In the early hours of January 21, 2012, a short, slight young man broke into a household goods shop in Belinsky called Vsyo dlya doma and left with three garden knives and about 10,000 rubles from the till. The description the police put out was thin: small, wiry, and for his size unusually strong. When officers picked up Alexander Bychkov on January 25 he was carrying knives, and he did not stop at the burglary. Belinsky, a town of fewer than nine thousand people in Penza Oblast, had been losing men for more than two years, and another resident was already in compulsory psychiatric treatment for three of the deaths.
The search of his house turned up a personal diary describing eleven killings, along with a large collection of violent films. In the diary he called himself a lone wolf and explained the murders as a way of proving himself. Investigators came to see a second motive in the choice of victims: hatred of the kind of men his mother drank with. Under questioning he said that he had sometimes cut out a victim's liver or heart and eaten it. That claim gave the Russian press its names for him, the Belinsky Chikatilo, the Belinsky cannibal and the heart-eater.
He was born on April 1, 1988, in the town that had been called Chembar until 1948, when it was renamed for the critic Vissarion Belinsky, who spent his childhood there. A brother, Sergei, followed two years later. Their father, Vladimir, came from the village of Pushanino and drove a combine before retraining to repair refrigeration equipment. Neighbors said their mother, Irina, had a drinking problem and that in time the father did too. He killed himself at forty.
By the town's account the mother put both boys to hard labor in the vegetable plot and sent them out collecting scrap metal, and beat them if they came home without money. Bychkov later described it himself: "Mother beat me. You've seen the old immersion heaters, with a cord as thick as your finger? Fifty strokes with that, and if you made a sound, more." In the same breath he said he did not blame her and that he had probably deserved worse. The brothers stole from neighbors' garden plots and were caught more than once, and usually let go out of pity.
At school he ate raw frozen meat and raw fish, and the other children called him the Predator. Later nicknames were Dried Rambo and the Poacher, and he had the second tattooed on his forearm. In 2007 he finished vocational school as a repair fitter for farm machinery and enrolled at the teacher training college in Belinsky, then took academic leave to look after Sergei, who had been beaten by unknown attackers, left with severe head injuries and registered as disabled.
Yevgeny Zhidkov was the first. He was sixty and had come into Belinsky on September 17, 2009, to collect papers from the district records office for his pension. Bychkov met him in a drinking bar and offered him a bed for the night. The investigation's version is that he killed Zhidkov in his sleep. Bychkov's own version, given years later, is of a stranger, a drink, an argument, a question ("What, you're going to threaten me?") and a knife. The two accounts have not been reconciled.
By the investigators' account, reported at his sentencing, the men who followed were alcoholics and vagrants whom he killed out of hostility to their way of life, and the pattern held. He took them somewhere deserted, gave them plenty of vodka, and killed them with a knife or a hammer. With a knife it was usually one or a few blows under the jaw, or a cut throat after he had stunned them with something heavy; with a hammer he struck the face and head wildly, more than a hundred times. He dismembered the bodies and buried the remains behind his house or threw them on the dump on Lermontovskaya Street. He killed between May and September, the months when construction crews from other former Soviet republics came to town, so that the police would look at the newcomers first. Among the dead was Vladimir Berezovsky, who had lived with his mother. Russian press accounts also name a victim called Arakelyan. Reports of the sentencing listed among the alleged victims Sergei Lisyanin, thirty-seven, Sergei Sukharev, thirty-four, and Vladimir Baskakov, forty-six, a former intensive-care doctor.
In September 2010 the dismembered bodies of three people were found in Belinsky. The police charged a local man, Alexander Zhuplov, a mentally ill man registered as disabled and known around town as Zhuplik, with causing grievous bodily harm resulting in death, and he was sent for compulsory treatment. His arrest drew open criticism of the local police even at the time. When the truth came out he was amnestied. A criminal case was opened against the district investigator who had put him before the court, and it was soon closed for absence of a crime. No one was punished.
On December 28, 2012, the Penza regional prosecutor approved the indictment: murder of two or more people and murder to conceal another crime, desecration of dead bodies, and burglary. Bychkov turned down a jury. A combined forensic psychiatric examination found a mixed personality disorder that did not stop him understanding what he was doing, and he was declared sane. The Penza Regional Court found nine of the killings proved, convicted him of murder and of the burglary, and on March 22, 2013, sentenced him to life in a special regime colony. He was twenty-four. The cannibalism could not be proved. He and his lawyer appealed; the appeal was rejected in June 2013, and the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation confirmed the sentence on November 20, 2013.
He was sent to IK-5 on Ognenny Island in Vologda Oblast, the colony for lifers known as the Vologda Pyatak, which Vasily Shukshin used as a location for Kalina Krasnaya. In 2018 he told a Russian paper he was bored and passed the time with television and letters. Among his correspondents was a sales clerk in Nevada who was teaching herself Russian and had found him on a Russian news site; she knew about the killings and the hearts, he said, and it had not put her off. He said he regretted the murders and would undo them with a magic wand if he could, and that after twenty-five years he would have the right to ask for release. He later married the woman, and they had a son.