The Devil's Dozen (16 page)

By the end of the summer of 1984, police counted twenty-four victims probably murdered by the same man. Whenever semen was left behind, it proved to have the same AB antigen. There was also a single gray hair on one victim, and some scraps of clothing. The killer had also shifted his pattern again. He now removed the upper lip, and sometimes the nose, and these he would leave in the victim’s mouth or ripped-open stomach. He had stepped up his pace from five victims the first year (they believed) to one nearly every two weeks. Investigators had no way of knowing that they had not yet found the earliest victims.

Given the escalation in victims, the Soviet minister of the interior appointed a dozen new detectives to the case, and with Burakov heading it, a task force of some two hundred men and women was assigned to the investigation. Officers worked undercover at bus and train stations, looking for a man between twenty-five and thirty years of age, tall, well built, with type AB blood. They believed he was cautious, of average intelligence, and verbally persuasive. He traveled on public transportation and probably lived with either his mother or a wife. He might be a former psychiatric patient, or a substance abuser, and he might have some knowledge of anatomy and skill with a knife.

One undercover officer spotted an older man in the Rostov bus station, speaking with a female adolescent, and when she got on her bus, noticed him sit next to another young woman. Under questioning, officials learned his name: Andrei Chikatilo. He managed a machinery supply company and was on a business trip, but he lived in Shakhty. He said he had once been a teacher and he missed talking to young people, so the officer let him go. But another agent followed him and watched him accost various women. When he solicited a prostitute, Chikatilo was arrested for indecent behavior. A search of his briefcase turned up a jar of Vaseline, a long kitchen knife, a piece of rope, and a dirty towel—nothing needed for the alleged business trip. Yet he had type A blood, not AB. He was also a member of the Communist Party, with a good character reference. Since there was nothing in his background to raise suspicion, he was released.

At his wit’s end, Burakov decided to breach protocol and consult with psychiatric experts in Moscow. Most were either uninterested in making an analysis or refused to say much, but Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky agreed to study the few known details. He also read everything he could find on sexual pathologies and schizophrenia and wrote a seven-page report. The killer, he said, was a sexual deviate, twenty-five to fifty years old, around five feet ten inches tall. He thought the man suffered from feelings of sexual inadequacy and he blinded his victims to prevent them from looking at him or from retaining his image on their eyeballs. He also brutalized their corpses, partially out of frustration and partially to enhance his arousal. He was a sadist and had difficulty achieving release without cruelty. He was also compulsive, following the goading of his need, and would be depressed until he could kill. He might even have headaches that urged him to act out for relief. A loner, he was not retarded or schizophrenic. He could work out a plan and follow it.

None of this helped to identify a specific person, so Burakov looked up records of men convicted of homosexual crimes and came across Valery Ivanenko, who had committed several acts of “perversion.” He also had a charismatic personality and once had been a teacher. At age forty-six, he was tall and wore glasses. In short, he sounded too good to be true. He was the perfect suspect.

Staking out the apartment where the man’s invalid mother resided, Burakov caught and arrested him. Yet his blood type was A. In a deal, Burakov enlisted his assistance in investigating the gay population of the area in return for allowing him to function as a homosexual without fear of reprisals. Ivanenko proved quite good at getting secret information, which in turn led to others providing even more information under pressure. Burakov soon knew quite a bit about Rostov’s underworld of perversion and violence, but he was no closer to catching the killer. This frustrated him.

Over the next ten months only one body turned up—that of a young woman—but she was killed near Moscow. Burakov went there to study the photos of this victim. The treatment of the corpse was so similar that he was convinced that the Maniac had traveled to the city. He checked flight rosters and had officers go painstakingly through all the handwritten tickets, but nothing was found. In fact, there was a significant clue, but they failed to see it. Meanwhile, three young boys were raped and killed in the area.

But the Rostov crew was quickly drawn back to Shakhty. In a grove of trees near the bus depot, a homeless, eighteen-year-old girl lay dead, her mouth stuffed with leaves. This was the same signature that was found on the girl in Moscow some weeks earlier. A red and a blue thread were found under her fingernails, and the sweat near her wounds typed as AB—different from her own type O blood. Between her fingers was a single strand of gray hair. This was the most evidence left thus far at a crime scene linked to the killer.

A special procurator, Issa Kostoyev, was appointed to look into the
lesopolosa
murders. By this time, they had fifteen procurators and twenty-nine detectives involved. Kostoyev looked over the investigative work done thus far and dismissed it. He believed they’d already come across the man they were after and just hadn’t known it. To try to learn more about the type of killer who would be so raw and brutal, Kostoyev had the classic nineteenth-century work on sexual predators by Richard von Krafft-Ebing translated into Russian. He also discovered a rare edition of
Crimes and Criminals in Western Culture
, by B. Utevsky, which included a chapter detailing cases of dismemberment and disfiguring of victims. He saw that some killers were driven merely by arrogance and the idea that their victims were objects that belonged to them to do with as they pleased. Kostoyev used this information to inform the team.

Burakov turned again to Dr. Bukhanovsky, allowing him to see all the crime-scene reports so he could write a more detailed profile. This, he thought, might help detectives to narrow the leads, as per the FBI’s profiling protocol. Bukhanovsky spent months on the task, this time turning out sixty-five pages. He labeled the unknown suspect “Killer X.”

The details, briefly, were as follows: X was not psychotic, because he was in control of what he did; he was narcissistic and considered himself gifted, but was not unduly intelligent. He was heterosexual, so boys were merely a “vicarious surrogate.” He was a “necrosadist,” needing to watch people die in order to achieve sexual gratification. The multiple stabbing was a way to “enter” them sexually, and he either sat astride them or squatted next to them. The deepest cuts were made at the height of his pleasure, and he might masturbate. There were many reasons why he might cut out the eyes: he could be excited by eyes or might believe his image was left on them, a superstition of unenlightened people. Cutting into the sexual organs was a display of power over women. He might keep the missing organs or eat them.

An interesting twist in the profile was the hypothesis that X responded to changes in weather patterns. Before most of the murders, the barometer had dropped. That might be his trigger, especially if it coincided with other stressors at home or work. Most of the killings were also done midweek, from Tuesday to Thursday.

While the psychiatrist was vague about height and occupation, he now thought X’s age was between forty-five and fifty, the age at which sexual perversions are most developed. It was likely that the suspect had had a difficult childhood. He was conflicted and probably kept to himself. He had a rich fantasy life, but an abnormal response to sexuality, to put it mildly. Bukhanovsky could not say if the man was married or had fathered children, but if he was married, his wife let him keep his own hours and did not ask much of him. His killing was compulsive and might stop temporarily if he sensed he was in danger of discovery, but would not stop altogether until he died or was caught.

Despite the length and detail of this psychological report, Burakov still found nothing of practical use for the investigation. Having learned about the way FBI profilers conducted prison interviews to acquire a database about behaviors and sexual fantasies of killers, he decided to try another method.

Burakov talked with Anatoly Slivko, a man who faced execution for the sex murders of seven boys. Slivko was willing to talk and he attributed such acts to an inability to engage in normal sexual arousal and satisfaction. Sexual murderers have endless fantasies in which they go through the murder scenario step-by-step, and feel the urge for action, and the act of planning their crimes has its own satisfaction. Slivko, too, offered nothing of practical use for the investigation, but his answers to questions revealed the paradoxically compartmentalized mind of a man who could kill boys, on the one hand, and feel morally indignant about using alcohol in front of children, on the other. That meant he could live in society in a way that hid his true propensities. Only hours after this interview, Slivko was executed.

The investigators believed that “X” was similar in psychological makeup to Slivko, and that meant he would be next to impossible to catch. At this time, the killing seemed to stop.

Only one dead woman turned up in 1985 in Rostov, and nothing happened that winter or the next spring. Then on July 23, 1986, the body of a thirty-three-year-old female was found, but it bore none of the markings of the serial killer, except that the victim had been repeatedly stabbed. Burakov had doubts about her being part of the series, but this was not so with the young woman found on August 18. All of the disturbing wounds were present, but she had been mostly buried, save for a hand sticking out of the dirt—a new twist. Now police had to wonder whether there were others not yet found because they, too, were buried.

At the end of 1986, Viktor Burakov finally had a nervous breakdown. He was weak and exhausted, and could not sleep, so he went to a hospital for a month, then rested for another month. Four years of intense work had brought him to this. But he would not give up. In fact, his ordeal had given him some perspective.

The winter of 1988 had melted into spring before a railroad worker found a woman’s nude body in a weedy area near the tracks on April 6. Her hands were bound behind her, she had been stabbed multiple times, the tip of her nose was gone, and her skull had been bashed in. A large footprint was found nearby. Then, only a month later, on May 17, the body of a nine-year-old boy was discovered in the woods not far from a train station. He’d been sodomized and then his orifices were stuffed with dirt. He also bore numerous knife wounds and a blow to the skull, and his penis had been removed. He was identified as Aleksei Voronko, and a classmate had seen him with a middle-aged man with gold teeth, a mustache, and a sports bag. They had gone together to the woods.

This was a strong lead, one that could be followed up among local dentists. Few adults in the area could afford gold crowns for their teeth. Yet by the end of that year, after visiting many dentists, investigators had turned up nothing. To their astonishment, the Ministry of Health issued a statement about a mistake that had been made in typing blood in other biological secretions. There were rare “paradoxical” cases, the lab report stated, in which the results did not match the actual blood type. In other words, any of the suspects that had supposedly been eliminated based on blood type could have been the killer.

While this was frustrating news and made the investigation more difficult in many ways, it also reopened a few doors from the past. However, to fully undo the mistakes of the past, semen samples, not blood, would have to be obtained, and this had to be done voluntarily. Four years’ worth of work would have to be redone. The idea was overwhelming. The only method of investigation that seemed viable now was to post more men to watch the public transportation stations. But Procurator Kostoyev insisted on better accountability and efficiency. He did not like wasting all the manpower at the train stations. Another hurdle.

Still, it was April 1989 before investigators came across another victim who could be added to the
lesopolosa
series—a sixteen-year-old boy, stabbed repeatedly and genitally mutilated. This crime was followed by the murders of five more boys and a woman. Since Mikhail Gorbachev had made changes in party leadership, decreased government censorship of information, and instituted the policy of glasnost, which allowed greater access to information, journalists were at last writing openly about the murders. They knew a serial killer was operating and they pressured officials to put an end to the murders. Few reporters realized that there were now thirty-two victims.

Desperate, Burakov decided on a new plan. He would select the most likely train stations for undercover efforts, and make surveillance overt in the others, so that only those stations where plain-clothes officers were patrolling would seem safe to the killer. In other words, the police would try to lure the killer toward places where he’d be likely to pick up another victim. In those places, they would record the names of every man who came and went. They would also place people in the forests nearby, dressed as farmers. It was a major effort, involving over 350 officers, but it was their last hope.

The train station in Donleskhoz was considered a good place to set up a post, since two of the victims had been found near there. Mushroom pickers generally used the station during the summer, but otherwise it was relatively uncrowded. Two other stations were selected as well. But even before the plan was put into effect, the killer chose a victim at the Donleskhoz station, a sixteen-year-old retarded boy. Part of his tongue was missing, as were his testicles, and one eye had been stabbed. When his identity was established, officers learned that he’d spent most of his travel time on the
electrichka,
the slow-moving train, but no one had seen him exit with anyone.