Rostov Ripper Decoded

He killed for twelve years before they caught him. Fifty three children, women, and drifters, hunted through the forest belts of southern Russia and left in the long grass with wounds the Soviet militsia refused to admit had been made by a single man.

He carried a kitchen knife in his briefcase. He held a Communist Party card in his wallet. He went home, every evening, to his wife and his daughter. His name was Andrei Chikatilo. The world would come to know him as the Rostov Ripper. The Butcher of Rostov. The most prolific serial killer the Soviet Union ever produced.

This is not the true crime account you have already read.

Rostov Ripper Decoded steps inside the man the Soviet Union refused to see. The boy who grew up in the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s being told his older brother had been eaten by neighbours. The teacher quietly nudged from school to school for inappropriate contact with pupils. The husband who came home with bloodstains his wife chose not to ask about for twenty seven years.

You will sit in the cell when a Rostov psychiatrist reads a sixty five page profile aloud and watches a serial killer weep for the first time in his fifty four years. You will stand at the bars of the iron cage as he bares himself to the courtroom that has just sentenced him to die. You will walk the lesopolosa, the strip of trees that became his hunting ground.

The question this book asks is not what he did. The question is why him, and not the thousand other men who came out of the same childhood.

By the time you close the back cover, you will know.

The next time you pass a quiet man with a briefcase at a railway platform, you will know what to look for.

CraigBeck.com