“I am being treated
unfairly,” he protested.
“I am charged with
only 48 killings, yet I
have killed 63 times”
forces officers dangled on ropes from
the outside of the apartment building to
prevent him committing suicide.
Pichushkin said he was 18 and a
student when he killed for the first time.
He suggested to a classmate that they kill
someone, but when his friend refused, “I
sent him to heaven.”
At the time he was having an affair
with a girl named Olga, who lived next
door to him. When she broke off the
relationship in favour of a mutual friend
named Sergei, Pichushkin killed Sergei
by throwing him out of a window. Now
he is also claiming that he killed Olga as
well, first luring her to Bitsevsky Park,
where her body was found in 2005.
Although he was originally under
suspicion, Pichushkin says, the police
finally decided that Sergei’s death
in 1992 was suicide.That was the
same year that his role model, Andrei
Chikatilo, was tried and convicted of the
murder of 53 women and children.
For the next nine years Pichushkin
apparently didn’t kill anyone. He started
his Bitsevsky Park serial murders in
2001, a year in which he killed 11
people, including six in one month.
According to prosecutor Yuri
Syomin at his trial in September 2007
Pichushkin could be “particularly cruel.”
After jabbing the half-empty vodka
bottle into the opened skull of one of his
women victims, he hammered tiny stakes
into her skull and around her eyes.
Pichushkin objected vociferously
to the phrase “particularly cruel.” He
observed: “This was a kind of ritual,
my style, my handwriting. Neither the
prosecutor nor the investigators know
what happened between myself and the
victims in the park.”
The court was crowded with relatives
of the murder victims. Several relatives
of other missing people turned up and
said they suspected him of killing their
loved ones too.
For most of the time Pichushkin
sat glowering in the glass cage, an icy
presence gazing at onlookers with an
expression of boredom and disgust.
Occasionally during the five-week
hearing, he became animated, as
when he revelled in describing his first
murder. “It was like first love – it was
unforgettable,” he said.
Sometimes too he became aggressive,
gesticulating to show the jury how he
strangled his victims, and the marks
his victims left on his hands as they
struggled.
When he was asked at the end of
his trial if he would like to make a
final statement, he replied: “A final
statement? That sounds grim. I donate
my final statement to all the deaf
and mute people. As for what all the
prosecuting lawyers have been saying,
it’s pitiful.”
Nevertheless, he did make a final
statement, revelling in his crimes and
mocking the court. “For 500 days I
have been under arrest and it has taken
you all this time to decide my fate. At
one time I alone decided the fate of 60
people. I alone was the judge and the
prosecutor and the executor. I was God.
I fulfilled all your functions by myself.
“Do not credit the police with
catching me. I’m a professional. I gave
myself up.”T
he jury took three hours to arrive at
their verdicts. When they returnedAnd he added: “I had no interest in
robbing them. The most important thing
was to take their lives.”
Defence lawyer Pavel Ivannikov
questioned the evidence in 23 of the
killings where no body was found, and
asked that he be cleared of those crimes.
“I would not want him to be blamed for
someone else’s crimes,” Mr. Ivannikov
said.
But during their investigations when
the police decided that there were so
many killings they must be the work of
two people, Pichushkin was furious. To
prove that he killed alone, he said, he
went out and killed two more people.
He also admitted killing one of
his last victims in February 2006 to
demonstrate that he was still at large
following inaccurate reports in Russian
newspapers that the “Bitsevsky Maniac”
had been caught.I
n guessing that there might have
been a second killer, the prosecution
were almost right. Initially Pichushkin
did have an accomplice. His name was
Mikhail Odichuk, and the two men
hatched a plan to become joint serial
killers. When they went into Bitsevsky
Park to look for places where they could
hide their victims’ bodies, Pichushkin
decided to strangle Odichuk.
“He had no idea that he was searching
for his own grave,” Pichushkin smirked.
After that he operated alone, and
killing became an addiction. “In all these
cases I killed for the same reason – to
feel alive,” he said. “The closer someone
is to you, the more pleasant it is to kill.”
In court he was held in a glass cage
and spoke through a microphone. He
never denied the murders but refused
to enter a plea. “I am being treated
unfairly,” he protested. “I am charged
with only 48 killings, yet I have killed 63
times.”
This indeed was the absolute focus of
his concern. For him, psychiatrists told
the court, the real punishment came
from being denied the title of Russia’s
most prolific serial killer.
One expert thought there was a
“sexual subtext” to the murders, for
Pichushkin had described his criminal
career as “a perpetual orgasm.”W
HEN Alexander Pichushkin
was arrested, police went to the
cramped apartment and the bedroom
he shared with his mother, and found
his chessboard with numbers on its
squares – all the way up to 63. He
denied any involvement in the crimes
at first, until he was confronted with
subway surveillance camera footage
that showed him walking with his last
victim minutes before he strangled
her.
After that he told his whole
astonishing story. “And I would
have reached the last squareon the
chessboard,
number 64,
if you had
not turned
up,” he
said. “If
you hadn’t
arrived,
I would
never have
stopped –
never. You
saved a lot
of lives by catching me.”“YOU SAVED A LOT OF LIVES BY CATCHING ME”“YOU SAVED A LOT OF LIVES BY CATCHING ME”
“For me, a life without murder
is like a life without food,” serial
killer Pichushkin boasted. “I felt
like a father to all these people
since it was I who opened the door
for them to the afterlife”