The red ripper, p.13
The Red Ripper, page 13
Namestnikov studied Kazakov’s report. He, too, was alarmed at what was going on in Rostov and believed there was a need to shake things up a little. But at that time, no one with the experience and seniority was free to tackle the case. He came up with a temporary solution, instead: Kazakov should go back down south as the head of a group of specialists and spend a month looking more thoroughly into the murders and at the way in which they were being handled. Then and only then would Namestnikov himself join him and decide further action.
And so, in September 1984, Kazakov was back. His job was essentially to look at the work being done by the local prosecutors. The activities of the police were to be supervised by Ivan Krapov, a top Moscow-based official in the central department of the Interior Ministry’s Criminal Investigation Department. With a battery of experts from a number of different scientific disciplines, they were determined to make up for the slowness and downright incompetence which had characterised the earlier part of the operation. They did not dare to consider what a huge job they would have on their hands.
Installed in the dingy headquarters of the local prosecutor’s office in Bolshaya Sadovaya Street, Kazakov began to study all the recent unsolved crimes in the area, particularly those with any kind of sexual basis or involving children or young people. The more he looked at the files, the more he became convinced by his initial hunch that a large group of them were the work of one man. He came up with a total of 23 that he believed should be linked into one case. His list started with Lyuba Biryuk, the thirteen-year-old girl whose body had been found by the side of the road in the little village of Donskoi back in June 1982. Convincing himself was the easy part. The bigger task was persuading the police.
The relationship between police and prosecutors was often a sensitive one in the Soviet system. On paper, at least, the division was clear. The job of the police is to find the criminal. They are the ones out on the streets, whether on foot or in cars, doing the groundwork, staking out buildings and handling informers. The Public Prosecutor’s Department, or rather its investigative branch, has no part in all that. Its men come into play only once the suspect is hauled in, questioning him or her and organising the forensic and other scientific analyses. They are also parts of two separate bureaucracies which answer ultimately to different masters in Moscow: the police to the Interior Minister and the prosecutors to the Prosecutor-General.
In practice, there are often tensions. The prosecutors, most of whom have been to university, are frequently critical of the police, often complaining that they are poorly educated, badly paid and inefficient. For their part, the police feel misunderstood and claim that no one appreciates the difficulties and frustrations of their work. The more important the case and the longer it drags on, the greater those tensions are likely to be.
It should not be forgotten that this case was a particularly difficult one. Despite all the murders, the real evidence was extremely thin. The bodies were also often badly decomposed by the time they were found. Of Kazakov’s 23, some thirteen were virtual skeletons by the time they made their way to the morgue. In Rostov, the summer temperature can often soar to the mid-nineties or more. In that kind of heat, a body can turn to a skeleton in as little as ten days. And some bodies lay undetected for five to six months.
The police already had Tyapkin and the other inmates of the psychiatric hostel under investigation. Each of them was charged with several murders and, what is more, each of them had confessed. Although their cases had not yet come to trial, there was little doubt that a court would convict. If they accepted Kazakov’s theory of a single killer, they would also be admitting that the men in their cells were innocent. This would have been extremely embarrassing for all involved—from those on the ground who had arrested them and taken their confessions, to those higher up in the police hierarchy who had placed their confidence in them and accepted their hypothesis at face value.
It would be unfair to say, though, that it was merely a matter of pride. The police did not share Kazakov’s doubts about the reliability of the men’s confessions. They seemed genuine enough to them. In their defence, they also pointed out that both Tyapkin and Ponomarev had been able to identify with some accuracy the places where they had supposedly carried out their killings. The fact that the two were mentally subnormal made this more, rather than less, reliable, they maintained. As they saw it, neither of the men seemed capable of inventing a story like that.
Kazakov’s theory also seemed to go against all the basic assumptions that Soviet police made about murderers. In their book, a killer normally either attacked men or he attacked women. In fact, some of the earlier male victims had even been identified as having been women, such was their adherence to the tenet that the victims must be of the same sex. But now they were being confronted with a kaleidoscope of different ages, sexes and backgrounds. It was extremely difficult for them to deal with a killer like Chikatilo who seemed indifferent to the nature and sex of his victim.
It was difficult for Kazakov, too. Yet he was prepared to suspend his disbelief in the face of the facts. For him, the most important clue was the way the victims had been killed. Mutilation of bodies was rare enough in itself. Even rarer were the injuries that they kept finding, particularly the stab wounds around the eyes and the amputated nipples and sexual organs. It would be too much of a coincidence for two or more killers, acting independently, to have this same trademark. Nor could it be a copycat killing—the media had still not reported any of the details. He was also swayed by the distribution of the bodies, most of which were found roughly along a line between Rostov and Shakhti.
Kazakov’s hunch was also backed by the forensic evidence. One of his biggest complaints about the case had been the almost casual way in which police had handled the clothing of the victims and other objects picked up at the scene of the crime. Some of what could have been vital evidence had simply disappeared. And the bulk of what they still had in their hands had not been properly analysed and key tests not carried out. A shortage of manpower and resources was one thing, this verged on the purely incompetent.
Among the group who had come down from Moscow was Svetlana Gurtova, head of the criminal biological department of the Russian Ministry of Health. A ferocious worker, she literally locked herself away for ten days and nights in a laboratory in Rostov with local experts, and went through the often ripped, bloodstained clothing with a fine-tooth comb. Every fibre, every strand, was subjected to the kind of painstaking examination that should have been carried out from the very start. She also looked for traces of sperm—a search which, inexplicably, had not been carried out before. It quickly yielded results. She founds signs of it on the clothing of nine of the victims and believed that it must belong to their killer. Like blood, sperm is divided into distinct groups. In what constituted a major breakthrough, Gurtova found that they all belonged to the same group: AB.
Kazakov already had most of what he wanted. Then he came up with the coup de grâce, the vital element to demolish a case which had been built almost entirely on confessions. Even if there was no evidence that Tyapkin and the others had been physically mistreated, he did not exclude the possibility that they had undergone strong psychological pressure to make them confess. Given their mental weakness, he also feared that they did not really understand the gravity of the charges to which they were admitting. As he had suspected, when he went to question them himself, they told him straight out that they had not carried out these crimes at all—in direct contradiction to what they had told the police. So why had they confessed in the first place? The way he saw it, they were so incapable of understanding what was happening that they would have confessed virtually to anything. And so it turned out. While going through the cases, Kazakov found that the eleven crimes admitted to by the unfortunate Kalenik included the killing of Valya Chuchulina, the mentally subnormal 22-year-old woman whose body was found just outside the town of Shakhti late in September 1983. There was only one problem: Kalenik was already sitting in jail at the time when the girl was killed.
It was enough for Kazakov and it was enough for his bosses too. When Namestnikov saw his findings, he agreed to his proposal to unite his list of 23 into one case and to create a special joint police and prosecutors’ group to which the locals from both branches would all be subordinated. Given the seriousness of the case and the sheer volume of material, the Rostov region was divided into two: the murders in the city of Rostov were put under the control of Rashid Aliyev, a prosecutor from the neighbouring north Caucasian republic of Dagestan, whilst a man named Ustinikov, an investigator from the Rostov region’s prosecutor’s office and a specialist in serious crimes, was put in charge of the rest of the area, based in Shakhti. To his relief, Kazakov himself was allowed to fly home to Moscow.
The next week, Namestnikov’s decision was formalised. On 8 October 1984 Yuri Velikanov, head of the criminal department of the Russian Public Prosecutor’s Office, signed the necessary order to link the cases and dropped the murder charges against the existing suspects. They didn’t all walk free though. Several of them had also been charged with various homosexual acts, still illegal under Soviet law, as well as other public order offences, and so they served a few more months in jail.
Although pleased that they had finally won their case, Kazakov and his colleagues in the Public Prosecutor’s Office were understandably angry about the way the whole investigation had been handled. The police had been so certain of the guilt of the men they were holding in custody that they had neglected other ultimately more fruitful lines of enquiry. And this was at a time when the real killer, who was clearly still at large, had been at his most active, adding eight murders to his horrific tally in July and August alone. Even Major-General Mikhail Fetisov, the current head of Rostov police and a staunch defender of police conduct during this difficult period, admitted subsequently that the whole investigation had reached a dead end by the summer of 1984.
All these years later, it is still as difficult to understand how police could spend so much time on what was patently the wrong tack. Was it an isolated case of sloppy work on their part or was it merely a symptom of the way the whole system of criminal investigation worked under the Communists? The performance of police the world over is judged largely on the percentage of solved and unsolved crimes. But in the Soviet Union this was particularly so. As the case of Kravchenko, five years earlier, had shown, the main thing often seemed merely to be to have a suspect. It mattered less that it was sometimes the wrong man.
The questions are more than purely academic ones, for Velikanov’s decree did not simply drop the charges against the innocent men. Acting in response to evidence collected by Kazakov, the Public Prosecutor’s Office also opened its own probe into what had gone wrong with the police investigation and the so-called ‘contraventions of legality’ committed along the way. Eight years later, the case was still open, a source of continuing tension between police and the prosecutors. Until Chikatilo himself was convicted, the whole procedure was in limbo. But once he was confirmed as guilty for the killings wrongly attributed to the others, then the way was open to move forward. As for the results, only time would tell.
With the passing of the resolution, the investigation should have been back on track. It wasn’t. Part of the reason was that many in the police remained unconvinced by the new theory that had been imposed on them by far-away Moscow. Angry at the way that they appeared to have been overruled, they clung to their version of events, even well after Kalenik and the other initial suspects had been released.
Among the experts who had come down to Rostov with Kazakov had been several psychiatrists from Moscow’s Serbsky Institute, who were trying to draw up a ‘psychological portrait’ of the killer. A local psychiatrist, Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, had already had an attempt at the problem and come up with a description, which, although necessarily vague, turned out in retrospect to have been a fairly good likeness. In particular, he had stressed correctly that the mystery killer was likely to be an ostensibly normal, probably married man with a regular job rather than the crazed maniac many supposed. The experts from the Serbsky agreed. Like Bukhanovsky, they were also sure that the killer would not be able to stop his activities. Yet this was exactly what was happening.
In fact, after the carnage of summer 1984, things had gone suspiciously quiet in the Rostov region. Of course, people were still getting murdered. There was such a high crime rate there that one could not expect anything else. But none of the bodies had the tell-tale injuries which would mark them as the work of ‘their’ killer. The last two bodies had been found in September in Aviators’ Park: that of Irina Luchinskaya, the 24-year-old tomboy, on the seventh; and that of a beautiful twenty-year-old prostitute named Sveta Tsana, two days later. But several months had passed since then, and there had been nothing more. As the prosecutors saw it, something had clearly happened to the killer. The only problem was what.
The theories were numerous, each of them plunging them into what was to be a huge and ultimately fruitless investigation. The first and most obvious explanation was that the killer had died. But how? Suicide was one possibility or maybe an accident of some sort, perhaps a car crash. The investigators checked both accident and suicide records, but did not come up with anyone who might have fitted the bill. There was also the possibility that he was alive and well and simply committing crimes elsewhere in the Soviet Union. So they began to step up contacts with police forces in other regions in the hope of finding similar murders. But here, too, they drew a blank.
There was also a third possibility, although no one put much faith in it: that the killer had been arrested for some other crime and was actually, unbeknownst to them, already in jail. It did not seem very plausible, but still had to be checked. So they began the enormous task of checking through the prison population, one by one, for likely suspects. It was a massive job, so they allowed themselves to narrow the field: as the research on the sperm samples done by Gurtova showed the killer to have ‘AB’ blood, they restricted their search to those prisoners who had that group.
When Major Gennady Bondarenko, deputy head of the police in the Pervomaisky district of Rostov, came to work on 13 September 1984, a report was waiting on his desk. He immediately began to study it. In the early hours of that morning, one of his most experienced men, inspector Aleksandr Zanasovski, had detained a man behaving suspiciously at the city’s central market. According to the officer’s report, he had been watching him for more than nine hours since late the previous evening, during which time he had travelled across the city and made several attempts to pick up women. Most interesting, though, was what Zanasovski had found in the man’s bag: knives and some lengths of rope.
Even in normal times, all this would have been reason for investigation. But these were not normal times. There was a serial killer on the loose out there. So, Bondarenko went down to the interview room and had the man brought in. Like Zanasovski, he had to agree that he seemed an unlikely sex offender on the face of it: married with two children, Communist Party member, responsible job at Sevkavenergoavtomatika, and so on. Nor did the man’s name, Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo, mean anything more to him than it had to Zanasovski.
But the more Bondarenko talked to him, the odder Chikatilo seemed. As they sat there, face to face across the little wooden table, Bondarenko ran through his officer’s report aloud, describing to his suspect how his nocturnal journey backwards and forwards across Rostov had been observed and recorded in its entirety from the moment that he first started trying to pick up women in the station.
‘So, Comrade Chikatilo,’ the policeman said slowly, as he laid the report down on the desk. ‘What have you got to say about all that?’
‘I missed the train and needed somewhere to spend the night,’ Chikatilo replied. ‘The bus station was closed, so I went over to the railway station. That’s all.’
Regardless of their questions, he refused to explain why he had kept criss-crossing the city. Nor did he provide an explanation for the knives and ropes.
Bondarenko realised that he needed to take a closer look at Chikatilo. So, in order to be able to keep his suspect in custody, he sent him over to the equivalent of the local magistrate’s court where he was charged with minor hooliganism—the usual wrap for harassing women—and given ten days. To Bondarenko’s regret, that was as far as he could go. Under the rules established by the investigative team, anyone suspected of involvement in the ‘Forest Path’ killings had to be handed over to them. From then on, it was out of his hands.
When the investigators to whom Chikatilo had been passed began to check up on their suspect, they quickly turned up an interesting fact, namely that he had been questioned several times back in 1978 in Shakhti over the killing of Lena Zakotnova, the little girl whose body had been found tossed into the Grushevka River. During the course of questioning, Chikatilo had revealed how he had been forced out of teaching because of the series of misdemeanours involving his pupils. Combined with his strange behaviour and the suspicious contents of his bag, it was enough for the investigators. They began to think he might be the killer.
In particular, they suspected a link with the murder of Dima Ptashnikov, the ten-year-old boy who had been killed six months before in Novoshakhtinsk, the only case for which they had any real clues. Although the evidence was thin, Chikatilo had the right shoe size. He also seemed to fit the rough description that they obtained from a witness who had seen a man going off with the dead boy.
Although he had been knocked off balance by his arrest, Chikatilo had recovered his composure and told them their theory was rubbish. He knew the evidence that the police had against him was flimsy and was determined that he was not going to confess to the murder of Ptashnikov—any more than he would admit to the twenty-odd other killings that he had already committed. Taking the offensive, he started insisting on his rights and demanded to be released immediately. They ignored him. Armed with the hooliganism charge, they could still hold him for a few more days, and, in the meantime, they took a sample of blood with the aim of trying to match it with the traces of sperm found on the boy’s clothing.
