Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (Russian: Андрей Романович Чикатило; Ukrainian: Андрій Романович Чикатило, romanized: Andrii Romanovych Chykatylo; 16 October 1936 – 14 February 1994) was a Ukrainian-born Soviet serial killer nicknamed "the Butcher of Rostov", "the Rostov Ripper", and "the Red Ripper" who sexually assaulted, murdered, and mutilated at least fifty-two women and children between 1978 and 1990 in the Russian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR, and the Uzbek SSR.

[9] On several occasions, this hunger caused Chikatilo to faint both at home and at school,[7] and he was consistently targeted by bullies who regularly mocked him over his physical stature and timid nature.

[20] Although Chikatilo claimed learning did not come easy to him due to headaches and poor memory, he was the only student from his collective farm to complete the final year of study, graduating with excellent grades in 1954.

Their three-month relationship ended after several unsuccessful attempts at intercourse, after which the woman innocently asked her friends for advice as to how Chikatilo might overcome his inability to maintain an erection.

[35] Chikatilo later claimed that his marital sex life was minimal and that, after his wife understood he was unable to maintain an erection, they agreed she would conceive by him ejaculating externally and pushing his semen inside her vagina with his fingers.

On the evening of 22 December, he lured a 9-year-old girl named Yelena Zakotnova to an old, dilapidated hut which he had secretly purchased that year; he attempted to rape her but failed to achieve an erection.

[57][58] Following Zakotnova's murder, Chikatilo was able to achieve sexual arousal and orgasm only through stabbing and slashing women and children to death, and he later claimed that the urge to relive the experience had overwhelmed him.

Nonetheless, Chikatilo did stress that, initially, he had struggled to resist these urges, often cutting short business trips to return home rather than face the temptation to search for a victim.

[59] On 3 September 1981, Chikatilo encountered a 17-year-old boarding school student, Larisa Tkachenko, standing at a bus stop as he exited a public library in Rostov city centre.

[64] The two walked together for approximately a quarter of a mile until their path was shielded from the view of potential witnesses by bushes,[63] whereupon Chikatilo pounced upon Biryuk, dragged her into nearby undergrowth, tore off her dress, and killed her by stabbing and slashing her to death as he imitated performing intercourse.

[77] Chikatilo lured the girl to a cornfield on the outskirts of the city, stabbed her in excess of fifty times around the head and body, ripped open her chest and excised her lower bowel and uterus.

[82][n 4] Due to the sheer savagery of the murders and the precision of the eviscerations upon the victims' bodies, police theorized that the killings had been conducted by either a group harvesting organs to sell for transplant, the work of a Satanic cult,[84] or a mentally ill individual.

[119] Bukhanovsky's 65-page psychological profile described the killer as a reclusive man aged between 45 and 50 years who had endured a painful and isolated childhood, and who was incapable of flirting or courtship with women.

His first murder victim was lured off a train at Krasny Sulin before Chikatilo bound her hands behind her back and stuffed her mouth with dirt, before severing her nose from her face[136] and inflicting numerous knife wounds to her neck.

Kravchenko was lured from the theatre on the pretext of being shown imported Western films Chikatilo claimed to have at his residence; his extensively stabbed, emasculated body was found in a secluded section of woodland the following month.

[150] The plan was approved, and both the uniformed and undercover officers were instructed to question any adult man in the company of a young woman or child, and note his name and passport number.

The only reason people entered the woodland near Donleskhoz station at that time of year was to gather wild mushrooms (a popular pastime in Russia), but Chikatilo was not dressed like a typical forest scavenger; he was wearing more formal attire.

[164] On 20 November, after six days of surveillance, Chikatilo left his house with a large jar, which he had filled with beer at a small kiosk in a local park[165] before he wandered around Novocherkassk, attempting to make contact with children he met on his way.

Additional details provided further proof of his guilt: one victim on the list of charges was a 19-year-old student named Anna Lemesheva, whom Chikatilo had killed on 19 July 1984 near Shakhty station.

[195] In December 1990, Chikatilo led police to the body of Aleksey Khobotov,[196] a boy he had confessed to killing in August 1989 and whom he had buried on the outskirts of a Shakhty cemetery, proving unequivocally that he was the killer.

[198] On 20 August 1991,[199] after police had completed their interrogation, including re-enactments of all the murders at each crime scene,[200] Chikatilo was transferred to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow to undergo a 60-day psychiatric evaluation to determine whether he was mentally competent to stand trial.

[201] Examining Chikatilo's history, Tkachenko observed a "steady but gradual descent into perversion" which had been compounded by biological and environmental factors, with his increasingly extreme acts of homicidal violence ultimately committed to relieve internal tension.

The media first saw Chikatilo on the first day of his trial, as he entered an iron cage specifically constructed in a corner of the courtroom to protect him from attack by the enraged and hysterical relatives of his victims.

[207] In the opening weeks of the trial, the Russian press regularly published exaggerated and often sensationalistic headlines about the murders, referring to Chikatilo being a "cannibal" or a "maniac" and to him physically resembling a shaven-skulled, demonic individual.

The prosecutor, Nikolai Gerasimenko, vocally supported the defence's claim, stating that the judge had indeed made too many such comments and had committed numerous procedural violations in his lecturing and insulting the defendant.

He also questioned the judge's objectivity and harked back to the decision of the court not to allow the defence to present testimony from independent psychiatrists; emphasizing that crimes of this nature could not have been committed by an individual of sane mind.

Harking towards the earlier testimony of psychiatrists at the trial, Zadorozhny argued that Chikatilo fully understood the criminality of his actions, was able to resist his homicidal impulses, and had made numerous conscious efforts to avoid detection.

In reciting his findings, the judge read the list of murders again, before criticizing both the police and the prosecutor's department for various mistakes in the investigation which had allowed Chikatilo to remain free until 1990.

Akubzhanov also rejected the numerous claims Kostoyev had made to the media in the months prior to the trial that police had deliberately withheld documents pertaining to Chikatilo from the prosecutor's department as being provably baseless, adding that proof existed he had been in possession of all internal bulletins.

[232][n 17] On 15 October, Akubzhanov formally sentenced Chikatilo to death plus eighty-six years' imprisonment for the fifty-two murders and five counts of sexual assault for which he had been found guilty.