The chessboard killer of Moscow
14.08.2007
– Distasteful news: Alexander Pichushkin, a 33-year-old park chess player, faces charges of serial murder – he told police after his arrest he planned to kill 64 people – one for each square on a chess-board. He was arrested last year at a count of 49 to 63 (depending on different sources) and went to pre-trial hearings yesterday. The international press is full of this story.
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Guardian Unlimited: Along the leafy lanes of Moscow's Bitsevsky
Park, Alexander Pichushkin was a familiar figure. The 33-year-old supermarket
worker played chess under the trees and even invited his opponents for a drink
afterwards. But yesterday Mr Pichushkin was in court accused of murdering 49
people and attempting to kill three more, a tally which would make him one of
Russia's most deadly killers. According to the prosecution, Mr Pichushkin lured
his victims, who were mostly elderly men, to a quiet part of the park. He then
attacked them from behind with a hammer. Mr Pichushkin boasted that he had killed
63 people. He said he drew a cross on his chessboard after each murder. His
plan to fill all 64 squares came unstuck in June 2006 when he went for a walk
in the park with Marina Moskalyova, 36, a supermarket colleague.
Full story...
Moscow Times: A law enforcement source who participated in
Pichushkin's arrest told The Moscow Times that police found a notebook in his
apartment containing a drawing of a chessboard. All but one of the 64 squares
on the board contained a date denoting the death of one of his purported victims.
Full story...
Telegraph UK: Alexander Pichushkin, a supermarket shelf stacker
known in Russia as the “Bitsevsky Maniac” after the Moscow park
where most of the killings took place, allegedly told investigators that he
had murdered 62 people. Officers who raided his flat last year reportedly found
a chess board with a coin representing each victim placed on all but two of
the 64 squares of a chessboard. According to police, the 33-year-old invited
elderly people out for a stroll to drink vodka with him by the grave of his
dog in an isolated corner of the Bitsevsky Park in the southwest of Moscow.
Once they were drunk, Pichushkin allegedly bludgeoned them to death with a hammer
or a bottle. Full
story...
Times Online: The prosecution claims that [Pichushkin] wanted
to kill more people than Andrei Chikatilo, Russia’s worst known serial
killer, who murdered 53 people. “He dreamt of surpassing Chikatilo and
going down in history,” said Yuri Syomin, the Moscow prosecutor. The Russian
press suggested last week that he would enter Guinness World Records by being
charged with 62 murders. But in the event he was charged with only 52 killings
over a five-year period. That compared with the 53 murders of women and children
in the Rostov area of southern Russia for which Chikatilo was executed in 1994.
Full
story...
Washington Post: 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.
Full
story...
See also: Arrest
of Alexander Pichushkin in June 2006
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