ExecutedToday.com

On this date in 1994, Ukrainian serial killer Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was shot dead in a soundproof room in Novocherkassk, Russia, for a stupendous serial murder spree in the 1980s USSR.

The quintessential case study in anonymous middle-aged melancholy turned larger-than-life horror, the sexually dysfunctional Chikatilo raped, murdered and mutilated dozens in a homicidal career beginning at the unusually late age of 42.

After that initial foray into rape-murder in 1978, three years passed before the factory clerk (molestation allegations had drummed him out of teaching in the interval) began his harvest of 50-plus victims: children and teenagers of both sexes, and young adult women.

In addition to the staggering body count, the murders of the “Rostov Ripper” were marked by orgiastic savagery: breasts severed, eyes gouged out, genitalia mutilated and even eaten, and bodies lacerated with scores of stab wounds.

Like many monsters, he was also, as much as his more well-adjusted fellows, a creature of his own time and place.

Chiktilo was a socially maladjusted child in part due to his father’s capture by the Germans during World War II, subjecting the family to the postwar ostracism that awaited returning POWs. (Some sources also say Chikatilo saw his mother raped by German soldiers.)

The part of his life for which he’s most famous, meanwhile, drew out into a years-long bloodbath even though he was a suspect from the very first murder — a crime for which another man was wrongfully executed. Sclerotic bureaucracy and investigative cock-ups hobbled the police effort throughout, a sort of criminological emblem of the Soviet Union’s twilight. Authorities were loathe to involve the public by admitting the presence of a serial killer, a type officially associated with bourgeois society.

Chikatilo was arrested once in 1984 carrying a Bundy-esque murder kit, but authorities couldn’t make anything stick (Chikatilo’s Communist Party membership helped); another officer stopped him leaving the forest where bodies turned up, but didn’t search the satchel which contained his most recent victim’s severed breasts. Chikatilo was investigated early on, but ruled out as a suspect because of a blood type mismatch between his blood and crime-scene semen — apparently the result of a rare biological anomaly that (combined with authorities’ outsized confidence in forensic detection) bought him years of killing and involved thousands more suspects before investigators finally circled back to Andrei Romanovich.

Even at his last arrest, investigators who knew they had their man nearly let him slip away because they couldn’t charge him within 10 days — finally cajoling a confession and the killer’s cooperation at nearly the last possible hour.

According to Cannibal Killers, the Chikatilo task force solved 1,062 unrelated crimes, including 95 murders, while puzzling out the Rostov Ripper.

There’s much more about Chikatilo’s career at trutv.com; the 1995 film about the Chikatilo murders, Citizen X, indulges some dramatic license, but it’s pretty watchable for a TV movie.

Also On This Date

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On this date in 1514, the leader of a Hungarian peasant uprising that scared the ermine robes off the feudal nobles met a punishment from the unspeakable depths of their medieval imaginations.

While Marki Sandor’s 1913 biographical treatment of this character — also rendered Georghe Doja or Dosa, or as György Székely for his native soil — is available online, it seems to be available only in Hungarian.

Since readily-accessible non-Magyar sources such as Dozsa’s Wikipedia page all appear to spring root and branch from the public domain edition of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica … well, who is Executed Today to buck the trend? (Some paragraph breaks added for readability.)

GYORGY DOZSA (d. 1514), Hungarian revolutionist, was a Szekler squire and soldier of fortune, who won such a reputation for valour in the Turkish wars that the Hungarian chancellor, Tamas Bakocz, on his return from Rome in 1514 with a papal bull preaching a holy war in Hungary against the Moslems, appointed him to organize and direct the movement.

In a few weeks he collected thousands of so-called Kuruczok (a corruption of Cruciati), consisting for the most part of small yeomen, peasants, wandering students, friars and parish priests, the humblest and most oppressed portion of the community, to whom alone a crusade against the Turk could have the slightest attraction.

They assembled in their counties, and by the time Dozsa had drilled them into some sort of discipline and self-confidence, they began to air the grievances of their class. No measures had been taken to supply these voluntary crusaders with food or clothing; as harvest-time approached, the landlords commanded them to return to reap the fields, and on their refusing to do so, proceeded to maltreat their wives and families and set their armed retainers upon the half-starved multitudes. Instantly the movement was diverted from its original object, and the peasants and their leaders began a war of extermination against the landlords.

By this time Dozsa was losing control of the rabble, which had fallen under the influence of the socialist parson of Czegled, Lorincz Meszaros. The rebellion was the more dangerous as the town rabble was on the side of the peasants, and in Buda and other places the cavalry sent against the Kuruczok were unhorsed as they passed through the gates. The rebellion spread like lightning, principally in the central or purely Magyar provinces, where hundreds of manor-houses and castles were burnt and thousands of the gentry done to death by impalement, crucifixion and other unspeakable methods.

Dozsa’s camp at Czegled was the centre of the jacquerie, and from thence he sent out his bands in every direction, pillaging and burning. In vain the papal bull was revoked, in vain the king issued a proclamation commanding the peasantry to return to their homes under pain of death. By this time the rising had attained the dimensions of a revolution; all the feudal levies of the kingdom were called out against it; and mercenaries were hired in haste from Venice, Bohemia and the emperor.

Meanwhile Dozsa had captured the city and fortress of Csanad, and signalized his victory by impaling the bishop and the castellan. Subsequently, at Arad, the lord treasurer, Istvan Telegdy, was seized and tortured to death with satanic ingenuity. It should, however, in fairness be added that only notorious bloodsuckers, or obstinately resisting noblemen, were destroyed in this way. Those who freely submitted were always released on parole, and Dozsa not only never broke his given word, but frequently assisted the escape of fugitives. But he could not always control his followers when their blood was up, and infinite damage was done before he could stop it.

At first, too, it seemed as if the government were incapable of coping with him.

In the course of the summer he took the fortresses of Arad, Lippa and Vilagos; provided himself with guns and trained gunners; and one of his bands advanced to within five leagues of the capital. But his halfnaked, ill-armed ploughboys were at last overmatched by the mailclad chivalry of the nobles. Dozsa, too, had become demoralized by success. After Csánad, he issued proclamations which can only be described as nihilistic. His suppression had become a political necessity.

He was finally routed at Temesvar* by the combined forces of Janos Zapolya and Istvan Bathory.

The radicalism of this revolt is not to be downplayed; Friedrich Engels’ The Peasant War in Germany, reports that Dozsa declared a republic and abolished nobility.

As with his French predecessor Guillaume Cale, his punishment would demarcate the feudal order by horrifically mocking its victim’s pretension to political authority. This description of Dozsa’s unenviable end comes from The History of Hungary and the Magyars, a 19th century text available free at Google Books, beginning with :

[After hearing his sentence, Dozsa] exclaimed — addressing the crowd whom he saw shuddering at his approaching doom — “Come back tomorrow, you miserable slaves, and see if I shrink in the midst of my sufferings! If a single groan escapes my lips, may my name be covered with eternal infamy!”

On the following day, he was placed almost naked on a burning throne, and his head was encircled by a crown of red-hot iron. Fourteen of his followers had been kept without food for several days, and were then brought into his presence, and while he was yet living the flesh was torn from his bones and cast to them that they might satiate their hunger. “To it hounds!” was his bitter exclamation, “ye are of my own rearing!”

This insurrectionist’s confrontation with backward power structures would offer plentiful fodder for those lands’ now-fallen Communist regimes; his name adorns many streets and monuments in Hungary and Romania.

However, Dozsa was well on his way into the nationalist pantheon before Communist ascendancy. Nineteenth-century composer Ferenc Erkel, for instance,** wrote an opera about him, and poet/nationalist revolutionary Petofi Sandor saluted him in verse in 1847.

The latter text is available in Hungarian on Dozsa’s Hungarian Wikipedia page, which also attributes at least two plays about him to the Interwar period.

* aka Timisoara — in modern-day Romania, where the execution actually took place.

** Dozsa was actually captured in a fortress constructed by John Hunyadi, whose executed son is a fellow nationalist martyr (playing for the traditional-authority team), and the subject of one of Erkel’s more famous operas.

Also On This Date

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