Editing Andrei Chikatilo (section)

===Investigative theories===
On 18 August 1986, a victim was found buried in a depression of earth in the grounds of a collective farm in the city of [[Bataysk]]. The wounds inflicted on this victim bore the trademark mutilations of victims linked to the manhunt killed between 1982 and 1985. The victim was an 18-year-old court secretary named Irina Pogoryelova. Her body had been slit open from the neck to the genitalia, with one breast removed and her eyes cut out. As the murderer had made serious efforts to bury the body, some investigators theorized that this explained the sudden dearth in the number of victims found.{{sfn|Cullen|1994|p=136}}

As the victims killed in the Rostov Oblast in 1985 and 1986 had died in the months of July and August, by the autumn of 1986, some investigators gave credence to the possibility that the perpetrator had relocated to another part of the Soviet Union and was returning to the Rostov Oblast only in summer. The Rostov police compiled bulletins to be sent to all forces throughout the Soviet Union, describing the pattern of wounds their unknown killer inflicted upon his victims and requesting feedback from any police force who had discovered murder victims with wounds matching those upon the victims found in the Rostov Oblast. The response was negative.{{sfn|Conradi|1992|p=115}}{{refn|group=n|Uzbek investigators did not link the two murders committed by Chikatilo in Tashkent to the series because in one instance, the victim had been beheaded,{{sfn|Conradi|1992|p=95}} and in the second instance, the mutilations upon the victim had been so extensive police had concluded the body had been caught in a [[mechanised agriculture|harvesting machine]].{{sfn|Krivich|1993|p=225}}<ref>{{cite news|url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1290&dat=19921015&id=jeg0AAAAIBAJ&pg=3807,7156775&hl=en/|title=Caged Russian Grandfather Guilty of 52 Grisly Murders|newspaper=[[Boca Raton News]]|agency=[[Associated Press]]|date=15 October 1992|access-date=18 July 2016}}</ref>}}