Andrei Chikatilo

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (??????? ?????????? ?????????) (October 16, 1936–February 14, 1994) was a Soviet serial killer. He was convicted of the murder of fifty-two women and children between 1978 and 1990.

First arrest

Chikatilo was identified behaving suspiciously at a Rostov bus station. He was arrested and held. It was found he was under suspicion for other crimes, which gave the investigators the legal right to hold him indefinitely. Chikatilo's dubious background was uncovered but provided insufficient evidence to convict him of the murders. He was found guilty on other matters and sentenced to one year in prison. He was freed in December 1984 after serving three months.

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It was later revealed that Chikatilo had been originally ruled out as a suspect in the murders because his blood group was tested as different from semen samples left by the killer. The forensic scientists later claimed that Chikatilo must be a unique individual whose blood group showed up as different when it was taken from a blood sample than when it was taken by a semen sample. No other scientists at that time took this theory seriously and it was generally regarded that the samples had been mixed up or the tests simply botched.

Related Topics:
Blood group - Semen

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Unfortunately for Chikatilo´s future victims this theory of non-secreters proved true some time later after his final arrest when it was found out that "a secretor status refers to blood protein antigen/antibody markers, which were used in the "classical" serological methods of blood identification in the days before the advent of DNA analysis. "Secretors" secrete these bloodmarkers into their other body fluids (saliva, tears, sweat, milk, etc.) while "non-secretors" do not. Therefore, you can determine the blood type of a "secretor" by testing body fluids other than blood, but would need actual blood to test the blood type of a non-secretor. About 80% of the population are secretors, and about 20% are non-secretors. Secretor status is of rapidly diminishing relevance today. Few labs (in the USA at least) do antigen/antibody analysis anymore because DNA methods are so much more definitive. Secretor status is irrelevant in DNA analysis." http://groups.yahoo.com/group/forensic-science/message/6541

Related Topics:
DNA analysis - Secretor

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