Russian serial killer convicted of 49 murders explains twisted plan to kill even more | World | News
Serial killer Alexander Pichushkin pictured in court in 2007 (Image: Getty Images)
Alexander Pichushkin, a chess prodigy born in Soviet Moscow in 1974, harboured a chilling ambition: to murder 64 people, one for each square on a chessboard.
Raised near Bitsa Park, a lush green space teeming with over 600 species of flora and fauna and a favourite haunt for city residents, Pichushkin was remembered as a cheerful, intelligent, and healthy child.
However, a tragic accident on a swing that damaged his frontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for impulse control and anger management – changed everything.
According to family friends, the boy underwent a profound transformation after the incident, becoming a completely different person. He became unpredictable and challenging; former friends began to torment him at school, further stoking his fury.
Concerned by what she was witnessing, his mother transferred him to a school for children with learning difficulties.
Despite these challenges, Pichushkin remained an exceptional child, particularly enjoying chess games with his grandfather, who recognised a spark in the boy. His grandfather took Pichushkin under his wing, regularly accompanying him to nearby Bitsa Park where Pichushkin would play and outshine all the other older men.
Pichushkin grew so attached to his grandfather that he moved out of his mother’s house to live with him, and the two became inseparable.
However, towards the conclusion of Pichushkin’s adolescence, his grandfather passed away, forcing him to return to his mother’s residence in Bitsa Park.
He began drowning his sorrows with vodka and carried on with chess, but developed a fixation with the “Rostov Ripper” investigation, concerning a Ukrainian mass murderer who brutally slaughtered more than fifty women and children across the USSR from 1978 to 1990.
Pichushkin committed his first murder on 27 July 1992, aged merely 18. He had arranged to meet a schoolmate, Mikhail Odïtchuk, in Bitsa Park to devise a scheme together to eliminate 64 individuals, matching each square on a chessboard.
However, when Odïtchuk arrived at the park, he informed Pichushkin that he had no interest in the plan. This sent Pichushkin into a homicidal fury.
The teenager throttled his mate, hurling his corpse into a neighbouring drain where it would never be found. Officers detained Pichushkin after being informed the pair had been spotted together just before Odïtchuk vanished.
Yet no proof could be discovered to definitively link Pichushkin to the disappearance. The young pupil was released.
Throughout the following 14 years, he would murder repeatedly, his targets a mixture of destitute drifters or, audaciously, acquaintances.
Pichuskin was a normal child until he suffered a traumatic head injury. (Image: AP)
No fewer than 10 of Pichushkin’s victims were residents who lived in housing blocks on the identical street as his own. He would target strangers and acquaintances alike, both men and women, approaching them with friendly gestures of vodka and companionship before luring them to remote sections of Bitsa Park where he would brutally beat them with weapons or bottles.
Following these vicious assaults, he would pierce their crushed skulls with sticks or empty vodka bottles as his twisted signature.
Pichushkin’s reign of terror ended in June 2006 when his 36 year old colleague Marina Moskalyova vanished.
Moskalyova had apparently harboured suspicions about Pichushkin and left her son a message revealing her whereabouts, instructing him to contact police should she fail to return.
Upon his arrest, the shelf-stacker immediately admitted to his crimes, explaining to officers that murder provided him with meaning.
“In all cases, I killed for only one reason. I killed in order to live, because when you kill, you want to live.”
During a search of Pichushkin’s residence – a modest one-bedroom flat he occupied with his mother – authorities discovered a chessboard adorned with small coins covering 62 of its 64 squares.
Each coin, Pichushkin revealed, symbolised a life he had claimed.
He informed them that just two more remained before achieving his objective, though he conceded he would probably have continued his killing spree regardless.
Serial killer Alexander Pichushkin being escorted into court in 2007 (Image: AFP/Getty Images)
He declared: “For me, life without murder is like life without food for you. I felt like the father of all these people, since it was me who opened the door for them to another world.”
He likened the experience of killing to wielding divine power. Pichushkin was found guilty on October 24, 2007, of 49 killings and received a life sentence, with the initial 15 years to be served in solitary confinement.
He remains alive today, carrying out his punishment at “Polar Owl”, a distant Arctic “supermax” facility that ranks amongst Russia‘s most infamous prisons.
The establishment houses both political detainees and Russia’s most dangerous serial murderers, with approximately 10 serial killers imprisoned there.
The late Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was another previous prisoner at the facility.
In April 2025, reports emerged that Pichushkin had informed officials he was prepared to confess to 11 additional killings.
Pichushkin is presently thought to be Russia’s second-deadliest serial murderer.
He trails only Mikhail Popkov, a former police officer suspected of slaying at least 90 young women and girls across Siberia between 1992 and 2011.
