Martin Antonenko
A Fixture
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2008
- Messages
- 8,994
The Rostov Ripper...
On November 20, 1990, the biggest manhunt that has ever existed in the Soviet Union ends!
On this day, detectives and militia members arrested the mass murderer Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo while fetching beer in Novocherkassk-on-Don.
The hunt for Tschikatilo lasted twelve years, who – at least (that much could be proven)! - Killed 52 people and escaped his captors again and again.
The criminal file against the serial killer, born in 1936 and father of two children, comprised 222 volumes.
His handwritten confessions, stylish, devoid of obscene words, and dictated from an almost photographic memory, are a monstrous document of sadism, necrophilia, and cannibalism.
Chikatilo murdered under four Soviet party leaders, cunningly, obsessively, mechanically
During the twelve-year manhunt, 165,000 blood samples were taken, 500,000 people checked, and five million resident registration cards checked.
Wrongly suspects were beaten to death by investigators or driven to suicide.
The choreography of the horror was always the same: Chikatilo, who was suffering from impotence, imitated the sexual act with a knife. 30 times, 50 times he stabbed. He cut out hearts and wombs, he ate private parts and bit off the tips of tongues.
Then he danced around the dead and hissed: "I'm a red partisan!"
In 1983 the police established the special commission "Forest Stripes". The brawny Viktor Burakov was named chief of the investigation...
...on the phantom.
The only clue: traces of sperm from blood group AB were found on all the stabbed people.
Six years later, the police knew little more. Without logistics and forensic know-how and without the help of trained psychologists, the Rostov special commission threw itself into the work.
His first murder could have put Tschikatilo behind bars. While still a teacher, he secretly bought an old mud hut in Shakhty, 40 miles from Rostov.
In December 1978 he lured a nine-year-old girl to the dacha. He threw the body into a nearby creek.
During a routine interrogation, the nervous-looking man got caught up in contradictions.
A spatter of blood was discovered in front of the house. There was also a phantom drawing with Chikatilo's contours....:
But despite these clues, the killer was released. The militia (that's what the police were called in the Soviet Union!) had focused on another suspect, the convicted Alexandr Kravchenko, who lived near the crime scene....:
After brutal interrogations, Kravchenko's alibi witnesses retracted their statements. Then the officials put a "mother hen", a kind of torturer, in the accused's prison cell.
Severely beaten, Kravchenko confessed to a crime he never committed. In 1983 he was executed.
The population reacted with panic to the bloody deeds. Adventurous rumors circulated in Rostov: it was said that an "Armenian transplant gang" was exploiting the murder victims, and that a mad surgeon was at work.
Meanwhile, the investigation was hectic and confused, behind a wall of silence. Although the perpetrator struck several times at certain locations, no one was warned. Alone in the so called "Pilots Park"...
...a piece of forest near the Rostov airfield, the investigators discovered seven bodies.
Only in 1989, thanks to Gorbachev's glasnost policy, was the public informed of the extent of the horror and asked to help.
Finally, the militia began systematically checking bus stations and train platforms. Civilian squads patrolled the Shakhty, Rostov, Novoshakhtinsk and Novocherkassk routes.
In August 1984, an investigator observed a bespectacled man approaching children indiscriminately at a Rostov bus terminal. The policeman checked the suspect's papers: married, living in Shakhty, a Tolkach (= material procurer of an industrial combine). He let him go.
On November 6, 1990, Tschikatiloes overdid it with his audacity. Again he had visited one of his favorite places and dismembered a 22-year-old girl in the woods near the forestry station.
With bloodstains on his cheek and earlobe, he climbed out of the bushes. A camouflaged militiaman checked him on the platform. Chikatilo's art of dissimulation was now highly developed.
The officer reluctantly let him go.
But the police officer reported the name of the person being checked to his superiors. An officer hesitated. Chikatilo? Old investigation files were combed through. When a train ticket seller was able to vaguely describe the companion of the last murder victim, the giant criminological puzzle was closed.
On November 20, 1990, the police arrested the mass murderer.
Chikatilo didn't protest, almost humbly he put his arms in the handcuffs. One investigator remembers the "prosaic" finale: "He behaved like a man who had waited a long time for this moment."
The next picture shows him during his first interrogation. Next to him is chief investigator Burakov...:
A large number of different murder weapons were secured in his house...:
Chikatilo came to trial at in Rostov-on-Don in 1992...
...and sentenced to death.
During the trial, Chikatilo wallowed in his role, constantly taunting the court and the victims' families...:
He was executed in Novocherkassk on February 14, 1994 - President Boris Yeltsin had refused the degree act.
The long hunt for Tschikatilo also uncovered immense omissions by the police, which (from the old days) revealed far too much - if necessary tortured out - "confessions" and far too little understood modern investigative methods.
Only in the final phase of the hunt for Chikatilo were even contacted "profilers" of the US FBI out of desperation - until then unique in Russian-Soviet criminal history!
In the story, Tshikatilo is only surpassed in terms of his victims by the former nurse Niels Högel, whom the police and public prosecutor's office have now accused of at least 106 murders of patients in the Oldenburg and Delmenhorst hospitals...:
Högel has since been sentenced to life imprisonment with subsequent preventive detention (he will never be released again!). The actual number of his victims is likely to be even higher than previously known.
On November 20, 1990, the biggest manhunt that has ever existed in the Soviet Union ends!
On this day, detectives and militia members arrested the mass murderer Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo while fetching beer in Novocherkassk-on-Don.
The hunt for Tschikatilo lasted twelve years, who – at least (that much could be proven)! - Killed 52 people and escaped his captors again and again.
The criminal file against the serial killer, born in 1936 and father of two children, comprised 222 volumes.
His handwritten confessions, stylish, devoid of obscene words, and dictated from an almost photographic memory, are a monstrous document of sadism, necrophilia, and cannibalism.
Chikatilo murdered under four Soviet party leaders, cunningly, obsessively, mechanically
During the twelve-year manhunt, 165,000 blood samples were taken, 500,000 people checked, and five million resident registration cards checked.
Wrongly suspects were beaten to death by investigators or driven to suicide.
The choreography of the horror was always the same: Chikatilo, who was suffering from impotence, imitated the sexual act with a knife. 30 times, 50 times he stabbed. He cut out hearts and wombs, he ate private parts and bit off the tips of tongues.
Then he danced around the dead and hissed: "I'm a red partisan!"
In 1983 the police established the special commission "Forest Stripes". The brawny Viktor Burakov was named chief of the investigation...
...on the phantom.
The only clue: traces of sperm from blood group AB were found on all the stabbed people.
Six years later, the police knew little more. Without logistics and forensic know-how and without the help of trained psychologists, the Rostov special commission threw itself into the work.
His first murder could have put Tschikatilo behind bars. While still a teacher, he secretly bought an old mud hut in Shakhty, 40 miles from Rostov.
In December 1978 he lured a nine-year-old girl to the dacha. He threw the body into a nearby creek.
During a routine interrogation, the nervous-looking man got caught up in contradictions.
A spatter of blood was discovered in front of the house. There was also a phantom drawing with Chikatilo's contours....:
But despite these clues, the killer was released. The militia (that's what the police were called in the Soviet Union!) had focused on another suspect, the convicted Alexandr Kravchenko, who lived near the crime scene....:
After brutal interrogations, Kravchenko's alibi witnesses retracted their statements. Then the officials put a "mother hen", a kind of torturer, in the accused's prison cell.
Severely beaten, Kravchenko confessed to a crime he never committed. In 1983 he was executed.
The population reacted with panic to the bloody deeds. Adventurous rumors circulated in Rostov: it was said that an "Armenian transplant gang" was exploiting the murder victims, and that a mad surgeon was at work.
Meanwhile, the investigation was hectic and confused, behind a wall of silence. Although the perpetrator struck several times at certain locations, no one was warned. Alone in the so called "Pilots Park"...
...a piece of forest near the Rostov airfield, the investigators discovered seven bodies.
Only in 1989, thanks to Gorbachev's glasnost policy, was the public informed of the extent of the horror and asked to help.
Finally, the militia began systematically checking bus stations and train platforms. Civilian squads patrolled the Shakhty, Rostov, Novoshakhtinsk and Novocherkassk routes.
In August 1984, an investigator observed a bespectacled man approaching children indiscriminately at a Rostov bus terminal. The policeman checked the suspect's papers: married, living in Shakhty, a Tolkach (= material procurer of an industrial combine). He let him go.
On November 6, 1990, Tschikatiloes overdid it with his audacity. Again he had visited one of his favorite places and dismembered a 22-year-old girl in the woods near the forestry station.
With bloodstains on his cheek and earlobe, he climbed out of the bushes. A camouflaged militiaman checked him on the platform. Chikatilo's art of dissimulation was now highly developed.
The officer reluctantly let him go.
But the police officer reported the name of the person being checked to his superiors. An officer hesitated. Chikatilo? Old investigation files were combed through. When a train ticket seller was able to vaguely describe the companion of the last murder victim, the giant criminological puzzle was closed.
On November 20, 1990, the police arrested the mass murderer.
Chikatilo didn't protest, almost humbly he put his arms in the handcuffs. One investigator remembers the "prosaic" finale: "He behaved like a man who had waited a long time for this moment."
The next picture shows him during his first interrogation. Next to him is chief investigator Burakov...:
A large number of different murder weapons were secured in his house...:
Chikatilo came to trial at in Rostov-on-Don in 1992...
...and sentenced to death.
During the trial, Chikatilo wallowed in his role, constantly taunting the court and the victims' families...:
He was executed in Novocherkassk on February 14, 1994 - President Boris Yeltsin had refused the degree act.
The long hunt for Tschikatilo also uncovered immense omissions by the police, which (from the old days) revealed far too much - if necessary tortured out - "confessions" and far too little understood modern investigative methods.
Only in the final phase of the hunt for Chikatilo were even contacted "profilers" of the US FBI out of desperation - until then unique in Russian-Soviet criminal history!
In the story, Tshikatilo is only surpassed in terms of his victims by the former nurse Niels Högel, whom the police and public prosecutor's office have now accused of at least 106 murders of patients in the Oldenburg and Delmenhorst hospitals...:
Högel has since been sentenced to life imprisonment with subsequent preventive detention (he will never be released again!). The actual number of his victims is likely to be even higher than previously known.
