Peter Conradi - The Red Ripper: Inside the Mind of Russia’s Most Brutal Serial Killer

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To Roberta

Introduction by Colin Wilson

Peter Conradi has, I believe, produced one of the most interesting case histories of a serial killer since Dr Karl Berg published The Sadist a study of the Dsseldorf Monster, Peter Krlenin 1932.

As the professor of forensic medicine in the Dsseldorf Medical Academy, Berg was naturally called in when, on 14 May 1930, the police finally arrested the killer who had terrorised Dsseldorf for fifteen months. During this time, the Monster had killed eight peoplea man, three women and four childrenby methods that included stabbing, strangulation and hammer blows. Berg was surprised to find a mild, pleasant-looking man who proved to be charming and intelligentand whose neighbours were at first convinced that the police had made some absurd mistake. Krten seemed pleased to recount his strange sexual history to a doctor, and the result was the first detailed study of the development of a psychopathic killer.

Since then, there have been few equally detailed studies of such criminals. In America during the mid-1930s, a sadistic pervert named Albert Fishsentenced to death for killing and partly eating ten-year-old Grace Buddspoke frankly to psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, and told him of a lifetime of sadism and child murder; but Wertham chose to devote only one chapter of his book The Show of Violence to Fish. Since the Second World War, there has been a steady increase in cases of sex crime, and in the decades since 1970, a terrifying rise in the number of what used to be called mass murderers, and what are now called serial killers, but none have been studied with the thoroughness that Berg brought to Krten.

The Chikatilo case is a welcome exception. Several psychiatrists, beginning with Aleksandr Bukhanovsky, have studied Chikatilo since his arrest in November 1990, and some of them have provided Peter Conradi with an amazingly detailed account of Chikatilos mental development. The result is that we have a more profound understanding of Chikatilo than of virtually any other serial killer since Krten. It enables us to see just how many interesting parallels there are with other well-known cases of sex murder.

The one that immediately springs to mind is that of Reginald Christie, the Notting Hill murderer. Like Chikatilo, Christie was so paralysingly shy that it made him virtually impotentas a teenager he was known as Reggie-no-dick and Cant-do-it Christie. Like Chikatilo, Christie was an intelligent depressive of low self-esteem, who tried to conceal himself behind an official facadeChristie was a reserve constable, Chikatilo a minor Communist Party member. Both succeeded in finding a wife with whom they could overcome their shyness and impotence, but proved unenthusiastic husbands where sex was concerned.

The basic psychological pattern of the sex criminal is a slow development of sexual craving through fantasy. Peter Krten was introduced to sadism at the age of nine by a dog-catcher who liked to torture animals. But it was in solitary confinement, in prison for burglary, that rape fantasies turned into dreams of blood. Christies fantasies were all about the violation of a passive, unresisting victim, and he put this into practice by luring women to sit in a deckchair and to inhale Friars Balsam, into which he introduced coal gas; when they were unconscious, he ceased to be impotent. Then, to prevent discovery, he had to kill them.

Unfortunately, Chikatilos work as a schoolteacher gave him the opportunity to develop his own sexual fantasiessex with underage girls, with whom he felt less shy than adults. It was at this point that he diverged from Christie when he experienced orgasm as he was beating a pupil with a ruler. And when, in December 1978, he lured a nine-year-old girl into his house and tried to rape her, the impotence supervened, but the sign of her blood triggered sadistic violence. Conradi says accurately: It was the most decisive moment of his life. As he stabbed her to death, the knife replaced his ineffective sexual organ, and he ceased to be a potential Christie, and became another Krten, for whom stabbing and the sight of blood brought sexual release. From that moment on, he became one of the most dangerous men in Russia.

In Europe or America, his career would probably have come to an end shortly thereafter, when police came to question him. He already had a record as a child molestor, and neighbours had seen a stream of prostitutes entering his house. The number of stab wounds on the victim must have indicated that the room in which she had been killed would be full of traces of blood. The most cursory forensic examination of his sitting room would have revealed him as the killer. But luck was with him; the police switched their attention to a neighbour who already had one conviction for a sex murder, and Aleksandr Kravchenko was finally executed for Chikatilos crime.

And now, like Christie and Krten, Chikatilo became an obsessive repeat-killer, a man for whom the act of murder brought release from his sense of inferiority and depression. In only one respect did he continue to resemble Christie rather than Krten: he remained a pathetic monster rather than a demonic sadist. Yet his crimes were demonic enough, and there is evidence that he tortured his victims before he killed them. He remained in the grip of his obsession for another twelve years, until the time of his arrest, and went on to kill more than fifty more victims.

Chikatilos incredible luck persisted. When arrested as a murder suspect in 1984, with a knife and rope in his bag, he was allowed to go free because he was one of those extremely rare freaks whose sperm-group differed from his blood group. So he was released to torture and kill another 21 victims. Unlike so many other serial killers he was not caught by carelessnessa carelessness that argues that they want to be caughtbut by chance, when a policeman glanced at his identity papers and entered a report.

Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, the great sexologist who devoted his life to studying sexual anomalies, believed firmly that all sex criminals should be regarded as mentally unbalanced. In the years since 1970, there have been a few cases that suggest he was not entirely correctcases such as Ted Bundy, Dean Corll and John Gacey, in which there seems to have been a clear conscious choice to become a human predator. But of all serial killers I can call to mind, the case of Andrei Chikatilo seems the most powerful argument for Hirschfelds thesis. Chikatilo is a haunting example of a man in the grip of an obsession over which he has no controlan archetypal pathetic monster.

Chapter One

The hands of the bus station clock showed 8 p.m. through the cracked glass, but it was still warm outside, a typical summers evening in the south of Russia. He looked around him for a second: grim-faced workers hurrying home after their shifts, young couples lingering for a few moments, tramps settling down with their bottles of vodka for the evening. He had been on duty all day and his eyes were beginning to blur with the sheer mass of humanity. The calendar on the wall read 13 September 1984.