Pichushkin sat in silence as the foreman
read out 48 successive and unanimous
guilty verdicts. Dressed in a grey V-neck
jumper, the “chessboard killer,” as the
Russian press dubbed him, showed no
remorse as the judge confirmed the
verdicts and ruled that there were no
mitigating circumstances – a preamble
to the certainty that he would be
sentenced to life in prison.
Pichushkin couldn’t be sentenced to
death like his icon Andrei Chikatilo –
Russia had had a moratorium on the
death penalty in 1996. Instead, a month
after the verdicts were delivered, he
was given life imprisonment, the first
15 years of which were to be served
in solitary confinement. The judge
ordering him to undergo psychiatric
treatment during his incarceration,
although Russia’s foremost psychiatric
institution had examined him before the
trial and declared him sane and fit to
answer for his crimes.
Throughout the sentencing hearing,
Pichushkin lounged back inside his glass
cage with one foot on a bench in front
of him, oblivious to the dense throng
of journalists crowding the courtroom.
He lowered his eyes as the sentence was
read out and appeared to smile.
The judge asked him: “Do you
understand the sentence?” Pichushkin
replied: “I am not deaf.”
Was he then mad? His mother, who
brought her children up after her
husband abandoned the family, said her
son might have been affected by a blow
on the head by a child’s swing at the age
of four, and by the sudden loss of his
grandfather, the only paternal figure in
his life.
If he was mad, he had made a skilful
job of covering it. When he was at home
he successfully kept up a pretence
of being quite normal. Neighbours
described him as quiet, gentle and fond
of animals.
One neighbour, Svetlana Mortakova,
remembered that as a boy Pichushkin
was always pleasant and polite. “Once I
found him in tears in the stairwell of the
block of flats where we lived, speechless
with grief over the death of his cat,” she
said.
Prosecutors stated they would
continue to investigate at least 11
other murders that he confessed
to. If his role in those killings
were confirmed, he would have
achieved his ambition. The man
who numbers his victims as if they
were sacks of corn could be the
most prolific convicted serial killer
in Russian history.
CHIKATILO WAS CHESSBOARD
KILLER’S ROLE MODEL
CHIKATILO WAS CHESSBOARD
KILLER’S ROLE MODEL
A
NDREI Romanovich Chikatilo
was born in October 1936 in the
shadow of one of Josef Stalin’s purges
in the south-east corner of the USSR.
In his youth he was bright enough
to earn a good degree in Russian
literature from the University of
Rostov. In 1966, when he was 30 years
old, he married and fathered a son and
daughter.
It was around the mid-1970s that
his sexual envy and frustration became
uncontrollable. By December 1978
Rostov was thrown into a 12-year
reign of terror by an unknown
murderer whose young victims
had been subjected to unspeakable
torture and mutilation before death,
and against whom the police seemed
utterly powerless.
Chikatilo’s first victim was Lena
Zakotnova, a teenage girl whose body
was found in a wood.
Over the succeeding years the list
of those who disappeared grew longer
as the body count mounted. In one
year alone there were eight deaths in a
single month.
By now Chikatilo had established
a pattern of killing that he rarely
changed. With the uncanny sixth sense
of a natural predator, he would pick
out the weak and vulnerable on the
edge of society.
Trawling the streets and railway
stations for the homeless drifters who
were unlikely to be missed, he singled
out the solitary victim on his way to
school.
“As soon as I saw a lonely person
I felt I had to drag them off to the
woods,” Chikatilo explained after his
capture. “I paid no attention to age
or sex. We would walk for a couple of
miles or so then I would be possessed
by an awful shaking sensation.”
The savagery of the attacks has
rarely been matched in the annals of
crime.
Despite an extensive manhunt that
stretched from Rostov to Siberia, the
police still seemed helpless in the face
of the carnage. It had spread to the
neighbouring states of Ukraine and
Uzbekistan when Chikatilo changed
his job to become head of supplies at
the Rostov locomotive repair yard, a
position which enabled him to travel all
over southern USSR.
Back in 1979, a man was picked
up in an isolated wooded area but
he convinced the police that he was
simply a hiker. After giving his name
and particulars he was allowed to go
on his way. Five years later that same
man was picked up close to the scene
of one of the murders, only this timehe was found to be carrying a length
of rope and a knife in his bag. Again,
however, that man was inexplicably
released. His name was Andrei
Chikatilo.
By 1990 Chikatilo was growing
more confident and he began killing
more frequently. He had another job in
Rostov that gave him even more time
away from home, so he returned to his
favourite haunts. But 1990 was also the
year that the net began to close round
him.
In late November a police officer
routinely stopped Chikatilo in the
street, reportedly after spotting a
bloodstain on his face. When, shortly
after, another body was found in
the woods, the officer reported the
incident of the bloodstain to his
superiors, and Chikatilo was put under
24-hour surveillance.
He was finally arrested as he
stood outside a cafe in the town of
Novocherkassk.
He initially denied everything, but
when caught out in lie after lie he was
formally charged with 36 murders. He
denied two of them but admitted the
rest and then confessed to many others
throughout the Soviet Union that had
either not been reported or not been
linked to the murders. There were 55
in all.
Chikatilo sat chained like a beast in
a huge iron cage built in the centre of
the courtroom when his trial opened in
Rostov in April 1992.
The verdict was something of
a foregone conclusion. Andrei
Chikatilo was found guilty and
sentenced to death. That sentence
involved a single pistol shot
to the back of the head which
was administered on Monday,
February 14th, 1994.Andrei ChikatiloDescribing his first
murder – “It was like
first love – it was
unforgettable,” he said