After a five-week trial, a jury found Pichushkin guilty last Wednesday on all counts. What is love? He soon became an exceptional chess player, often defeating competitors much older than he was. As the story goes, the cops laughed in Pichushkins face, called him a drunk, and told him to go home, which he did. Could it have been his fathers abandonment of the family? Pronin accompanied him to an isolated area in Bitsa Park, whereupon Pichushkin pulled out a bottle of vodka and offered him a drink. A twenty-minute slog through the snowy woods. At the end of their game, Pichushkin invited Pronin to take a walk with him, claiming it was the anniversary of his dog's death and that he wanted to visit the grave in Bitsa Park. It was warm outside, and there were too many people around. In an effort to both dull the pain of the loss as well as to calm his severe aggressive tendencies, he began to consume large quantities of vodka. On the other side of a narrow doorway, her grandson is playing a video game that involves shooting barnyard animals. All along, or at least since he began killing in earnest in 2001, Pichushkin had been torn by an irreconcilable conflict. Investigators discovered a chessboard with approximately 61 spaces marked off in his Moscow home. For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you. A week after his conviction, Pichushkins attorneys filed an appeal, requesting a more lenient sentence. He would always attack from behind in order to take the victim by surprise and avoid spilling blood on his clothes. Surrounding it are tens of thousands of people living in sprawling, rusting apartment blocks speckled with satellite dishes. He no longer pushed his victims down the well. It would be four more yearsand several dozen more bodiesbefore Pichushkin was finally stopped. After a long time, she looks up and turns her gaze to the television set. Biography and associated logos are trademarks of A+E Networksprotected in the US and other countries around the globe. I felt like the father of all these people, since it was me who opened the door for them to another world. (During the trial hell have this to say about intimacy: The closer a person is to you and the better you know them, the more pleasurable it is to kill them.) They can hear trails of moving laughter somewhere far away, other people carousing, but here, in this particular swath of woods, there are only trees and shadows. He didnt have strong opinions. [1], Alexander Pichushkin was born on 9 April 1974 in Mytishchi, Moscow Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, and grew up on 2 Khersonskaya Street in Moscow proper. He ended up sentenced to life in prison. Then he said he was busy and hung up. "In all cases I killed for only one reason. Victim number 32, a middle-aged man who disappeared in late spring 2003, was a typical target. They said they just wanted to talk to him about some burglaries, but I thought there were a lot of police for a burglar, and I asked Sasha, Did you rob someone? and he said, No. . But then Moskalyevas sonbefore calling his fatherrang Pichushkin. He had some type of head injury around the age of 4 and spent time in an institute for the disabled as a child. To conceal the bodies, he often threw his victims into a sewer pit. Children were forbidden to venture into the woods. Before his arrest, locals referred to the unknown killer as the Bitsa Park Maniac.. What emerged from months of plying Pichushkin with sandwiches and cigarettes, months of pretending that he was an evil genius, was not the Hollywood-style maniac everyone had imagined but an empty vessel, someone no one could organize into a tidy psychological portrait. When Pichushkin was 4 years old, he fell backwardoff of a swing. But nine years is a long time to wait, especially for someone who would later tell the court that for me, life without killing is like life without food for you. He must have understood that once he started killingnot dabbling or experimenting but really killing, and killing wantonlyhe wouldnt stop. [15], Pichushkin claimed that deciding whether his victims should live or die made him feel like God. Their apartment building was a six-minute walk from the north end of Bitsa Park.[2]. After Pichushkin was escorted from the buildinghe did not resistthey gave her some documents stating exactly what he was being accused of. Criminologists, psychologists, and serial-killer aficionados weighed in online with theories and speculation. The Maniac was worried that this foul-smelling, inebriated little man would change his mind and turn around, depriving Pichushkin of what he believed was his. At an early age, he suffered a head injury and brain damage. Alexander Pichushkin, 42, was jailed in Moscow in 2007 for 49 murders He began writing to a 29-year-old shop worker called Natalya from jail They are now engaged with Natalya adopting the. He eventually left the bodies in the open to be discovered, and also left broken vodka bottles sticking out of the skulls of some of his victims. She couldnt focus. He is talking to someone we cant see. The press dubbed Pichushkin the Bitsevsky Park Maniac and then the Chessboard Killer, because the police allegedly found a chessboard in his apartment on which he had recorded his murders, one per square. The worst, says Natasha Fyedosova, was the corpse they found by the side of a stream. He doesnt know where he is. Did something happen when he was little? Alexander Pichushkin, who claimed to have killed 60 people, stood in a reinforced glass cage with his hands cuffed behind his back as a judge delivered the harshest possible punishment under. He used to ask, Wheres Sasha? she says. Once Pronin was dead, Pichushkin threw his body into a nearby well. The five-story buildings, or khrushchovki,named after then premier Nikita Khrushchev, were the Soviet Unions first large-scale public-housing projects. Its unlikely he knew Lobov, who didnt come from one of the apartment houses on Khersonskaya, and its unclear exactly where they metprobably on Kakhovka Prospekt, near the metro station, where the kids with leather jackets and multiple piercings drink vodka from plastic cups and hang out next to the flower stands and dumpling kiosks. He would also push a vodka bottle into the gaping wound in their skulls, which became his trademark. Natasha Fyedosova says Pichushkin never had any interest in girls, never talked about sex or looked at women the way boys and men often look. Bums. That fall and winter the killing continued, but it was less feverish; five or more people were murdered during this stretch. He doesnt have a career. Later, he branched out and began killing younger men, women, and children too, attacking them behind and taking them by surprise. Now everyone is leaving the courtroom, and the Maniac is putting his hands behind his back so someone we cant see can handcuff him. Natasha Pichushkina, the Maniacs mother, moved into a two-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of 2 Khersonskaya, a six-minute walk from the north end of Bitsevsky Park, when she was 11 years old. Newspapers nicknamed Pichushkin the "Bittsevsky Maniac" and "The Bittsa Beast.". Nacido el 9 de abril de 1974 en Mytishchi, (ciudad cercana a Mosc) durante el periodo de la antigua Unin Sovitica, Alexander Pichushkin tuvo una infancia muy complicada. Asked why Pichushkin preferred the woods, he says, Have you ever tried killing someone on the street in broad daylight?, Suprunenko spent months questioning the Maniac and probably knows him better than anyone else, including Pichushkins family. The Maniac is in a cell on a closed-caption screen, laughing, posing unwittingly in his televised cage. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Pichushkin is incarcerated in the Arctic penal colony "Polar Owl" and spends his days in solitary confinement. Some faux camaraderieYou respect me, and I respect you, so lets drink!and then a surprise blow to the head, followed by a shove down the well. Russian serial killer commonly referred to as "The Chessboard Killer" who is thought to have murdered at least 49 people in Bitsa Park in Moscow. The death of his beloved grandfather affected him deeply and he became aggressive and violent towards others soon after. People talked about hearing shouts and cries echoing through the trees. [9] Pichushkin was arrested at his mother's home on 30 July and taken to Moscow police station for questioning. In 2007 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He killed prolifically over the next decade and also began competing with another serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo. But perhaps he was afraid of it, too. If he had killed people he didnt know, in another neighborhood, it wouldnt have been as bad, but he killed people he knew. Indeed, the Maniac befriended people so he could kill them. Now she seems certain that this man with sturdy hands and thick wrists, this co-worker, is the Maniac. Alexander Pichushkin killed his first victim in 1992 but killed only sporadically until 2001, when he began regularly targeting victims. ", 13 Unsettling Facts About Alexander Pichushkin, The Chessboard Killer. On October 24, 2007, Alexander Pichushkin was found guilty of murdering forty-eight people. This is not to say that killing was not sexual for him. It's now known that Pichushkin committed his first murder around 1992 and that the death was ruled a suicide at the time. That means that at least forty people vanished before the police, and then the detectives at the Interior Ministry and the prosecutor generals office, realized there was a serial killer in Moscow. Suddenly she looks very, very tired. In 2007, Moscow police found a chessboard. In November 2005, a 63-year-old ex-cop named Nikolai Zakharchenko turned up dead in the woods. He told Odichuk he wanted to kill someone. All the victims family members, the prosecutors, almost everyone with any connection to the case, say Suprunenko and his team did a superb job. When future-serial killer Alexander Pichushkin was a child, he fell backward off of a swing. Pichushkin ceased killing for several years until 1996, when Russia placed a moratorium on the death penalty. He mostly targeted homeless elderly men, luring them with offers of free vodka. During his trial, Pichushkin told the courts: "A first killing is like your first love. What about that chessboard, though could those empty squares really be a clue for how many murders he had actually committed? "[16], Pichushkin was convicted on 24 October 2007 of forty-nine murders and three attempted murders. According to Biography, the dates on the board corresponded to the dates on which Pichushkin had murdered his victims. I just tried to raise him like a normal mother. She glances at the photographs on the refrigerator. They were dank, charmless, and overflowing with tenants, but they were the first single-family homes most of these people had ever lived in. According toBiography, the dates on the board corresponded to the dates on which Pichushkin had murdered his victims.

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