Cannibals (15 page)

After listening to his fantastical story, the officers decided to accompany Tracey back to the apartment where the alleged attack had taken place.

Dahmer answered the knock on the door and when he saw that it was the police tried to bluff his way out of the situation. He told them that he had just lost his job at the chocolate factory (which was true) and that he had lost his temper after getting rather drunk. He offered to go and get the key to the handcuffs from his bedroom, but as one of the officers followed him into the room he noticed the photographs. There were dozens of Polaroid pictures of bodies in various states of dismemberment and human skulls in a refrigerator.

Becoming increasingly worried about what he had stumbled across, the police officer walked into the kitchen and noticed that the refrigerator was the same as the one in the photographs. When he opened the door to the refrigerator he literally screamed out loud at what he saw, as a human head lay on the shelf and was staring out blankly at him. Also inside the refrigerator were three bags containing a heart, flesh and portions of muscle. Inside the freezer were three heads, a human torso, a bag containing human flesh and some internal organs. A cupboard in the kitchen contained various chemicals and two bleached human skulls. On the floor there was a large kettle containing two hands, a penis and testicles.

In the other rooms, three more skulls were discovered in a filing cabinet, while a wardrobe contained a whole skeleton, dried human scalp and more genitalia. In a box there were two more skulls, and next to this was a 260-litre vat of acid. Finally the police found three human torsos in various stages of decomposition. Everywhere the stench of death and rotting flesh was making the officers retch.

Dahmer’s calm exterior soon disappeared and he started to squeal and struggle as the three police officers attempted to overpower him. Tracey Edwards just stood aghast, with his mouth open, realizing that the threats by Jeffrey to cut out his heart and eat it, had probably been true.

Dahmer entered a plea of guilty but insane on July 13, 1992. During the trial he was protected by an 18-foot high barrier because of the intense reaction created by his crimes. The trial was short and the jury found Jeffrey Dahmer to be guilty but sane. He was sentenced to serve 15 life sentences, or 957 years.

Dahmer was sent to Columbia Correctional Institution, in Portage, Wisconsin. On November 28, 1994 Dahmer was ordered to clean the shower block by the prison warders, along with another inmate. As the warders turned a blind eye, the pair of inmates were clubbed to death by fellow prisoners carrying broom shanks. The leader of the rebel gang was a man named Christopher Scarver. Scarver was a convicted killer on antipsychotic medication, who claimed to be Christ because he was a carpenter and his mother’s name was Mary. Scarver was hailed as a hero for killing the cannibal and said that he was acting out his ‘father’s’ commands to kill Dahmer.

Ironically this was only the second time that Jeffrey Dahmer had been allowed to associate with fellow inmates, and the previous occasion had also resulted in him being seriously injured. Jeffrey Dahmer was convinced that he would be killed while he was in jail, and as it happened he was right.

Hoping to lay to rest the grisly ghosts which haunted Milwaukee, the city elders purchased all the gruesome memorabilia and incinerated the lot.

Chikatilo – The Ripper of Rostov – was a former teacher, who preyed on adolescent boys and girls

Although the Soviet Union liked to think they didn’t have any serial killers, Andrei Chikatilo soon disproved this theory. He was a self-described ‘mad beast’ and ‘mistake of nature’ who confessed to occasionally nibbling on internal organs.

Born on October 16, 1936, Andrei Chikatilo was a native of the Ukraine. His background gives certain clues as to why he developed into a depraved killer. Andrei’s family had suffered greatly in the 1930s due to Stalin’s forced collectivization. Collectivization meant the destruction of a centuries-old way of life, and alienation from control of the land and its produce. Collectivization also meant a drastic drop in living standards for many peasants, and it faced widespread and often violent resistance among the peasantry. Apart from the poverty and hunger that Andrei experienced, he also lost an older brother, Stepan, who was allegedly murdered and cannibalized by neighbours during the famine that spread across the country. People, desperate for food, would remove meat from corpses just in an effort to survive. Human flesh was bought, sold, or even just hoarded. Children saw the terribly disfigured corpses, heard terrible tales, and Andrei’s mother warned the young lad to stay in his own yard or he might get eaten as well. All this must have had a terrible effect on a growing boy, and indeed he was to carry this memory with him for the rest of his life.

Most of his childhood was spent alone and he used to live in his own world of fantasy. The other children in his neighbourhood often mocked him for being ‘strange’ and he developed a rage which would build up inside him. His first sexual experience was when he struggled with a ten-year-old friend of his sister’s and the experience excited him to such an extent that it caused him to ejaculate. To keep himself amused in his many hours of solitude he would dream up images of torture, and this was to be a major part of his killings in his adult life.

After Andrei left school he joined the army for a while and when he returned home tried to have a girlfriend. However, he was unable to perform the sexual act and the girl made a fool out of him by spreading rumours of his lack of manhood. Andrei had visions of catching the girl and ripping her body to pieces, which caused him to become sexually excited – then he knew there was something very wrong inside him.

Ironically, Andrei became a teacher and did get married to a local girl named Fayina, even though it was arranged by his sister. Andrei was painfully shy sexually and Fayina realized he had no real interest in conventional sex. She did manage, however, to coax him into providing her with two children, and to the outside world he presented himself as a meek family man. But beyond this facade there were dark and sinister urges brewing.

Andrei’s mother died in 1973 when he was 37, and it wasn’t long before he realized that he loved the feeling of power when he molested young girls. He knew that to get real satisfaction he needed to get violent, and this is why this pervert turned into a cold-blooded killer.

On December 22, 1978, in the town of Shakhty, Andrei Chikatilo followed nine-year-old Lena Zakotnova and managed to lure her back to his house. He used his teaching skills and kind manner to befriend the little girl, but behind the closed doors of his home Andrei turned into a monster. He jumped on top of the frightened girl, covered her mouth to suppress her screams, and began tearing at her clothes. He tore at her underwear and rubbed his genitals against her body. His inability to achieve an erection made Andrei angry, and his attack became more and more violent. The moment he saw blood trickling from her body he achieved the orgasm he was so desperate for, and from that moment on he knew that fondling and rape would not be enough for him, he needed the sight of his victim’s blood.

Still in a state of frenzy he thrust a knife into the girl’s stomach and tore open her chest cavity to get at her blood and organs. This inflamed his pleasure even further and when he was satiated he put his hands round young Lena’s throat and simply squeezed the remaining breath out of her body.

Coming out of his crazed state Andrei suddenly realized exactly what he had done. He looked down and saw the severely mutilated body of the young girl. There was blood all over the room and indeed all over his own body. He covered her body with what was left of her clothes and then carried her to the nearby Grushevka River. Her body was discovered two days later.

Many men were questioned over the attack on Lena, and Chikatilo was one of them. However, his wife gave him an alibi and a man named Aleksandr Kravchenko was charged and later executed for her murder in 1984. Only when Chikatilo confessed to the girl’s murder in 1990 did the authorities realize that they had killed the wrong man.

Chikatilo managed to control his violent urges for another three years. However, in 1981, he was fired from his teaching job due to allegations that he had molested some of the male students and, unable to get another teaching job due to his reputation, was forced to take a job as as a supply clerk at the Rostovnerud factory. This new position meant he had to travel to and from his place of work by bus or train. Turning this situation to his advantage, Andrei started looking for victims to satisfy his sexual cravings at the local bus and train stations.

On the evening of September 3, 1981, Andrei was out looking for his next victim. He watched everyone as they walked past him, fantasizing what he would like to do with them. Soon he saw someone who took his fancy, 17-year-old Larisa Tkanchenko who was sitting at a bus stop. She was a girl who was well known locally for her loose morals and when Andrei approached her, Larisa was quite willing to accept the older man’s invitation to go for a walk. Once Chikatilo and Larisa reached a secluded spot, he instantly starting tearing at her clothes, his extreme desires taking complete control of his actions. As the young girl started to scream and fight off her attacker, Chikatilo’s pleasure heightened. He pushed Larisa onto the ground and pushed dirt into her mouth to suppress her screams, then he punched her in the face and chest and finally strangled her into unconsciousness. As Larisa gasped her last breath Chikatilo, at the height of his frenzy, ejaculated over her body and bit off one of her nipples. Unlike his first murder which had left him frustrated and confused, this time he felt elated and actually ‘danced with joy’ around the body. With his sexual appetite satisfied he threw the body in the River Don, where it was discovered the very next day.

The murder of Larisa must have satiated his desires for a while because Chikatilo did not kill again until the following June. On June 12, 1982 Chikatilo was in Zaplavskaya on a business trip, when he came across 13-year-old Lyubov Biryuk who was walking along a quiet, wooded path to Donskoi Village. Chikatilo attempted to rape the young girl before stabbing her to death. Her body was discovered on June 27 and, although parts of it had been eaten away by animals, the medical examiner managed to find 22 separate stab wounds. Most of the wounds had been to the breasts and genitals, but even more disturbing was the fact that Lyubov had been stabbed in both eye sockets.

Chikatilo took his fourth victim just two days before the discovery of the body of Lyubov Biryuk. Lyuba Volubuyeva was 14 years old and once again Chikatilo satisfied his sexual urges by repeated stabbing of the chest and the eyes.

Then, for some reason, Chikatilo changed his usual pattern of killing as his next victim was a young male. Nine-year-old Oleg Pozhidayev was killed on August 13, 1982, although his body was never recovered.

Again and again Chikatilo murdered young male and females and every time a body was discovered they had been severely mutilated around the genital area. On the girls he would gouge the breasts and destroy the vagina, uterus and bladder or abdomen. On the boys he would mutilate the penis, scrotum and anus.

An experienced detective, Major Mikhail Fetisov, from the Moscow militia, was sent to Rostov in September 1983 to head the investigation. He immediately criticized the incompetence of the local police and told them that the killings were the work of a single sex-crazed man. He even went as far as to use the words ‘serial killer’ which was unheard of in the Soviet Union at the time and was still seen as a purely western concept.

The police started to study the criminal profiles on their records in the hope that they might find someone who had a mental health background.

The Rostov police placed patrols at the bus and train stations, having realized that this was where their killer picked up most of his victims. One day when Inspector Aleksandr Zanosovsky was on duty he noticed a middle-aged man in glasses who seemed to be paying a lot of attention to young girls. The detective approached the man and asked to see his identification papers. The man produced his documents which identified him as Andrei Chikatilo, a freelance employee of the Department of Internal Affairs, which was a wing of the KGB. He was allowed to go about his business but several weeks later, Sanosovsky noticed the same man acting suspiciously.

This time the detective did not approach him but kept a watch on him for several hours. Chikatilo didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular but he just rode bus after bus around the local district. During these bus rides he would approach young women and try to engage them in conversation. After numerous rejections Chikatilo eventually found a young girl who had had too much to drink and he persuaded her to put her head in his lap while he fondled her. Zanosovsky decided it was time to make a move and he approached Chikatilo who immediately started to perspire profusely. The detective demanded that he open the briefcase he was carrying and inside they discovered a jar of Vaseline, a piece of rope, some dirty towels and a kitchen knife.

On arriving back at the police headquarters, Zanosovsky learned that the culprit was already under investigation for stealing a car battery from the factory where he worked. This was enough to keep him in custody while they made further investigations to connect him with the ‘Forest Strip Killer’ as he had become known. However, when they checked Chikatilo’s blood group it did not appear to match and to make matters even worse an incompetent policeman allowed the contents of the briefcase to be returned to their owner. Of course Chikatilo took no time at all in destroying this evidence. With no other evidence to hold him on, the police could only prosecute him with the theft of the battery and he served three months in prison. This time the police had let their man slip through their fingers.

As a result of his conviction Chikatilo lost his job at the factory, but in January 1985 he managed to get a new one, this time working as a travelling buyer for a locomotive factory in Novocherkassk. Whether his three months incarceration had had any effect on Chikatilo is a matter of opinion, but for six months he resisted any urge to kill again. That was until August 1985 when he killed 18-year-old Natalya Pokhilstova and dumped her body near Domodyedovo Airport.

On August 27 Chikatilo murdered 18-year-old Irina Gulyayeva and police once again stepped up their investigations to apprehend the Rostov killer. It is believed that, for some reason, Chikatilo did not murder again until May 1987, a long period which leaves many questions unanswered. On May 16, 1987, 13-year-old Oleg Makerenkov was murdered near the village of Revda and the remains were not discovered until after the arrest of Chikatilo.

From this point Chikatilo’s killing spree seems to have spiralled out of control. In 1988 he claimed eight lives and in his last year of freedom, 1990, he killed another nine people.

A new man, Issa Kostoyev, who was director of the Central Department for Violent Crime, had now taken over the investigation and started very carefully going over all the evidence they had gathered. After the body of 16-year-old Vadim Tishchenko was discovered near the railway station in Rostov, Kostoyev decided to inundate the area with undercover agents, many of them equipped with night vision goggles. However despite this increase in patrol, Chikatilo still managed to claim his very last victim – 22-year-old Svetlana Korostik.

After Chikatilo had killed her he cut off parts of her body and ate them before covering the remains with leaves and returning to the station. One of the plain-clothes officers on patrol noticed the middle-aged man who was sweating heavily, and also that he had spot of blood on his cheek and earlobe. He checked his papers, but unaware of Svetlana’s murder, he felt he had no reason to hold the man and let him go on his way.

Korostik’s body was discovered on November 13 and when Kostoyev came across the report of a man being stopped in the vicinity of the railway station on the night of the murder he decided to look further into the background of Chikatilo. When he discovered that Chikatilo’s work records showed him in the vicinity of many of the murders, Kostoyev decided to have his suspect followed.