The Killer Department: Detective Viktor Burakov's Eight-Year Hunt for the Most Savage Serial Killer in Russian History by Robert Cullen

Author:Robert Cullen [Cullen, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Chikatilo, Andrei Romanovich, 1936-1994, Serial murders, Sex crimes, Serial murderers, Mentally ill offenders
ISBN: 9780679422761
Amazon: 0679422765
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 1993-03-02T06:00:00+00:00

They reminded him that the medical examinations of some of the exhumed bodies suggested that he had cut off their penises.

"I don't remember that," he said. "If I did it, I can't explain it."

Was he covered with blood after he dismembered the bodies?

"Never," he said. "Because after the person was dead, the blood flowed very lightly."

This was important. The Rostov investigators had often wondered why no one had ever come forward after a lesopolosa killing to report seeing a man spattered with blood leaving the area of a murder. This might explain it. Slivko was suggesting that an experienced killer would know how to kill without causing excessive bloodshed. He would know that once the heart had stopped, the blood flow ebbed to a trickle. And he would tailor his killing ritual accordingly.

One of the more innocuous questions elicited the most remarkable answer. Had he ever used tobacco or alcohol?

Slivko reacted slightly indignantly. He had never smoked. Once, he had tried to get drunk, thinking that it would help him feel attracted toward women. It did not.

More importantly, he said, he took his duties as a youth worker very seriously. "I was always working with children, and I felt a responsibility toward them," said the man who had killed seven boys. "It was a matter of morality, a matter of principle, that I could not appear before them smelling of alcohol."

That comment, as much as anything else Slivko said, gave the investigators a glimpse into the mind of the type of man they were seeking. Slivko was a man whose psyche was so compartmentalized that he could kill a series of children and still think it immoral to appear before children with liquor on his breath. The lesopolosa killer could be equally compartmentalized. He could be living an altogether normal existence—except for the times when the sadistic lust that seemed to live outside him compelled him to kill.

Something, however, had banked that lust. The melting snows of the spring of 1986 revealed no new bodies. Since the horrible summer of 1984, only one, in fact, had turned up in Rostov oblast—Inessa Gulyaeva in the summer of 1985. The public mood in Rostov reverted to its normal cynical apathy. The investigation rolled along like a great, suspect-producing machine, testing drivers and spitting out the names of those with type AB blood, and turning up occasional gay men, psychiatric patients, or sex criminals. But the near absence of new victims perversely increased Burakov's frustration, by adding to the questions he could not answer. Had the original lesopolosa killer left Rostov or just stopped killing in Rostov? Was he in jail, or had they come so close to catching him that they had frightened him into curtailing his killing? Could Inessa Gulyaeva be the victim of a different killer? He didn't know.

Then, on July 23, the militsia in Chaltyr, a farming town south of Rostov, reported the discovery of the body of Lyubov Golovakha, thirty-three, a collective farm worker. She had been stripped naked by her killer, then stabbed twenty-two times.

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