Alexander Vladimirovich Bychkov was born on April 1, 1988 in Belinsky, a town in Penza Oblast that still has fewer than nine thousand people. Murderpedia gives his birth year as 1989. His parents drank. He finished vocational school in 2007 as a repair fitter for agricultural machinery.
Between September 2009 and January 2012 he killed nine men. Most of them drank heavily or were living rough. The method was consistent: he would invite a man somewhere quiet, supply vodka generously, and then use a knife or an axe. The first was Yevgeny Zhidkov, sixty, on September 17, 2009, who had come into town to sort out the paperwork for his pension. The second was Vladimir Berezovsky, who was seeing Bychkov's mother.
He wrote it all down. The diary set out his crimes in detail, and the Russian press gave him a series of names on the strength of what he did and said: the Belinsky Chikatilo, Rembo, the Belinsky cannibal, and the heart-eater.
He was arrested on January 21, 2012 for a theft from a shop. His DNA was then matched to traces from the murder scenes, which identified the man local police had been looking for over three years, and he admitted the killings at the first interview. Investigators checked him against seventeen disappearances. He said he had killed nine.
Before that, the case had already gone badly wrong for someone else. A man had been convicted of one of the murders Bychkov committed. He was later amnestied. The criminal case opened against the district investigator who had obtained that conviction was closed for absence of a crime, and he was not punished.
He said he had practised cannibalism, and that claim is where his lurid nicknames come from. The court could not establish it, and several further killings could not be proved either. Nine episodes were enough for the sentence.
The Penza Regional Court convicted him on March 22, 2013 under the article covering murder of two or more persons and murder committed to conceal another crime, together with theft, and sentenced him to life in a special regime colony. Psychiatrists found him sane. The appeal court left the sentence standing in June 2013, and the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation confirmed it on November 20, 2013.
He is serving the sentence on Ognenny Island in Vologda Oblast, the prison Russians call the Vologda penny. In 2018 he told a Moscow paper that he would have the right to apply for release after twenty-five years. By then he was corresponding with a woman in the United States who had read about him on a Russian news site; he later married her, and they had a child.