Alexander Pichushkin

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Alexander Pichushkin

Background information
Alias(es):	Bitsa maniac or chessboard killer
Born:	9 April 1974 (1974-04-09) (age 34) Mytishchi, Moscow Oblast, Russia
Penalty:	Life imprisonment
Killings
Number of victims:	63 claimed, 48 proven
Span of killings:	1992 through 2006
Country:	Russia
Date apprehended:	2006

Alexander Pichushkin (Russian: Александр Пичушкин), born 9 April 1974 in Mytishchi,Moscow Oblast, known in the Russian media as the "Bitsa Maniac" and also the "Chessboard Killer" is a Russian serial killer. He is believed to have killed at least 48 people and up to 61-63 people in southwest Moscow's Bitsa Park, where several of the victims' bodies have been found.

Pichushkin committed his first murder as a student in 1992 and stepped up his campaign in 2001.^[1] Russian media have speculated that Pichushkin may have been motivated by a macabre competition with Russia's most notorious serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, who was convicted in 1992 of killing 52 children and young women in 12 years.^[2] Pichushkin has said his aim was to kill 64 people, the number of squares on a chessboard.^[3] He later recanted this statement, saying that he would have continued killing indefinitely if he had not been stopped ^[4]

Pichushkin primarily targeted elderly homeless men (aka "bomzh") by luring them with vodka. After drinking with them he would kill them, hitting them on the head with a hammer. He then stuck vodka bottles in their skulls to ensure that they did not survive. He claimed that while killing people he felt like god 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"^[5] he is also reported to have said. Experts at the Serbsky Institute, Russia's main psychiatric clinic, have found Pichushkin irrecuperable.

He was arrested on 15 June 2006, and convicted on 24 October 2007 of 48 murders and three attempted murders.^[6] He asked a Russian court to add an additional 11 victims to his body count, bringing his known death toll to 61 and possibly 63 victims.^[7] During the trial, he was housed in a glass cage.^[8] It took Judge Vladimir Usov an hour to read the verdict – life in prison^[9] with the first 15 years to be spent in solitary confinement.^[6]