The red ripper, p.8
The Red Ripper, page 8
One feature of the killings was almost like the murderer’s signature: virtually every body they found had stab wounds around the eyes. As a phenomenon, it was extremely rare. Later, when other bodies were found hundreds of miles from Rostov, it was these bizarre eye-wounds which would help police to identify the victims as ‘one of theirs’. Explaining it was not so easy. According to one theory, the murderer believed the old wives’ tale that a dead person’s retinas somehow retain the last image they see before death—in this case the face of their killer. Another more likely theory was that the killer was so ashamed of what he was doing and so unwilling to come to terms with it that he tried to avoid the gaze of the victims. Blinding or at the very least blindfolding them was the only way.
But if they were similar in death, then in life the victims had been very different. They were a strange mixture of age, social background and of sex. Like Biryuk, Pozhidayev had been an innocent child who had been unlucky enough to cross Chikatilo’s path. But most of the others fitted into the mould of Tkachenko, victims of broken homes, who had drifted out of conventional society into extreme promiscuity and then into prostitution.
This was certainly true of Karabelnikova, an eighteen-year-old who had been killed after going off willingly for sex with Chikatilo. The product of a broken marriage, she had lived first with her coalminer father, then, after falling out with him, she had gone off to her mother. However, she quarrelled with her as well and went to live in a hostel. An affair with a soldier offered a way out, but their wedding plans fell through and she was caught in the middle, with no one to confide in besides a grandmother. Given the variety of places where she lived, it was days before her disappearance was even noticed. As for her body, it lay unnoticed for a full two weeks before it was found.
It was precisely this problem which made it so difficult for police to solve many of the murders. Other than catching the killer in the act of carrying out the crime, the solving of a murder usually begins with identifying the victim. However, if the police do not even know the name of the dead man or woman, it is difficult to move to the next stage: where they lived, where they worked, where they spent their time and who their friends were—in short, all the kind of information that is needed to reconstruct the last few hours and days of their lives and ultimately to track down the killer.
With many of Chikatilo’s early victims, it was precisely this problem of identification that was the difficult part. Many of the women he killed in the first few years were people whom nobody cared about. Some were teenage girls caught between their mother and father in broken homes. Others were mentally disturbed women from hostels or else tramps, alcoholics and prostitutes who walked the streets by day and spent their nights in railway stations. In comparison with large Western cities like London or New York, there were few homeless people in Rostov, yet, however much the Soviet authorities tried to pretend that they did not exist, they formed a perceptible social group not just in Rostov but also in many other sizeable Russian cities.
For all the Communist state’s pretensions to equality and compassion, it did very little for those at the bottom of society. Social services were badly developed and there were virtually no social workers of the type found in the West. With unemployment officially deemed non-existent, those without jobs were treated as parasites and threatened with jail rather than given help and money. Alcoholism and homelessness were also traditionally treated merely as public order problems rather than social ones. Every evening, the police would appear at the railway station, round up the tramps and either put them overnight in drying-out stations or else in the cells. The ranks of the down-and-outs were also swollen by former prison inmates, who often returned to society to find themselves without home or job or any kind of counselling on how to build a new life. Life was particularly hard for former residents of Moscow, St Petersburg (Leningrad, as it then was known as) and other cities with strict residence requirements, who were often forced into a kind of hopeless nomadic life because authorities withdrew their much-prized right to live in their home town.
It was no coincidence that Chikatilo chose this particular kind of victim. The very nature of the Rostov region meant that there was still a disproportionately large number of unregistered people living there, even in the relatively stable days of the early 1980s. Without a propiska—the formal registration of residence—a person was a mere name, not an individual let alone someone with rights, and had no place in the system. They were treated as little better than stray dogs. The police were not the only ones to be aware of the problems of tracing such people. A cool and calculating killer, Chikatilo must also have realised the obvious advantages of murdering someone whose disappearance could go unnoticed for weeks, months or even years.
But there was also a strong bond between murderer and victim, a mixture of both attraction and hatred. Even if it did not seem like it on the surface, they had a lot in common. Certainly, he had things that they did not, like a home, a good job and some money. Despite his increasingly horrific crimes, he was still in society and they had dropped out of it into the limbo below. Yet, like them, he also felt a sense of rejection, of being a misfit who was forever misunderstood and not properly appreciated by his fellow men. Some very powerful affinity drew him to them.
At the same time, he loathed and was repelled by this world where all was allowed, where the barriers of decency and morality had long since fallen. The more time he spent hanging out in the railway station, the more he was appalled by the side of humanity that he saw there. He despised the women for their drunkenness and their ready willingness to have sex with a man for the sake of a glass of vodka or a few crumbs to eat. And he hated them even more for the way that they would go off with him. Certainly there is no evidence that any of the tramps and prostitutes who allowed themselves to be picked up by him did so unwillingly.
‘They followed me like dogs,’ he told his captors later, the choice of words expressing the depth of his disgust at the ease with which they had submitted to his will and followed him. The feeling behind the remark was obvious. They deserved what they got. If only they had behaved according to higher moral standards then they would still have been alive. Yet they had come with him and by so doing had demonstrated that they had no right to live. In all likelihood, such reasoning was little more than a weak attempt to justify his actions. It also suggests that Chikatilo’s motives may not have been exclusively sexual. He conceived himself in the role of an exterminator of those whom he considered little more than vermin. In his perverted way, he began to see himself not as a killer but somehow as a cleanser of society.
It would be difficult, however, to apply that argument to Olga Stalmachenok, who disappeared in Novoshakhtinsk on 11 December 1982. A well-brought-up girl from a caring family, she set off home on the bus that afternoon from music school as she did every day. In a cruel twist of fate, the bus broke down. All the passengers had to get off at the railway station and wait for a replacement to come. It was at that moment, at about five o’clock in the afternoon, that Chikatilo made contact with her.
Years later, it turned out that several people saw the ten-year-old leave on that last fateful bus ride. There was indeed one who saw the little girl walk off with her killer and could even have identified him—if anyone had bothered to ask her. Maria Sobivchak watched the two of them walk past as she went out on to the street to fetch her own child that evening. The man was leading the girl very firmly by the hand, as if he were her father or grandfather who had just told her off for something. ‘Why is he being so harsh with her?’ she wondered at the time. The incident itself though seemed nothing to her. She could not know that a crime had been committed.
However, it stuck in her mind because of the man’s face. She felt that she knew him from somewhere. It was only years afterwards, when police came around the neighbourhood with a photograph of Chikatilo that she put two and two together. Not only had this been the man, but she also remembered where she had seen him before; Chikatilo had taught her son when he was working in the school in Novoshakhtinsk. She had even met him once when she attended a parents’ evening.
It turned out that a bus conductor had also noticed Olya. She remembered her getting off the bus when it broke down at the station, but then she disappeared during the few minutes it took for the replacement to arrive. A red car had been standing nearby and she assumed that Olya Stalmachenok had gone off in it. But she was not so sure, and realised only later that she had been one of the last people to see the little girl alive. The police never made contact with either of the women. They were pursuing another, more bizarre line of questioning.
At that time, an envelope arrived at the main post office. By the afternoon it was already on a desk at police headquarters. The postcard was addressed simply to ‘Parents of the Missing Child’. Its text was short and cruel: ‘Greetings, parents. Don’t get upset. She is not the first and not the last. Before New Year we need another 10. If you want to find her, then search among the leaves on the Vdarovşki Posadki.’ It was signed ‘Sadist—Black Cat’.
Having so far enjoyed no success in solving any of the murders, the police threw everything into their attempt to identify the author. Viktor Burakov, chief of the section for serious sexual crimes in the Rostov CID, was convinced that the card was written by someone who knew the area well. For, as he pointed out, the term Vdarovski was one used only by the locals. As the investigation gathered pace, dozens of police officers were despatched to local post offices. The desk clerks were questioned over whether they had seen anyone posting the card, or even asking to borrow a pen in order to write it.
That was only a part of it. Breaking new ground, experts from the local branch of the KGB were called in to analyse the handwriting for clues to the identity of the author. Using the individual letters which made up the text, they devised a key which was then applied to thousands of other letters and documents written by employees of factories, offices and other institutions in the region. The letter was also carefully compared with other anonymous ones reported in the past to police. To many of those taking part, the operation looked like a fruitless search for a needle in a haystack. But it was merely a foretaste of the huge operations which were to be launched in the next few years in response to a particular theory or piece of evidence.
Their bosses thought it was worth it: in the past, the same technique had been applied successfully to track down another killer, a man from the city of Vitebsk who was convicted of killing 36 women. This time, though, it drew a blank. A search of the thick undergrowth of Vdarovski Posadki failed to turn up Stalmachenok’s body—for the simple reason that it was not there. She had been killed in another stretch of woodland some distance away, and her remains lay there for four months before they were eventually discovered by chance.
Nevertheless, the police never entirely gave up the idea of a connection and even revived it briefly some four years later. But, again, it was to get them nowhere. When Chikatilo was finally arrested, he denied all knowledge of the letter. The police were already facing enough problems tracking down the killer. Now, it seemed they had to contend with a hoaxer as well. Black Cat turned out to be a red herring.
Chapter Seven
By summer 1983, the Soviet Union was going through a minor political earthquake. Nothing to compare with the turmoil that was to come at the end of that decade, but dramatic none the less. After over eighteen years in power, the ageing Leonid Brezhnev had finally died and had been replaced by Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief. His successor was barely younger and certainly not much fitter, but he was determined to inject new life into the moribund Soviet economy. And the way he wanted to achieve this was by improving discipline. Towards the end of the Brezhnev era, the whole attitude to work had been summed up by the old saying: ‘We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us’. But no more.
The pay did not get any better, but Andropov was determined that the work would. To achieve his goal he was ready to resort to the strong-arm methods that had served so well in his previous job. Employees long used to slipping out to shops, the barber or the café during working hours were hauled unceremoniously back to their bosses. Punishments meted out to these violators of ‘labour discipline’ varied from cuts in salaries and bonuses to demotion to the bottom of the waiting list for state housing. Trying to turn the whole country into a giant gulag was never going to save the Soviet economy. It was already locked into a deep, long-term decline that no amount of tinkering could change. Yet it might still have succeeded in slowing the slide if only it had been continued for a little longer.
By all accounts, Chikatilo survived the new harsh regime relatively unscathed. As he found time and time again, the great advantage of working as a supply clerk was the very independence; Andropov or no Andropov, he remained his own master. His working hours were flexible and his trips away from his office in Shakhti were frequent. If he wanted to spend hours just hanging around at the railway station or walking the street, then he was free to do so—and no one would know about it.
That was about the only thing that was going well. He was quickly beginning to realise that he was almost as bad a supply clerk as he had been a teacher. Colleagues found him cold and unfriendly and wondered why he behaved so oddly the whole time: his superiors thought him incompetent and wasted no time in telling him so.
‘As a man there was something strange about him. I cannot say that anyone particularly liked him,’ recalled one woman who worked with him as head of the warehouse where he had to bring his supplies. Others used to watch in fascination as he sat at his desk writing in a little exercise book. He was so absorbed in what he was doing that sometimes he did not even seem to hear when people were talking to him. He used to keep his distance from the men, too, never joining them when they went out drinking after work, and walking straight past when they stood in the corridor talking and smoking.
By now, his obsession was also beginning to have an effect on his work. The planyorki, the planning meetings held early every morning, inevitably saw Chikatilo receiving a sharp dressing-down from his bosses. Any job in the supply division was inevitably a thankless one. Shortages and breakdowns were a permanent feature of the old planned economy, with items always running out or turning out to have been of poor quality. And the poor supply clerk always seemed to get the blame. It was one of the hazards of the job.
Even so, Chikatilo seemed to get told off more than most. Pyotr Evgrafov, the plant’s deputy director, who chaired the meetings, began to loathe his employee so intensely that he would make him leave in the middle, just like a teacher sending out a naughty pupil. The former teacher accepted meekly, without putting up any kind of protest. But the air of indifference that he cultivated was only a front. Underneath, he was suffering. In spite of the criticism, he was convinced that he was doing his job properly. Evgrafov and the others simply didn’t like him, just as his bosses at the school hadn’t liked him. And because of that, they would pick on him and deliberately do so in front of as many people as possible.
‘God, it would be better if I went away on a trip again,’ he once said to Nina Dovgan, a brassy blonde who worked as a bookkeeper in the material supplies department. ‘At least when I am on the road, there is no one always there telling me off.’ She was about the only one in the place who didn’t have just bad words to say about him. Whenever he returned from a trip, it was Dovgan’s job to book in the materials that he had brought back. Despite all the stories about Chikatilo being a bad worker, she was more struck by his incredible memory. If she could not find anything that he was meant to have brought back, he could tell her immediately where he had put it in the warehouse, down to the last shelf or cupboard. She was also one of the few people ever to have sat down and drunk with him. Sometimes he would flirt a little with her and a couple of the other secretaries, even inviting them to join him on summer picnics to celebrate their birthdays or other special occasions. He was good fun as well. He liked jokes. But that was all. He never made a pass at her nor, as far as she could tell, at the other women.
As for everyone else, they were struck by what seemed to be Chikatilo’s increasingly odd behaviour—a product of his other, secret life which he was finding difficult to keep separate. As part of his job, for example, he would often go off by truck with a driver to pick up supplies in Rostov or other nearby cities. But once the job was done, he would stay on, sending the driver back to Shakhti on his own. ‘I’ve just got some business to attend to here,’ he would say. ‘I’ll find my own way back later.’ Even if the driver offered to wait for him, he would refuse. It seemed strange, particularly since it took a good two hours to get back by rail, and from the early evening trains became infrequent.
And there was the matter of the bag he had with him the whole time. The women in the office were always eaten up with curiosity about it and one day they couldn’t resist any longer; waiting until he had left the room for a few minutes, one of them hurriedly opened it. After all the dramatic build-up, what they saw in the end was rather disappointing. Inside they found nothing more exciting than a change of clothing, a pair of white underpants and a T-shirt. Nevertheless, it did not stop them playing a trick on him. Before closing the bag, they put in a brick as a joke. He did not say anything at the time. Despite the extra weight, he just picked up the bag when it was time to go home and took it with him. He probably did not want to open it in front of them. The next morning when he came to work he told his colleagues off for not acting their ages.
Chikatilo’s long absences from home were beginning to tell on his family life. Fayina was seeing her husband less and less, at a time when their children were going through a difficult phase. At thirteen, Yuri was getting more and more aggressive and difficult to handle. He began treating his father with contempt and used to refer to him to his face by a nickname—kozel (goat)—which is extremely insulting in Russian. There were times when he even reportedly hit his father, but Chikatilo did nothing to try and control him.
