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. When police searched his apartment they 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 suffered a head injury, 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 went to the police, but as an undocumented worker she was pressed to drop the complaint. A teenager named Mikhail Lobov also survived an attack that year.
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, and said that for him a life without murder was like a life without food. He said he had killed sixty-three people and asked to be held accountable for all of them. 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.
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. On October 24, 2007, after about two hours of deliberation, 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. If those were proved, the court's count would rise to fifty-nine. For now it 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.