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Mikhail Fetisov was a career police detective and member of the Moscow Militia (then known as the Moscow Municipal Militsiya) who in 1983 became the lead investigator into the Andrei Chikatilo serial murder case. He later became a lieutenant general in the Russian police force.
Chikatilo's murders had begun as early as 1978 in the Rostov Oblast, at that time covered by a rural police militia with only a small detective force, known as the "Division of Most Serious Crimes". By 1983, as murders of young boys and girls mounted across the countryside overwhelming local authorities, the Soviet government ordered a team from Moscow, with Fetisov as its commander to take charge and investigate the killings.[1]
Fetisov, then a major in the Moscow militia, arrived in Rostov-on-Don with a team of specialists, including a forensics expert named Victor Burakov who Fetisov put in charge of a new investigation division which he christened the "killer department".[2] The two spent the next seven years searching for Chikatilo, their investigation seriously hampered by Soviet era bureaucratic methods as well as the reluctance of local Communist Party officials to even admit that a serial killer was on the loose in Rostov.[3]
Chikatilo, who had been mistakenly released once during an initial roundup of suspects, was eventually arrested after a sting operation caught him emerging from the woods near a rural train station shortly after a young child had been killed in the same location. Chikatilo was eventually tried and convicted for dozens of murders and executed in 1994.[4]
Following the Chikatilo investigation, during which time Fetisov had been promoted to a colonel in the police militia, he returned to Moscow and remained in the police after the breakup of the Soviet Union. In the new Russian Federation, Fetisov was promoted to major general and retired shortly thereafter as a lieutenant general with several civil service awards.[5]
Civil Service Awards
- Order "For Personal Courage"
- Jubilee Medal "In Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin"
- Medal "For Distinction in the Protection of the State Borders"
- Medal "Veteran of Labour"
- Jubilee Medal "50 Years of the Armed Forces of the USSR"
- Jubilee Medal "70 Years of the Armed Forces of the USSR"
- Medal "For Impeccable Service" (Classes 1st through 3rd)
Fetisov was later portrayed by Donald Sutherland in the 1995 film Citizen X.
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