Criminal Minds

by Jeff Mariotte

  Not only did that attitude make it hard for the Soviet police to track down the killer, it also meant that potential victims didn’t take steps to protect themselves, because the state-run media weren’t allowed to warn the public that a serial killer was on the loose.

  After Chikatilo’s first murder, on December 22, 1978, the Soviet bureaucracy made it easy for him to get away with it. He lured a nine-year-old girl into an old house and tried to rape her, but he was unable to achieve an erection. He choked her to death and stabbed her, which finally brought him to a climax.

  Evidence could have connected Chikatilo to the murder, but the authorities focused on another man who had a previous conviction for rape and murder. They arrested this man and tortured him until he confessed. He was sentenced to fifteen years, but when the victim’s relatives pressured the courts for harsher justice, the wrong man was retried and executed. Chikatilo had killed, but he would not be punished for it.

  Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born in Ukraine on October 16, 1934. He was born with hydrocephalus, an excess of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain, which caused him to have a misshapen head and other physical ailments. A terrible famine racked Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, thanks to Joseph Stalin’s desire to crush Ukrainian nationalism. In 1932 Stalin raised Ukraine’s grain procurement quotas by 44 percent. This meant that there would not be enough grain for the peasants, because Soviet law required that no grain from a collective farm could be given to the residents of the farm until the government’s quota was met. The result was that at least six million people died. Some turned to cannibalism to survive.

  Chikatilo’s mother told Andrei and his sister that their older brother, Stepan, had been a victim of cannibals. There is no independent evidence that Stepan ever existed, and he might have simply been a figment of her imagination. When the USSR entered World War II, Chikatilo’s father was conscripted, and Chikatilo spent those years sleeping in his mother’s bed. He was a chronic bed-wetter, and she beat him every time he soiled her sheets.

  During the war, Chikatilo witnessed the effects of German bombing, and later he said that the bodies in the street both frightened and excited him.

  Chikatilo was a lonely child, partly blind and given to violent fantasies. His first sexual experience was at fifteen, when he grabbed a ten-year-old friend of his sister’s and wrestled with her, which caused him to ejaculate. For most of his life thereafter, he was impotent, although he could achieve orgasm through the violent abuse of his victims.

  Despite his physical and emotional problems, Chikatilo was intelligent, and he tried to get into Moscow State University. He failed the entrance exam, so he fulfilled his mandatory military service and then became a telephone engineer. His sister moved in with him and arranged a meeting with a girlfriend, Fayina, whom Chikatilo subsequently married. Even with her he couldn’t achieve an erection, but he could ejaculate and inseminate her by hand; in this way they had two children and the semblance of a normal life.

  Chikatilo changed careers and became a schoolteacher. That didn’t last long, because there were complaints about his inappropriate behavior toward the children. He moved from school to school and town to town as he kept being fired from each teaching job. He finally ended up as a factory clerk near the city of Rostov-on-Don, and he held this position until his arrest. It was there that he began killing, at the advanced age of forty-two.

  Enough trust was put in him by the company that Chikatilo was sent all over the country by himself, and he did this frequent travel by train or bus. Although many of his homicides occurred close enough to home to earn him the nickname the Rostov Ripper, he frequently picked victims near bus depots and train stations in the cities he traveled to—making him even more difficult to pin down.

  After his first victim in 1978, Chikatilo didn’t kill again until 1981. That year he took one victim, a seventeen-year-old student whom he enticed to have sex but who laughed at his inability to become erect. Between June and December 1982, he killed six girls between the ages of ten and nineteen as well as a nine-year-old boy.

  His pattern was to lure them from a rail station or depot into nearby woods, where he would stab and slash and mutilate, some with as many as seventy separate wounds. He often slashed or cut out the eyes. Sometimes he ate internal organs, and possibly sexual organs, which he frequently removed from his victims. Later he took to slicing off the upper lip or nose and leaving it inside the victim’s mouth or slashed-open stomach.

  The next year, 1983, Chikatilo again took a break until June. Between then and the end of the year, he murdered six more women and girls, who ranged in age from thirteen to twenty-five, and two boys, ages seven—his youngest victim yet—and fourteen. Chikatilo murdered fifteen victims in 1984, including his oldest yet, a forty-five-year-old woman, and a mother-daughter combination. Two of the year’s victims were male, the rest female.

  Chikatilo was arrested twice during these years, once when a police officer observed suspicious behavior around the bus stops and saw Chikatilo receiving oral sex from a prostitute. When Chikatilo was arrested, he had a knife and a length of rope under his coat, but his blood type didn’t match what the authorities were looking for, based on semen samples from other crime scenes, so he was released. Another time he served three months in prison for petty thefts.

  In 1985, Chikatilo was relatively quiet, killing only twice: both victims were eighteen-year-old girls. He didn’t kill again until 1987, when his victims were three boys, ages twelve, thirteen, and sixteen. In 1988 he committed three more murders, two boys and a young woman, and that pattern repeated in 1989. During this period, the authorities learned that semen samples don’t always match up to blood types.

  As if a dam had broken, in 1990 Chikatilo broke his own record, killing eight victims: six boys and two women. The Soviet investigators were drawing nearer, and during that year they developed a plan to place obvious officers at certain stations and depots, forcing their unsub to take his victims from the stations where they had plainclothes officers positioned.

  Their plan worked, and they came up with a suspect. He was someone they had talked to before and had released, but now they knew that their science had been faulty. Chikatilo was picked up again, in spite of a lack of solid evidence. He could be held for ten days, and nine passed before he finally confessed. The police thought they had him on thirty-six homicides, but there were far more, as many as fifty-five or fifty-six, Chikatilo claimed. Some could not be corroborated, and he was charged with fifty-three counts of murder.

  While Chikatilo was studied, judged sane, and waiting for trial, the Soviet Union collapsed. He went on trial in Russia and was placed in a large cage. Sometimes he drooled, sang, or rolled his eyes, and on two occasions he exposed himself in court. His trial stretched from April to August 1992, and the jury took two more months to reach a verdict. He was convicted of fifty-two counts of murder and five of molestation and was sentenced to be executed. That happened on February 15, 1994, with a single shot to the head—a much more merciful end than he had given his victims.

  Chikatilo is also brought up in the episode “Jones” (218), in which it’s pointed out that he fantasized that the males he killed were his captives whom he was responsible for torturing. That torture and mutilation, in his imagination, made him a hero.

  Andrei Chikatilo is a classic example of an organized killer—up until the actual murder begins, at which point he lost control and attacked savagely. Fired from all of his teaching jobs, once his killing spree began, he held the same factory clerk’s job until his arrest, with enough trust put in him by the company that he was sent all over the country by himself. He kept his admittedly unusual marriage going and raised two children. Despite his odd appearance, he was able to quickly grasp what would entice people of various genders and ages—sweets, money, sex—and sweet-talk them into accompanying him into the woods.

  Toward the end, Chikatilo might have been undergoing a final mental disintegration. This could account for
the frequency of attacks in 1990 and the fact that even though he must have known he was the subject of a massive search (given the increased police presence around his usual hunting grounds), he could not seem to take a break from killing as he had done in earlier years. It’s possible that if he had maintained his rate of killing one or two a year, he might have stayed on the loose for even longer. People all over Russia are no doubt thankful that he didn’t.

  WHETHER OR NOT the Mexican authorities admit it, they have had their share of serial killers, as has South America. FBI profiler Robert Ressler has been invited to Ciudad Juárez to try to help solve the murders of four hundred to eight hundred women that have taken place there since the early 1990s. All of these murders, often called the “femicides” of Juárez, are not believed to be the work of a single killer, but it’s theorized that a serial killer could be contributing to the overall total. Juárez is one of the fastest growing cities in the world, with a murder rate exceeding that of any city not in a war zone. With the continuing femicides and the drug-related killings, the number of murders there in 2009 topped than twenty-six hundred.

  In 1999, Fernando Hernandez Leyva, from Cuernavaca, Mexico, was arrested—again; he had been arrested in 1982 and 1986 and had escaped both times. This time he was accused of 137 murders, along with several kidnappings and robberies. Hernandez Leyva reportedly admitted to more than a hundred murders. If this number is true, he would be the worst-known individual serial killer in Mexico’s history. In custody, he tried to commit suicide by hanging himself, but his more than three-hundred-pound bulk broke the rope.

  In South America lives the man called the Monster of the Andes. At least, we can presume that he lives; the Ecuadorian authorities released him from prison in 1998, and he hasn’t surfaced again. Wherever he is, however, Pedro Alonzo Lopez is probably still killing.

  Lopez was born in Colombia in 1949, the seventh child of thirteen. His mother, a prostitute, caught him fondling his sister’s breasts at the age of eight and turned him out onto the street. Terrified, the boy turned to the first kindly stranger he met, but that man took the boy into a building and repeatedly sodomized him.

  After a brief interlude at a day school ended with molestation at the hands of a male teacher, Lopez returned to the streets, making his living by petty crimes and car theft. Arrested in 1969 for auto theft, he had been in prison for just two days when he was gang-raped by four older inmates. He took revenge on them with a handmade knife and killed the first four victims of what would become a very long list.

  By the time he was arrested for the second time, in 1980, he confessed to having raped and murdered more than 350 girls throughout Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador. The authorities didn’t believe him until he started showing them his crowded dump sites. Having had his innocence stolen at such a young age, Lopez claimed, made him determined to do the same to as many people as he could. He swore, in his only prison interview, that he would kill again when he was freed.

  The facts are in dispute, but most reports say that Lopez served twenty years in solitary confinement in Ecuador. That was the country’s legal limit, and Ecuador has no death penalty. So even though Lopez was wanted in Colombia and Peru, he was taken to the Colombian border during the night, in 1998 or 1999, and released. Other reports say that he was delivered into the hands of the Colombian authorities. Either way, no one seems to know where he is today.

  PROBABLY THE MOST famous serial killer worldwide is Jack the Ripper. He is also one of the earliest known murderers to meet the modern criteria for the term serial killer. Before Jack, stranger murder was all but unheard of; except during war, people killed personal enemies or family members, but not people they had never met.

  As one might expect, references to Jack crop up occasionally on Criminal Minds. In the episode “Jones” (218), a female killer patterns her murders of men after the Ripper’s crimes against women. He comes up again in “Zoe’s Reprise” (415), in which the killer’s crimes resemble those of a number of famous murderers.

  Because Jack was never caught or identified, all we really know about him are his crimes (and the inferences that can be drawn from those crimes, which have been the subject of debate ever since). His five murders (possibly as many as eleven, but five are definitively agreed upon) have formed the basis for entire libraries of books that purport to examine the case and, often, to reveal the “real” Jack the Ripper. In fact, even the name might well be fraudulent, because it came from a letter to London’s Central News Agency that is widely considered to have been the work of an impostor.

  Taken as a whole, the eleven murders, which occurred from April 3, 1888, to February 13, 1891, are termed the Whitechapel Murders, after the district of London’s East End where they occurred.

  The five victims who are believed to have been killed by a single murderer are Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly.

  Nichols was the first of the five to be killed. When her body was found on August 31, 1888, her throat had been slashed with two cuts, and her abdomen was sliced open. There were other, less severe incisions on her abdomen.

  Chapman’s throat also had two cuts when she turned up on September 8. Again, the abdomen of the victim was slashed open, and in this case her uterus had been removed.

  Stride and Eddowes were both murdered on September 30. Stride had a single slash to the throat and no abdominal mutilation; it is presumed that the Ripper was interrupted and thus went on to take a second victim. Eddowes had her throat severed and her abdomen opened, and her left kidney and most of her uterus were gone.

  Kelly, the last certain Ripper victim, was found in her apartment on November 9, 1888. Her throat had been cut to the spine, her abdomen was opened wide, and nearly all of her internal organs, including her heart, were missing.

  Suspects in the Ripper murders were in no short supply and included people from high society, such as Prince Albert Victor, royal physician Albert Gull, and a wealthy man named Francis Tumblety. Modern profilers don’t know if the real Ripper was ever named as a suspect, but they speculate that the killer was a highly disorganized type. He may have had more in common with Richard Trenton Chase than with a skilled medical doctor or a member of the royal family. His murders were sexually motivated. He was someone who would not have stood out among the vagrants and prostitutes of Whitechapel (as a member of the royal family certainly would). He was mentally deranged and became more so with each woman he killed. He used a blitz-style attack because he was not someone who could charm anyone into a vulnerable position. He was a quiet loner, he probably returned to the scenes of his murders, and he was most likely questioned during the investigation.

  Today, it’s all guesswork, of course, and the real answers—short of the discovery of a contemporary diary or journal confessing to the crimes in enough detail to be persuasive—will never be known. It’s this air of mystery, in addition to the brutality and the novelty, at the time, of the murders, that keeps people reading and writing about Jack the Ripper even now.

  17

  The Strangest of the Strange

  SOME CRIMES AND CRIMINALS defy easy categorization. Murderers are a dime a dozen, it seems, especially on prime-time television. But every now and then, Criminal Minds turns toward the truly bizarre, the once-in-a-lifetime—one hopes—cases that stand out among all the serial killers, home invaders, and family annihilators. Those cases are the subject of this chapter, a roundup of some of the oddest incidents.

  In “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (103), Jason Gideon has to ask for help from his old nemesis, bomber Adrian Bale, whose treachery got six FBI agents killed in Boston and sent Gideon into a psychological tailspin. But when a different bomber locks a collar bomb around a victim’s neck and sends him into a police station, the BAU team is short on options and time.

  The events of this episode are reminiscent of an incident in Pennsylvania on which the FBI’s real BAU consulted—an incident that, like many on Criminal Mi
nds, was more complex than it appeared at first.

  AT 2:40 P.M. on August 23, 2003, in Erie, Pennsylvania, a man named Brian Douglas Wells walked into the PNC Bank branch at Summit Towne Center with a homemade shotgun in his hand and a bomb around his neck, under his T-shirt. He carried several detailed notes—a script, according to the FBI: one to give to the bank teller, one for the teller to give to the police, and one describing the steps that Wells had to follow to have the bomb removed. He had been given fifty-five minutes to accomplish these tasks. His note said, in part, “This powerful, booby-trapped bomb can be removed only by following our instructions. Using time attempting to escape it will fail and leave you short of time to follow instructions. Do not delay.”

  Wells got the money and raced back to his car. He drove to a nearby McDonald’s, where his note led him to another note—the first stop in a bizarre, desperate scavenger hunt with survival as the goal. He started off again, but the police pulled him over and ordered him out of the car. They handcuffed him and sat him down on the curb. When he explained that there was a bomb locked around his neck, they evacuated the area and called the bomb squad.

  Panicking, Wells spent the next thirty minutes begging the officers to save him. Before anything could be done, the bomb exploded. Far from the end of the investigation, this was only the beginning.

  Brian Wells was hardly the sort of man one would expect to be involved in such a strange, dramatic plot. By all accounts he was a naive, gentle forty-six-year-old who worked on his old car, took care of his cat, watched videos with his mother, and delivered pizzas for a living.