Russian 'mad beast' who butchered 52 faces the firing squad

RUSSIA'S most infamous serial killer, a shaven-headed former schoolteacher and self-confessed cannibal, was found guilty yesterday of committing 52 sex murders in a frenzy of terror that lasted 12 years.

Andrei Chikatilo, a 57-year-old former Communist Party member with a degree in philology, slaughtered 17 women, 21 boys aged between 8 and 16, and 14 girls aged between 9 and 17, according to a court verdict pronounced in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don. Police photographs showed that he had often decapitated his victims, cut out their internal organs, sliced off their genitals and gouged out their eyes.

Chikatilo, who described himself during his six-month trial as 'nature's error, a mad beast', was expected to be sentenced to death by firing squad after the judge, Leonid Akubzhanov, had finished reading out the court's 330-page findings.

The killer spent the trial incarcerated in a giant metal cage, staring in sullen silence as prosecutors detailed the crimes he committed from 1978 to 1990 in an area stretching from southern Russia and Ukraine to the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan.

Several relatives of the victims fainted in the courtroom as they listened to the evidence. One elderly woman denounced him as 'a damned soul and an evil sadist'.

The court heard that more than 30 of those who died were vagrants and prostitutes who were lured into the Russian forests in exchange for a promise of sex, food or vodka. Others were adolescents and children who innocently asked him for help on the street.

He carried out ghoulish operations on the sexual organs of some victims, causing investigators to theorise that the murders had been committed by Satanists or a gang collecting testicles for transplants. In some cases, he chopped off the victims' tongues, inflicted more than 50 stab wounds on the corpses and ate the genitals.

A psychiatrist who examined him, Alexander Bukhanovsky, said that Chikatilo had been fascinated by cannibalism because he believed that starving peasants had killed and eaten his elder brother during the famine which Stalin brought upon the Soviet countryside in the 1930s. The psychiatrist also noted that Chikatilo's father, like many thousands of Soviet soldiers in the Second World War, had been captured by Nazi forces and then imprisoned by Stalin upon his release, on grounds of betrayal of the homeland. 'The child was brought up as the son of an enemy of the people, as a traitor,' he said.

Chikatilo's wife, Faina, was married to him for 27 years and bore him a son and a daughter, but she said she had suspected nothing, even when he spent more and more nights away from home and she had to clean blood from his clothes. 'If I had known what my husband was doing . . . I would have done something to stop him. But how was I to know?' she said.

The case embarrassed the 50 investigators and 500 policemen who hunted the killer. One suspect was tried and executed for the killing of a nine-year-old girl whom Chikatilo later acknowledged as his first victim. Another suspect committed suicide, and a third tried to kill himself.

Chikatilo was arrested in 1984 at a Rostov market after spending the night trying to pick up women. Suspected of murdering a 10-year-old boy, he was freed after three months because of a discrepancy between his blood and sperm groups that appeared to rule him out. He was eventually arrested in November 1990 when police saw him making advances to a young man.

(Photograph omitted)