Customer Reviews

The Killer Department

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Pick up a deck of playing cards and count them. Put them down and know for a fact that this is how many people Andrei Chikatilo murdered between 1978 and 1990 before he was caught. It was a case that baffled Soviet police for over a decade, almost never solved thanks to the constrictive Soviet system that would never allow such knowledge of a `serial killer' to be known or addressed. The bureaucrats forbid the publication of the murders to alert the public, and one by one their children disappeared. `Citizen X' will convince you that true evil can and does exist, often in the worst possible places.

In Russia, children are taught to respect and trust grownups to the point where it becomes second nature to them, and it is this fact that enabled Chikatilo to lure so many girls and boys, even young women, with promises of alcohol, cigarettes and candy, away from prying eyes. In the seclusion of the forests around the Rostov and Shakty Oblasts, he would rape and mutilate them, often biting off portions in order to achieve release. It became known later that he had been impotent for years, but the grisly sight of his work allowed him to achieve some sort of sexual satisfaction. Cullen's interview before his execution has enabled the author to enlighten us to Chikatilo's activities during the murders.

`Citizen X' was a name penned by a psychologist who profiled Chikatilo, something unheard of in the Soviet Union, and enabled investigators to construct a pattern of events around the killer. It is a testament to the dedication of the police who worked on the case, often to exclusion of all else, including their health that Chikatilo was ever caught at all. Most notably is the man who spearheaded the case since day one, Viktor Burakov, and a more dedicated police officer has never existed. His determination, and his ability as a careful and analytical thinker enabled him to eventually piece together Chikatilo's patterns until his arrest. And while he was tried for fifty-two murders, the actual count may go as high as a hundred.

Chikatilo himself was a diseased monster, incompetent at life, for though he was trained as a school teacher, he had been fired for sexually assaulting a young girl around 1976. He worked odd jobs until he found steady work at a train plant in Rostov. Cullen's book assembles all of it in stunning detail that draws the reader in until they are silently urging Burakov onward to solving the case. It is fortunate then that Chikatilo was caught and in late 1990 they put a bullet into his misbegotten brain.

After reading Tom Rob Smith's novel Child 44, which moved the story 30 years earlier and which had an unsatisfyingly contrived ending, I wanted to turn to a "true crime" depiction of the serial child killer. For those of us accustomed to seeing CSI shows and endless TV dramatizations of serial killers, FBI profilers, etc, Killer Department provides a mind-boggling counterpoint. It's almost as if in everything we think of as useful tools, the Soviets did the opposite. It took 6 years to catch the killer, although Chikatilo's victims numbered at least 56 and stretched over 10 years.

There are heros here: Detective Burakov, a dedicated Party member who was willing to chance flaunting Party-line restrictions, and the psychiatrist Bukhanovsky, also willing to ignore directives from superiors. It quickly became apparent that there was a serial killer--from the methods of murder. Hundreds of people eventually worked on the case. But there was little coordination. Authorities (not Burakov) believed that there had to be 2 or more separate killers: they refused to countenance the idea that one person would sexually assault and kill both males and females. Psychiatry had withered under Stalin: Freud was a decadent figure. Children were not warned to be careful around strangers--quite the opposite. Almost all murders were done by family members in drunken rages or to cover up theft. Children were safe in the workers' paradise: crime was a capitalist problem. Confessions were de jure: with 400 murders a year in Rostov, careful scientific investigations were a rarity. It turns out that Soviet forensics consistently mistyped semen samples, classifying blood type A as AB. Chikatilo was type A, and since semen samples from victims were mistyped as AB, the murders perhaps continued for years longer than they should have.

You get a fascinating view of Soviet society here. It's a thoroughly chilling tale, accentuated by the appetites for most of those in authority to find convenient scapegoats, and colored by a too-prevalent disinterest in underclasses: lost youth, homosexuals, children discarded by parents, children who could vanish without anyone notifying authorities or caring at all. But in the end, the killer was caught--more by luck and by the dedicated work of Burakov. Burakov suffered breakdowns, and there were times he came close to being demoted back to coal mining or the like. Catching Chakatilo was a triumph by individuals, not by the State.

I heard the author speaking about his book on the radio years ago, I just had to read the book. Great insight into a serial killer reasoning. Frightening, horrible reasearch into the murder's life.

The subject of serial killers is an absorbing,if gruesome subject, and the story of Andrei Chikatilo is particularly fascinating, especially given how prolific was his murderous 'career'. This book is interesting and well written and is a good complement to another book on the same subject entitled Red Ripper. That book puts the focus on Chikatilo himself and is a very personal portrait of the killer, while this book focuses on the investigation and the investigators, with only a chapter or so dealing with Chikatilo's personal history. On the whole, I think I preferred the former but that is just a matter of personal taste and I would recommend both books to those with an interest in the topic.

Andrei Chikotilo murdered, sexually abused, and mutilated about fifty children in and around the small city of Rostov in southern Russia during the 1980s. The author of this book, Robert Cullen, was a reporter in the USSR for a news magazine and spent about ten years in the area. He also interviewed many of the people involved in this decade-long investigation, so he knows what he's talking about.

This clearly written and systematically organized book has two chief virtues, as far as the general reader is concerned. First, he reveals just about everything you'd like to know about the crimes themselves -- the victim, the chief investigator (Viktor Burakov), and the extensive investigation that finally led to Chikotilo's arrest, conviction, and execution. Second, Cullen is also the author of works dealing with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and wittingly or otherwise, he gives the reader a fascinating glimpse into the social structure of the nation, including its bureaucracy, and a take on the life of ordinary citizens. Want some idea of the gay community in Rostov? Cullen breaks it down into three or four levels of degradation for you. You wouldn't want to have lived in Rostov, not for material reasons at any rate. (The courtroom in which Chikotilo's trial takes place is decrepit and the seats look like a conglomeration of left overs from a yard sale during the Great Depression.)

Chikotilo himself remains an enigma, a quiet and scholastic-looking middle-aged man who could carry out the most heinous acts when impelled by the impulse to do so. Various Soviet psychiatrists give opinions of his character and motives but they're not very convincing. Alekxandr Bukhanovsky and Andrei Tkachenko give it a try. The murderous impulses were partly caused by weather patterns or by the gradual build-up of certain unspecified hormones. Our more sophisticated analysts couldn't do any better, as far as that goes. Serial murder doesn't yet have a credible explanation. Attempts at discovering one are constantly hampered by what one analyst has called the "preposterousness factor." We can all understand why some people kill their friends and relatives. Those are people we care about, whose opinions of us we value. They're in a position to hurt us, and we must live with them. But complete strangers?

But, to me, as a behavioral scientist, at least as interesting as Chikotilo and his awful exploits is the picture of Soviet society that peeks through the cracks of the narrative. The judicial system, for instance, automatically puts the defendant at a disadvantage. Chikotilo was appointed a defense counsel, but could not call in psychiatrists or technical experts in support of his position. At the same time, in this instance anyway, being placed under arrest for horrible crimes, and urged to confess, doesn't mean the defendant automatically gets the crap beaten out of him.

Cullen comes up with some surprising insights. Half-way through this crime spree, it was clear that some of the police investigators were doing a sloppy job of surveillance. Murders were being committed under their noses. The bureaucratic response was the same as the response of the Soviet Union after the German invasion stalled before Moscow and Stalingrad in World War II. You don't solve the problem with a subtle change in tactics. You solve it by throwing more men at it. And if that doesn't work, you throw still more men at it.

The book is fascinating as an exercise in analysis. What you won't find in it -- in case you're looking for it -- is sensationalism. The wounds on the bodies are described only in enough detail to provide a general picture of the corpse that's relevant to the investigation. There is no blood. There are no screams as the horrified victims writhe in agony. And there isn't a single whiff of cadaverine as weeks-old bodies are examined. The taste Cullen shows is worthy of Newsweek and the New Yorker. It wouldn't fit in a tabloid.

What's also lacking -- and I'm not sure this is bad -- is much about the emotional responses of the people involved. Sometimes, someone may get "angry", but that's about it. In the middle of the investigation, the apparently tireless Burakov had what we would call a "nervous breakdown." He stopped sleeping. He almost stopped moving. He had to haul himself up a staircase with his hand. (It sounds like a major affective disorder.) But that's as far as we get into Burakov's mind. The book is more about thinking and acting than feeling.

It's instructive to compare the book, "The Killer Department," with its cinematic expression, "Citizen X", starring Steven Rhea and Donald Sutherland. A two-hour movie is, by its nature, subject to alteration and compression. It has to be, in a case as complicated as Chikotilo's. And the movie does quite a good job of transposing the story. It's made more dramatic without losing any overall sense of the murders or their solution. Instead of communism being a dark and omnipresent shadow over the investigation, the ideology is personified by the Commissar, played by Joss Ackland, who periodically harasses and impedes Burakov's procedures.

The movie is quite good and so is the book. Nice jobs.

I'm a sucker for books about real life serial killers (yet trust me, I'm still a pretty nice guy) and this one (which was later made into a solid HBO movie) delivered the goods. What made it especially interesting was the Russian setting and how it focussed on the frustration of the lead investigator who wanted to use modern psychological techniques to track the killer, but was stifled by the communist political system he worked in. This real life story is somewhat remindful of the fictional plot of The Alienist, with the key difference being that in Caleb Carr's novel psychology is a brand new science, whereas in the non-fiction Citizen X psychology is simply foreign to criminal investigation in the Soviet Union.

Citizen X is an interesting look at the search for a serial killer as the Soviet Union falls. The frustration of the stifling and rigid government rules that hampers the investigation, a look at Russian beliefs about law, government, and murder. Enjoyable, interesting, and very sad at times. If you are interested in Soviet/Russian life, or serial killers in general this is a good read.