Alexander Yuryevich "Sasha" Pichushkin ' onMouseout='HidePop("41582")' href="/topics/Mytishchi">Mytishchi

Mytishchi

Mytishchi is a city and the administrative center of Mytishchinsky District of Moscow Oblast, Russia, which lies to the northeast of Russia's capital Moscow, on the Yauza River and the Moscow–Yaroslavl railroad. The city is the oblast's largest center for industry and education...

, Moscow Oblast

Moscow Oblast

Moscow Oblast , or Podmoskovye , is a federal subject of Russia . Its area, at , is relatively small compared to other federal subjects, but it is one of the most densely populated regions in the country and, with the 2010 population of 7,092,941, is the second most populous federal subject...

), also known as The Chessboard Killer and The Bitsa Park Maniac, is a Russian serial killer

Serial killer

A serial killer, as typically defined, is an individual who has murdered three or more people over a period of more than a month, with down time between the murders, and whose motivation for killing is usually based on psychological gratification...

. He is believed to have killed at least 49 people and up to 61–63 people in southwest Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

's Bitsa Park

Bitsa Park

Bitsevski Park is one of the largest natural parks in Moscow, Russia. The park, traversed by the Bitsa River, sprawls for some 10 km from north to south and covers the area of 18 square kilometres.-Contents:...

, where several of the victims' bodies were found.

Murders

Pichushkin committed his first murder as a student in 1992 and stepped up his crimes in 2001. Russian media have speculated that Pichushkin may have been motivated by a macabre competition with Russia's most notorious serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo

Andrei Chikatilo

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo was a Ukrainian-born Soviet serial killer, nicknamed the Butcher of Rostov, The Red Ripper or The Rostov Ripper who murdered a minimum of 52 women and children between 1978 and 1990...

, who was convicted in 1992 of killing 53 children and young women in 12 years. Pichushkin has said his aim was to kill 64 people, the number of squares on a chessboard. He later recanted this statement, saying that he would have continued killing indefinitely if he had not been stopped.

Pichushkin primarily targeted elderly homeless men by luring them with vodka

Vodka

Vodka , is a distilled beverage. It is composed primarily of water and ethanol with traces of impurities and flavorings. Vodka is made by the distillation of fermented substances such as grains, potatoes, or sometimes fruits....

. After drinking with them, he would kill them, hitting them on the head with a hammer. He then stuck vodka bottles in their skull

Human skull

The human skull is a bony structure, skeleton, that is in the human head and which supports the structures of the face and forms a cavity for the brain.In humans, the adult skull is normally made up of 22 bones...

s to ensure that they did not survive. He also targeted younger men, children and women. He would always attack from behind to avoid spilling blood on his clothes. He claimed that while killing people he felt like God

God

God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....

 as he decided whether his victims should live or die. "For me, life without killing is like life without food for you," he once said. "I felt like the father of all these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to another world." Experts at the Serbsky Institute, Russia's main psychiatric

Psychiatry

Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...

 clinic, have found Pichushkin irrecuperable.

According to the documentary, "Serial Killers", Pichushkin, once apprehended, led police officers to the scenes of many of his crimes in Bitsa Park. He demonstrated a keen recollection of how the murders were committed, often acting them out in great detail, which has been committed to film. He also revealed that a number of the murders he committed were not done in his preferred method (hammer blows to the back of the head), but by throwing his victims down into the sewers underneath Bitsa Park (although one of his victims did survive the ordeal).

The murder of Marina Moskalyova, 36, in the summer of 2006, was his last. When a metro ticket was found in her possession at the time her body was found, authorities were able to view the last footage of her alive from surveillance tapes of the Moscow metro system, where she was walking on the platform accompanied by Pichushkin.

Trial and imprisonment

He was arrested on 15 June 2006, and convicted on 24 October 2007 of 49 murders and three attempted murders. He asked a Russian court to add an additional 11 victims to his body count, bringing his claimed death toll to 60 and 3 surviving victims. During the trial, he was housed in a glass cage. It took Judge Vladimir Usov an hour to read the verdict: life in prison with the first 15 years to be spent in solitary confinement

Solitary confinement

Solitary confinement is a special form of imprisonment in which a prisoner is isolated from any human contact, though often with the exception of members of prison staff. It is sometimes employed as a form of punishment beyond incarceration for a prisoner, and has been cited as an additional...

.

External links

• Interview with Pichushkin
• Russian serial killer convicted October 24, 2007
• CrimeLibrary.com
• Criminal Brief
• http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071025/ts_nm/russia_serialkiller_dc