© 2008 William Ahearn
By the mid-1980s, the Russian police knew they had a serial killer stalking train and bus stations and murdering women and girls and boys and sometimes leaving the bodies in the woods. The killer was known as “The Butcher of Rostov” or the lesopolosa (forest strip) murderer and in response Russian investigators formed a task force, brought in a psychiatrist as a profiler for the first time, and began the tedious legwork of looking for a maniac. When they finally arrested Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo in 1990, they had attributed 36 murders to him.
They weren’t even close. In the course of confessing, Chikatilo took credit for some 56 lesopolosa murders. Chikatilo was no Henry Lee Lucas, he directed the police to where the bodies were buried. There was little doubt in the investigators’ minds that Chikatilo was the killer; the description of the mutilated bodies would only be known to the author of the crimes.
One interesting aspect of the investigation is that Chikatilo was a non-secretor and that misdirected the conclusions of the analysis of the sperm found at the murder scenes. Now that DNA testing has supplanted the secretions tests, this kind of confusion shouldn’t happen.
For more background on Chikatilo, go here, here and here. For other Russian serial killers, go here.
David Greico’s 2004 film “Evilenko” features a first-rate performance by Malcolm McDowell, a riveting story and one bizarre aspect that I had never seen before. Motive is often explored in serial killer movies and brutal or traumatic childhoods are sometimes used to explain later behavior. In “Evilenko,” the impetus to callously kill some 50 women and children is explained by the killer as a result of politics: Perestroika to be exact. Maybe the west (the film is from Italy) needs to view the Russians in political terms. Chikatilo didn’t express such views at his trial. There is also extreme liberties taken with the profiler in the film (who was based on Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky) and his involvement at least provided a truly sick comic moment.
There is another film on the same subject titled “Citizen X” that I haven’t seen yet and am looking forward to.