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fate that befell his older brother, to be killed and eaten in the most violent, vicious way imaginable.
    Chikatilo’s series of gruesome murders attracted a great deal of police attention, but at the time the Soviet media had its hands tied. Journalists were not permitted to publicise the existence of a serial killer in the Soviet Union, as this reflected badly on the political situation there, or so the apparatchiks felt. Thus, the public were not warned to be on their guard and to keep their children safe from harm. For this reason, Chikatilo’s crimes became easier, and he continued to kill his victims, in increasingly savage ways. In just one month, August 1984, he did away with eight victims. Despite the increasing death toll, the only clue the police were able to find was that the killer’s blood group was AB. This was determined by analysing the semen found on the bodies of some of his more recent victims.
     
    B ROUGHT TO JUSTICE
     
    However, it was in late 1984, just as his murders had reached a peak, that Chikatilo was arrested at a railway station where he was trying to seduce some young girls. He was arrested and found to have a knife and a length of rope in his bag but, because his blood group was A, not AB, he was eventually released. This evident mistake by police has never been explained, and it had tragic consequences. Once he was released, Chikatilo redoubled his killings, so that dozens more innocent people lost their lives. In 1988, he murdered eight more times, and in his last year of freedom, 1990, he killed nine people, several of them boys. By then, a new detective, Issa Kostoyev, had taken over the case and was determined to bring him to justice. Kostoyev ordered an army of detectives to wait at train and bus stations in the area and her plan worked.
    A detective waiting at a station saw Chikatilo sweating profusely and breathing heavily, with bloodstains on his clothes, took his name and checked with his superiors to see if there was any information about him. When news came back that he had been a suspect, he was arrested. As it turned out, Chikatilo had just murdered twenty-year-old Svetlana Korostik. After ten days in custody he finally confessed to around fifty-two more murders, many more than the police had been aware of.
     
    M ONSTER IN A CAGE
     
    Chikatilo was brought to trial in April 1992. By this time, he was mentally ill and was locked inside a cage. The cage was designed as much to keep him safe from his victims’ relatives as to stop him from lashing out. At his trial, it became clear that Chikatilo had completely lost his mind: he was no longer the neat, sober-looking individual he had been when he was arrested, but had become a shaven-headed monster who ranted and raved at the judge and jury.
    After a high profile trial that drew many shocked spectators, and that was reported in the media internationally, Chikatilo was convicted of all the murders he was charged with, and received a total of fifty-two death sentences. On February 15, 1994, he was executed by a single bullet to the back of the head. The reign of terror of the cannibal serial killer had finally come to an end.

Gary Heidnik

     
    Gary Heidnik was an American killer who abducted a number of women and kept them captive in his basement, murdering two of them and causing extensive injuries to the others. His horrific crimes included kidnapping, murder, torture, sexual abuse of all kinds and cannibalism. A high-school dropout and ex-army soldier with a schizoid personality disorder, he committed numerous crimes, including beating and raping his Filipino wife, abducting and sexually abusing a mentally subnormal young woman, and then, worst of all, abducting five women and holding them in his house, inflicting all manner of torture on them until two of them died. At that point, he dismembered the first victim’s body, cooked it and fed it to the surviving victims. Eventually, one of the captives escaped and went to