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Date: 14 Aug 2007 16:09:09
From: Maple Tree
Subject: Alexander Pichushkin - The chessboard killer
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http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=4047
Alleged Chessboard Killer Faces Trial
Monday August 13, 2007 8:01 PM
By MISHA JAPARIDZE
Associated Press Writer
MOSCOW (AP) - One by one, the squares on the chessboard filled up with
numbers - each commemorating a murder.
Alexander Pichushkin allegedly killed most of his victims in a sprawling
Moscow park, smashing their skulls with a hammer or throwing them into
sewage pits after getting them drunk. He boasted he had nearly reached the
last square, No. 64, by the time police captured him last year.
``For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you,'' he
told investigators in a nationally televised confession. ``I felt like the
father of all these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to
another world.''
Pichushkin, 33, looked calm and aloof Monday as he sat in the defendant's
cage of the Moscow City Court during a preliminary hearing in which a judge
accepted his request for a jury trial and ruled it would start Sept. 13.
After his June 2006 arrest, Pichushkin claimed he had killed more than 60
people over several years, but prosecutors said they had evidence to charge
him with only 49 murders carried out in Moscow's Bittsa Park between
2005-2006.
At the cramped apartment where he shared a bedroom with his mother, police
found his chessboard with numbers attached to its squares - all the way up
to 62.
Most of the victims were men, many of them homeless, whom Pichushkin had
allegedly lured to the park with a promise of vodka. To some, he proposed a
toast in memory of the dog he walked in the park and buried there when it
died, investigators say.
Pichushkin allegedly rammed sticks or vodka bottles into the shattered
skulls of some of his victims. More than 40 were purportedly killed by being
tossed into a sewage pit.
As the killings grew more frequent in 2005 and panic spread through the
public, hundreds of police were sent to sweep the 6.6-square-mile park for
suspects.
At one point last year, police thought they had a break in the case:
Officers shot and arrested a man who had brandished a knife as he tried to
flee a police patrol. To show they were on the wrong track, Pichushkin
killed two more victims within a week, he told investigators.
Pichushkin said police in the area repeatedly stopped him for identity
checks but let him go.
He was finally caught when officers found his name and phone number on a
piece of paper in the apartment of his last victim, a woman who worked with
Pichushkin in a food store. She had apparently become suspicious of
Pichushkin and had left behind a note so police would be able to track him
down.
``As we were heading to the park and talking, I kept thinking whether to
kill her or take caution,'' Pichushkin said in the confession. ``But finally
I decided to take a risk. I was in that mood already.''
He denied involvement at first, but then confessed to the woman's murder
after police confronted him with subway surveillance camera footage that
showed him with her. Pichushkin went on to confess to at least 62 murders
and led police to the bodies of victims.
One of three men who survived being thrown into sewage dumps went on to
identify Pichushkin as his assailant.
Russian media, including the government-run Rossisskaya Gazeta, 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 over the course of
12 years.
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 the Bittsa Park began almost a
decade later.
The Moscow Times quoted an unidentified law enforcement source as saying
that Pichushkin grew up without a father and that his mother had placed him
in a home for disadvantaged and troubled children. Later, she sent him to
live with his grandfather.
Defense lawyer Pavel Ivannikov told reporters outside the courtroom Monday
that Pichushkin had admitted guilt on all charges. Pichushkin faces life in
prison if convicted; Russia has a moratorium on capital punishment.
Experts at the Serbsky Institute, Russia's main psychiatric clinic, have
found Pichushkin sane.
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Date: 15 Aug 2007 19:35:57
From:
Subject: Re: Alexander Pichushkin - The chessboard killer
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On 14 ago, 22:41, Paul Rubin <http://[email protected] > wrote:
> "Maple Tree" <[email protected]> writes:
> > At the cramped apartment where he shared a bedroom with his mother, police
> > found his chessboard with numbers attached to its squares - all the way up
> > to 62.
>
> Which two squares were left open? Was he saving e1 and d8 for himself
> and some fantasy bride?
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Date: 14 Aug 2007 13:41:32
From: Paul Rubin
Subject: Re: Alexander Pichushkin - The chessboard killer
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"Maple Tree" <[email protected] > writes:
> At the cramped apartment where he shared a bedroom with his mother, police
> found his chessboard with numbers attached to its squares - all the way up
> to 62.
Which two squares were left open? Was he saving e1 and d8 for himself
and some fantasy bride?
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