They called him the chessboard killer. In the forest, he turned into a monster with a nasty taste

They called him the chessboard killer. In the forest, he turned into a monster with a nasty taste

The 32-year-old Pichuškin initially tried to deny it, but the police played him footage from security cameras in the subway, which showed him going out in the company of his latest victim. At that time, they already knew for sure that it was him, that they had before them a man whom they suspected of at least 14 murders. However, Pichushkin still managed to surprise them. When he realized that he would not escape from this trap, he asked for a bottle of vodka, after which he uttered the shocking sentence: "I killed 61 people."

Highly intelligent "retard"

Alexandr Yuryevich Pichushkin was born on April 9, 1974. His father left the family when the boy was nine months old, and his mother remarried. Little Saša's upbringing was mostly provided by his maternal grandfather, with whom the boy developed probably the most cordial relationship he had ever felt with anyone.

Alexander got close to Bittsev Park (the second largest park in Moscow) quite early, at the age of two, when the Pichushkins moved to the Moscow district of Zjuzino. It was acquired in the so-called "Khrushchevka", i.e. the first Soviet "block houses", which began to be built in the 1950s at the beginning of Nikita Khrushchev's era.

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At first it seemed that the boy would live a normal childhood in one of these houses. But then he suffered his first serious accident: a few years after moving, he fell backwards from a swing, and when he tried to get up, the returning swing hit him hard in the forehead. A child's frontal bone is weaker than an adult's and does not protect nearly as well - little Saša ended up in the hospital with suspected damage to the frontal cortex. Such damage sometimes causes a person to become morbidly impulsive, unable to control himself and prone to aggression.

This is exactly what started to happen to little Pičushkin. At school, he snapped at others and sometimes behaved erratically. And because he was rather weaker and because the children's collective is still immature and often cruel to any difference, the other children quickly started to bully him. Sometimes they beat him brutally, sometimes they were content to shout at him: "Retard". It only increased Alexander's hostility towards others. The tense situation eventually resulted in his transfer to a school for children with learning disabilities, where he dropped out despite actually being highly intelligent.

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It was his grandfather who was the first to finally notice the boy's intelligence and at the same time understand that his talent remained wasted and had no outlet, because the "remedial school" was more concerned with Pichushkin's disability rather than the development of his abilities, and even at home his mother did not guide him very well.

The grandfather took little Saša in for some time, encouraged him to engage in intellectual activities outside of school, and to test his abilities, taught him to play chess. This game started to entertain his grandson and he was doing great. He fell in love with going to the park with his grandfather, where they just played on the grass and where his combination skills soon caught the attention of other "park" chess players. The grandfather was happy that his grandson was doing well and encouraged him to try his luck against them too - even though many of them were against boys like him up to two generations older. And Alexander succeeded in winning over them.

At that time, it probably still seemed that he had a chance for a happy life - he found something in which he could realize himself, that he was good at, where no one mocked him and where others admired his abilities; for the older gentlemen had nothing left to prove, and the boys sincerely wished for his victory. But then came the twist.

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When Alexander reached puberty, his loving and apparently sincerely loved grandfather died. The boy had to go back to his mother. His grandfather's death shook him to the core, and his mother's new family added to him - he felt that all the care, love and attention of his parents was focused on his half-younger sister, his mother's daughter and stepfather.

He did not cope well with the situation. He appeared to be calm on the outside, but in fact he began to drink in large quantities of vodka to numb his pain from the loss of a loved one and somehow manage his bouts of aggressive behavior. Apparently, the vodka didn't help much with that.

The mother apparently tried to help him somehow, but she did not have as much understanding for the boy's hobbies and his mental relationship as her father used to. In an attempt to entertain her son, she bought him a moped. Saša went for a ride, but an hour later he returned home beaten and without his moped.

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With the fixed idea that the whole world was against him, he gradually began to replay in his head various fantasies about cruel and bloody revenge on all those who wronged him. He could not vent his aggression in, for example, computer games or Internet discussions, because none of that existed in the Soviet Union at the time. Trying to play sports didn't give him much self-confidence. Even school didn't cure him, because he started learning to be a carpenter, where he didn't have much opportunity to develop his intellectual abilities. He continued to go to Bitcevský Park to play chess, but this time he not only played with older men, but also drank vodka. Unlike them, he could brilliantly combine and develop battle strategies even when he was underpowered.

At the beginning of the 1990s, another event took place that set the young man on a sinister and terrible path. The Russian police have finally caught the serial killer Andrei Chikatil, the terrible "Butcher of Rostov", who tortured and killed at least 53 people in the vicinity of Rostov-on-Don during his 12-year rampage. The trial of Chikatil began in April 1992 and all the Russian media were full of it. However, the newly eighteen-year-old Pichushkin was fascinated by something different about his case than others - he found that the descriptions of Chikatil's crimes excited him.

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He already had some experience in this direction. As later investigations showed, he sometimes sought out young children, tormented them, threatened them and recorded it on camera. This is how he grabbed one small child by the leg with one hand, lifted him upside down in the air behind her, while saying to the camera: "Now you are in my power... If I let you out of the window like this, you will fly 15 meters and it will be after you."

He then played the recorded videos to confirm himself in his power. However, the trial with Čikatil gave him the idea that "it is possible to go" even further. The fact that this serial killer was caught and held accountable for his actions (Chikatelo was actually sentenced to death in the trial and executed by firing squad two years later) did not deter him. Perhaps he believed that with his high intelligence he could avoid such a fate.

"First murder is like first love"

Pichushkin committed his first murder on July 27, 1992. The victim was Mikhail Odichuk, his classmate, but surprisingly not one of his former school oppressors. On the contrary, it was his best friend, who was connected to Pičushkin by the fact that he was rather weaker among his peers - even than Pičushkin himself.

The would-be murderer, who had been obsessed with the idea of ​​committing a bloody massacre since Čikatil's trial, suggested to Odičuk that they could try to kill several people together. It's hard to say what Odičuk was thinking at that moment, but he didn't reject the plan right away. Maybe he thought his friend was just joking, maybe he was completely taken aback by such an idea. Or maybe he was afraid of rejecting his erratic boyfriend right away.

In any case, the two young men went to the darkened Bitcev park in the evening, watching for potential victims, and Picushkin slowly and in detail developed the details of the upcoming murders. Odičuk apparently only now realized that his menacing kind was really serious, and rejected the whole plan. Which was the last thing he did in his life.

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Pičushkin had an uncontrollable fit of rage. When he led Odičuk to the park, he already had the murderous tool with him, a long piece of rope to tighten the murderous noose around his neck. Now he pulled it on his classmate and friend and really strangled him in the park. He then threw his body into an uncovered canal.

"The first murder is like the first love - you don't forget it. I was completely out of it for a long time," he described this act many years later. And he wasn't making it up. Nine long years passed from the first murder to the serial killing. Unfortunately, the police did not find him during this time.

He didn't start murdering again until 2001, and this time he focused mainly on elderly homeless people who spent the night in the park. He first gained their trust by offering them vodka (a Moscow homeless man would never refuse), and after getting them drunk, he threw them into the drains and canals that ran through the park.

"It needs a hammer, I need more emotion"

But he soon found that such a straightforward way of getting rid of people didn't satisfy him, which he later described again in the rather creepy-sounding words that he "needed more emotion". From that moment on, he began to attack people with a hammer, smashing their heads with repeated blows. He then rammed bottles of vodka into the gaping holes in the skulls as his "signature". And the homeless were no longer enough for him either - now he was also attacking younger men, women and children. He was brutal and insidious in his actions. He would attack each victim from behind to catch her by surprise and prevent her from getting blood on his clothing, which might happen if she resisted.

At the same time, he could at least recognize ten of his victims by sight, because they lived in the same block of flats as him. He continued to hide the bodies of the murdered in the sewers, but after four years of killing, he stopped enjoying it. On the one hand, he was tired, and on the other hand, he apparently had a morbid desire for a lot of media attention and understood that he would only get it if he drew attention to himself.

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During one single autumn month in 2005, three human bodies were found in the park with their heads shattered and some object thrust into the mess of broken skull bones and brains. Finally, people started talking about a psychopath running amok in Bitcev Park. The killer could be satisfied - in the spring of 2006, all major Russian newspapers were already writing about him, and news about him ran on all federal channels. He later stated that he especially appreciated that the media did not forget to describe his eerie "signatures".

The last murder, committed in June 2006, was fatal for him. The murdered victim was 36-year-old Marina Moskaljová, whom he smashed in the head again in the park and stuck two pieces of wood into the broken skull. However, the chess player miscalculated this time.

Moskaljová was his colleague from work, a single mother of a teenage son. When Pichushkin offered her that they could go to the park for a drink together, she gladly accepted, but before that she left a message for her son at home telling her where she was going and with whom - and giving Pichushkin's name.

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It was interesting that the killer knew about this ticket. He later testified that "all the voices in the world were telling him to let her go" and that he was determined to let her go. He even walked away from her in the park for ten minutes, apparently hoping that the woman would pick herself up and go home in the meantime. But Moskaljová decided to wait for him, and when he returned, he could no longer control himself. This was followed by fatal blows to the head and the production of the "signature".

Police found a subway ticket on the murdered woman, which led them to review CCTV footage from the vestibule, where they found her getting off the train shortly before her death in Pichushkin's presence and walking together on the platform towards the park. Combined with the note to her son that was found at her home, it was no longer difficult to identify and convict the perpetrator.

But the policeman's killer still shocked when he reported more than 60 killed on his account. He claimed that he felt like God while killing because he made decisions about life and death. "I killed to live because a life without murder is to me like a life without food," he claimed. "I felt like the father of all those people because I was the one who opened the door to another world for them."

According to psychiatrists, he was mentally healthy at the time of his actions, able to recognize the danger of his actions, but suffering from an antisocial and narcissistic personality disorder. He was convicted of 49 murders and three attempted murders (three people he threw into the sewer happened to survive), then he himself asked to be charged with another 11 murders that the police did not discover. He is currently in solitary confinement in the arctic penal colony "Polar Owl".

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