Moscow park killer ‘wanted victim for every square of his chess board’
A MAN accused of killing dozens of people in a Moscow park over several years and marking his murders on a chessboard - with the goal of filling all 64 squares - will face trial next month.
After his arrest last year, Alexander Pichushkin claimed he had killed more than 60 people, but prosecutors said they had evidence to charge him with only 49 murders.
Pichushkin, 33, looked calm and aloof as he sat in the defendant’s cage of the Moscow City Court during a preliminary hearing yesterday. The judge accepted his appeal for a jury trial and ruled it should be open to the public. The trial is due to start on next month.
Pichushkin faces life in prison if convicted; Russia has a moratorium in place on the use of the death penalty.
The killings in the sprawling Bittsa Park terrorised the Russian capital.
Pichushkin was arrested in June 2006 after police found his name and phone number on a piece of paper that a woman who was killed in the park had left for her son.
He denied his involvement at first, but then confessed to the murder after police confronted him with video footage taken by a surveillance camera in the subway that showed him accompanying the victim.
Pichushkin went on to confess to at least 62 murders and led police to the bodies of his victims, investigators said. Shortly after his arrest, police invited a television channel to film and broadcast his confessions in an effort to counter media speculation that he had been forced into admitting his guilt.
In the footage, Pichushkin looked calm as he bragged about what he said was his passion for killing.
“For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you,” he 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 clinic, have found Pichushkin sane.
Pichushkin said in the televised confessions that he had killed his first victim, a classmate, in 1992 when he was 18. Police had questioned him then, but no charges were filed.
The killings in Bittsa Park began almost a decade later. Most of the victims were men whom Pichushkin had lured to the park by the promise of a drink, investigators said.
Police found his chessboard with numbers attached to its squares, all the way to 62, the chief investigator in the case, Andrei Suprunenko, said in a recently published interview.
Pichushkin also used the chessboard to keep stoppers from bottles of vodka he offered his victims.
Pichushkin killed more than 40 people by throwing them into a sewage pit after they were too drunk to resist, Mr Suprunenko said. Three others survived and one of these identified him, he said.
Pichushkin killed the others by hitting them with a hammer, the investigator said. Some of the victims had fragments of glass pressed into their skulls.
An elderly woman who was in the court, Tamara Klimova, came home from holiday to discover her husband missing. Prosecutors now believe he was killed by Pichushkin.
“I would like him to be handed over to the people so that they can tear him apart,” Mrs Klimova told reporters.
