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

and mutilate them using a “killing kit” of various knives and sharp instruments he carried with him in his briefcase.
    By the time the trial began, Chikatilo’s head was shaved and he appeared quite mad, howling at the courtroom spectators from within a specially built cage. But even seeing the earlier photographs of him in the press, I never recognized him from that day I met him in the Moscow tent city. I still occasionally told my Richard Cottingham story, never realizing what punch-line lurked beyond it. It was only years later that I came across a transcript of Chikatilo’s police interrogation in which he complained about the conspiratorial attempt to build a garage and toilet behind his son’s apartment and his intention to meet with Gorbachev in Moscow. I was transfixed in horror—could it possibly be the same guy? It had to be —the story was just too eccentric, and even the Russian investigator remarked on Chikatilo’s emotional peaks when he began to speak of the garage. Indeed, after some further research I uncovered an account of Chikatilo’s visit to Moscow in October 1990 just before he committed his last three murders. 2
    I came to realize that in my life I had met not one, but two serial killers—unidentified and out there killing—and for the longest time I had not even known it. How many more could there be? And where the hell were they coming from?
    I was puzzled by the conventional backgrounds of these two killers—both gainfully employed family men: Cottingham, a New York City computer operator with a house and three kids in the suburbs; and Chikatilo, a university-educated schoolteacher, father of two children, writer of political essays for Soviet publications, and, later, factory materials purchaser. These two were not grizzled glassy-eyed drifters or twitchy recluses—types we frequently associate with serial killers. They were ordinary.
    Most of all, I was fascinated with their invisibility—their forgettability. Apparently they stalked and killed like evil transparent ghosts. Even when I had run into Cottingham, presumably carrying two severed heads and having just set fire to a hotel I was checking into, I would forget him within seconds of the encounter. Cottingham was so forgettable that after leaving behind a mutilated corpse under a motel bed, he checked back into the very same motel a mere eighteen days later, and nobody recognized him.
    Of Chikatilo himself, I still have no memory—just that of his ridiculous story and fragmentary glimpses of the monster: glasses, the knot of his tie, a clean-shaven cheek, a briefcase lying in the grass by his feet—but of him  . . . nothing. This invisibility let him kill fifty-three people and almost walk away untouched, with blood on his face, from a police officer looking for him. What manner of ghoulish monsters were these?
    All of this led me to contemplate how Cottingham and Chikatilo came to exist—where had they sprung from and by what means and paths did they move about for me to so randomly stumble across these two homicidal monsters, roaming free in the wild among us?
    In my attempt to map the primordial substance from which they rose, I came to write this book, and in a way, map my own substance as well. Was there something about me that led me to cross their paths? I learned that many victims of serial killers “facilitate” their own deaths by their choice of lifestyle or behavior—hitchhikers, runaways, street hookers. While not a victim, I perhaps facilitated my meeting with Cottingham by my choice of hotels near a hookers’ stroll. I strayed into a serial killer’s hunting grounds as a trespasser and got a bump from a monster.
    While my Cottingham encounter in New York was one of those experiences that one can easily write off as coincidence, my second encounter with a serial killer made me wonder. I questioned the mathematical odds of running into two killers in that manner. One killer I could easily understand,