Andre Chikatilo: serial killer case study

¶ … created with an aim to highlight the aspects of crime as linked with the history's most brutal serial killer and rapist, Andrei Chikatilo who has an extensive history of brutal sexual assault and murder of innocent victims aged between 7 to 19 years old girls and boys and including women aged in their early twenties. The paper tends to describe his brief family history, educational level, profession, criminal offenses, psychological disorders as well as the physical disorders related to sexuality, the time he spent in prison and the climax of his criminal activities. The serial killer most famously known as the Butcher of Rostov conducted 52 sexual assaults followed by murders of innocent children including boys and girls and older women.

The general definition of crime describes the event contradicting the laws and regulations of the state. These crimes have various forms and depths pertaining to the nature and the triggering causes of the crime. In the case of Chikatilo, his crime definition can be given as a sexual assault followed by murders. An involuntary criminal act that forces a person to engage in sexual activity with him without his or her consent and later with the fear of getting caught the assaulter kills his victim to protect himself. With more elaboration, Chikatilo was involved in butchering his victims, cutting off the limbs and internal organs of the human body and then dumping the bodies to dump yards or rivers so that recognition or identification of the dead bodies is not possible. Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936 Yablochnoye, Russia. His early education includes basic schooling. Later he opted for admission in Moscow State University to which he could not be admitted because of failing in the entrance exam. Soon after that, he joined the Soviet Military and conducted his services until 1960 (Philbin and Philbin, pg., 45).

He acquired a degree in Russian literature in the year 1970 and soon was appointed as a teacher in one of the schools of Novoshakhtinsk.

Chikatilo's family comprised of his parents and hid abducted and missing brother Stephan. His father served for the Soviet Union army as soon as the war was broken in against the Germans but later he was arrested with the blasphemy of getting himself caught intentionally. This made him receive a rank of traitor in Russia due to which his own son Andrei hated him for his life. At the age of five, his mother about the abducted brother he once had informed him. This event is supposed to have a profound effect on Chikatilo's later mental condition since as a young boy he was exposed to a brutal conception of cannibalism of which his own brother was supposedly victim. During his early childhood he was also exposed to frequent German bomb raiding as the Soviet Union was at war with German forces at that time. The country suffered an era of famine and drought during that period which leads people to pursue cannibalism to satisfy their hunger needs. Chikatilo's brother Stephan went missing during those times and his parents believed that the neighbors abducted him for food. Chikatilo with a young mind received an adverse impact on his brain, which resulted in him imagining the things that could have been done to his brother. During his childhood, he was diagnosed with a problem of bed wetting which continued until his youth. He was made to share bed with his mother because of the poor conditions in the nation's state of war and received beatings on wetting the bed every time. The physical torture made him lose his self-confidence and contributed to developing wrong perceptions of himself.

These psychological changes affected him in later years of his life when he was appointed as teacher. Due to his irrational and excessively indecent behavior with the students, he was forced to switch to different schools for the job and was declared a bad teacher. Later he quit the job moving to pursue another job as a factory clerk (Askenasy, pg., 77). Andrei personal life was as normal as any family man's was. He was introduced to a girl who was a friend of his sister and later they married to conceive two children, Lyudmila and Yuri.

Andrei had a series of mental health issues, which developed in his childhood due to living in adverse psychological conditions during war, and unfair beatings received from his parents over his chronic bed-wetting problem. Defining more clearly the mental disorder of Chikatilo, he was regarded as a sexual sadist obtaining satisfaction by mutilating his victims. His brain had a dysfunction popularly known as the 'water on the brain' and scientifically called Hydrocephalus. This disorder was the reason of his near sightedness, chronic bed-wetting and penile dysfunction. The criminal history can be reported back during his time of national service when he tried to have sex with a female but soon discovered himself failing to achieve an erection. Later when he tried to force another female for intercourse, he realized that his satisfactions were achieved when he overpowered the woman and became excited with the fear and anger. This was the onset of his attempting sexual assaults on women and children. According to some reports he admitted feeling aroused in the presence of children therefore he was declared with another psychological disorder involving pedophilia. This also lead him to raping and killing children specially boys whom he used to satisfy his sexual needs and later brutally kill them to take his revenge on life.

As stated by him, he did those killings not for the sexual desires alone but to satisfy himself where he couldn't knowing his failure as a successful person in life. His statements regarding the killings to be highly influenced by his psychological pains receive during childhood with beatings and people making fun of him though these did not work much as they were falsely a measure to escape from the judgment.

During his life as a teacher, he attempted to have forceful sexual contacts with both female and male students due to which he was made to resign and leave the school for good. Later at another school, he was found to make an attempt on one of the sleeping boys at dormitory of which he was made in charge. With this action going unnoticed, as the soviet regime at that time did not allow any action taken against single teacher, which could raise questions against other, he was set free to carry out his experiments in finding his contentment (Fido and Southwell, pg., 102).

The series of murders and sexual assaults began back in the year 1978 when he took a nine-year-old girl Yelena Zakotnova away after bribing her to offer 'imported chewing gum'. A woman named Svetlana Gurenkova who was waiting for a vehicle on the street to take her home first spotted her with Chikatilo. Chikatilo took the girl to his secret destination, which was a shack where he locked the doors of the shack and attempted to rape her. While she tried to escape, Chikatilo used his forearm to press against her throat to refrain her from screaming. He had already blindfolded her before attempting to have sex with her with the fear that she might see his face too clearly. Later he tried to kill her with three stabs in the stomach, which caused the girl to lose consciousness yet remained alive while he thought he had killed her.

He quickly tried to escape from the crime scene and in his hassle; he committed two mistakes, which gradually lead to his arrest and identification. He left the dripping blood on the doorsteps and the light of the shack burning for the entire day. He later drowned the body of the girl in the river not knowing that she is alive. Eventually dumping in the icy cold river killed Yelena and later after discovery of her body, Svetlana played an important role in raising suspects against Chikatilo. After her description, a sketch was prepared which resembled Chikatilo. It was used for further investigation in criminal identification. Different suspicious criminals were arrested and investigated one of which Alexsandr Kravchenko identified the sketch of the person made with the description given by Svetlana. He identified him to be Chikatilo as his former teacher and later when Chikatilo was arrested for investigation, he was let go after confirming the statements by his wife. The evidences gathered the police found the statement of Kravchenko and the bloodstains outside the doorsteps of his shack.

Larisa Tkachenko was his second victim of sexual assault and murder. When he begin his work as a factory clerk he had work traveling as a part of his job requirements therefore he gathered enough time to plan attacks away from home. Larisa was not forced as it was being done with her consent in exchange of a sexual favor. When she realized that Andrei was unable to maintain himself she tried to stop him and wanted to leave. However, this made Andrei use physical torture as means of controlling her which later lead to him killing her by hitting her head constantly. His aim was not to have a casual sex with the victim but to kill her and satisfy his physical needs, which he discovered during his previous thrilling encounter.

He also showed abnormal behaviors after sexual assault when he chewed and swallowed away one of the victim's nipples. The dead body of Larissa was found the next day with no clue of the murderer. His second victim was a thirteen-year-old girl named Liyuba Biryuk, which was followed on from a bus stop. The killing took place in June 1982 by introducing several stabs to the body including the eyes. The body was found two weeks later with no sign or clue. Two more youths were victimized in July, two in September and one in December (Jenkins, pg., 34). Out of these latest victims, two of them were found to be young boys. During December, he admitted killing a ten-year-old girl. Laura sarkisyan, an Armenian fifteen-year-old girl was his next victim shortly after the murder of the ten-year-old girl. The place of her buried was found only after years when he confessed murdering her. Lyuda Kutsyuba was another victim, which was an adult of twenty-four years of age, following murders of another woman who was not recognized but aged from 18 to 25 years. Another victim was found to be a boy named Igor Gudkov who was savagely mutilated. Soon after December 1984, Chikatilo stopped killing for a year to protect him from being caught but in august 1985, he victimized an eighteen-year-old mentally challenged girl by killing her with thirty stabbed wounds in the body after sexual assault. The same year he killed another woman who agreed to fornicate as a sexual favor in return for a place to spend night. In 1987, he continued his criminal activity by killing a thirteen-year-old boy in the town of Revda. In the same year July, he victimized another boy in Zaporozhye who was brutally killed and the knife used to stab him was broken into two pieces as subjecting to brutal assault.

The same year another boy was victimized in September. The varying gaps between his killings were only because he wanted to escape from the law since he was taken into considerations of criminal investigations as a suspect judged by his strange behaviors. The killings resumed in April 1988 with victimizing a thirty-year-old woman near the town of Krasni-Sulin. She was stabbed once again brutally causing Chikatilo to use his entire force in killing her. During the assault, Chikatilo did not realize imprinting his shoe on the soil near the dead body, which was identified by the criminal investigation body a size of 9 to 10, which lead to a clue in identifying one of the physical attributes of the murderer. The next year he victimized eight more women, young girls and boys. One of the killings took place at his daughter's apartment and this time it was a sixteen years old girl. After the assault and murder, he disposed away the body by cutting off the victim's limbs and defragmenting his body parts, which could be easily dumped. Nineteen-year-old Yelena valga was also victimized the same year while Chikatilo was on his way to his father's birthday party shortly following the murder of a ten-year-old boy in Rostov. The discovered bodies had many similar characteristics while no certain patterns. Chikatilo had removed the internal sexual organs of females and moved them to be buried in a different place. As with the boys, their copulatory organs were essentially removed after the assault. After a gap of one year and a half, the killings continued in the year 1990, which recorded nine similar sexual assaults followed by murder until November. In November, he sexually assaulted and killed his oldest male victim named Vadim Tishchenko on Rostov's railway station. Next year a girl was victimized named Svetlana Korostik who was brutally mutilated followed by getting her tongue cut and nipples chewed.

The arrest and extermination of Chikatilo took place soon after he victimized the boy named Vadim Tishchenko. His body was discovered near Rostov's Leshkoz railway station. A proper surveillance was then set up in areas where the killer had previously assaulted the victims. As a strategy, police officers sent women and girl swearing attractive clothing to attractive the suspected killer but all went in vain as Chikatilo planned his killings smartly. An attendant at Shakhty station recognized the assaulted boy with a tall man who bought tickets together with him. The female attendant reported that the man was trying to convince the boy for something and repeatedly asked him to get off the train but the boy refused and tried to run away. The attendant's daughter later revealed during investigation that the man with the boy was a regular and had been seeing with younger people all the time. Soon after killing Vadim, murder of Svetlana Korostik helped him in being captured. As a strategy, the police team had dressed up as local citizens to avoid alarming the killer therefore while returning back from the place of action, Chikatilo was observed taking brisk walk and wiping off sweat from his face. Upon reaching closer, he was seen to have blood spots on his face and a bitten finger, which specially grabbed the attention of the officers. The injured finger was a result of Vadim trying to fight back and chewing off his hand in an attempt to escape. The same year in November, he was spotted on his way trying to talk to young males and children. Immediately three men in leather jackets for investigation purposes took him away and held him for interrogations for a week. After this week, he wrote several letters to Prosecutor General of Russia, which clearly described his mental state depicting psychological disorders.