UBC: Lourie, Hunting the Devil

[truepenny]

Hunting the Devil: The Pursuit, Capture and Confession of the Most Savage Serial Killer in History by Richard Lourie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read this book in conjunction with Comrade Chikatilo: The Psychopathology of Russia's Notorious Serial Killer, and the parallax view was fascinating.

Lourie is a little too "human interest" for my taste: he's actually much more interested in the biography of the man who organized and led the search for Chikatilo than he is either in Chikatilo or his crimes. Now, I agree with him, Issa Magamedovich Kostoev, the head of Russia's Department of Crimes of Special Importance, is a much more interesting person than Chikatilo, and Lourie could actually have done more than he did with the parallels between the two men. Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (who was executed the year after both this book and Comrade Chikatilo were published) was ethnic Ukrainian and, being born in 1936, lived through the years when Ukraine was being kicked around Europe like an old soccer ball. His mother told him stories of his older brother Stepan, killed and eaten by starving Ukrainians before Chikatilo was born. (The problem with this story is that, although Chikatilo's sister also remembers their mother's vivid recounting of Stepan's death, no one else remembers it happening, and there are no records of a Stepan Romanovich Chikatilo, eaten by cannibals or otherwise.) Chikatilo wanted to go to law school, but his father committed the terrible crime of surviving being a POW in WWII, which in Stalin's insane troll logic made him a traitor. So Chikatilo became a teacher and then a supply clerk, married, had two children, and in 1978 started raping, killing, and mutilating girls, boys, and young women.

Issa Magamedovich Kostoev is ethnic Ingush, which in Stalin's insane troll logic made him and his entire nation traitors. He lived through two "resettlements" (in which three of his siblings died), and clawed his way up, by virtue of being smart and aggressive, to the point that he could in fact go to law school; he also had the sense, unlike Chikatilo, not to try for Moscow, knowing it was pointless. (Kostoev's dream was actually to become a test pilot, but he got thrown out of the stiff competition for admission for brawling.) Kostoev became a master interrogator, solved a number of difficult cases (including indicting basically the entire legal and judicial structure of Rostov-on-Don for corruption), and became head of the Department of Crimes of Special Importance. And got handed the dreadful clusterfuck that was the investigation of the serial killer working in Rostov-on-Don.

Putting Kostoev and Chikatilo side by side makes mincemeat of most of Chikatilo's attempts at self-exculpation. Chikatilo had an awful childhood? So did Kostoev. Chikatilo was denied his heart's desire? So was Kostoev. It's that old unanswerable question of why some people are able to choose not to do evil. And in some cases, like Kostoev, become illuminated inside with the desire to do good.

Like I said, Lourie could have done more with that.

He does do a good job of following Kostoev's Herculean achievement in actually catching Chikatilo, and in putting both Chikatilo's career as a murderer and Kostoev's career as an investigator in context with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the transition from Stalinist corruption, paranoia, and mindless bureaucracy to glasnost--which if not a miracle panacea at least brought a new set of problems to the table. His version of the inside of Chikatilo's head is based on imagery and metaphor, but is in its own way effective. I have no idea if his version of Kostoev is an accurate portrait of the real human being, but he does make him a splendid protagonist.



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Comments

[sovay]

Like I said, Lourie could have done more with that.

Does he go as far as you have just laid out, or is that mostly your own compare-and-contrast?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

All of the biographical facts are his, and he does recognize the comparison. But he doesn't explore it in any particularly meaningful way. He's not thinking in terms of the question that interests me, of the choice not to do evil.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

What is it about true crime that seems to make people especially prone to superlative subtitles? "The Most Savage Serial Killer in History," "America's Greatest Manhunt," etc etc. I know that impulse is present everywhere, but it seems to be especially forceful in this genre, to talk up your topic as being the absolute worst, worse than all the other worst things out there.

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

In regards to your comment that "Lourie could have done more with that", I agree.

But I'm not entirely certain he knew how. One of my favorite authors is also a lawyer who takes on cases of child abuse, in defense of the child, and has written numerous books on the subject. But even he has said that if we could figure out why some people transcend the evil done to them in childhood and why other choose to, in some way, imitate their abuser, we would unlock the key to the future of our species. It would be nice to be able to figure it out, but unfortunately the research being done in this area is more about the pathology of either the criminal, or his/her victim(s).