Welcome back to the deep dive. I want to start
today by asking you to picture a man just a A
generic middle -aged man standing at a bus stop.
Okay. He's wearing a slightly shabby gray suit,
maybe a hat that's seen better days. He's clushing
a beat -up leather briefcase, thick glasses.
Right. You'd see him everywhere. Exactly. He
looks like a high school math teacher or maybe
a mid -level bureaucrat who stamps forms at the
post office. He is the definition of nondescript.
If you saw him, you wouldn't just forget him.
You'd barely register he was there in the first
place. And that invisibility, that sheer blandness.
is the most terrifying part of the story we're
covering today. Yeah. Because that man you're
picturing, that is the face of one of the most
prolific and savage serial killers in recorded
history. We are talking, of course, about Andrei
Chikatilo. The names attached to him are enough
to make you want to turn the lights on. The Butcher
of Rostov, the Red Ripper, the Forest Strip Killer.
And the numbers. The numbers are just staggering.
52 convictions. 56 confessions. And these happened
over a 12 -year period from 1978 all the way
to 1990. It's a case that really redefines the
word nightmare. But you hit on something absolutely
crucial in that opening image, the paradox. The
paradox, right. How does a man commit more than
50 murders? And we're talking about brutal, messy,
chaotic murders while living a completely mundane
life as a husband, a father of two and a loyal
card carrying member of the Communist Party.
That's the mission for this deep dive. We aren't
just here to recount the gore because, frankly,
there's too much of it and it becomes almost
numbing. We are here to understand the mechanism.
Yes. How did the human mind break in such a specific
way to create him? And maybe more importantly,
how did the society around him break? way that
allowed him to keep doing it for over a decade.
That second question is, I think, just as important
as the first. You have to look at the ecosystem
he operated in. This was the Soviet Union in
the 1970s and 80s, a closed society. And there
was a very specific ideological belief held by
the state that became a fatal blind spot. The
belief was that serial killing was, and I quote,
a capitalist disease. OK, stick a pin in that
because that sounds absolutely insane to modern
ears. They essentially believe that because they
were a socialist country, they were immune to
serial killers. Effectively, yes. The official
party line was that these kinds of crimes, these
sex maniacs as they call them, were a product
of Western decadence. Caused by what? Pornography.
Pornography, social inequality, the dog -eat
-dog nature of capitalism. The Soviet Union,
in contrast, was promoted as a harmonious society.
Everyone had a job, everyone had housing, everyone
had purpose. Therefore, Theoretically, there
was no sociological trigger for a serial killer
to even exist. So if your official map says monsters
don't live here, but you start finding bodies,
you don't look for a monster. You look for something
else. You look for spies or foreign agents or
just common hooligans, or you deny the pattern
entirely. That ideological denial created this
massive shadow. And in that shadow, Andre Chikatilo
operated with near impunity. Well, let's turn
on the flashlight and look into that shadow.
To understand the man in the gray suit, We have
to go way, way back before the murders. We have
to go back to Ukraine in the 1930s. And looking
at the research, his childhood reads like a laundry
list of the worst things that can happen to a
human being. It's almost unbelievable. It's a
perfect case study in trauma. Andrei Romanovich
Chikatilo was born in October 1936 in a small
village called Yablutny. Now, you have to think
about that time and place. Ukraine in the mid
-1930s. That puts him squarely in the shadow
of the Holodomor, the terror famine. Exactly
right. Now, the absolute peak of the Holodomor
was 32, 33, a few years before he was born. But
the devastation lingered for years. The agricultural
backbone of the entire region was shattered by
Stalin's forced collectivization. So the land
was just destroyed. And then, as he's growing
up, you have the onset of World War II. Food
wasn't just scarce. For many, it was non -existent.
Chikatilo claimed later in his life that he didn't
taste bread, actual bread, until he was 12 years
old. That detail stopped me cold. 12 years old.
Think about the developmental impact of that.
We're talking about a developing brain, a developing
nervous system, completely starved of basic nutrients
for the first decade of its existence. It creates
a baseline of pure survivalism. When you are
that hungry for that long, empathy is a luxury
you cannot afford. You're just operating on the
lizard brain. Eat or die. His family reportedly
survived by eating grass, leaves, and whatever
roots they could dig out of the frozen ground.
It's unimaginable. But there is a darker psychological
scar related to this famine that we need to talk
about. The story of his brother, Stepan. This
is the part that, as you said earlier, sounds
like a grim fairy tale. His mother, Anna, apparently
told him he had an older brother named Stepon
who was kidnapped and eaten. Eaten by who? By
starving neighbors. That was the story she told
him repeatedly. She would use it to terrify Andre.
Don't go out of the yard or they'll eat you just
like they ate Stepon. My God. Now, do we know
if this actually happened? Because survival cannibalism
was a real documented thing in those famines,
wasn't it? It was a documented tragic phenomenon,
yes. But here's the thing. Biographers and historians
have never found a birth certificate or a death
certificate for Esteban Chikatilo. So the brother
might not have even existed? It's entirely possible
he never existed, or if he did, he died of a
common illness. But here is the crucial point
for our profile. It doesn't matter if it was
true. Because Andre believed it. Exactly. To
him, it was an absolute terrifying fact. He grew
up with this core belief that the world is a
place where people eat people. that human bodies
are not sacred vessels, but meat. And that he,
specifically, was prey. That is a horrifying
foundational brick for a child's psyche. And
his mother doesn't exactly sound like a nurturing
figure who helped him process that fear. Far
from it. Anna was described as harsh, cold, and
physically abusive. Chikatilo was a bedwetter
chronic enuresis, which is very common in traumatized
children. Right. In a one -room hut, where they
often shared a bed for warmth, this was a major
issue. And every single time he wet the bed,
she would beat him violently. So the person who
is supposed to protect you from the eaters outside
is actually the one hurting you inside. It's
a total betrayal. A complete betrayal. And then
just to add another layer of chaos to this childhood
from hell, the Nazis' day. Of course. 1941. Operation
Barbarossa. Chikatilo is five years old. He witnesses
the German army rolling through his village.
He sees bombings, fires, mass executions. He
recalled hiding in ditches with his mother while
their village literally burned around them. His
entire worldview is shaped by fire and violence.
What about his father? Was he in the picture
at all during this? His father, Roman, was conscripted
into the Red Army. Almost immediately, he was
captured by the Germans and held as a prisoner
of war. Now, in most countries, a POW returning
home is treated as a hero or at least a victim
of war. But in Stalin's Russia, under the infamous
Order No. 270, Surrendering was considered treason.
Right, the cowardice label. There is no such
thing as an honorable surrender. So when Roman
finally returned after the war, he wasn't welcome
back. He was branded a traitor. He was socially
ostracized. This meant the Cicatillo family was
at the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy.
Andre was the son of a traitor, poor, starving,
and wearing rags. So he enters adolescence with
zero self -worth. He's bullied. He's an outcast.
How does he cope? Because usually kids like that
either crumble or they find some kind of shield.
He built a shield out of ideology. If he couldn't
be physically strong, he was very frail and sickly,
and he couldn't be socially popular, he decided
he would be the perfect Soviet citizen. He'd
be the best communist. The very best. He buried
himself in books. He memorized Marxist -Leninist
theory. He became an ardent, almost fanatical
young communist. He would lecture other kids.
That's a classic overcompensation. You can make
fun of my clothes, but you can't make fun of
my devotion to the party. Precisely. It gave
him a sense of power and righteousness that he
couldn't find anywhere else. He eventually applied
to law school, hoping to become part of the system.
But his father's traitor status likely caused
his rejection. So he pivoted to engineering and
communications. But as he's trying to build this
normal life, this new devastating problem emerges,
one that shattered his attempts to be a normal
man. maybe the central psychological wound. We're
talking about the impotence. Yes. Chronic psychological
and physiological impotence. As he reached puberty,
he found he could not achieve an erection. He
was physically incapable of conventional sex.
And in a culture that values strength, stoicism,
and virility, that has to be just a crushing
private humiliation. It was the ultimate humiliation.
He tried to date. He tried to form connections.
But every attempt at intimacy ended in abject
failure and shame. There is a story that a local
girl he was infatuated with spread rumors about
his condition, mocking him to the entire village.
And he tried to kill himself over it. Right.
I read that somewhere. He attempted to hang himself.
His mother found him and cut him down. But think
about the lesson he learns here. Intimacy equals
shame. Women are sources of humiliation. And
he has no control over his own body. This really
feels like the fuse is lit right here. You have
rage, shame, and a desperate desire for control.
But he doesn't explode yet. He manages to create
this mask of sanity. An incredibly effective
one. He even gets married, which, given what
you just said, is baffling. It is baffling until
you look at the mechanics of it. He moves to
Rostov -on -Don in the 1960s. His sister, Tatyana,
basically plays matchmaker. She introduces him
to a woman named Fyodosia Odnacheva. And Fyodosia,
she didn't know about his issues. Not at first.
But she found out very, very quickly on their
wedding night. However, this was the Soviet Union
in the 60s. Divorce was deeply stigmatized. She
wanted a family. He wanted the appearance of
normalcy. So they came to some kind of arrangement.
A very strange clinical arrangement. They had
two kids, a son and a daughter. How is that possible
if he was impotent? Feodosia later testified
about this. It was, well, bleak is the word.
Chikatilo would achieve ejaculation through masturbation,
which was often difficult for him, or other external
stimulation, and they would manually insert the
semen to ensure conception. That is incredibly
bleak, but for him it worked. He got the props
he needed. Look, I have a wife, I have kids,
I am a normal man. And he kept building the mask.
He got a degree in Russian literature and philology
from Rostov University. He became a teacher.
A teacher? Yeah. You're putting a man who struggles
with dominance and has these deep -seated issues
with youth in a classroom. I mean, that just
seems like a recipe for disaster. It was a catastrophe
from day one. He was a terrible teacher. He had
no command of the room. He was awkward, weak.
The students, sensing this weakness, just tore
him apart. They mocked him. played pranks on
him. So he was being bullied again, but this
time by children. Exactly. And this is where
the behavior starts to shift from weird and isolated
to actively criminal. He started acting out.
He worked in boarding schools, which gave him
constant access to dormitories. He would loiter
in the hallways at night. He would watch the
children sleep. He would fondle himself under
his desk during class. And then the touching
started. Groping students. Yes. And here is the
first massive catastrophic failure of the system
that allowed him to escalate. In 1973, parents
and students complained. He was caught red -handed
groping students. So police, arrest, jail. Nothing.
The school administration did not want a scandal.
It reflected poorly on the school, on the party,
to have a deviant teacher in their ranks. So
they simply asked him to resign quietly. Unbelievable.
It gets worse. They give him a positive reference
just to get rid of him. They pass the trash.
Repeatedly. He moved from school to school, vocational
college to vocational college. Every time he
crossed the line, he was just shuffled along.
This taught him a very, very dangerous lesson.
That there are no consequences. None. I could
do what I want, and the system will protect itself
rather than stop me. That impunity. It leads
us directly to 1978, the year the dam finally
breaks, the year of the first murder. Walena
Sakitnova, nine years old. And this wasn't a
crime of opportunity in the woods, was it? This
was planned. It was planned in the sense that
he had prepared a location. He had secretly purchased
a small, run -down Shaka Kata in the town of
Shappi without telling his wife. It was his private
lair. His own little world. On December 22nd,
he lured Yelena there. His intent, as far as
we can tell, was sexual assault. But, as always,
his body failed him. He couldn't perform. And
the frustration. The frustration that had been
building for 40 years, the famine, the bullying,
the impotence, the mocking students, it all just
converged in that shack. He went into a frenzy.
And he attacks her. He strangled her and stabbed
her. And in that moment of extreme violence,
as he was stabbing her, he ejaculated. This is
the aha moment for him, isn't it? But in the
most horrific way possible. It's the moment of
complete rewiring. He realized that for him,
violence was sex. The stabbing provided the release
that normal intercourse never could. He didn't
need an erection. He needed blood. He needed
total dominance over a dying victim. That discovery
changed him from a predator into a monster. But
the tragedy of Yelena Zakhanova's death didn't
end with her murder. What happened next is honestly
one of the most infuriating parts of this entire
story, the investigation. The police were under
immense pressure. A dead child is a big deal,
even in a system that wants to deny crime. They
needed to solve it fast. So they grabbed the
first likely suspect. They found a man named
Alexander Kravchenko. He's a young man with a
prior conviction for a sexual crime. He was the
usual suspect. Did they have any evidence linking
him to this murder? Absolutely none. In fact,
he had a solid alibi. He was home with his wife.
So how do you charge a man with an alibi? You
destroy the alibi. The police brought in Krivchenko's
wife. They interrogated her for hours. They likely
threatened to charge her as an accomplice or
take her children away. They bullied her until
she broke and changed her story. And once the
alibi was gone? They went to work on Krivchenko.
They beat him. They tortured him. Until he signed
a confession to a crime he didn't commit. And
based on that coerced confession? Alexander Kravchenko
was sentenced to death and executed by firing
squad. An innocent man was killed for Chikatilo's
first murder. Yeah, Chikatilo is watching all
of this unfold. He knows he killed that girl.
He knows Kravchenko didn't. What goes through
his mind when he sees the state execute someone
else for his crime? It was the ultimate validation.
It proved to him that he was smarter than them.
It proved that the system didn't care about the
truth. It only cared about closing the file.
It made him feel invisible. invincible. It's
like the state gave him a permission slip. Go
ahead. We're too incompetent or too ideologically
committed to stop you. And so the forest strip
killings began. Let's talk about that term, forest
strip. This relates directly to his modus operandi,
which became terrifyingly consistent. By the
early 80s, Chikatilo had changed careers again.
He was no longer a teacher. He was a supply clerk
for a manufacturing firm. This was the perfect
cover. Why perfect? His job required him to travel
constantly to different factories and suppliers
across the entire Rostov Oblast. He was always
on a train, always on a bus. He had a legitimate
reason to be anywhere and everywhere. He became
a drifter with a purpose. Exactly. He would hang
around train stations and bus stops and look
for the vulnerable. Runaways, children skipping
school, women traveling alone, prostitutes. People
on the margins. And he used his harmless intellectual
persona to lure them. He was brilliant at it.
He would offer to show them a shortcut through
the woods. He would offer chewing gum, which
was a rare coveted item in the USSR at the time.
Really? Chewing gum? Oh, yeah. Or foreign stamps
or a ballpoint pen from America. He appealed
to their curiosity or their greed, but mostly
he relied on the fact that he looked like a harmless
grandfather. He didn't look like a threat, so
they walk with him into the forest strip. These
are the windbreaks between agricultural fields,
right? Yes, thick rows of trees planted to stop
soil erosion. They are everywhere in rural Russia.
They provided instant privacy just a few hundred
yards from civilization. Once they were deep
in the trees, he would attack. And the violence.
We don't need to be gratuitous, but we need to
understand the signature. It wasn't just killing.
It was mutilation. It was a frenzy. It was absolute
frenzy. Dozens of stab wounds. But there is one
specific detail that speaks to his twisted, superstitious
mind. He would gouge out the victim's eyes. Why?
Why the eyes? Was this just pure sadism? It was
fear. Chikatilo believed in a very old, scientifically
debunked theory called optography, the idea that
the last image a person sees before they die
is permanently imprinted on their retina like
a photograph. That sounds like something from
a Victorian Gothic novel. I mean, Jack the Ripper
stuff. It is. But Chikatilo, the man with the
university degree in literature, believed that
if the police looked into the dead victim's eyes,
they would see his face reflected there. So he
cut them out. It shows this bizarre clash in
his mind between his education and his primitive
magical thinking. So bodies start turning up.
Mutilated bodies, eyes gouged out. All near train
stations and bus stops. Surely someone puts the
pieces together. Eventually, yes. The body count
became impossible to ignore. This led to the
creation of Operation Forest Path. It was a massive
undertaking. Major Mikhail Fedosov and a brilliant
forensic expert named Viktor Burakov were put
in charge. They recognized they were hunting
a single predator. But they were hunting with
one hand tied behind their back because of the
ideology we talked about at the start. Right
back to the capital's disease. The higher -ups
in Moscow refused to publicize the case. They
didn't want to admit a serial killer was operating
in the Soviet paradise. This meant the public
couldn't be properly warned. People had no idea
this was happening. And the police were looking
in all the wrong places. They rounded up the
usual suspects, the intellectually disabled,
the homeless known homosexuals who were criminals
in the USSR. They were looking for a freak, not
a card -carrying party member with a family.
But despite all of that... Despite all the wrong
turns, they actually catch him. In 1984, this
is the part that makes you want to just throw
your headphones across the room. This is the
pivotal tragedy of the entire case. 1984. Chikatilo
is at a bus station in Rostov. He's acting weird.
He's soliciting women, rubbing up against them.
Police arrest him for a minor public order offense.
Fraudism, essentially. They search his bag. What's
in the briefcase? A kitchen knife with a long
blade. A length of rope. And a jar of Vaseline.
Come on. That is literally a serial killer starter
kit. You couldn't make it more obvious. It's
damning. Absolutely damning. How does he even
try to explain that? He was quick on his feet.
He said the knife was for his work, for cutting
rubber gaskets. The rope was for tying packages.
The Vaseline. He said he had dry skin or used
it for shaving. It was a weak, flimsy excuse,
but he stuck to it. But the detectives weren't
buying it, right? They must have had a gut feeling.
They knew he was their guy. Burkoff knew. He
fit the description. He traveled to all the murder
sites for his job. He was perfect for it. So
they decided to rely on science to nail him.
They compared his blood type to the semen found
on the victims. And this is where we need to
get a little technical, because this bit of science
is what let a monster walk free. Okay, here's
the breakdown. In forensics at the time, they
relied on ABO blood typing. The semen found on
several victims was type AB. Okay. And Chikatilo?
What was his blood type? They drew his blood.
He was type A. A does not equal AB. Therefore,
the semen isn't his. Therefore, he isn't the
killer. Case closed. That was the conclusion.
But it gets weirder. The scientists came up with
an explanation for why the police were so convinced
it was him, even though the blood didn't match.
They called it paradoxical secretion. What on
earth does that mean? The theory was that a person
could have one blood type in their, say, type
A, but secrete a different blood type marker,
like type AB, in their bodily fluids, like saliva
or semen. Is that real? Is that a real medical
thing? No, absolutely not. Modern science tells
us that is not how it works. People are either
secretors. meaning their blood type antigen shows
up in their fluids, or non -secreters, meaning
it doesn't. You don't secrete a different blood
type. So how did they get type AB from the crime
scenes? What happened? Most likely, the samples
were contaminated. They were old. They were mixing
the killer's fluids with the victim's blood or
other fluids. Or the testing itself was just
fundamentally botched. But the result was catastrophic.
The lab report said, he is type A. The killer
is type AB. It cannot be him. And because of
that one piece of paper, they ignored the knife,
the rope, the travel logs, and their own detectives'
instincts. They had to. In the rigid Soviet system,
the word of the scientific expert was absolute.
They released him. They actually sent him to
prison for a few months on a petty theft charge.
He'd stolen a roll of linoleum from his work
just to pin something on him, but they cleared
him of the murders. They let him go, and he went
on to kill for six more years. Six more years.
More than 20 victims died after he was released
in 1984. 20 lives that should have been saved.
And to Cotillo, he felt untouchable. He felt
like he was protected by destiny itself. But
Viktor Burakov, the detective, he didn't give
up, did he? He knew something was fundamentally
wrong. Burakov was haunted by this case. He was
obsessed. He knew the standard police methods
were failing. So in 1985, he did something radical
for the Soviet Union. He went outside the police
system. Here he go. He contacted a psychiatrist
named Dr. Alexander Bukhanovsky. Why was that
so radical? I mean, we've had criminal profiling
in the West for ages. Because in the USSR, psychiatry
was often used as a political weapon. If you
disagreed with the party, you were diagnosed
with sluggish schizophrenia and locked away in
a mental institution. It wasn't really used for
legitimate criminal profiling. It was seen as
a kind of Western pseudoscience. So Burakov asking
for a profile was basically him admitting that
the entire system wasn't enough? Exactly. He
was desperate. He gave Bukhanovsky all the files,
the gruesome crime scene photos, the reports.
Bukhanovsky spent nights poring over the material.
And he wrote a document called The Prospective
Portrait. And what did it say? It was eerily,
chillingly accurate. He didn't describe a raving
lunatic. He described it as a psychological mistake
of nature. He said the killer was likely a man
between 45 and 50. A family man. Seemingly normal.
but suffering from profound sexual impotence.
Wow. He said he wasn't killing for hate or for
pleasure in the normal sense, but for sexual
substitution. The violence was his orgasm. He
absolutely nailed him. He described Chikatilo
perfectly without ever having met him or even
knowing he existed. It was a game changer. It
gave the investigation a new lens. They stopped
looking for the crazy person and started looking
for the invisible person. But even with the profile,
Chikatilo was a ghost. And the killing continued.
The spree actually intensified in the late 80s.
And he started targeting boys more frequently.
Why this shift in victimology? Part of it was
likely opportunity, but part of it was probably
that as he got older, he felt physically weaker.
Boys were perhaps easier to lure or overpower
than adult women. And he was traveling even more
for his job. It was like a production schedule
of death tied to his work trips. But every spree
has to end. 1990, the net finally, finally tightens.
The police decide to flood the zone. Operation
Forest Path placed officers, both uniformed and
undercover, at every major train station and
bus stop in the entire region. They were watching
everyone. And on November 6, 1990, an officer
named Igor Rybakov is at the Dunlis -Guz station.
It's a small rural station, not a major hub.
Rybakov sees this man walking out of the woods.
The man is wearing a suit and a hat, but he just
looks wrong. Wrong how? He's carrying a nylon
sports bag. There's a red smear on his cheek.
It could be anything, but it looks like blood.
Rybakov stops him. Comrade, can I see your papers?
The man hands over his ID. Andre Chikatilo. And
Rybakov asks him what he was doing in the woods,
dressed like that. Chikatilo gives a strange
answer. He says, I'm picking mushrooms. In November.
In a suit. Rybakov is not an idiot. He knows
there are no mushrooms in November. And then
he notices Chikatilo's finger. It's wrapped in
a rag, crudely bandaged. It looks like a fresh
wound. Does he arrest him right then and there?
No. Being weird in the woods with a bad mushroom
story isn't a crime, unfortunately. He has no
grounds for arrest, so he hands the ID back.
But, and this is the single moment that changes
history, Rybakov writes a report. He documents
the stop. Stopped Andre Chikatilo. Suspicious
behavior. Finger bandaged. He filed it. And a
few days later. They find the body as Fetlana
Karostik in those same woods. The investigators
check the station logs. They see Rabikov's report.
They run the name Chikatilo. And the computer,
or more likely the card catalog, lights up. We
arrested this guy in 1984. He was the suspect
with the knife and the rope. The bells go off.
Everywhere. They realize they let him slip through
their fingers once. They're not going to do it
again. They put him under 24 -hour surveillance.
They watch him move through the city. They see
him acting predatory, approaching boys at bus
stops, trying to lure them away. They see him
buying beer and trying to get children to drink
with him. They have enough. November 20, 1990.
He leaves the cafe. He's walking toward a beer
stall. The Alpha team, the elite unit, moves
in. They grab him. They shove him into a Volga
police car. The Red Ripper is finally in custody.
But arresting him is one thing, convicting him
is another. Remember, they still have that wrong
blood test from 1984 hanging over their heads
like a guillotine. Exactly. And they didn't have
DNA testing readily available yet, not like today.
They had a lot of circumstantial evidence. The
knife, again. The rope, again. But the real smoking
gun was that finger. The bandaged finger that
Officer Rybakov saw. What happened to it? During
a struggle with one of his last victims, a 16
-year -old boy named Victor Tishchenko, Victor
had fought back fiercely. He'd bitten Chikatilo's
finger down to the bone. It was a vicious defensive
wound. When the police arrested Chikatilo and
stripped him, they found the healing wound. It
was a direct physical link to a victim who had
fought for his life. That is heroic. Victor Tishchenko,
in his last moments, essentially marked his own
killer for the police. He did. But Chikatilo
was tough. He was a practiced liar. He sat in
the interrogation room with Issa Kostoyev, the
lead investigator, and he said nothing. Or he
rambled on about being a good communist, a grandfather.
He played the victim. And the clock is ticking.
In the Soviet legal system, you can't just hold
a suspect forever without a charge. Ten days.
They had ten days to get a confession or charge
him with what they had. Without a confession,
the case was shaky because of the blood type
confusion from 84. Kostoyev tried everything.
He played good cop, bad cop. He showed him the
photos of the victims. Chikatilo just stared
at the wall. Day eight, day nine. They must be
getting desperate. They are. Kostoyev realizes
he can't bully a confession out of this man.
He needs a different key. He needs to unlock
his mind. So he calls Dr. Bukhanovsky. The profiler.
Psychiatrist. Bukhanovsky walks into the room.
It's a small, drab interrogation room. He sits
down across from the monster. But he doesn't
treat him like a monster. He treats him like
a patient. What does he say to him? He essentially
reads the profile to him out loud. He says, Andre,
I know you. I know you aren't a wolf or a beast.
You are a man in pain. I know about the impotence.
I know about the shame. I know that you are a
mistake of nature and that you suffer immensely
because of it. He empathized with him. He didn't
condemn him. He validated his internal pain.
It was the perfect key. Chikatilo had spent 50
years feeling like a broken, misunderstood thing
that nobody could possibly comprehend. Suddenly,
here was a man of science looking him in the
eye and saying, I understand you. Chikatilo just
broke. He started to weep. He looked up and said
the words, I am that person. And the floodgates
just opened? Completely. He confessed to everything,
and I mean everything. He talked for days on
end. He filled volumes with details. He drew
sketches of where the bodies were buried. He
corrected the police on details they had wrong
in their own files. And he confessed to the cannibalism,
to the blood drinking. Yes, he admitted that
he would chew on the tongues of victims. He admitted
to drinking their blood. He claimed it gave him
energy. He also explained the eye gouging. He
said he eventually realized the optogram theory
was probably fake, but by then it was just part
of his ritual. It's chilling that he confessed
not out of guilt, but out of what? A sense of
relief. Relief and I think a deep -seated narcissism.
Finally, someone was paying attention to his
life's work. He wanted to be studied. He wanted
to be important, even if it was for being a monster.
So we go to trial. April 1992, the Soviet Union
has just collapsed. It's a new, chaotic Russia.
The trial is a complete media circus. It was
one of the first major media events of the post
-Soviet era. It was held in a massive hall to
accommodate the public and the press. And for
Chikatilo's safety, they built a literal iron
cage in the middle of the courtroom. To protect
him from the victim's families? Oh, yes. The
parents of the murdered children were there.
They were screaming, fainting, throwing things
at the cage. If he hadn't been in there, they
would have torn him to pieces with their bare
hands. In Chikatilo, he puts on a show inside
the cage. A complete circus act. He decided to
play the insanity card. He shaved his head. He
wore an athletic suit. And he just acted deranged.
He would shout gibberish. He would lower his
pants and expose himself to the judge. He would
scream, I am a pregnant woman. He also sang right.
He would sing the old communist anthem. The top
of his lungs. Singing the communist anthem in
1992, right after the fall of the USSR. There's
a dark, pathetic irony there. He's singing the
song of the dead system that enabled him. It
was pure theater. He thought if he looked crazy
enough, they would just send him to a hospital
for the rest of his life. But Bukhanovsky and
other psychiatrists testified. They said, do
not be fooled. He is sane. He knows right from
wrong. This is a calculated act. And the judge,
a man named Akubzanov, he wasn't fooled either.
Not for a second. The verdict was read. It took
days to read the full verdict because there were
so many individual counts. He was found guilty
of 52 murders. The judge sentenced him to death
for each one. 52 separate death sentences. And
the judge took the opportunity to publicly slam
the system. He called out the paradoxical secretion
error. He called out the school administrators
who just passed him along. He made it crystal
clear. Chick -Aidle held the knife. But the system
held the door wide open for him. Chikatilo appealed,
of course. He even wrote a letter to Boris Yeltsin,
the new president. He asked for mercy. He claimed
he was a victim of the Stalinist era, that his
mind was broken by his childhood. Yeltsin denied
the appeal instantly. So February 14, 1994, Valentine's
Day of all days. They took him to Novichokask
Prison. They led him down a corridor into a soundproof
room, a stark concrete room. An executioner stepped
up behind him and fired a single pistol shot
into the back of his head, just behind the right
ear. Were there any last words? He was reportedly
in shock. He was told he was being moved for
another medical exam. He didn't know it was the
end until the gun was against his head. And just
like that, the Red Ripper was gone. Buried in
an unmarked grave in the prison yard. Erased
from the world. You know, when we do these deep
dives, we usually try to find an aha moment or
a clear takeaway. But this one, it just leaves
this heavy, awful residue. It does. It forces
us to confront the fact that evil doesn't always
look like a monster from a movie. It looks like
a math teacher. It looks like your neighbor.
It looks like nothing at all. And it forces us
to look at the systems we trust. The science,
the police, the government, that whole structure.
That's the real horror story here, I think. It's
not just the man with the knife. It's the arrogance
of an ideology that said, we are perfect, therefore
this can't be happening. That arrogance cost
dozens and dozens of lives. I just keep coming
back to that blood test in 1984. The paradoxical
secretion, that one moment. It's the hinge of
history for so many people. The single point
where everything could have been stopped. It
makes me wonder, and this is the thought I kind
of want to leave you with today. We trust forensics.
We trust DNA now, of course. We trust the file
in the cabinet, the report from the lab. But
human beings... make those files. Human beings
run those labs. And we are all fallible. Right.
So how many monsters are out there right now
walking free? Not because they are criminal geniuses,
but because someone somewhere mislabeled a vial
or because a form got lost in the mail or because
a police department didn't want to admit they
had a problem they couldn't solve. That is a
terrifying thought. The idea that clerical error.
Could be the best friend a serial killer ever
had. On that incredibly uplifting note, we are
going to wrap up this deep dive. Stay vigilant
out there. And we'll see you next time.