When the operatives broke into the house on a quiet Chkalov street, even they, who were well-worn, could not recover from horror: the kitchen and living room, walls and curtains, furniture, equipment - everything was covered in blood.
“I've never met something like this before,” investigator Ruslan Magomedov told journalist Vladimir Ladny. However, a complete shock awaited the operas when they found out whose son had done all this. And he, the son of a celebrity, was the first to recognize Ivan Vorobinsky, the head of the district's criminal police, whom he knew by his father when he was still young, and greeted joyfully:
- Hello, Uncle Wan!
Killer of the century
1990 - by the end of the year, a message flashed in the newspapers that a long-wanted maniac, a resident of Novocherkassk, Andrei Chikatilo, born in 1936, who had been terrorizing residents of Rostov and neighboring regions for ten years, was arrested.
During this period of time, for sexual reasons, he killed more than 50 women and children with particular cruelty. Most of his victims were subjected to monstrous vivisection after being raped - the maniac cut off their breasts, buttocks and other parts of the body.
For many years Andrei Chikatilo was, as they say, quite a prosperous citizen. He graduated from the philological faculty of Rostov State University, got married, joined the CPSU, regularly paid party fees, participated in building a new community of people - the Soviet people, raised two children. At different times he worked as the chairman of the regional committee for physical education and sports, a teacher (!) At school, a master of industrial training, an educator (!) In a vocational school, an employee of supply organizations.
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1984 - the devil beguiled - Chikatilo committed theft, but the law enforcement agencies did not sleep: he was prosecuted for theft. Then he was expelled from the ranks of the CPSU. So for the last six years Chikatilo has been killing people, being already non-partisan.
For the capture of the maniac, a special group was created, and an operation codenamed "Lesopolosa" was developed. Special outfits of plainclothes officers were monitoring where they hoped to find the killer. Police girls, acting as bait under the guise of women of easy virtue, loitering at train stations, in parks and similar places.
The case was complicated by the fact that the police did not have any witness statements. Literally not a single person from the nearby crime scene noticed anything suspicious.
It was just right to call the maniac a ghost, but nevertheless, the police had one clue - on the body of a 9-year-old boy who died in the summer of 1982, sperm of the fourth group was found. And this, according to all the classical laws of forensic science, meant that the blood of the criminal was also of the fourth group.
"Classic laws of criminalistics" played, however, a bad joke with the investigation. 1984 - one task force detained Chikatilo at the station, drawing attention to his suspicious behavior. They took a blood sample from him, but because the group was the second, the offender was simply released.
Subsequently, it turned out that Chikatilo's physiology was abnormal - he had different sperm group and blood group. The holy faith of those who conducted the investigation in forensic dogmas gave the sadist the opportunity to rape and kill people for another six years.
Several corpses with the characteristic handwriting of the crime were found annually. The members of the task force went to consult the same maniac-murderer Anatoly Slivko, who was awaiting the death penalty in the Stavropol prison. The bomber turned out to be talkative. “First,” he argued, “here it is necessary to look for not one, but several killers: one is not capable of such a thing. Secondly, look for someone who has some kind of exciting image. " (For Slivko, boys in white shirts served in this "way".)
But the maniac's advice did not help the investigation either. And the accident helped.
1990 was a "fruitful" year for Chikatilo - six murders. He committed the last crime on October 6 near the Leskhoz station; on October 13, the corpse of a murdered woman was found. When questioning possible witnesses, it was found out that the police sergeant I. Rybakov on October 7 drew attention to a man with a briefcase, who was walking to the station, and checked his documents.
The documents were in order, but, fortunately, the sergeant remembered the surname - the letter C. Chikatilo was quickly found, but they did not take it right away - but what if a mistake? Only after looking at his behavior and realizing that this elderly man was actively interested in boys, he was arrested.
Quite quickly, the maniac confessed to 35 murders (although, perhaps, there were more of them). He began his testimony by naming the place where one of the victims was buried.
Later they proved that Chikatilo committed 53 brutal murders.
Chikatilo was sentenced to death under the criminal codes of three republics - Ukraine, Russia and Uzbekistan. While on death row, the offender gave an exclusive interview to the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, where he spoke about the last days before his execution:
- Nobody comes. My wife and all my relatives have left, and they don't tell me where. I do not know why. Nobody wants to visit.
About "nobody wants" - wrong. The relatives actually went into hiding, changing their names, being wary of the victims' lynching. Official interest in Chikatilo is huge. Scientists from a number of countries dream of studying this phenomenon, offering huge amounts of currency for the brain of a record-breaking maniac.
The correspondent asks questions:
- How are you treated?
- Okay. Respectfully. Well, that's okay.
- How are they fed?
- What do I mean, I'm already used to it - all my life on business trips, in the Urals and all the Siberians. Whatever you eat me. And then fish, vegetables. I sit and read.
- And what are you reading now, Andrei Romanovich?
- Now Nikolai Ostrovsky. Yes, all sorts of things are given out by the prison, see. (Pulls up the curtain and shows a half dozen books folded behind it).
- Did the Supreme Court uphold the verdict?
- Yes, that is, as approved - removed some of the articles. So I filed appeals to the Presidium of the Supreme Court, and filed it with the Prosecutor General, and my lawyer proved that everything is fine. They were there, in consequence, hung on me corpses from all over the Union. All blood groups were adjusted, the second - blood, the fourth - sperm. For the report. Yes, I already wrote all this to the court, I criticized them for it.
- You write appeals, so you hope for a pardon?
- Yes, I'm really so, detached, somewhere not on earth, but higher, with God, or something. In the Universe somewhere, I look at everything from there. I am already above all this.
- Do you believe in God?
- Yes, average. Hopefully.
The only support in the family
For the driver of the heavy-duty truck Lesha, this flight promised to be fun and simple. In Kursk, he literally packed up to capacity - he loaded the car with containers, and drove along the highway to Rostov-on-Don. Then he could not even imagine that this trip would turn into a nightmare, which neither he nor his colleagues could have imagined.
Suddenly the car stalled near Kamensk, but this is not a problem for an experienced driver. I could not fix it. I asked for help.
But the owners perceived the incident differently: he threw it! Where is the product?..
When they beat him, he thought the worst had come. The worst was yet to come.
He woke up from pain, bound. And he felt that a knife was slowly and tastefully introduced into his body.
… Yuri Andreevich cut them skillfully, for a long time and with pleasure. He also beat day after day - cruelly and endlessly, hitting when Lesha's broken ribs were already making holes in his lungs and blood, bubbling, burst out with air from them. “Check, all the goods are in place, I didn’t take anything,” Lesha wheezed while he could speak. "Yes? Then write a receipt, - Yuri dictated. - “To His Majesty Yuri Andreevich. I undertake to give the money in dollars in the amount … "Did you write it? That's right, Now let's work on."
But when it seemed that it could not be worse, a new shock awaited Alexei.
- Do you know what's in store for you? Who are you dealing with? the tormentor asked. - Well, look, - and showed the birth certificate. - Does my surname mean anything to you? And rightly so. Now look who the ancestors are.
In the column "parents" Lesha read with horror; “Mother - Chikatilo Evdokia Semyonovna, Russian. Father - Andrey Chikatilo Romanovich, Ukrainian."
The surname of his son, Yuri Andreevich, born in August 1969, also appeared in the testimony shown by Lesha - it was changed on January 11, 1991 in the registry office of the Novocherkassk City Executive Committee of the Rostov Region, entry No. 3. There were not many entries in that book for that period: it is not renamed now fashionable, and everyone touched one surname - Chikatilo.
The police then insisted on this measure, for the sake of family safety: there were a lot of people who wanted to take revenge, if not Andrei Romanovich himself, then at least his relatives. She, the police, helped the renamed Chikatilo to leave, to dissolve in the neighboring republic, Ukraine, which eventually became another country.
They did everything to save little Yura, so that he would not carry, like a terrible cross, the name of his father and his deeds.
Evdokia Semyonovna Chikatilo, the wife of the late Andrei and Yura's mother, came to the investigator herself a day after Yury's arrest. Small, aged early, although she retained the reflections of her former beauty, with light gray hair in her dark hair and endless pain in her dark, tortured gaze. Learning that she was in trouble with her son, she came here from Kharkov, where most of the renamed from the Chikatilo family moved. It’s easy to get lost in a big city, which was what was expected.
But the thoughts, the pain of the soul cannot be lost or taken away. And when they were told in Kharkov that Yura was in trouble, his mother and sister (respectively A. Ch.'s wife and daughter) flew in as if on wings.
- I asked, so I asked my son Yura not to leave, stay with us, he is with us, women, - the last only support now; but wherever there, did not obey, - repeated Evdokia Semyonovna.
Yura's sister, Svetlana Chikatilo, is smart, decisive, with two grown-up children, she was also worried about the binding in which her brother ended up. They were both summoned by their daughter-in-law Tanya - a pretty slender blonde, Yura's wife in a civil marriage, who gave him a son - he was already 2 years old, a smart, loud little toddler. In general, if you see it on the street - a happy family.
“You know, I had no idea that my husband was the son of that very Chikatilo,” says Tatiana. And you believe her. Because Evdokia Semyonovna also, in her words, did not suspect about the many years of monthly murders that her husband was engaged in.
Tanya is smartly dressed: she works as a "shuttle", carries leather and other consumer goods from Turkey. Yura did the same from time to time. When asked why the marriage with Yura was not registered, although she has a common son, she was sincerely surprised:
- Why do you need paperwork if you believe a person? … I'll make a reservation right away: all this happened in the spring of 1996, the investigation generally started in full force only at the end of April, because the circumstances of the case are kept in a special secret, and they have not been fully clarified.
Therefore, here too, the legal accuracy of all described actions is not guaranteed. Although the experienced investigator in charge of the case, Captain Ruslan Magomedov, was quite categorical.
- Articles 117, 108 and 126 are charged to him by rail. That is, illegal imprisonment of a person whom he tortured. Forgery of documents. Rape … And there is still a lot going after it …
Several suspected rapes: one of his acquaintances, for example, in case of refusal, he promised to cut off her friend's ears. But the statement lies alone. From a 20-year-old friend of the owner of the very same apartment at Rostselmash. It was because of her, as the investigation suspects, that Yura was severely beaten, and even the BMW was taken away, in which he arrived in the city. Having regained consciousness, Yura "ran over" the landlord, demanding a receipt for 10,000 greenbacks, otherwise he promised to cut out the family and scatter the pieces around the city.
He made money in Rostov, however, and without that bad, he chose a rather original method: he walked around the kiosks, allegedly on behalf of their owner, and allegedly took money as a cashier. They found a bunch of different equipment at home - from the Photon TVs to the Sony music center, everything is neat and new, only a little splattered with blood.
If you look through his notebook - it is green, with a sweet yellow flower. The very first under the cover, even before the alphabet, is the lawyer's phone number written in large size. He was summoned by Yura as soon as he was detained. I was always ready.
Then Yuri, just like his father once, demanded a psychiatric examination. And he does it in the same jail where his father used to be. Accident? Well, let it be an accident.
T. Revyako
