Alexander Yuryevich Pichushkin was born in Mytishchi, outside Moscow, on April 9, 1974. As a small child he fell backwards from a swing and was struck in the forehead by it as it came back, an injury his family and later his lawyers treated as the beginning of everything. He was raised largely by his grandfather, moved back in with his mother when the grandfather died, and never left. He worked stacking shelves in a supermarket, played chess with pensioners on the boards in Bitsevsky Park, and lived a life that from the outside contained nothing at all.
He killed his first victim, a school friend, in 1992, and then stopped for nine years. From 2001 he killed steadily. His method was almost always the same: he approached older men in the park, often heavy drinkers, and invited them to come and drink a memorial toast to his dog, which was buried there. When the man bent over the grave he hit him on the back of the head with a hammer, and afterwards pushed the empty vodka bottle into the wound. He rolled the bodies into an open sewer well in the park. The Russian press called him the Chessboard Killer, after the board on which he was said to be counting.
For years the deaths were recorded as accidents, drownings and drunken falls, which is why the number grew so large in a city with a functioning police force. When bodies began surfacing intact the park acquired a name in the Moscow press, and he became the Bitsa Park Maniac.
He was caught by a note. Marina Moskalyova, a co-worker he took to the park in June 2006, had left her son a piece of paper with Pichushkin's name and telephone number on it and the time she was meeting him. Metro cameras showed the two of them together. He was arrested days later and confessed immediately and expansively.
He said he had been working towards sixty-four murders, the number of squares on a chessboard, and that killing was like food or drink to him, and that a life without it was pointless. Investigators verified forty-eight, and there was some indication that he inflated the figure to overtake Chikatilo. He was convicted on October 24, 2007, of forty-eight murders and three attempted murders, and sentenced to life, with the first fifteen years in solitary confinement. He asked at his trial to be tried for all sixty-three. He is held at the Polar Owl colony above the Arctic Circle.