When the Soviet Union entered World War II, his father, Roman, was drafted into the Red Army and subsequently taken prisoner after being wounded in combat. During the war, Chikatilo witnessed some of the effects of Germany’s blitzkrieg warfare, which both frightened and excited him. On one occasion, Chikatilo and his mother were forced to watch their hut burn to the ground. In 1943, while Chikatilo's father was at the front, his mother gave birth to a baby girl, Tatyana. In 1949, Chikatilo's father, who had been freed by the Americans, returned home. Instead of being rewarded for his war service, he was branded a traitor for surrendering to the Germans.
Chikatilo was shy as a child and developed a passion for reading. By his teens, he was an avid reader of Communist literature, and was appointed chairperson of the pupils' Communist committee at his school. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, he was consistently a target for bullying by other students. During adolescence, he discovered that he suffered from chronic impotence, aggravating his social awkwardness and self-hatred. Chikatilo was shy in the company of females. His only sexual experience as a teenager was when he was seventeen. He jumped on an eleven-year-old friend of his younger sister and wrestled her to the ground, ejaculating as the girl struggled in his grasp.
Between 1957 and 1960, Chikatilo performed his compulsory military service, and in 1963, married a woman to whom he was introduced by his younger sister. The couple had a son and a daughter. Chikatilo later claimed that his marital sex life was minimal and that, after his wife understood that he was unable to maintain an erection, he and his wife agreed that in order for her to conceive, he would ejaculate externally and push his semen inside her vagina with his fingers.
Murders
On December 22, 1978, Chikatilo lured Yelena Zakotnova, nine years old, to an old house he had secretly purchased, and tried to rape her. He failed to achieve an erection, however, and when the girl struggled he choked her to death and stabbed her body, ejaculating in the process of knifing the little girl. Chikatilo then dumped her body in a nearby river. Spots of the girl's blood were found in the snow near Chikatilo’s house, and a witness gave police a detailed description of a man closely resembling Chikatilo whom she had seen the talking with the girl at the bus stop where she had last been seen alive. However, Alexsandr Kravchenko, twenty-five, who, as a teenager, had served a jail sentence for the rape and murder of a teenage girl, was arrested for this murder and subsequently confessed to the killing. He was tried for the murder in 1979. At his trial, Kravchenko retracted his confession and maintained his innocence, stating his confession had been obtained under extreme duress.
Despite his retraction, Kravchenko was convicted of the murder and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Under demands from the victim's relatives, Kravchenko was retried and eventually executed for the murder of Yelena Zakotnova in July, 1983, although he proclaimed his innocence. Following Zakotnova's murder, Chikatilo was able to achieve sexual arousal and orgasm only through stabbing and slashing women and children to death, and he later claimed that the urge to relive the experience had plagued him.
Chikatilo began his career as a teacher of Russian language and literature in Novoshakhtinsk. His career as a teacher ended, however, in March of 1981, after several complaints arose that he had molested several students of both sexes. Chikatilo eventually took a job as a supply clerk for a factory.
Chikatilo committed his next murder in September of 1981 when he again tried to have sex with Larisa Tkachenko, seventeen, in a forest near the Don River. When Chikatilo failed to reach an erection, he became livid and battered and strangled her to death. As he had no knife, he mutilated her body with his teeth and a stick.
Then again, on June 12, 1982, Chikatilo encountered Lyubov Biryuk, thirteen, walking home from a shopping trip in the village of Donskoi. Once the path both were taking together was shielded from the view of potential witnesses by bushes, Chikatilo pounced upon Biryuk, dragged her into nearby undergrowth, tore off her blue floral dress, and killed her by stabbing and slashing her to death. Following Biryuk's murder, Chikatilo no longer attempted to resist his homicidal urges. Between July and December, 1982, he killed a further six victims between the ages of nine and nineteen.
Chikatilo established a pattern of approaching children, runaways, and young vagrants at bus or railway stations, enticing them to a nearby forest or other secluded area, and killing them, usually by stabbing, slashing, and disemboweling the victim with a knife. Some victims, in addition to receiving a multitude of knife wounds, were also strangled, had their eyes gouged out, or battered to death. Chikatilo's adult female victims were often prostitutes or homeless women who could be lured to secluded areas with promises of alcohol or money. Chikatilo would typically attempt intercourse with these victims, but he would usually be unable to get an erection, which would again send him into a murderous fury, especially if the woman mocked his impotence. He would achieve orgasm only when he stabbed the victim to death.
Chikatilo did not kill again until June 1983, but he had killed five more times by September of that year. The accumulation of bodies and the similarities between the patterns of wounds inflicted on the victims forced the Soviet authorities to acknowledge that a serial killer was on the loose, and on September 6, 1983, the public prosecutor of the USSR formally linked six of the murders thus far committed to the same killer.
A Moscow investigative team of police officers, headed by Major Mikhail Fetisov, was sent to Rostov-on-Don to direct the investigation. Major Fetisov centered the investigations on the Shakhty area and assigned a specialist forensic analyst, Victor Burakov, to lead the investigation. Due to the absolute savagery of the murders, much of the police effort concentrated on homosexuals, known pedophiles, mentally ill citizens, and sex offenders, slowly working through all that were known and eliminating them from the investigation. Three known homosexuals and a convicted sex offender committed suicide because of the investigator’s unsympathetic tactics. But as police obtained confessions from suspects, bodies continued to be discovered, proving that the suspects who had confessed could not be the killer the police were seeking.
In October of 1983, Chikatilo killed a nineteen-year-old prostitute and in December a fourteen-year-old pupil named Sergey Markov. In January and February of 1984, Chikatilo killed two women in Rostov's Aviators Park and on March 24, lured Dmitry Ptashnikov, ten years old, away from a stamp kiosk in Novoshakhtinsk. While walking with the boy, Chikatilo was seen by several witnesses who were able to give investigators a detailed description of the killer. When the boy’s body was found three days later, police also discovered a footprint of the killer, as well as semen and saliva samples on the victim's clothes.
On May 25, Chikatilo killed a young woman, Tatyana Petrosyan, and her eleven-year-old daughter, Svetlana, in a wooded area outside Shakhty. Tatyana had known Chikatilo for several years prior to her murder. By July 19, he had killed three more young women between the ages of nineteen and twenty-two, and a boy of only thirteen.
Chikatilo was fired in 1984 from his work as a supply clerk for theft. The allegation had been filed against Chikatilo the previous February and he had been asked to leave quietly, but had refused to do so as he had disapproved of the charges. Chikatilo found another job as a supply clerk in Rostov and in early August he killed Natalya Golosovskaya, sixteen, in Aviators Park, and the next day another girl only seventeen, dumping her body on the banks of the Don River before flying to the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent on a business trip.
By the time Chikatilo returned to Rostov in mid-August, he had killed another young woman and a twelve- year-old girl. Within two weeks, an eleven year-old boy had been found strangled and castrated with his eyes gouged out in Rostov before a young librarian, Irina Luchinskaya, was killed in Rostov's Aviators Park in early September. Exactly one week after his fifteenth killing of the year, Chikatilo was observed by an undercover
