On June 14, 2006, Marina Moskalyova, thirty-six, left a note for her son before she went out. It said she was going for a walk in Bitsevsky Park with a man from the supermarket where she worked, and it gave his name and telephone number. She also had a metro ticket in her pocket. Her body was found in the park, and the ticket led detectives to station camera footage of her walking along the platform with a co-worker hours before she died. The man in the footage was Alexander Pichushkin, a thirty-two-year-old shelf stacker. Detectives raided his apartment two days after her body was found, arrested him, and found a chessboard with dates written on sixty-two of its sixty-four squares.
Pichushkin was born on April 9, 1974, in Mytishchi, on the northern edge of Moscow. Around the age of four he was struck on the head by a swing, his mother said later, and as a child he spent time in an institution for the disabled; his defense later treated the injury as the beginning of what followed. He was raised in large part by his grandfather, who taught him chess and took him to play on the boards in Bitsevsky Park, a large wooded park in southwestern Moscow. When his grandfather died he moved back in with his mother and stayed.
The first killing came in the summer of 1992, when Pichushkin was eighteen and Andrei Chikatilo was on trial in Rostov. The victim was a school friend, Mikhail Odichuk, whom he had tried to talk into killing people with him. When Odichuk treated it as a joke and then tried to back out, Pichushkin killed him in the park. Accounts of how differ: the prosecutor at his trial said he strangled the boy and threw him into a sewage pit, while other accounts say he used a hammer. The police questioned him but brought no case, and the death was not solved.
Nine years passed before he killed again, on May 17, 2001. From then on the pattern hardly varied. He approached men in the park, often older men who drank, many of them homeless or living alone, and invited them to share a bottle of vodka to remember his dog, which he said was buried in the woods. The dog did not exist. When they reached the spot he hit them on the back of the head, usually with a hammer, and threw many of the bodies into the open wells of the park's sewer system. In later killings he pushed the neck of a vodka bottle into the head wound. Most of his victims were men, but he also killed women and people he knew.
Because the bodies went into the sewers, and because the dead were so often men whom nobody reported missing, the killings could go for years without being recognized as murders. When the bodies began to be found in the park with the same wounds, the Moscow press named the killer the Bitsa Park Maniac. At least three people survived him. On February 23, 2002, he pushed Maria Viricheva, a pregnant saleswoman, into a well and beat her head against its sides. She climbed out, and by one account went to the police and, as an undocumented worker, was pressed to drop the complaint; the Moscow paper MK reported instead that she told people she had stumbled into the open hatch, and that she gave birth to a daughter that summer. Mikhail Lobov, fourteen, survived an attack in March 2002, and MK reported that he tried more than once to tell adults about the man in the woods and was brushed off as a glue-sniffing boy. A third survivor, Konstantin Polikarpov, did not testify.
After his arrest Pichushkin confessed readily and at length. He said he had meant to fill all sixty-four squares of the chessboard and had come up short. He described the first killing as being like first love. In a confession broadcast on NTV soon after his arrest he said, "For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you," and that he had felt like the father of all these people, since it was he who had opened the door for them to another world. He said he had killed sixty-three people and asked to be held accountable for all of them; some Russian reports give the number he claimed in court as sixty-two, the number of dated squares. The prosecutor, Yuri Syomin, charged him with fifty-two murders and three attempts, saying that for the rest there were no bodies, no weapons, no witnesses and not even records of anyone missing. Experts at Russia's main forensic psychiatric center found him sane.
At a preliminary hearing on August 13, 2007, relatives of the dead sat in the courtroom. By then the police had found only fourteen bodies, and the forensic evidence was thin, though a hammer had been recovered from a pond. Syomin said Pichushkin had dreamed of surpassing Chikatilo and going down in history. Tamara Klimova, whose husband had disappeared five years earlier, told Russia Today that he should be handed over to the public rather than kept in prison at its expense. The judge granted his request for a jury and an open trial, to begin on September 13.
He asked for a jury, which was then rare in Russia, and his trial opened in Moscow in the late summer of 2007. He sat in a glass cage and listened as the prosecutors went through the killings one by one. Syomin told the jury that Pichushkin had taken particular pleasure in finishing off victims as they begged for mercy, and that one of the late killings, in February 2006, had been committed to show that he was still free after newspapers reported the maniac had been caught. He told the court he had known about Marina Moskalyova's note and killed her anyway. "I burned myself, so there's no need for the cops to take credit for catching me," he said. "I'm a professional." His lawyer, Pavel Ivannikov, challenged the evidence in twenty-three of the killings, in some of which no body had been found, and asked the jury to acquit him of those. "I would not want him to be blamed for someone else's crimes," he said. Syomin told the jury the state had proved forty-eight murders and three attempts. On October 24, 2007, after about two hours of deliberation, by most accounts, though some give three, the jury found him guilty of forty-eight murders and three attempted murders. On October 29 the judge sentenced him to life imprisonment, with the first fifteen years to be served in isolation. Russia's moratorium on the death penalty ruled out execution.
He was sent to the Polar Owl penal colony in the Yamalo-Nenets region, above the Arctic Circle, where he remains. In April 2025 Russia's penal service announced that he had told investigators he was ready to confess to eleven more murders of men and women, reported to be unsolved killings in the Severnoye Butovo district of Moscow. If those were proved, the court's count would rise to fifty-nine. In May 2025 the penal service refused his request to be moved to a colony in Mordovia, closer to his relatives, and he sued it. That September, RIA Novosti reported from court papers that in an appeal to Russia's Supreme Court he had asked for his life sentence to be cut to twenty-five years, citing his frank confession and cooperation; the court refused. For now the count stands at forty-eight. Most of the names behind that number belonged to men who had been drinking alone in a Moscow park and whom almost no one had gone looking for.