Andrei Chikatilo — The Butcher of Rostov

Between 1978 and 1990, Soviet citizen Andrei Chikatilo murdered at least 52 women and children across Russia and Ukraine, making him one of the most prolific serial killers of the 20th century. A schoolteacher and procurement clerk, he used his extensive work-related travel to seek victims at bus and railway stations, luring runaways and young people before leading them into isolated wooded areas where he attacked them. Soviet authorities launched one of the largest manhunts in USSR history, questioning over 200,000 people. In a catastrophic miscarriage of justice, an innocent man named Aleksandr Kravchenko was convicted of one of Chikatilo's murders and executed in 1984. Chikatilo had briefly been a suspect but was cleared due to a rare biological anomaly that caused his blood secretions to differ from his blood type, confusing early forensic analysis. Chikatilo was finally arrested in November 1990 after a plainclothes officer observed him at a train station. He confessed to 56 murders and led investigators to the bodies of previously unknown victims. He was tried in a steel cage in a Rostov courtroom, convicted of 52 murders in 1992, and executed by a single gunshot to the back of the head in February 1994. His case exposed serious flaws in the Soviet criminal justice system, including the execution of an innocent man and authorities' institutional reluctance to acknowledge that a sexual predator of this scale could exist in a socialist society. He became the subject of numerous films and documentaries, and his case significantly influenced the development of criminal profiling in post-Soviet Russia.