Andrei Chikatilo

Andrei Chikatilo was born in a small village in Ukraine on 16th October 1936 amidst famine due to some political and economical disruptions. The children were dying out of starvation and having born in a poor family, Andrei couldn’t escape his fate and worse; the World War erupted, resulting into bombings of Ukraine from both Russia and Germany’s side. Ukraine became a living hell and growing up amidst it was extremely traumatizing for little Andrei.

If that wasn’t enough, Andrei suffered from a condition called hydrocephalus, which causes water on the brain from birth, which further led to some urinary tract disorders such as bed wetting and impotency to some degree. His father was sent to Germany to fight USSR’s wars and got tortured by the Germans and when the war was over, and he finally came back home, he was tried by the Soviet army, which led to constant torture and the family lived in constant fear.

The news spread about his father and Andrei’s school life caught up with his destructive health and emotional trauma due to his father’s notoriety as a traitor. He became the subject of bullying. He became a sexually frustrated teenager, and his first sexual encounter led him to even more of ridicule and name calling. Due to his health condition, he ejaculated almost immediately and the word spread around fast. He became a shy and introvert kid, and somehow, this caused his brain to form association between sex and violence.

He finished his high school education and due to his poor academics, he failed to enter the college and did National Service for some time before starting on a job as a telephone engineer.

His sister came to live with him and as she noticed that he was unable to attract the opposite sex, she fixed a date for Andrei with one of her friends. The couple lived together for sometime and despite Andrei’s inability in maintaining erection, he managed to hold his marriage and fathered two children. His brief stint as a schoolteacher came to a halt in 1971, when he was accused of assaulting kids and got fired.

In December 1978, Andrei committed his first murder and his victim was an adolescent girl, who he lured in a shed. Andrei tried to rape her first, but his inability to do so led him to slash the little girl Lena, while ejaculating on her body at the same time. This was his first tryst with the extremely violent sexual encounter, which later became a key factor in all his future murders. However, someone saw him with the victim a few hours before her disappearance and Andrei was arrested. But a fake alibi from his wife got him out of the prison.

He stayed low for the next three years or so and in September 1981, he decided to go for another murder and chose 17 years old Larisa Tkachenko as his next victim. This then became a fetish for Andrei, and he started hunting for victims of both sexes. He would meet them at bus stops or train stations and lure them into nearby abandoned places or forests, and rape them.

He entered knife in their bodies and ejaculated on them after that. In most of his early killings, he also took out the eyeballs of the victims, and later admitted to a psychologist that he did so because he believed that he didn’t want to see victims to see his face as they would remember it even after their death.

The Russian authorities woke up from a deep sleep as the dead bodies kept piling up. The murders were so brutal that the locales believed some supernatural evil entity or a werewolf was involved. The concept of serial killing was new to Soviet society in those days and a widespread fear prevailed everywhere. The Russian police became active and indulged in surveillances around the more affected areas around Rostov Park and City Centre.

Andrei got arrested for suspicious behaviour on a bus stand in 1984, but due to the lack of evidence, he couldn’t get incarcerated for long, and he frequently saw the face of the prison due to minor offences. In 1985, Andrei moved to Novocherkassk and killed two more women. Police, unable to catch him, met with psychiatrists for help and interviewed several other serial killers to understand a killer’s state of mind but failed to gain some positive lead.