Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters Read Free Page A

to find them before she died, but the authorities were not helping. This neatly dressed man’s prissy complaints about some garage seemed to me petty and stupid in comparison—and worse: boring television. Searching for somebody else to interview, I drifted away from him as fast as I politely could, not even listening to the last few things he had to say, and quickly forgot all about him. That is how I missed filming an interview with Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo—the Red Ripper — “Citizen X”—three weeks before his capture—one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history.
    While Cottingham I remembered, I forgot everything about Chikatilo other than the neatness of his dress and the banality of his complaint. I do not remember his eyes, other than the tears in them and the fogged veil of the lenses in his glasses; nothing of his face other than it was clean shaven. He remains but a softly spoken shadowy politeness in my memory—but in my nightmares, he stills comes to me as a monstrous geek with eyeless sockets spewing tears.
    Within days of my brief conversation with him in Moscow, he would return to his home in Rostov in the Ukraine to kill his fifty-first known victim. Riding on a local train, he convinced a sixteen-year-old mentally handicapped boy to accompany him to his “cottage” with the promise that there were girls there. The two got off the train and Chikatilo walked the boy into a dense wood, where he suddenly forced him to the ground and ripped off his trousers. He tied the boy with a rope that he carried with him in his briefcase just for that kind of occasion and then rolled him over and removed the rest of his clothes. (Was it the same briefcase I saw that day in the tent city?) He molested him and then bit off the tip of the boy’s tongue and stabbed him repeatedly in the head and stomach. Afterward he cut off the boy’s genitals and threw them into the bushes. After dragging the body into some thick undergrowth he recovered the rope and wiped the blood off himself and his knife with the boy’s clothes. He straightened out his own clothing (and was it the same shirt and tie I saw him in?) and then calmly returned to the nearby railway station and took the train home.
    Ten days later at a different railway station, Chikatilo killed another sixteen-year-old boy, mutilating him in a similar fashion, his fifty-second victim. A week later, behind the same station where he killed the mentally handicapped youth, he murdered his fifty-third and final victim, a twenty-two-year-old woman. He cut off the tip of her tongue and both her nipples after mutilating her genitals. After he emerged from the bush with blood smeared on his face, he was washing up at a platform water tap when a police officer, on the lookout for a killer, briefly questioned Chikatilo and recorded his identification. He was allowed to continue on his way—the police officer later stated that he had no way of determining that the smear on Chikatilo’s face was actually blood. Gorbachev’s new rules strictly regulated police conduct toward citizens—everything was to be done by the book now. The police officer let Chikatilo go, but for the next few days he was put under surveillance. When the body of the female victim was eventually discovered near the station where he was questioned, Chikatilo was immediately picked up.
    The following year I watched the Chikatilo trial on Russian television and saw photographs of him. Chikatilo had killed women, girls, boys, and youths indiscriminately, almost always luring them either to a killing shack he kept in a seedy part of town or to isolated fields or woods. He used his refined and educated persona to seduce his victims into trusting him. Often preying on the destitute, the mentally handicapped, the lost, and the young, he offered food, sex, shelter, or directions to entice his victims to accompany him to their deaths. Once he had his victims isolated, he would brutally attack