detective attempting to lure young women away from a Rostov bus station. He was arrested and held. A search of his belongings revealed a knife and rope. He was also discovered to be under investigation for minor theft at one of his former employers, which gave the investigators the legal right to hold him for a prolonged period. Chikatilo's dubious background was uncovered, and his physical description matched the description of the man seen with Dmitry Ptashnikov in March. These factors alone did not provide enough evidence to convict him of the murders. He was, however, found guilty of theft of property from his previous employer and sentenced to one year in prison, but was freed on December 12, 1984 after serving only three months.
Following the September 6 murder of Irina Luchinskaya, no further bodies were found bearing the trademark mutilation of Chikatilo's murders. Investigators in Rostov theorized that the unknown killer might have moved to another part of the Soviet Union and continued killing there. The Rostov police sent bulletins to all forces throughout the Soviet Union, describing the pattern of wounds their unknown killer inflicted upon his victims, and requested feedback from any police force that had discovered victims with wounds matching those upon the victims found in the Rostov Oblast. The response was negative.
Upon his release from jail, Chikatilo found new work in Novocherkassk and kept a low profile. He did not kill again until seven months after getting out of jail when he murdered a young woman close to Domodedovo Airport, near Moscow. One month later, in August, Chikatilo killed another woman in Shakhty. Both victims were linked to the hunt for the killer as the same modus operandi was used in the killings.
In November of 1985, a special procurator named Issa Kostoyev was appointed to supervise the investigation of the serial killer. The known murders around Rostov were carefully re-investigated and police began questioning known sex offenders again. The following month, the militia and Voluntary People's Druzhina renewed the patrolling of railway stations around Rostov. The police also took the step of consulting a psychiatrist, Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky, the first such consultation in a serial killer investigation in the Soviet Union. Bukhanovsky produced a sixty-five page psychological profile of the unknown killer for the investigators, describing the killer as a man between forty-five and fifty years old who was of average intelligence, likely to be married or had previously been married, but also a sadist who could achieve sexual arousal only by seeing his victims suffer. Bukhanovsky also argued that because many of the killings had occurred on weekdays near mass transportation and across the entire Rostov Oblast, the killer's work required him to travel regularly and, based upon the actual days of the week when the killings had occurred, the killer was most likely tied to a production schedule.
Chikatilo followed the investigation carefully, reading newspaper reports about the manhunt for the killer, and kept his homicidal urges under control. Throughout 1986 he is not known to have committed any murders. That did not last long.
In 1987, Chikatilo killed three more times. On each occasion he killed while on a business trip far away from the Rostov Oblast, and none of those murders were linked to the manhunt in Rostov. Chikatilo's committed his first murder of 1987 in May when he killed a thirteen-year-old boy named Oleg Makarenkov in Revda. In July, he killed another boy in Zaporozhye, and a third in Leningrad in September. In 1988, Chikatilo killed three times, murdering an unidentified woman in Krasny-Sulin in April, and two boys in May and July. His first killing bore wounds similar to those inflicted on the victims linked to the manhunt killed between 1982 and 1985, but as the woman had been killed with a slab of concrete, investigators were unsure whether or not to link the murder to the investigation. In May of the same year, Chikatilo killed a nine-year-old boy in Ilovaisk, Ukraine. The boy's wounds left no doubt that the killer had struck again; this murder was linked to the manhunt. On July 14, Chikatilo killed a fifteen-year old boy named Yevgeny Muratov at Donleskhoz station near Shakhty. Muratov's murder was also linked to the investigation, although his body was not found until April, 1989.
Chikatilo did not kill again for another year, not until March 8, 1989, when he killed a sixteen-year-old girl in his daughter's vacant apartment. He dismembered her body and hid the remains in a sewer. As the victim had been dismembered, police did not link her murder to the investigation. Between May and August, Chikatilo killed a further four victims, three of whom were killed in Rostov and Shakhty, although only two of the victims were linked to the killer.
On January 14, 1990, Chikatilo killed an eleven-year-old boy in Shakhty. On March 7, he killed a ten-year old boy named Yaroslav Makarov in Rostov Botanical Gardens. The eviscerated body was found the following day. On March 11, the leaders of the investigation, headed by Mikhail Fetisov, held a meeting to discuss progress made in the hunt for the killer. Fetisov was under intense pressure from the public, the press, and the Ministry of the Interior in Moscow, to solve the case. The intensity of the manhunt in the years up to 1984 had receded a degree between 1985 and 1987, when only two victims had been conclusively linked to the killer, both of them in 1985.
But by March 1990, six further victims had been linked to the serial killer. Fetisov had noted laxity in some areas of the investigation, and warned that people would be fired if the killer was not caught soon. Chikatilo killed three further victims by August. On April 4, he killed a thirty-one year old woman in woodland near Donleskhoz station; on July 28, he lured a thirteen year old boy away from a Rostov train station and killed him in Rostov Botanical Gardens; and on August 14, he killed an eleven year old boy in the reeds near Novocherkassk beach.
Police deployed a very visible 360 men at all the stations in the Rostov Oblast, and positioned undercover officers at the three smallest stations: Kirpichnaya, Donleskhoz, and Lesoste. These were the routes through the Oblast where the killer had struck most frequently. Police hoped to force the killer to strike at one of these three stations. The operation was implemented on October 27, 1990, but, on October 30, police found the body of a sixteen-year-old boy named Vadim Gromov at Donleskhoz Station. Gromov, however, had been killed on October 17, ten days before the start of the initiative. The same day Gromov's body was found, Chikatilo lured another sixteen year-old boy, Viktor Tishchenko, off a train at Kirpichnaya Station, a different station under surveillance from undercover police, and killed him in a nearby forest.
Just six days later, Chikatilo killed and mutilated a twenty-two year-old woman named Svetlana Korostik in a woodland near Donleskhoz Station. While leaving the crime scene, an undercover officer spotted him approach a well and wash his hands and face. When Chikatilo approached the station, the undercover officer noted that his coat had grass and soil stains on the elbows, and Chikatilo had a small red smear on his cheek. To the officer, he looked suspicious. The only reason people entered woodland near the station at that time of year was to gather wild mushrooms, a popular pastime in Russia. Chikatilo, however, was not dressed like a typical forest hiker. He was wearing more formal attire. Moreover, he had a nylon sports bag, which was not suitable for carrying mushrooms.
The undercover police officer stopped Chikatilo and checked his papers, but had no formal reason to arrest him. When the police officer returned to his office, he filed a routine report, containing the name of the person he had stopped at the train station. On November 13, Korostik's body was found. Police summoned the officer in charge of surveillance at Donleskhoz Station and examined the reports of all men stopped and questioned in the previous week. Chikatilo's name was among those reports, and his name was familiar to several officers involved in the case, as he had been questioned in 1984 and placed upon a 1987 suspect list that had been compiled and distributed throughout the Soviet Union. Upon checking with Chikatilo's present and previous employers, investigators were able to place Chikatilo in various towns and cities at times when several victims linked to the investigation had been killed.
Arrest
Former colleagues from Chikatilo's teaching days informed investigators that Chikatilo had been forced to resign from his teaching position due to complaints of sexual assault from several pupils. Police placed Chikatilo
