Hunting the Devil / The Killer Department
Lourie, Richard & Cullen, Robert
T he wisdom of your parents no longer obtains: Crime pays. Commit a crime, survive a crime, observe a crime with your handycamand the riches of the kingdom shall be yours. There are lurid books to...
...Cullen does a remarkable job of elucidating the obsolescence of Soviet police techniques, and in so doing reminds us how miraculously efficient are our own men in blue...
...But the investigation, like all else in the old USSR, was a fiasco of mismanagement and ineptitude...
...they all pay very well...
...Though capable of achieving orgasm—and, later, on two occasions, of sufficient conjugal performance to impregnate his wife—he must surely have felt burdened with shame and rage...
...He wrote and published articles, and took a teacher's job at a mining school...
...His father discovered that—in Stalin's mind at least—to have survived the Nazi prison camps was a form of treachery, and he was sentenced to ten years of sawing Siberian timber...
...Puberty brought Chikatilo the straw that doubtless broke his psychic camel's back...
...there are eight million stories in the naked oblast, and everyone has one to sell...
...Tests misidentified the killer's blood type...
...Robert Cullen's account is by a long chalk more detailed, and ultimately more convincing...
...Even so, he tried...
...It grabs top ruble, too...
...Burakov risked his career by consulting a psychiatric expert on transsexualism, who turned out to predict with great- accuracy B ut the demons of Chikatilo's psy- che, the burning sense that he'd been deprived of eyes and genitals, would not let him be...
...A ndrei Chikatilo was born practically blind...
...To a nation raised on "SWAT" and "Hill Street Blues," no text could so effectively delineate the antiquated behemoth that was the Soviet Union...
...This had so frightened him that he even had bought a knife and begun carrying it with him at all times...
...Inspectors sometimes found remains of a campfire by the murder sites, which dovetailed with his wife's testimony that he often took a frying pan with him to his job...
...That he is widely known throughout the former Soviet Union bespeaks the progress of freedom...
...His hero is Issa Kostoev, the chief inspector who triumphs over his Ingush heritage (the Ingush were victims under Stalin of what was not yet known as ethnic cleansing) to become a respected lawman known for his, refusal to accept the obviousexplanation...
...At the time of his arrest in November 1990, Chikatilo was wanted in connection with the murders of at least fifty-three, often carving off, in one piece, the nose and upper lip of the victim, or—surprisegouging out the eyes with Oedipal fury...
...Is the free-market scramble for unauthorized biography and dirt-mongering far behind...
...The day before had been the anniversary of Joseph Stalin's birth, who would have been ninety-nine...
...Richard Lourie, well known for previous books on the Soviet Union, offers the better-written and less believable account of Chikatilo's capture...
...He married, fathered two children, and lived the gray existence of model Soviet citizen on Rostov's Fifty Years of the All-Union Leninist Communist Youth League Street.his freshly bloodied knife...
...When David Letterman was asked what he would call his television show on a new network, he claimed he'd not yet decided, but was hoping to work "Buttafuoco" into the title...
...He claimed to have experienced orgasm after slashing open a woman's abdomen...
...I doubt it...
...One gleans readily enough, however, that Kostoev is a friend of the author, and so is herein painted in the pure light of goodness one associates with bad fiction and fudged political memoirs...
...It was virtually impossible to cross-reference information from department to department because there were no computers...
...Instead, Kostoev instigated a witch-hunt for area homosexuals, several of whom committed suicide as the investigation intensified...
...No birth record of this brother has ever been found, but such savagery was common enough, and it may have been just a cautionary tale with a gruesomely ironic moral—that young children should beware of strangers...
...Gawky, slope-shouldered, near-blind and not handsome, stripped of his father and maybe a brother, destined to sexual inaptitude, Andrei Chikatilo was a man whose center could not have held for very long...
...a 300-person manhunt surrounding a' tiny area still allowed Chikatilo to slip through and murder again when the detail at an out-of-the-way train station deserted its post on a meal break...
...He strung line and cable for a KGB communications unit during military service, then went on to earn three degrees at university...
...Cullen sees Kostoev as something of a fool, and Lourie hardly mentions Burakov at all...
...and Chikatilo was let go after being apprehended with a briefcase containing a knife, some rope, and petroleum jelly—but the acuity of our police psychiatric research, particularly as regards sex crimes, is inferior to none in the world...
...He had taken it with him on the morning of that day, December 22...
...With a wry dolor not unworthy of Updike, he calls the onanists "that loneliest tribe...
...And this is his steamy rendering of the moments before Chikatilo murders for the first time: Just the other day some of the boys had come running up behind him in the park and knocked him to the ground, yelling vicious insults at him, a teacher, a grown man...
...That he appears here in mutually "exclusive" stories (the first of the chief inspector of the case, the second of its head detective) tells us less about our perennial fascinadon with the grotesque, and more about the Rashomon-like discrepancies that creep in when men are offered large sums of money to share—and, thus, along the way, embroider—the details of their exploits...
...Or Burakov...
...But Lourie's book aspires to and achieves an immediate, often breathless quality...
...But their appearance in these rather different stories means the free market has penetrated the silence of the old police state, and no more heartwarming news could come to totalitarianism's opponents...
...He lost his teaching position after some unwarranted incursions into the boys' dormitory...
...in the 1980s, Rostov's finest were still using color-coded index cards—a red strip for homosexuals, etc...
...And the night before had been the longest of the year, the earth tipping its farthest from the sun...
...And Chikatilo's sister remembered that when he was a young boy, his mother cradled him in her arms as she weepily recounted how his brother had been abducted and cannibalized during the horrible famine of the 1930s, brought about by the brutal collectivization of the farms...
...Sometimes, after the most horrible and unspeakable acts, he would find his rage yet unsated, and would fall upon a nearby tree, hacking away at its trunk with the killer's age, psychic makeup, and profession—information, Cullen claims, to which Kostoev paid scant heed...
...evidence was routinely lost or destroyed...
...On December 22, 1978, Chikatilo lured a young girl to a house that nobody, not even his wife, knew that he owned...
...He joined the party, got himself installed as a "police assistant," which meant a flip-top red ID case that carried a measure of respect...
...There are lurid books to be written, serial rights to be ironed out, melodramas to be shot and scored...
...These two tell the tale of a man who is perhaps the most savage and perverted serial killer in history, and how he was finally captured after a twelve-year spree of deeds unthinkable...
...he discovered he was impotent...
...After blindfolding, molesting, choking, manually inseminating, stabbing, and sexually mutilating her, he tossed her still alive into a nearby river...
...Is it anyway better than state socialism...
...The society that once proclaimed crime a product of bourgeois capitalism has discovered itself more correct in that judgment than it ever could have imagined...
...Perhaps it was that one extra minute of darkness that brought Chikatilo to equinox as well...
...They worked together on the Chikatilo investigation for over eight years...
...Everybody got the joke...
...We are shown a remarkable posed photograph of Kostoev peering into a microscope that appears to antedate Enrico Fermi...
...The Ukraine of the 1940s offered no chance for a poor young lad to acquire himself some spectacles, and in the classroom his eyes filled with tears at his inability to read the blackboard...
...Ultimately, of course, these two accounts are incompatible as fact...
...He finally got work as a procurer for a factory, but within himself felt a drive to acquire the only things that in the end would bring him true sexual satisfaction...
...Everyone makes mistakes—Jeffrey Dahmer was interrupted mid-murder by police who wrongly concluded all was well...
...Well, you might ask Kostoev...
...Now, thanks to glasnost, the darkness of the human soul yields more than top dollar...
...And so began his grisly career as a sadist and pedophile, rapist, sexual cannibal, onanist, and necrophile...
...He tells the story of Viktor Burakov, a tough detective so obsessed with the case that he sometimes dreamt that he himself was the villain...
Vol. 26 • June 1993 • No. 6
