“The Red Ripper of Rostov" | The Andrei Chikatilo Story
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Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz, Jeffrey Dahmer, all of these killers committed acts so heinous, so evil, that it's hard to imagine anyone worse. The mysterious thing that makes serial killers tick is why we're so fascinated by them. But what happens when a story pushes those boundaries? What happens when guilty pleasures go too far?

American serial killers live in infamy. Documentaries, dramatizations, podcasts, books. We love putting these people on pedestals, exploiting their crimes for our own entertainment. But none of these American icons compare to the vessels of pure evil that stalk the other side of the world.

while Bundy, Gacy, Berkowitz and Dahmer haunted the United States through the 70s, 80s and 90s. A Russian man named Andrei Chikatilo put them all to shame. Between 1978 and 1990, Andrei raped, tortured, murdered, disemboweled, mutilated, emasculated and cannibalized 56 young women, girls and boys to satisfy his own sadism.

Soviet Russia probably brings several images to your mind, most of them gray and tough as nails. But Andrei had the USSR wrapped around his finger. Bodies piled up in the dense Russian forests. Children were lured away from train stations and never seen again. Runaways, prostitutes, and vagrants all met Andrei's wrath. And few were spared from the worst deaths imaginable. Many of their families never saw their loved ones again.

Those who did wished they hadn't. Not like that. Not how Andrei left them to rot, with pieces of them scattered on the ground. His crime cemented him as the most prolific serial killer in Russian history. He'd go down in history as the Red Ripper of Rostov. And his story begins in the mid-1930s, just as Adolf Hitler was coming to power some 1,700 miles away. Part 1: Back in the USSR

Andrei grew up in Yaboluchne, a small village in northeastern Ukraine, which, at the time, belonged to the Soviet Union. It was 1936, and the difficult life of the average Ukrainian boy was about to get much more complicated. Andrei was born on the heels of the Holodomor, an artificial period of famine, starvation, and genocide orchestrated by Joseph Stalin.

The name comes from the Ukrainian words for hunger and extermination . It represents a two-year period of mass starvation across Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and grain-growing regions of Soviet Russia. The Ukrainians got the worst of it, and historians believe Stalin was responsible for starving 7 million people to death. The famine traces back to 1929, when Stalin sought to collectivize agriculture.

Groups of communist agitators forced Ukrainian peasants to turn over their homes, personal property, farms, and fields to the government. Andrei was born in a farming family, and both his parents worked as forced laborers on their own land. The government never paid them a single ruble for their work. Instead, they were allowed to cultivate a small plot of land behind their hut. The rest of the food went to the KGB. His family never had enough.

often eating grass and leaves so they wouldn't starve to death. To instill some survival instinct in their son, Andrei's parents told him a horrible story about his long-lost brother. Before he was born, his parents had another son named Stepin. When Stepin was four, a group of starving neighbors kidnapped the child and cannibalized him. There's no written record that Stepin Chikatilo ever existed, but Andrei took that story to heart and carried it wherever he went.

When all you've known are poverty, hunger, ridicule, war and death, Stepin's story was just another day in Yabluchne. The family got by, at least long enough for Andrei's father, Roman, to join the Red Army. It was the summer of 1941, and the Nazis had begun their violent occupation of Ukraine.

At just five years old, Andrei watched the Nazis commit unthinkable acts as they decimated his country. He watched bombs, fires, and mass shootings like morning cartoons, and spent most of his time seeking shelter in cellars and ditches. The Nazis forced Andrei and his mother, Anna, to watch as they burned their home, and the pair relocated to a single-room hut nearby.

While his father was at war, Andrei shared a bed with his mother, but chronic bedwetting pushed her over the edge. She beat him every time he had an accident. Andrei's mother gave birth to a baby girl named Tatyana in 1943, likely the result of rape while his father was still at war. After all, German soldiers had a habit of raping Ukrainian women.

Since Andrei and his mother shared a one-room hut, many believed he watched as the Nazis had their way with her. Despite the hardships, Andrei proved to be an intelligent kid. His teachers always praised him for his brains, but his stomach kept getting in the way. Andrei usually went to school so hungry that he'd pass out. The bully saw him as a prime target and mocked him for his meek stature and timid personality.

Andre and Tatiana's father returned home from the war after spending years as a German POW. While their mother beat and berated the children, their father always had a gentle hand. Perhaps he learned how cruel and punishing some humans can be after spending time in a Nazi camp. But the Soviets didn't take kindly to surrender. Roman was labeled a traitor and an outcast by those around them.

By puberty, Andrei had grown into an accomplished student and dedicated communist, but he was still as socially awkward as ever, made worse by chronic impotence or the inability to maintain an erection. He was horribly shy around women and could never work up the courage to ask for a date. Instead, he pounced on his sister's 11-year-old friend, wrestling with her on the ground until he climaxed, the first signs of a sick and twisted man.

Andrei spent three years of mandatory service in the Soviet army before returning to Yabluchne in 1960. He met and dated a young divorcee, but his impotence prevented them from pursuing a serious relationship. Rumors spread around the village about Andrei's condition, and his shame and paranoia got so bad that he tried to kill himself. His mother found him with a noose around his neck and cut him free. But the added shame of attempted suicide

something frowned upon in Soviet Russia, forced Andrei to run away from home. He settled in a village north of Rostov-on-Don, a port city near the Sea of Azov between Georgia and Ukraine. Tatyana moved in with him for six months before marrying a local boy and settling with his family. She was determined to help her brother overcome his condition and set him up with a woman named Feodosia. They got married in 1963.

While Andrei was attracted to his wife, he saw their marriage as arranged. He still couldn't maintain an erection, so they resorted to vitro fertilization. They had a daughter in 1965 and a son in '69. Part Two: The Professor Life wasn't horrible for Andrei circa 1970. He had a wife, two children, a stable job, and a loving sister. He studied Russian literature and language, obtaining degrees in both subjects.

When a Ukrainian high school needed a Russian language teacher, Andrei answered the call. And it's here that his sick sexual temptations got the better of him. He was a timid man and useless as a teacher. While bright, he was too modest to keep his students in line, at least not by traditional means. One of his students, a 15-year-old girl, was alone when Andrei lunged at her. He groped every inch of her body and ejaculated as she struggled in his arms.

Shortly after, he locked another female student in the classroom and proceeded to beat and sexually assault her. Andre had a nasty habit of pleasuring himself whenever students were nearby, something his fellow teachers caught him doing on several occasions. He was even in charge of patrolling the dorms where boarding students stayed overnight. It was his job to make sure everyone was accounted for. Instead, he bussed into girls' rooms, hoping to see them naked.

He loitered around public toilets to quench his pedophilic desires and carried sticks of gum to attract young kids. Students and faculty complained about Andre every chance they could, but the school hardly did anything about it. Instead, the director called a meeting and told Andre that he could resign voluntarily or be fired. The police never got involved. Andre took the former option and wound up teaching at another school in 1974.

Nothing changed at his new school. In fact, things only got worse, culminating with murder in 1978. Part Three: The First Murder It was December of '78, and Andre had just purchased a rundown hut in secret.

Three nights before Christmas, Andrei lured a nine-year-old girl named Yelena Zakatnova to the house and attempted to rape her. But the impotent man couldn't maintain an erection and resorted to stabbing the child several times in the stomach while choking her with his free hand. He dumped her body in the Grushevka River and she was found under a bridge two days later. All the evidence pointed toward Andrei. Police found bloodstained snow near the hut. A neighbor saw him there that night.

Another witness described Andrei to a T, saying they saw him talking with Yelena at a bus stop, the last time anybody saw her alive. If not for rampant incompetence, the police could have stopped Andrei right then and there. Instead, they arrested the wrong man. The cops arrested 25-year-old Alexander Kravchenko for the murder after finding blood on his wife's clothing.

Somehow, they matched the blood on her clothes to Yelena's and assumed they had their man. But Alexander had an airtight alibi for the evening of December 22nd. Neighbors and friends confirmed he'd been home all night with his wife, but the cops refused to listen. Instead, they threatened his wife with being an accomplice to murder and the witnesses with perjury. The horror stories of Russian jail were enough to change their stories.

Out of options, Alexander confessed to killing Yelena. The Russian courts put him on trial, at which point Alexander retracted his confession, claiming he gave it under duress. The judge didn't buy it and sentenced him to death, a sentence that was later commuted to 15 years in jail, the maximum prison length in Russia at the time.

but Yellen's family wanted justice, and they believed Alexander was the one who killed their daughter. Under serious pressure, the courts retried Alexander, found him guilty once again, and sentenced him to death by firing squad. He was eventually executed in July of 1983, while the real killer was free to rape, torture, and murder his way across the USSR. Part Four: The Domino Effect

Andrei's teaching career ended in March of 1981 as the allegations of molestation, sexual assault and child abuse piled higher and higher. But Andrei bounced back, landing a gig as a supply clerk for the Rostov-based factory. The job required extensive travel to purchase raw materials and negotiate contracts, but that didn't really matter. The job was the perfect cover for him to bounce from town to town, murder as he pleased, and then disappear without a trace.

Bus stops and train stations were his preferred hunting ground. He looked for young boys or girls who appeared alone, prostitutes, vagrants, runaways. He sought people that, in his mind, nobody would search for them if they suddenly disappeared. Other times, he just pounced on anybody that looked easy enough. On September 3rd, 1981, the Red Ripper killed again. He met a 17-year-old student named Larissa at a bus stop near the library in Rostov.

He lured her into the forest under the guise of drinking vodka and relaxing by the river. But when they got far enough into the woods, Andrei pounced on Larissa, ripped her clothes off and tried to rape her. Impotence took over once again, as it would every subsequent time Andrei tried to rape someone. She fought back, kicking, screaming, and hoping that somebody would hear her through the thick trees, but nobody did. Andrei grabbed a handful of mud, stuffed it down her throat,

and strangled her to death. He didn't have a knife, so Andrei ripped into her body with his teeth and bit off one of her nipples. Police found her body the next day, bitten, beaten, and poorly hidden under leaves, branches, and torn newspapers. Andrei resisted his murderous urges for nine months after killing Larissa. Then, after arriving at a bus stop in Donskoy on June 12th, 1982, Andrei opted to head back on foot towards Rostov.

As he left the bus station, he met 13-year-old Lyubov Biryuk on her way home from the grocery store. The two walked together for about a quarter mile. Andrei looked around, didn't see any witnesses, and then dragged the girl into the overgrown bushes near the road. Nobody found Lyubov's body until June 27th. The medical examiner found 22 knife wounds in her head, neck, pelvis, and chest.

Oddly, she had significant damage to her eye sockets, a trend Russian police discovered among most of Andrei's victims. The dominoes fell after Lyubov's murder. Andrei stopped resisting his urges and killed five more people between the ages of nine and 18. He followed the same general script, lure his victims to a secluded area, try to rape them, fail to maintain an erection,

brutally murder them to get himself off. He told them he knew a shortcut, promised them company, or said he had some rare coins and stamps to show them. Food, candy, alcohol, didn't matter. Andre was the perfect example of don't talk to strangers.

But what was with the eyes? Why did he mutilate their eye sockets and sometimes remove their eyes altogether? It stemmed from an old Russian superstition that the killer's image imprints itself on the victim's eyes. So, to solve his little problem, Andrei gouged out or mutilated their eyes. His final murder in 1982 was a 10-year-old girl named Olga who was on the bus heading home to her parents' house.

He convinced her to get off the bus with him and led the girl away hand in hand. Once they crossed the city limits, he attacked her, stabbing her over 50 times all over her body. Before leaving, he cut open her chest and exhumed her uterus. Part Five: Operation Forest Path. By 1983, investigators had a pile of bodies on their hands, four of which they linked to the same killer.

A police team from Moscow, headed by Major Mikhail Fetisov, was dispatched to Rostov to help local police. The hunt for whoever was killing these kids became known as Operation Forest Path. Mikhail's team suspected a serial killer and confirmed their suspicions once they found Olga's body. Her wounds were consistent with the other bodies, and political pressure forced Mikhail to come up with an answer, any answer, not necessarily the right one.

The most popular theories revolved around an elusive team of organ harvesters who sold them for transplant on the black market. They also liked the idea of a satanic cult, a mentally ill person or a homosexual. Instead of stalking out bus stops and train stations, Russian police focused most of their effort on known pedophiles and homosexuals. They cross-referenced alibis with anyone arrested for homosexuality, pedophilia, or who'd spent time in a psych ward.

By September 1983, several mentally unstable men confessed to the murders after hours of brutal interrogation. Three gay men committed suicide thanks to McHile's questionable tactics. Still, the investigation solved over 1,000 unrelated crimes and 95 other murders, but one could easily question those confessions and convictions. Bodies kept popping up, even after the police garnered several confessions. It couldn't have been these men.

On October 30th, 1983, the team discovered the mutilated body of Vera Shevkin, a 19-year-old prostitute with wounds consistent with Andrei's other victims. Though this time, the killer left her eyes intact. Two months later, they found 14-year-old Sergei Markov, a schoolboy who was lured off a train station before being raped and murdered. The killer emasculated Sergei and stabbed him over 70 times.

Between January and September 1984, Andrei killed 14 more people, including a mother and her 10-year-old daughter. Andrei lost his supply clerk job after his employer accused him of stealing, but he found similar work at a different Rostov factory by August. To celebrate, Andrei lured 17-year-old Lyudmila Alexeyeva to the banks of the Don River, claiming he knew a shortcut to the bus terminal.

He stabbed her 39 times, disemboweled her, and bit off her upper lip. Police eventually found the body with Lyudmila's excised lip stuffed in her mouth. Part Six: If at First You Don't Succeed By September of 1984, Andrei had already killed 31 people. Number 32 came when he slaughtered a 24-year-old librarian named Irina Luchinskaya while on her way to the sauna.

Worst of all, he killed 21 children under the age of 18. The Red Ripper had to be stopped, but he always seemed one step ahead of the Rostov police. Then, on September 13th, 1984, they got their chance. Two undercover detectives saw Andre talking to a young woman at a Rostov bus station. She wasn't easily swayed, perhaps on guard given all the recent news. The cops followed him through the city as he tried courting different women.

They'd eventually detained Andrei and searched him, discovering an eight-inch knife, several yards of rope, and a jar of Vaseline. Though incriminating, the knife, rope, and lube weren't enough to arrest him. Instead, Rostov police leaned on another active investigation. They were still looking into Andrei for stealing from his former employer,

And while the Red Ripper case forced everything else to the back burner, his petty theft was enough to legally hold Andre at the jailhouse. But they couldn't keep him forever. They needed proof and they needed it fast. His description matched a witness's story who saw Andre walk off with a 10-year-old boy named Dmitry Tashnikov in January of '84.

When police found Dimitri's body, they also discovered the killer's footprint and two DNA samples, semen and saliva. Remember, it's only 1984. DNA testing hadn't hit the mainstream and wouldn't be used in an actual case until 1986. They could still test Andrei's blood, but the results didn't help their cause.

Andre had type A blood, but medical examiners determined the DNA samples recovered from six different victims were from someone with AB blood. Rostov cops added Andre's name to their overwhelming list of potentials, but the mismatched blood discounted him as the prime suspect. Andre only served three months in prison for stealing from his former employer. He walked out a free man on December 12th, 1984.

At the same time, the head of the Russian public prosecutor's office, basically the Russian attorney general, linked 23 of Andrei's victims to one killer and dropped all charges against anyone who'd previously confessed they were back to square one.

Andrei kept a low profile until August 1985, when he boarded a train from Rostov to Moscow and killed an 18-year-old girl named Natalia Paklistova. He slaughtered another woman named Irina Guleyeva four weeks later, and her wounds linked her to the manhunt. Part seven, "The Russian Mindhunter." In the late '70s and early '80s, criminal psychology, especially serial killer profiling, was still in its infancy.

But with over 30 dead bodies, 24 of which were linked to the same killer, Russian police were open to trying anything if it meant getting the Red River behind bars. Enter criminal psychologist, Dr. Alexander Bukhanovsky, who's credited with being the first psychologist to ever work on a criminal investigation in the Soviet Union.

They gave him everything, crime scene photos, ME reports, evidence, statements, everything. It was up to Dr. Bukhanovsky to produce a full criminal profile on the Ripper of Rostov. Here's what he concluded. In a 65-page report, Bukhanovsky described the killer as a reclusive man between 45 and 50 years old. Andrei was 49. The killer lived through an agonizing and stressful childhood and was incapable of flirting with women.

The killer was intelligent, well-educated, and already married with children, but the killer hid a much darker side. They were an impotent sadist who could only achieve sexual gratification by watching their victims suffer. Murder symbolized the sexual intercourse he couldn't perform. His knife represented a functioning penis. The killer traveled for work as most of his crimes occurred on weekdays near bus stops, train stations, and airports.

Based on the days of the week when the murders occurred, the killer most likely followed a production schedule for work. Bukhanovsky described the killer like they were childhood friends and Russian police were kicking themselves for letting Andrei slip through their hands. Meanwhile, Andrei kept close tabs on the case through newspaper reports and limited broadcasts. He kept his homicidal urges under control and covered his tracks well enough to throw police off his scent.

The case went cold for three years and Rostov cops assumed the killer had moved to a different part of the country. They sent bulletins to departments across the Soviet Union, telling fellow officers what to look for if they started finding bodies. The investigation in Rostov sputtered out and many believed the Ripper had moved to Moscow to keep killing in the capital. Part eight, the comeback tour.

Andre resurfaced in 1988 when he killed two young boys and an unknown woman between April and July. It's not that he'd stopped killing between '85 and '88. The cops just couldn't link the murders to his case. The bodies in the spring of '88 told a different story. He lured Jane Doe off a train and tied her hands behind her back. He packed her mouth with dirt, stabbed her in the neck, and cut off her nose. The fatal blow came from a slab of concrete to the head.

Investigators found the body, but argued if they could link it to their serial killer. She hadn't been disemboweled, her eyes and genitals were intact, and the killer bludgeoned her to death instead of stabbing or strangling her. By 1990, the political pressure to find the Red Ripper was on. They'd been hunting him for seven years and had little to show for their efforts. If only they knew Rostov police literally had the killer in jail, but let him go back in '84.

Thanks to more media freedom in 1990, the Red Ripper story spread across the Soviet Union like wildfire. Still, that didn't stop Andrei from adding three more victims to his body count. An 11-year-old boy, a 13-year-old boy, and a 31-year-old woman. Part nine, "Springing the Trap."

The most consistent part of Andre's killing spree was where he found his victims. Train stations, bus stops, airports, anything you could label mass public transit. It was time to set a trap, a trap that was several years too late. The plan was simple. Station obvious uniformed police officers at the heavily populated transit platforms. It'd be impossible to spot the killer in the crowd, especially since they didn't know who they were looking for.

Ideally, the uniformed officers would scare the killer to more isolated, local transit stations where undercover cops could wait to pounce on him. On October 27th, 1990, 360 officers spread across the busiest stations in the Rostov Oblast. Meanwhile, a handful of undercover cops patrolled the three most likely locations and the ones Andrei stalked most often.

Andrei killed his final victim on November 6th, 1990, a little over a week into the undercover operation. He led 22-year-old Svetlana Korostik into the woods, killed her, and mutilated her corpse. That's when an undercover cop named Igor Rybakov saw him return to the platform and watched him clean his hands and face with some well water.

Igor also noticed grass and soil stains on Andrei's coat and a tiny red smear on his cheek. His finger looked injured as if he'd closed a door on it. Igor approached Andrei and took down his information, though he didn't have any legal recourse to detain him. Later that day, Igor returned to the police station and filed a report about the man and his injured hand.

Seven days later, police found Svetlana's body in the woods. They pulled all the reports regarding any men questioned in the area within the past week, and Andrei's name popped right up. They remembered him from 1984 and knew he'd been on the suspect list ever since. They cross-referenced his past and current employers and traced his decade-long killing spree across the Soviet Union.

They contacted old colleagues and teachers who told them everything about Andre's lewd classroom behavior and history of sexual assault. From there, they followed Andre like a hawk, watching as he tried to talk to several women and children on trains and buses. When one rebuked him, he'd wait a few minutes before approaching another. Watching him in the act made officers sick, but they needed to compile enough evidence to arrest Andre before he hurt anyone else.

On November 20th, 1990, six days into their around-the-clock surveillance, Rostov police watched Andrei leave his home with a large glass jar. He filled it with beer at a kiosk in the park and then used it to try and lure children away to drink. Thankfully, nobody fell for the trap. Then Andrei stopped for lunch at a cafe. Upon leaving the cafe, four undercover officers arrested him.

He maintained his innocence at the station, claiming they'd already done this song and dance in 1984. However, one piece of evidence linked Andre to his penultimate victim, a 16-year-old boy named Victor Tyshenko. Police discovered Victor's body a few days into the sting operation. The crime scene told the story of a strong teen who wouldn't go down without a fight. He bit the tip of Andre's finger, breaking the bone and severing the fingernail.

When they arrested Andre, police examined his injured finger and determined the injury was consistent with a human bite. He'd self-treated the wound with iodine instead of going to the hospital, which only raised more suspicion.

Until now, all of their evidence against Andrei was purely circumstantial. They couldn't prove Viktor bit his finger, nor could they tie him directly to any of the murders. Under Soviet law, they could only hold Andrei for 10 days without charging him, and the clock was ticking. First, they tried questioning him at the KGB headquarters in Rostov. The plan was to make Andrei feel like a sick man who needed psychiatric help.

If he believed he could plead insanity, maybe he'd confess to the crimes. But Andre wasn't that dumb. He stuck to his guns and maintained his innocence. Although he did admit to molesting his students back in the day. Next, they tested his blood again, but they only got the same results. Andre was type A and the killer was AB. This time they could try a little more than just blood and obtained a semen sample from Andre to compare.

It was a match. In ultra rare cases, one's blood can differ from their semen and saliva. The Red Ripper was one of those cases. But blood isn't as conclusive as DNA. And the cops still needed to get a confession out of Andre if they had any hopes of putting him behind bars. Still, he never budged off his innocent spot. It was day nine and the cops had 24 hours to formally charge Andre with a crime.

Completely out of options, they called in the one man who knew Andre better than anybody, Dr. Bukhanovsky. Page by page, Dr. Bukhanovsky read through his psychological profile of Andre, hitting nail after nail on the head. Two hours later, Andre erupted in tears and spilled his guts to the doctor. Nobody had ever dissected him like that. Perhaps it was the story Andre needed to hear about himself, or maybe he just longed for someone to understand him.

Bukhanovsky left the room and told police that Andrei was ready to confess. For the next several days, Andrei walked the cops through 36 of the 38 murders they linked him to. He recounted precise details of each crime and could often sketch the crime scene down to the finest point. He learned to avoid blood squirts and squatted near the bodies to listen until their hearts stopped beating. He occasionally tasted their blood, which he claims sent shivers down his spine.

He used his teeth to tear at their lips, nipples, and genitals, and cut out their tongues. Then he skipped around their bodies, waving the severed tongue in one hand. He ate the nipples and tongues of some victims and confessed to chewing on the uterus of his female victims.

On November 30th, Rostov police formally charged Andrey with the 36 murders he confessed to between 1982 and 1990. He admitted to 20 more killings that the cops hadn't linked to the case or simply pinned on someone else. In the case of Yelena Zakotnova, for which Alexander Kravchenko was wrongfully convicted and executed, the innocent man received a posthumous pardon. Part 10, An Unmarked Grave.

The Red Rippers trial was the first mass media event in post-Soviet Russia. It kicked off on April 14th, 1992, and the courtroom was packed with members of the victims' families. For his own safety, the police kept Andrei locked in an iron cage in the corner of the courtroom. The press went wild with their headlines, with words like "maniac" and "cannibal" hitting the doorsteps of eager readers.

It took two days to read the charges against Andrei as Judge Leonid Akubjanov detailed every murder for the court records. Family members burst into tears when they learned how their loved ones died in Andrei's hands.

The rest of Andre's trial was a media spectacle. He fell deeper into insanity each day, often arguing with the judge and claiming he was wrongfully accused. He'd erupt in socialist anthems and expose himself to the courtroom full of reporters and cameras. On several occasions, guards had to escort Andre back to his cell.

On October 15th, 1992, Judge Akubjanov sentenced Andrei Chikatilo to death, finding him guilty of 52 murders and five counts of sexual assault. Upon hearing the verdict, Andrei kicked a bench across the courtroom and claimed the judge was abusing his power. But when given the opportunity to address the court one more time, perhaps to apologize for all the people he'd hurt, Andrei kept his mouth shut.

Andrei tried to appeal his conviction over the next two years, but the Russian Supreme Court and President Boris Yeltsin rejected him every time. On February 14th, 1994, the Red Ripper of Rostov stepped into a soundproof room and dropped to his knees. The executioner pressed a gun behind Andrei's right ear and fired a single bullet into his skull. They then buried him beneath an unmarked grave on the prison grounds.