from him.

  That assertion was impossible to credit. In the booklet on the case that Viktor Burakov compiled and disseminated throughout the Soviet Union in 1987, Chikatilo was listed as the ninth suspect. That booklet was a basic primer on the case and available to anyone working on the investigation. If Kostoyev had not read it and did not become aware of Chikatilo until he surfaced at the Donleskhoz station in 1990, it could only be because Kostoyev had failed to do his homework.

  Kostoyev also tried to denigrate the contributions of Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky to the investigation. He told interviewers that Bukhanovsky's profile had been flawed, and hinted that Bukhanovsky was trying to profit financially from his involvement in the case. The latter insinuation angered Bukhanovsky, who wrote both of his profiles gratis, as a service to the investigation. Bukhanovsky countered by telling interviewers that if Kostoyev had only had the sense to use the profile he had written, by narrowing the search to heterosexuals with backgrounds in teaching and factory supply, Kostoyev could have wrapped the case up in 1987, saving more than a dozen victims' lives.

  "Kostoyev kept looking for homosexuals. It was a reign of terror for them," Bukhanovsky said.

  They were not the only ones. At least five people committed suicide as a result of the killings and the investigation: Vladimir Pecheritsa, the convicted rapist who fell under suspicion in Donskoi after the murder of Lyubov Biryuk in 1982; Viktor Chernyayev, Yevgeny Voluyev, and Anatoly Otryeznov, the three gay suspects in Rostov; and Vladimir Dyakonov, father of the victim Aleksandr Dyakonov. He slashed his wrists in 1990, a year after his son's death, apparently because of his remorse at having beaten his son the day before Chikatilo encountered him. And there was the matter of Aleksandr Kravchenko, executed in 1979 for the slaying of Yelena Zakotnova, a crime for which Chikatilo was convicted in 1992.

  Burakov and Fetisov could say with justification that Chikatilo would have been caught far earlier but for the mistakes in the laboratory work. Both, though, were quick to acknowledge that the investigators had committed many mistakes, particularly in the early years of the case. There was the failure, in 1985, to find the travel records at NEVZ that would have established Chikatilo's presence in Moscow when Natalia Pokhlistova was killed. There was the failure, in 1984, to show Chikatilo to the witnesses who had seen a man walking away from the center of Novoshakhtinsk with Dmitri Ptashnikov. There was the failure to link Chikatilo to two victims whom he had known, Tatyana Petrosyan and Irina Dunenkova. But all those paled beside the decision made in 1984 that Chikatilo's blood type exonerated him.

  The Ministry of the Interior opened two internal investigations into the militsia's conduct during the case, one reviewing the Kravchenko conviction in 1979 and the other the treatment of Yuri Kalenik and other young men associated with the intemat for the retarded in Gukovo, treatment that led to Kalenik's spending five years in jail.

  But the latter investigation was apparently not very thorough. Kalenik, in an interview in the summer of 1992, said that no one had approached him to ask how he came to confess to several of the first murders in the lesopolosa series. If anyone had, he would have heard a frightening story.

  During his first days of interrogation, Kalenik recounted, the syshchik Valery Beklemishchev "would give me hints. He said, 'We've been following you, we know everything. We know you killed.' He told me what I was accused of He prompted me. He didn't give me all the details, but hints. They took me for a fool, because I'd been in the intemat. But I'm not a fool. I realized it had to do with rape and killing and cutting eyes out.

  "At the beginning I said I hadn't done anything, but he said, 'We know you did it,' and started to frighten me. He said they'd put me in a situation where I'd have no choice but to confess. Then they told me I was a retarded kid and that even if I confessed, I couldn't be convicted because of that. They took out a law book and showed me where it said that. Beklemishchev hit me on the head, not hard, and said, 'Think it over.' Then they took me back to my cell. The next day it started over again.

  "They beat me," Kalenik said. This was not done by Beklemishchev, he went on, but by underlings. "It happened in the cell block. Then it happened when I was being put in a police van. A sergeant beat me."

  Kalenik snorted when asked if the beatings had injured him. "Let me tell you, the militsia can beat you up scientifically," he replied. "They don't leave traces. They know where to hit you— around the kidneys, for instance. They cover their hands with towels so there's no blood. They're experienced at it. And you're simple and low. They tell you, 'You can't prove anything. We'll be right.' "

  After a few days of this, Kalenik gave up. He relied in part on the assurance that, as a retarded person, he could not be convicted.

  "I confessed," he would say nine years later. "I wanted to save my health. I had no trouble making it up, fantasizing, because they'd told me a lot about the crimes already. As soon as I started to confess they stopped beating me. They started bringing me cigarettes."

  After his false confession, Kalenik found it easy to pass the next tests. The investigators showed him groups of three photographs, one of which would be a victim. "At first I might point to an entirely different person. And then they'd say, 'Think hard.' You understand? They'd help me. So I'd point to another one."

  In much the same way, he said, he passed the test of finding the crime scenes. "They'd prompt me," he recalled. "Like at the music school in Novoshakhtinsk. They'd point it out. I knew that I was supposed to have met her at a school. I figured it out right away. They directed me with clever words. They wouldn't say, 'Go that way.' No. They're more clever than that. They'd do it with hints. I can't explain it exactly because it was so long ago, you know? If I went in the wrong direction, they'd say, 'Think better'.

  Kalenik's story, had anyone listened to it, would have made a convincing argument for the wisdom of providing effective legal counsel to Russian suspects during interrogation.

  Yuri Kalenik, like many of the individuals whose lives were disrupted by the lesopolosa case, wasted no energy following Andrei Chikatilo's trial. He was busy trying to survive in the battered Russian economy. After his release from prison in 1988, he did not return to the job he had trained for, laying floors. Instead, he found work as a boiler stoker at the intemat in Gukovo, where he was paid the equivalent of a few dollars a month and felt somewhat secure. He tried, he said, to avoid the militsia whenever he saw them.

  Valery Ivanenko, Viktor Burakov's informant in Rostov's gay community, suffered a stroke shordy after Chikatilo's arrest. He was paralyzed and unable to speak for six days, and then he died. His mother had died some years before, and he was alone and friendless. Viktor Burakov arranged for his funeral.

  Boris Panfilov, swept up like more than a hundred other men in the investigation of gay suspects, tried to reassemble his life after getting out of prison. He returned to school and was taking economics courses, hoping to become a businessman in Russia's new, market economy.

  Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky took advantage of the changing economic system to become a medical entrepreneur. Though he maintained his position at the Rostov Institute of Medicine, he founded a private psychiatric clinic he called Phoenix. Some of the patients who came to him, he said, were men with conditions very similar to Andrei Chikatilo's in its earlier stages. He worried about whether Russia would be visited by a plague of serial killers.

  Bukhanovsky continued to work with the militsia, writing profiles for use in murder investigations. And he began to organize what he hoped would be an international symposium on serial killers in Rostov in 1993, with the Chikatilo case as a focal point of
study.

  A few of the militsionery involved in the case went on to higher positions. Vladimir Kolyesnikov, who made the arrest of Chikatilo, received his general's star shortly afterward and transferred to Moscow. He became chief of the national division of criminal apprehension, in charge of monitoring searches for criminals throughout Russia.

  Mikhail Fetisov preferred to remain in Rostov. After the aborted coup of August 1991, he dropped his membership in the banned Communist Party. Soon afterward, he hung a picture of Boris Yeltsin on the wall behind his desk. Fetisov tried to implement his plan to modernize the militsia with computers and new radio cars. In the summer of 1992, his office got its first personal computer.

  Viktor Burakov was promoted to lieutenant colonel and remained in charge of the special unit that investigates sex murders in Rostov. He never bothered to remove the portrait of Feliks Dzerzhinski, founder of the KGB, from his office; it stands atop some of the file cabinets that hold the data compiled during the lesopolosa case. Burakov received no medals for his role in bringing Chikatilo to justice. This was not surprising, given the number of important people he had disagreed with during the investigation. He worried that he might reach the age of fifty in 1996 without making it to the rank of colonel. If that happens, he will have to retire, and he does not want to give up militsia work.

  When he reflected upon the lesopolosa case, it seemed to him like a long nightmare. He remembered years when his head constantly ached and he could not get on a train without seeking on the face of every passenger the guilty eyes of a killer. He was not a religious man, but sometimes he thought he should be grateful to God, or to some natural force, for giving him the will to continue the pursuit for eight years.

  He tried, after the Chikatilo interrogation was over, to spend more time with his younger son, Maksim. He knew that for the sake of the militsia and the lesopolosa investigation, he had left the rearing of his older son, Andrei, largely to his wife. Now he also spent more time on the tiny plot of land that he had been given, along with other militsia officers, on an old collective farm just outside Rostov. He put a fence around it, and his wife, Svetlana, planted grapes, cabbages, tomatoes, peppers, a pear tree, and an apple tree to supplement the family larder.

  On weekends and during his summer vacation, while Svedana tended the garden, Burakov began to build a brick cottage, with two rooms below and a single loft room above. The work went very slowly. Bricks and mortar were hard to find and increasingly expensive. But by the end of Chikatilo's trial, he had the walls built, topped by a tin roof. He thought that if he ever finished the interior, he and Svedana might move there, leaving the apartment in Rostov for one of his sons.

  One thing he did not have any qualms about was the prospect that Andrei Chikatilo would be executed. "As long as there have been civilized societies, there has always been a death penalty," he said, slightly puzzled that the question would even be raised. "It seems to me that for terrible, murderous crimes there must be a death penalty."

  He thought, he said, that the best way to deal with Andrei Chikatilo would be to let the executioners do their job in the prescribed Russian manner: to arrive, unannounced, at his cell one morning; to take him from the cell down a dark corridor to the execution room; and there to put a pistol to his ear and a bullet through his misbegotten brain.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES AND NAMES

  The research for this book was done with the cooperation of Viktor Burakov and Mikhail Fetisov of the Rostov militsia. Both of them gave generously of their time in answering my questions. They helped arrange interviews with other law enforcement officials. And they provided access to investigative files, confession protocols, videotapes, and other records pertaining to the lesopolosa case. They spoke almost entirely on the record, even in response to sensitive questions. They neither asked for nor received any editorial control over the manuscript. All the interpretations and judgments—as well as any mistakes—are mine. I am deeply grateful to both of them for their help.

  Dozens of other people graciously answered my questions, even when they touched on events that were still painful to them. Some went well out of their way to be helpful. Yuri Kalenik, for instance, rode an elektrichka for six hours to respond to my request for an interview. I am grateful to him and to all the others I interviewed both in Rostov and in Moscow. Their names are all cited in the text.

  Dr. Aleksandr Bukhanovsky and Dr. Andrei Tkachenko, two psychiatrists who worked extensively with Andrei Chikatilo, were particularly generous with their recollections and time. Dr. Bukhanovsky showed me excerpts from his profile of the lesopolosa killer, and Dr. Tkachenko read at length from his files on Chikatilo's psychiatric evaluation. I wish to thank them both.

  In a number of instances, I have changed the names of people involved in the case. Several gay men preferred that their real names not be published. So did Andrei Chikatilo's former son-in-law. The names of two militsia informants were changed at the request of Viktor Burakov. The names of several people who fell under suspicion during the investigation have been changed to respect their privacy.

  My work was made much easier by the assistance of Olga Kolobova and Nikolai Sazhnev, who cheerfully transcribed hours of taped interviews, smoothing out my Russian grammar in the process.

  My landlady in Rostov-on-Don, Valeria Ivanovna Krupenina, provided a spare room to sleep and work in and all the baklazhan I could eat. I am only sorry I didn't have room for more of her delicious cakes.

  Robert Ressler, who pioneered in the FBI's study of serial killers and is now a private consultant, helped me understand some of the general features of these crimes. David Bigbee, the special agent in charge of the FBI's DNA analysis unit, patiently tutored me in the basics of blood and semen analysis. So did Dr. Rafael Oriol of the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research.

  I would like to thank Rob and Web Stone for introducing me to the project, and Rafe Sagalyn and Kim Witherspoon for expediting it. Linda Healey, my editor at Pantheon, deftly saw the project through.

  Finally, I must thank my wife, Ann, and my children, Peter and Catherine, for their abundant love and forbearance.

  Chevy Chase, Maryland Januarys 1993