Strange Sight | CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND UNSOLVED CASES

Andrei Chikatilo

[OVERVIEW]

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was born on October 16, 1936. He was a Soviet Serial Killer who sexually assaulted his victims before murdering and mutilating them. His victims consisted of women and children.

He confessed to killing 56 people, he was tried for 53 of those murders and convicted of 52 of them.

[EARLY LIFE]

At the time of his birth, Ukraine was in the grip of a famine caused by Joseph Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture. Chikatilo's parents were both collective farm labourers who lived in a one-room hut and who received no wages for their work, but instead received the right to cultivate a plot of land behind the family hut. The family seldom had sufficient food; Chikatilo himself later claimed not to have eaten bread until the age of 12, adding that he and his family often had to eat grass and leaves in an effort to stave off hunger.

Throughout his childhood, Chikatilo was repeatedly told by his mother Anna that prior to his birth, an older brother of his named Stepan had, at age four, been kidnapped and cannibalized by starving neighbours, although it has never been established whether this incident actually occurred, or if a Stepan Chikatilo even existed. Nonetheless, Chikatilo recalled his childhood as being blighted by poverty, ridicule, hunger, and war.

When the Soviet Union entered World War II, Chikatilo's father was drafted into the Red Army. He would later be taken prisoner after being wounded in combat. Between 1941 and 1944, Chikatilo witnessed some of the effects of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, which he described as "horrors", adding he witnessed bombings, fires, and shootings from which he and his mother would hide in cellars and ditches. On one occasion, Chikatilo and his mother were forced to watch their own hut burn to the ground. With his father at war, Chikatilo and his mother shared a single bed. He was a chronic bed wetter and was berated and beaten by his mother for each offence.

In 1943 Chikatilo's mother gave birth to a baby girl, Tatyana. Because Chikatilo's father had been conscripted in 1941, he could not have fathered this child. As many Ukrainian women were raped by German soldiers in World War II, it has been speculated Tatyana was conceived as a result of a rape committed by a German soldier. As Chikatilo and his mother lived in a one-room hut, this rape may have been committed in Chikatilo's presence.

In September 1944, Chikatilo began his schooling. Although shy and ardently studious as a child, he was physically weak and regularly attended school in homespun clothing and, by 1946, with his stomach swollen from hunger resulting from the post-war famine which plagued much of the Soviet Union. On several occasions, this hunger caused Chikatilo to faint both at home and at school, and he was consistently targeted by bullies who regularly mocked him over his physical stature and timid nature. At home, Chikatilo and his sister were constantly berated by their mother. Tatyana later recalled that in spite of the hardships endured by her parents, their father, Roman, was a kind man, whereas their mother was harsh and unforgiving toward her children.

Chikatilo developed a passion for reading and memorizing data, and often studied at home, both to increase his sense of self-worth and to compensate for his myopia, which often prevented him from reading the classroom blackboard. To his teachers, Chikatilo was an excellent student upon whom they would regularly bestow praise and commendation.

By his teens, Chikatilo was both a model student and an ardent Communist. He was appointed editor of his school newspaper at age 14 and chairman of the pupils' Communist committee two years later. An avid reader of Communist literature, he was also delegated the task of organizing street marches. Although Chikatilo claimed learning did not come easy to him due to headaches and a poor memory, he was the only student from his collective farm to complete the final year of study, graduating with excellent grades in 1954.