EVIL PSYCHOPATHS (True Crime) (24 page)

He was persuaded that it would be best for him to admit everything but claim insanity. Days passed while Chikatilo considered this, still denying he was the killer. Finally, however, he confessed, going through each of the thirty-six murders in detail. He explained that he was clearing the world of undesirables – vagrants, runaways and prostitutes. These were the people he killed. He told how he could not achieve an erection and used the knife as a penis substitute. He had also believed the story of the killer’s image being imprinted on the victim’s eyes, but had stopped believing it which explains why he stopped damaging the eyes at one point. He told how he could only get gratification if he committed violence. ‘I had to see blood and wound the victims.’ He talked about placing his semen inside a uterus that he had just removed and as he walked back through the woods, he would chew on it; ‘the truffle of sexual murder,’ as he described it. He would tear at his victims’ mouths with his teeth. He said it gave him an ‘animal satisfaction’ to chew or swallow nipples or testicles.

In all, he confessed to fifty-six murders and said that being caught was a relief. Why had he done it? Perhaps because of his chilling childhood; father a POW during World War II and desperate famine in Russia, a famine so bad that there were reported instances of cannibalism. Human flesh was bought and sold and Chikatilo was told by his mother that his ten-year-old brother had been taken and killed and eaten.

He was examined and found to be sane before being brought to a court in Rostov where he was kept in a large iron cage. The court was full, some 250 people screaming at him when he was brought in. The trial was a fiasco and there was little doubt from day one that Chikatilo would be found guilty. His efforts at pretending to be mad, drooling and rolling his eyes, singing, speaking nonsense and claiming that he was being ‘radiated’ were to no avail.

He was found guilty on fifty-two counts of murder and five of molestation. The people in the courtroom cried out for him to be handed over to them so that they could do to him what he did to his victims and it is reported that the Japanese offered a million dollars for his brain so that they could study it.

However, on 15 February, he was taken to a soundproofed room, told to face the wall and not turn round. He was then executed with a shot behind the right ear.

Part Six: Psychopathic Killers From The Rest Of The World

Idi Amin

In the house of Idi Amin, military dictator and President of Uganda during most of the 1970s, sat a freezer. Every now and then, Amin, in the midst of one of his frequent diatribes on any number of subjects – internal opposition, the Israelis, the Zionists who ran America, or the former British colonial powers – would stroll over to the freezer and open a drawer. He would then deliver a lecture to the drawer’s contents – the heads of some of his most distinguished victims, men such as his former Chief Justice.

This story may or may not be apocryphal, but there is no denying the brutality that Amin unleashed on the country under his control. It made people terrified of the late-night knock on the door or the sound of a car pulling up beside them in the street – those bundled into the car by members of Amin’s hated and murderous State Research Bureau, were never seen again.

The number of deaths in Uganda while Amin was in power can only be estimated. The International Commission of Jurists suggested a death toll of at least 80,000, but estimated that it was more likely to be closer to 300,000. Amnesty International reckoned that as many as 500,000 Ugandans were killed. Amongst the dead were many high-profile Ugandans, such as former Prime Minister, Benedicto Kiwanuka, the Anglican Archbishop, Janani Luwum, former Governor of the Central Bank, Joseph Mubiru, Vice Chancellor of Makerere University, Frank Kalimuzo, playwright, Byron Kawadwa and two cabinet ministers, Erinayo Wilson Oryema and Charles Oboth Ofumbi.

The rest of the world watched in horror, powerless to act against the increasing madness and destructiveness of Amin’s depraved regime. Closing the American Embassy in Uganda due to concern about Amin’s increasingly erratic behaviour, US Ambassador Thomas Melady did not mince his words when he described the dictator as ‘racist, erratic and unpredictable, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, and militaristic’.

Idi Amin Dada’s rise to power was extraordinary. He was born in either 1924 or 1925 in Koboko in Uganda, the son of Andreas Nyabire a member of the Kakwa tribe, who converted to Islam from Catholicism in 1910, changing his surname to Amin Dada. He abandoned his family, however, and Idi Amin was brought up by the family of his mother, Assa Atte, an ethnic Lugbara who was a practitioner of herbal medicine, treating members of the then-ruling Buganda royal family. When Amin left school in 1941, he had a series of odd jobs before enlisting in the Ugandan army as an assistant cook. It was a lowly starting point from which to launch an attempt at leading his country.

His records show that he joined up when the war was already over, but, ever willing to make grandiose claims for himself, Amin always claimed that he was forced to enlist during the Second World War and that he fought in the Burma Campaign.

He served as a private in the King’s African Rifles, part of the British Colonial Army, in Kenya from 1947 until 1949 when his unit was deployed in Somali to fight Somali Shifta rebels who were engaged in banditry there. In 1952, he fought against the Mau Mau rebels in Kenya, by this time promoted to corporal, but making sergeant in 1953.

At the time, a black African could achieve no more than the rank of warrant officer in the British Colonial Army and Amin was promoted to that rank in 1954, returning to Uganda that same year. By 1961, things had changed slightly and he rose to lieutenant, a signal honour as he was one of the first two Ugandans to achieve the status of commissioned officer. He was a captain by the following year and then major the year after that. In 1964, he became Deputy Commander of the Ugandan Army.

Meanwhile, Idi Amin’s prowess as a sportsman was being noted. He had been Ugandan light-heavyweight boxing champion for ten years and was also very good at swimming and rugby.

His real rise to power came through his association with Prime Minister Milton Obote. With Obote, he devised a scheme whereby they would secretly supply Congolese rebels with arms in exchange for gold and ivory. When, in 1966, the Ugandan Parliament demanded an investigation, Obote seized power, abolishing the purely ceremonial presidency held by the Kabaka – or King – Edward Mutesa II of Buganda. Obote became President while Amin, who had personally led an attack on the Kabaka’s palace, was promoted to Colonel and given command of the Ugandan Army and Air Force.

Inevitably, Amin and Obote became enemies. In October 1970, Obote demoted Amin and when Amin heard that he was about to be arrested for misappropriating army funds, he used the power he still had over the army, to stage a military coup, seizing power while Obote was at a Commonwealth summit meeting in Singapore.

Initially, Amin claimed to be a soldier and not a politician. His regime was merely there in a caretaking capacity, he claimed, until elections could be held. He released political prisoners and allowed the remains of the late Kabaka, who had died in exile in London, to be brought back to Uganda for burial, cleverly appeasing the former regime’s supporters. It was a popular coup amongst foreign powers, the British Foreign Office labelling him ‘a splendid type and a good football player’.

Nonetheless, the killing began within a few days of him taking office.

A week after the coup, he declared himself President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. He suspended bits of the Ugandan Constitution, giving military tribunals precedence over courts of law. Government House in Kampala was renamed ‘The Command Post’ and he replaced the previous internal security bureau with the sinister State Research Bureau, gangs of uniformed men who wore dark glasses even at midnight and whose business of death and horrific torture was fully endorsed by Amin. Before long, 20,000 Ugandan refugees had joined Milton Obote in exile in neighbouring Tanzania. A failed attempt by these exiles to restore Obote to power in 1972 unleashed a bloodletting as Amin purged his armed forces of supporters of the former President, principally those who were of the Acholi or Lango tribes. By early 1972, at least 5,000 of these troops had been killed and twice as many civilians had disappeared never to be seen again.

He also began to order the deaths of people regardless of ethnic groupings – journalists, lawyers, judges, students, intellectuals, criminals and foreign nationals. Entire villages were massacred and so many people were killed and thrown into the River Nile that the Owen Falls Hydro-Electric dam in Jinja was blocked on several occasions, allowing the crocodiles to feed at their ease.

The crocodiles were lucky to be able to come by their food so easily because food was not quite so easy to come by for his people. Amin drove the country into the ground economically, his actions depriving the country of the production expertise needed to both grow food for internal use and to earn much-needed foreign income from exports. For example, when he came to power in 1971, Uganda was a net exporter of sugar but he decided to expel all the Asians who ran the country’s sugar mills and, without the necessary expertise in production and organisation, the sugar industry collapsed. The result was that Uganda became an importer of sugar. The tourist industry collapsed due to neglect and lack of foodstuffs and the coffee industry stalled while the instant-coffee processing facilities waited, like most other Ugandan factories, for spare parts or repair.

Much of the money that did come into the country from foreign earnings was squandered by the government on tax-free luxuries to keep Amin’s soldiers happy. The Boeing 707 and Hercules C130 that made up the entire fleet of Ugandan Airlines, made regular trips to London’s Gatwick Airport where it would load up with radios, whisky, cars and other luxury items for Amin’s 21,000 army officers.

His ‘Economic War’ launched in August 1972, included the taking by force of properties owned by Europeans and, particularly, Asians. There were some 80,000 Asians in Uganda, people who had immigrated from the Sub-Continent when Uganda had been a colony of the British. They were good business people and ran many successful concerns in the country, efficiently and profitably. Amin announced the expulsion of the 60,000 Asians in Uganda who held British passports, a decree later changed to the expulsion of the country’s entire Asian population of 80,000, apart from professional people such as doctors, lawyers and teachers. Many of them came to Britain.

The businesses the Asians left behind were gifted by Amin to his supporters but mismanagement and poor organisation led to entire industries collapsing and had a disastrous effect on the increasingly weak Ugandan economy.

Amin’s hatred of Israel knew no bounds. Following the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, he sent a letter to UN Secretary-General, Kurt Waldhiem, in which he applauded the massacre, saying that Germany was the most appropriate locale for this because it was where Hitler burned more than six million Jews. In June 1976, he astonished the world when he permitted an Air France plane, originating at Tel Aviv in Israel, that had been highjacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a German terrorist group, the Revolutionäre Zellen, to land at Entebbe Airport, on the shores of Lake Victoria, not far from Kampala. All the non-Jews and non-Israeli citizens on board were released, leaving eighty-three Jewish hostages and twenty others who refused to leave the plane. In the subsequent Israeli rescue operation in which all the hostages were freed by Israeli commandos, forty-five Ugandan soldiers died. In the shocking aftermath, he ordered the summary execution of air-traffic controllers, policemen and other airport officials who had been on duty at the airport. It was, ultimately, one of the most humiliating episodes of his entire rule.

In the few years he had left in power, his behaviour became increasingly strange. When Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Uganda in 1977, he retaliated by declaring that he had defeated the British. In celebration, he awarded himself the CBE (Conqueror of the British Empire). His new title, as announced on Ugandan radio, was ‘His Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, CBE’.

He praised Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, in speeches, promising to create a memorial to him in Kampala. On one occasion, he arrived at an event on a sedan chair carried by four local British businessmen, describing himself as ‘the new white man’s burden’.

Worst of all, gruesome rumours began to be substantiated that Amin indulged in cannibalism.

Things had eventually begun to conspire against him by 1978. There was increasing anger at his actions within Uganda and a number of his ministers fled into exile. In an attempt at deflecting attention away from the deteriorating situation at home, he sent troops into Tanzania. The Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere mobilised his army and retaliated, supported by Ugandan rebels, opponents of Amin. Despite aid from Libya’s President Gaddafi, his army was pushed back and defeated. Amin fled on 11 April, 1979 as Kampala fell to the Tanzanians, firstly to Libya and then to Saudi Arabia.

He made one attempt to make a comeback in 1989 when he reached Kinshasa at the head of an armed group, but Zairian President Mobutu forced him to return to exile.

Idi Amin Dada died, almost unnoticed, and without expressing remorse for the hundreds of thousands of deaths for which he was responsible, in Saudi Arabia on 16 August, 2003 after slipping into a coma. His wife pleaded with Ugandan president Museveni to let him go back to Uganda to die. Museveni told her that he would be forced ‘to answer for his sins the moment he was brought back’.