Andrey Chikatilo was born in 1936 in the village of Yablochnoye of the Ukrainian SSR. Times were hard, only a few years after the Holodomor in Ukraine (1932-1933). Chikatilo said that as a child he had to eat grass and leaves in order to survive. Perhaps this was not the only psychological test of his childhood, because in the end he turned into a monster, for whom there was no other punishment but a bullet in the back of the head.
When the trial of Chikatilo was concluded in October 1992, he was found guilty of 53 proven murders and sentenced to death for each of them. This man was executed on February 14, 1994, but the thought of him still makes you shudder.
15. He believed that his brother was stolen and eaten by neighbors
There is no confirmation of this story, since there are no documents that Andrei Chikatilo ever had a brother, but, according to him, his mother told him that his older brother Stepa was kidnapped and eaten by neighbors. She said that it happened when the child was four years old - and, knowing that such cases were indeed frequent during the famine of 1932-1933, it is quite possible to believe it. “On the one hand, it scared and horrified him, but on the other, he developed an unhealthy interest in the topic of cannibalism, and his fantasies have been constantly associated with it since then,” said the psychiatrist who examined Chikatilo.
14. He gnawed the body parts of his victims with his teeth
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Chikatilo received many nicknames: Rabid Beast, Red Partisan, Rostov Ripper, Red Ripper, Killer from the forest belt, Citizen X, Satan, Soviet Jack the Ripper. Although he is known as a cannibal, he cannot be said to have eaten the bodies of his victims - and, more importantly, that he enjoyed it like other famous cannibals - he rather chewed off parts of their bodies. Men have genitals, women have nipples, victims of both sexes have tongues.
13. His mother may have been raped in front of him
When the Soviet Union entered World War II, Andrei Chikatilo's father was drafted and went to war. The Nazis took over Ukraine in 1941 and over the next few years hijacked more than 5 million prisoners of war, and even more people starved to death or died at the hands of the Nazis. Chikatilo talked about what he remembers from childhood as "horrors". In 1943, a sister was born to Chikatilo, which means that, with a high degree of probability, his mother was raped by a Nazi soldier (a poor village, absolutely unprotected residents, a lonely woman). If this happened, then little Chikatilo could even witness the rape, since the family lived in the same room and the mother and son slept in the same bed.
12. He was a brilliant and versatile student
What is most shocking in the stories of serial killers is that many of them, up to a certain point in their lives, looked and behaved completely normal. The same outwardly normal was Andrei Chikatilo in his younger years. He studied well, at the age of 14 he was the editor of a school newspaper, was distinguished by his modesty and inconspicuousness, and the teachers could not get enough of him. They say that Chikatilo had a certain superiority complex and he considered himself smarter than his classmates. After leaving school, he wanted to go to law at Moscow State University, but failed the exam. He himself believed that he was not taken due to the fact that his father was repressed (as a "traitor" and "traitor to the Motherland" who was in captivity). Instead of Moscow State University, Chikatilo graduated from the Akhtyrka Technical School of Communications, went to work on the laying of power lines, then served,became carried away by writing articles in regional newspapers and eventually entered the Faculty of Philology at Rostov University, which he graduated in 1970 with a degree in Russian language and literature.
11. His first sexual experience was domination
There are suggestions that Chikatilo was born with signs of hydrocephalus, which later led to bedwetting (which he suffered until the age of 12) and impotence. He was an incredibly shy child and turned into an even shy teenager (in part because classmates looked at him as the son of a "traitor to the Motherland" captured during the war, and said that his father was a coward). At the age of 15, Chikatilo received his first sexual experience during a comic struggle with his younger sister's girlfriend - and in the process he accidentally ejaculated. When the news of this reached the ears of classmates, their life was completely gone. Perhaps this was the beginning of psychological impotence, which then Chikatilo fought all his life.
10. He was impotent, but got sexual release by killing people
After a humiliating situation with involuntary ejaculation on a girl at the age of 15, Chikatilo began to have erection problems. When he was about 20 years old, he had a girlfriend and they tried to have sex three times - but he never succeeded. After a year and a half, the girl left him. After finishing his military service, Chikatilo met another lady, already divorced, but he did not succeed with her either. This lady decided to consult with her friends about the problem - and as a result, Chikatilo was extremely wounded that now her acquaintances also learned that he was impotent. “They whispered about it behind my back, I was so ashamed. I tried to hang myself, my mother pulled me out of the noose. I thought no one needed such a loser. And I had to leave from there, from my native place,”he said later.
9. He fathered two children
Nevertheless, a woman willing to marry him was soon found. In 1963, Chikatilo married his sister's friend Faina Odinacheva. His wife gradually came to terms with problems in her sexual life, especially since they still managed to make two children. Lyudmila Chikatilo was born in 1963, and her son Yuri was born in 1969. When Andrei Chikatilo committed his first murder in 1978, in which a 9-year-old girl became a victim, his son was about the same age. Chikatilo was a pedophile and mostly children were his victims. 36 of the 53 known victims were children between the ages of 8 and 17. And sexually harassing students at the school where he taught, Chikatilo began even when his youngest son was 4 years old.
8. He was a school teacher and educator
Yes, it's creepy, but Chikatilo was not only the father of two children, but also worked for several years as a school teacher in a boarding school. He was fired for sexual harassment of female students with the wording "of his own free will." Then he was a teacher at the GPTU, where he molested a sleeping 15-year-old boy, for which his students called him "masturbator" and "gay." As can be seen from these cases, he never succeeded in winning the love and respect of his disciples. The disciples rebelled against him, mocked him and gave offensive nicknames like "Goose".
7. He harassed students, for which he was fired
It is believed that children were attracted to Chikatilo as weaker and vulnerable creatures that can be manipulated. The first case of harassment occurred in 1973 - the teacher asked the student to stay in the classroom after school, then began to beat her with a ruler, which turned him on with all the ensuing consequences. There was also a case when he grabbed a student in the pool and drowned her until he could finish. After these episodes became known, Chikatilo left school and was fired. However, no one raised a fuss, the case was hushed up, and Chikatilo moved to another city and continued to behave as if nothing had happened.
6. He was a murder suspect long before his arrest, but he got off the water
One of the most unpleasant facts about Chikatilo's "career" is that he was being investigated for the murder of his very first victim, was a suspect, but he was released. Chikatilo lured 9-year-old Lena to his secret hideout, promising gum. He was not the main suspect, but blood stains were found near the same house. But Chikatilo's track record (an exemplary family man, husband, father, communist) helped him create a positive image. After this incident, the maniac hid for two years. The next time he encountered the police was in 1984 (and by that time he had already killed 23 people). But despite the fact that he was detained with a suitcase, which contained petroleum jelly, rope and a knife, the investigators released him, as he did not look like a typical sex maniac.
5. The group of sperm found on the victim did not match Chikatilo's DNA due to an error in the analysis
When Chikatilo came to the attention of the police in 1984 (with his suspicious suitcase), they took his blood for analysis. The blood group was the second. And they were looking for the suspect from the fourth, since the sperm of the fourth group was on the victim's corpse. Later, this circumstance was explained by the fact that Chikatilo allegedly had "paradoxical secretion" - the blood of the second group, and the discharge - the fourth. But in reality, the analysis of the detected semen was carried out with errors and gave the wrong result.
4. Until the age of forty, he led an almost normal life
Serial killers usually show their sadistic tendencies in early childhood by torturing or killing pets or bullying classmates. Andrei Chikatilo was a modest introvert, but led an almost normal life until 1978. It was assumed that if he lived somewhere in the US or Canada, with easy access to pornography, he would have started killing much earlier. But in the USSR, pornography was not easy to obtain. At his trial in 1992, Chikatilo pulled out a pornographic publication and, waving it around, told the astonished public that it was "the source of his problems."
3. His first victim was 9 years old
After the body of nine-year-old Elena Zakotnova was found in the Grushevka River in 1978, a criminal previously convicted of rape was accused of her murder and executed (and school teacher Chikatilo managed to get out of the water). Chikatilo met a little girl Lena Zakotnova at a bus stop, which, by the way, later became his favorite way to choose a victim. He lured the girl into his secret hideout, offering to treat her with gum, then stabbed her with a knife, tried to have sex with her corpse - unsuccessfully - and eventually threw the girl's corpse and school backpack into the river. 12 years later, he killed two more nine-year-olds: these were the boys Oleg Pozhidaev and Alexei Voronko.
2. He gouged out the eyes of the victims
There is a superstition that the image of a murderer remains in the eyes of the victim before death, and Chikatilo mentioned this more than once. When he first began his bloody harvest, he often gouged out victims' eyes. Subsequently, he stopped doing it, but later he began again - when he decided that he did not like the way dying people looked at him.
1. At the trial, he made a whole performance
The trial of Chikatilo began on April 14, 1992. When the defendant was given the floor, he talked for two hours about being a victim of circumstances, blaming his parents, the Holodomor, and in general anything but himself. He talked about how hard it is to be impotent and how it puts pressure on the psyche. Said he was helpless and weak. During the trial, the defendant was in a cage, which, on the one hand, made him look like a beast behind bars, and on the other, protected him from the relatives of the killed who were present in the courtroom. By the way, many of them passed out right there. All his behavior at the trial was aimed at appearing insane in order to avoid capital punishment. He even tried to show his genitals with the words that this is a useless appendage and he could not do anything with it.