Andrei Chikatilo

Before the summer was over Chikatilo had claimed three more victims. Lyuda Kutsyuba a twenty-four-year-old female, an unidentified woman aged between 18 and 25 and a seven-year-old boy, Igor Gudkov, who was savagely butchered.

By September 1983 the total number of victims had risen to fourteen, of which six had been found. The central Moscow militia, concerned by the number of dead children that were being reported by the local police, sent Major Mikhail Fetisov and his team to Rostov to take over the investigation. Soon after his arrival, Fetisov reviewed the situation and sent a scathing report to his superiors in Moscow criticising the ineptitude of the local police and suggesting that all six murders were the work of a single sex-crazed killer.

Mikhail Fetisov

Moscow headquarters reluctantly accepted his findings but fell short of calling the perpetrator a "serial killer" as that was seen to be a purely western phenomenon and not possible in Russian culture. A strange attitude considering that Rostov alone recorded over four hundred homicides a year.

As most of the murders seemed to centre around the Rostov area, particularly Shakhty, Fetisov and his deputy, Vladimir Kolyesnikov, decided to assemble a special squad that would focus its investigation on that area. To lead the squad, Fetisov selected Victor Burakov, an experienced forensic analyst who was considered by many to be the most talented crime scene investigator in the department. Soon after the appointment, Burakov and his team moved into a separate office in the militia headquarters building in Rostov. In line with Soviet bureaucracy, the new sub-unit was given the ponderous title of "Division of Especially Serious Crimes." As most of the bodies had been recovered from woodlands, the case was known unofficially as the "Lesopolosa" or "Forest Strip killings."

Viktor Burakov

Believing that the person responsible for the killings was abnormal, the team began to search through the records of mental hospitals looking for anyone whose behaviour patterns and history indicated an inclination towards crimes involving sex and violence. Criminal records were also checked for known sexual offenders or anyone questioned in relation to similar offences in the past. The task was long and arduous as each person that matched the criteria had to be interviewed, have their movements at the time of the offences checked and have blood samples taken for matching.

The samples of semen taken from the victims indicated that the killer had "Type AB" blood. If any of the suspects matched, they were detained for further questioning, those that didn't were released.

In the absence of computers, the details of all the suspects interviewed were handwritten on index cards and kept in boxes. One of the cards recorded that Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo had been interviewed but was released when his blood type failed to provide a match. Sometime after he was released, the police picked up a suspect acting suspiciously near the Rostov streetcar depot and brought him in for questioning. The suspect, named Shaburov, who was obviously retarded, soon confessed to stealing a car with four other men. Not long after, he confessed that he and his friends had also killed several children. His friends were then arrested and the four were questioned extensively for twenty-four hours.

The four men, who had met at a school for the mentally retarded, readily confessed to seven "Forest Strip" murders, even though they were unable to provide any details of the victims or their locations. Several months later, when fresh murders were committed while the suspects were still in custody, the police believed that they were dealing with a "gang of madmen" and rounded up several other retarded young men for questioning. The "questioning" was apparently brutal and unrelenting, resulting in the death of one of the suspects with another committing suicide while in custody.

Eventually, as the murders continued, the "gang" theory was dropped and the boys released. One other theory was that the killer worked as a driver for one of the many factories in the area, which would explain how he was able to cover such large areas in a short time. To check the theory, anyone who held a drivers licence and drove as part of their job was checked. In all, over 150,000 people were interviewed before this line of inquiry was also abandoned.

By September 1984, apart from establishing the blood type of the killer, the investigation had failed to uncover any useable evidence. The fact that the blood type was shared by ten percent of European men meant that it alone was of very little help unless they were able to find someone to match it to. To make matters worse, while the police were struggling to find an answer, the murders were accelerating at an alarming rate. From January to September, fifteen new murders had been committed, eleven of them during the summer period alone.

In an effort to narrow down the possibilities, Burakov enlisted the aid of several psychologists and sexual pathologists from the Rostov Medical Institute and asked them to prepare a profile of the killer. Most of the specialists that were consulted refused to assist the police on the basis that they did not have sufficient information on which to base their analysis.

Aleksandr Bukhanovsky

Only one psychiatrist, Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, offered his help and agreed to provide a profile of the "Forest Strip" killer. Bukhanovsky didn't have much to base his analysis on. Obviously the killer was a sexual deviate, approximately 5'10" tall, 25-50 years old, a shoe size of 10 or more and had a common blood type. After studying the police files, Bukhanovsky gave the opinion that the killer probably suffered from some form of sexual inadequacy and brutalised his victims to compensate for it.

While the additional information provided another means of identification the killer would first have to be caught. In order to facilitate that, Burakov arranged for additional men to patrol the bus, tram and train stations. One such location that received more attention than most was the bus station in Rostov. Not only was it the busiest in the district but it was also the last known location of two of the victims. Aleksandr Zanosovsky, a local police inspector with an intimate knowledge of the location was given the job of patrolling the area. His task was to look for anyone acting suspiciously around other commuters, especially young women and boys.