Further Reading For Andrei Chikatilo
The Red Ripper: Inside the Mind of Russia’s Most Brutal Serial Killer by Peter J. Conradi
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We hear about American serial killers all the god damn time. Sometimes we hear about British ones. But you notice how you never hear about Japanese serial killers? Or Russians? Weird, right? Every culture has them and each culture’s killers have a particular flavor to them. American and British killers always seem to be characterized by the sexual component of their murders. Japanese killers always seem to have a particular brutality to them that makes them uniquely Japanese. The Russians are no different. As a matter of fact, the most notorious of them all has to be Andrei Chikatilo, aka The Rostov Ripper. He seemed to be a combination of the two paradigms: Sexual and cruel. Soviet-era politics, the official State belief that serial murder was a symptom of capitalist societies is a large reason for why Chikatilo was able to get away with his murders for as long as he did.
Chikatilo was active in Russia between 1978 and 1990, ultimately confessing to 56 murders and convicted for 53. He met people, men and women, adults and children, at train stations and often lured them into seclusion where they were brutally murdered and often abused or raped before and after death due to Chikatilo’s particular bent for horrific violence and impotence in the absence of blood and weapons. In many ways, he was extremely similar to American serial killer, Dean Corll.
In 1992 Chikatilo was condemned to death and mere months later, in contrast to the painfully slow American system of capital punishment, Chikatilo was taken into a small sound-proofed room in the prison that was housing him and he was shot behind the ear, put down like a sick animal.
Episodes: 141 & 142
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