On December 22, 1978, Andrei Chikatilo first experienced the thrill of killing another human being when he sexually assaulted and stabbed nine-year-old Lena Zakotnova and dumped her body into a river in the town of Shakhty, Russia. It was an experience he would duplicate more than fifty times before his long overdue capture.

A quiet, unassuming, scholarly man, Chikatilo was impotent with women for the most part (he did eventually marry and father two children) and found out early on that violence during sex excited him beyond anything else. In the early 1970's he began a teaching career, no doubt to enable himself to be in the company of children, his prime victim pool, on a daily basis. He embarked on a child-molesting spree at a school in Novoshaktinsk and left for Shakty in 1978 after his discretions became suspected by other students and faculty.

Chikatilo's murders began in earnest in 1981 when he switched jobs and became a travelling supply clerk, giving him ample free time and a larger hunting ground to find victims. His second murder occurred around the same time and Chikatilo became a literal killing machine, racking up fourteen total kills by the end of the summer. Most were lured from train and bus stops in different towns in the immediate area and most of the victims were young vagrants that were rarely missed until their corpses turned up. Chikatilo 's trademark was a horrifying escalation of sexual mutilation.

Chikatilo's kills mounted throughout the 1980's and bodies of his victims became more and more increasingly butchered. Police could not locate their mysterious killer despite their best, though sometimes clumsy, efforts. The man dubbed "The Rostov Ripper" baffled detectives while plucking children and women seemingly from under ivestigator's noses as they regularly patrolled area train and bus stations.

Chikatilo began a new job in 1985, again one that included frequent travel, and resumed his killing in 1987. A short jail term stemming from theft charges at his former employment appears to have scared him straight for roughly two years until he murdered a thirteen-year-old boy in Revda during May. The sex-killer was soon taking victims at his previous pace and due to the fact that his travels stretched much farther than before the links between them went fairly unnoticed for a time and police were slower to piece things together. Meanwhile Chikatilo killed nine times in 1988, with many of the victims missing body parts such as nipples, genitals, and tongues.

Finally on November 20, 1990, Chikatilo was arrested after detectives investigated a recent police report that he had been found at the Leskhov bus station with spots of blood on his face the same day that Svetlana Korostik, 22, had been mutilated, beaten, and stabbed to death in a wooded area nearby. Chikatilo refused to admit his guilt until the 29th of the month when he broke and admitted to 53 slayings. His confessions were unneringly accurate in detail and in the months following he travelled the country with police, pointing out places he had killed and locating bodies and dumpsites. He even went so far as to demonstrate his attacks using a dummy.

Investigators soon realized that Chikatilo should have been stopped much sooner. After his very first killing he was under suspicion after blood was found on the steps of a small shack located on his property near the scene of Zakotnova's abduction. Another man was instead found guilty and put to death for the murder. At another time Chikatilo had been subjected to blood tests which cleared him of involvement. Russian forensic scientists unbelievably did not know that in rare cases, blood and semen samples from the same person will turn out differently when tested, making it appear as if they came from two different people. Chikatilo was lucky enough to be one of those people and when his tests came back negative he was dropped as a suspect. At about this same time several retarded men were arrested for the crimes and confessed only to be later released after the murders continued during their confinement. The damage was done, however, as brutal interrogations killed one of the acused and another committed suicide in jail. To add to the ineptitude, one police detective had even been reprimanded and demoted for continuing to be convinced of Chikatilo's guilt in the serial slayings.