Alexander Pichushkin was a Moscow store worker who killed people in Bitsa Park, a large forest park in the southwest of the city, for most of five years before he was caught in June 2006. A jury at the Moscow City Court found him guilty in October 2007 of 48 murders and 3 attempted murders, and he was sentenced to life. The Supreme Court of Russia upheld the sentence in February 2008.
Most of the people he killed were men, many of them older, many of them heavy drinkers or homeless, and many of them people he knew. Prosecutors said he invited them into the park to drink vodka in memory of a dead dog, then pushed them into open sewer wells or struck them on the head. Bodies were turned up in the park and in the city's sewage works for years without anyone connecting them. He was identified only because his last victim, a co-worker, left her son a note with his name and telephone number.
After his arrest he told investigators that he had set out to kill one person for every square on a chessboard. Police found a board in his apartment with numbers on 61 of its 64 squares. He has claimed between 60 and 63 killings. Investigators checked 11 of those claims and said in 2008 that they were not confirmed, and in April 2025 he said he was ready to confess to 11 more. None of the killings beyond the 48 has led to a conviction.
Pichushkin was born in Mytishchi, a town just outside Moscow. Most sources give the year as 1974: the Associated Press gave his age as 33 at his trial in 2007, AiF gave 1974, and 360.ru gave April 1974. Lenta.ru and Novaya Gazeta Europe give 1972. His mother is Natalya Pichushkina. His father left when he was a baby, and he was raised by his mother and his grandfather, according to AiF and 360.ru. In 1976 the family moved to Khersonskaya Street in the Zyuzino district of Moscow, close to Bitsa Park, Lenta.ru reported.
As a small child he fell from a swing and suffered a head injury. His mother told Komsomolskaya Pravda after his arrest that the injury left him with speech problems; Lenta.ru and 360.ru say he confused certain letters when he spoke and wrote, and that for a time he was sent to a boarding school for children with speech disorders. The Associated Press reported in 2007 that he grew up without a father and was placed in a home for troubled children before living with his grandfather. AiF described him as a quiet boy who liked chess and checkers and sometimes wrote poetry. He trained as a carpenter at a vocational school. A school acquaintance quoted by Kommersant called him the life of the party and a young man with a head for business; others remembered him as withdrawn and aggressive.
He did not serve in the army. When he was called up he was sent to a Moscow psychiatric hospital, then named after Kashchenko, and found unfit, his mother said; she told Komsomolskaya Pravda that he came back "not the same." Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported that he had been registered with a psychoneurological clinic until he was 18 and then considered cured. According to Lenta.ru, he began working in 1989 as a laborer at a food store and started drinking heavily, and in 1992 he failed a medical examination for police service. He went on to work as a laborer, loader and salesman. By 2006 he was a loader at a small food store on Khersonskaya Street.
The first killing came in 1992. Mikhail Odiychuk was a classmate from Vocational School No. 66, where both were training as carpenters. According to the indictment as reported by Kommersant, Pichushkin proposed that the two of them kill people together. When Odiychuk began to avoid him, Pichushkin strangled him with a rope in Bitsa Park on July 27, 1992, and put his body into a sewer well. His body was never found.
Police questioned Odiychuk's acquaintances at the time and did not suspect Pichushkin, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported in 2007. The Associated Press reported that no charges were brought then. The case was proven at trial in 2007 on Pichushkin's own identification of Odiychuk from a photograph, a 1992 Moskovsky Komsomolets notice about the search for the missing young man, and a certificate from the school showing that the two had studied together, MK reported. Odiychuk's relatives had never met Pichushkin.
He later described the first killing as being like first love, which one never forgets, 360.ru reported. 360.ru also reported that he began after following the trial of Andrei Chikatilo, the Rostov killer convicted in 1992 of killing 52 people.
Nine years passed before the next killing in the court record. The main series began on May 17, 2001, when he took a 52-year-old man who drank heavily to the park and drowned him in a sewer well, according to 360.ru. By the end of 2001 he had killed 11 people, six of them in a single month, prosecutors said at his trial. Most were over 50 and drank heavily, and some were homeless.
The method changed little at first. He told men he wanted company to drink in memory of his dog, which had died. Prosecutor Maria Semenenko told the jury that he bought the same brand of vodka for most of them at a kiosk near the park. Once they were drunk, he pushed them into open wells of the park's sewer system, where many drowned. In some cases he strangled them or struck them on the head.
He told the court in 2007 that in 2001, his most active year, he would go out early in the morning, always sober, and try to be home by 8:30 in the evening to watch a television serial, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported. He said he preferred to kill people he knew and paid little attention to how his victims looked or lived, and that he forgot their faces within minutes.
Prosecutors described other methods as well. In early 2002 he threw a homeless man from a 16th-floor balcony, according to Kommersant and 360.ru. He bought a homemade gun disguised as a pen and shot two men with it, Kommersant reported. On November 12, 2002, according to Komsomolskaya Pravda's account of the evidence, he bought his first hammer, and Valera Dolmatov was killed that day. The hammer weighed about 800 grams.
From 2005 he struck intoxicated victims repeatedly on the head with a hammer and left the bottle in the wound, prosecutors said, and he stopped trying to hide the bodies. Prosecutors said that in February 2006 he killed one man to show he was still at large, after newspapers wrongly reported that the Bitsa killer had been caught.
The court counted 47 men and 4 women among the 51 people he was convicted of killing or trying to kill, Vesti reported; three of the four women died. Lenta.ru reported that he chose people who could not resist because of age, disability or mental illness. Kommersant's account of the closing arguments recorded the prosecution's view that most of the victims knew him and that all of them had led unsettled lives, drinking or living rough. Russian and wire reports describe them mostly in those terms. The families who came to court described them as people.
Nikolai Ilinsky was killed in 2002. He had recently divorced and was going through a hard time, and he had been drinking. His sister, Natalia Shvarnskaya, identified him at the morgue and told the court he was lying as she had last seen him, asleep, MK reported.
Vladimir Fedosov was a driver whose work schedule did not allow him to drink. His daughter, Natalia Fedosova, told the jury that he drank only beer, on vacation. He had been afraid to go out after dark, she said, because three of his friends had disappeared shortly before him, and people in the neighborhood believed men were being kidnapped and sold into forced labor. She learned what had happened to her father from an investigator in 2006, after Pichushkin confessed.
Komsomolskaya Pravda, reporting from the trial in October 2007, named many of the others, most by the familiar first names used in court. Oleg Lvov had known Pichushkin for five years, and Pichushkin said he regretted killing him. Volodya Fomin worked with him at a Pyaterochka store. Yuri Kuznetsov was a strong man waiting for a hernia operation. Sergei Fedorov, known as Ezhik, was someone Pichushkin said he knew well. Igor Kashtanov was tall and well read. Vera Zakharova never told him her age. He met Viktor Ilin near Kakhovskaya metro station. The paper also named Vyacheslav Klimov, Gena Safonov, Sergei Pavlov, Andrei Konovaltsev, Gera Chervyakov, Alexei Pushkov, Sergei Chudin, Egor Kudryavtsev, Kolya Zakharchenko and Oleg Lavrinenko. Sergei Pavlov's partner and Sergei Chudin's wife followed the case.
About a dozen relatives were in court for the verdict, the Associated Press reported, and many had attended the whole trial. Two of the legal victims who came to a preliminary hearing told reporters they wanted a life sentence, Kommersant reported.
The jury convicted him of three attempted murders. Komsomolskaya Pravda described the three survivors in September 2007.
Maria Viricheva was 19, by that paper's account, and about 18 weeks pregnant when he pushed her into a sewer well on February 23, 2002. She held on to a rung inside the well until morning, climbed out and called for help. She spent nine days in the hospital and kept her baby, a daughter. She did not go to the police herself because she did not have a Moscow residence registration. A district police officer who questioned her in the hospital persuaded her not to file a report and to say she had fallen into the well, according to the investigation as reported by Komsomolskaya Pravda. Pichushkin later told the court he had learned of this from investigators.
On March 10, 2002, he approached a 13-year-old boy who had run away from an orphanage and offered him money to help carry a printer. He pushed the boy into the same well. The boy caught a ledge and got out through another manhole. He told investigators later that being deceived had upset him more than the fall. Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that police did not follow up on what he told them.
Konstantin Polikarpov, 31, was Pichushkin's neighbor. Pichushkin brought him to the park with the story about the dog, gave him alcohol, struck him three times with a hammer and put him into a well. Polikarpov got out through another manhole and walked home. His stepfather said doctors had doubted he would live. Neighbors said he was left disabled and had no memory of the attack. Komsomolskaya Pravda reported that when Pichushkin learned he was alive, he drank for days, then approached him; Polikarpov did not react, and Pichushkin concluded he was hiding what he knew.
The Associated Press reported in August 2007 that one of the three survivors identified Pichushkin as his attacker.
For years the dead were not recognized as the work of one person. Between 2001 and 2005, about 29 bodies were found in Moscow's sewer system, and police assumed most were accidents or drunks who had fallen in, MSK1.RU reported in 2025, citing the investigator who led the case. Komsomolskaya Pravda reported in 2007 that prosecutors had not opened criminal cases for 29 bodies recovered at the Kuryanovskaya aeration station, where the city's sewage is treated. Fontanka reported that the director of the treatment works had reported the bodies.
Many of the deaths were recorded as accidents, and some families were relieved rather than grieving, 360.ru wrote. Stray dogs scattered remains in the park, which made the work harder. RAPSI, the legal news agency, reported in 2013 that his psychiatric records had been removed from the register in 2001.
From late 2005 the Moscow police were hunting what the press called the Bitsa maniac, Kommersant reported in June 2006. Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported that several people survived attacks and went to the police, and that a composite sketch was made. 360.ru reported that investigators had witness accounts of a man with a scar on his face that matched Pichushkin.
Marina Moskaleva was 36 and worked as a saleswoman at a supermarket, a Perekrestok store where Pichushkin had also worked, Kommersant and Komsomolskaya Pravda reported. In June 2006 she went for a walk in Bitsa Park with him. Before she left she gave his telephone number to her family; Kommersant reported that her teenage son later told investigators she had gone walking with Pichushkin, and 360.ru reported that she left her son a note with his name and number. When she did not come home, her son telephoned Pichushkin, who said he did not know where she was and hung up, Radio Svoboda reported.
Her body was found on June 14, 2006, in a stream that runs through the park. Detectives also found metro surveillance footage of the two of them together, the Associated Press reported. At his trial Pichushkin said he had known about the note but could not stop himself from killing her.
He was detained at his mother's apartment in June 2006. 360.ru reported that it happened on the morning of June 16: his mother opened the door after seeing a neighbor through the peephole, and a special police unit came in and took him from his bed. Lenta.ru and Novaya Gazeta Europe give the date as June 18. His mother learned of the accusations from the newspapers, 360.ru reported.
During the search he handed over the hammer used to kill Moskaleva, Kommersant reported, and a court ordered him held for ten days. Then he told investigators he was the Bitsa maniac. He said he had meant to kill 64 people, one for each square of a chessboard, and that three squares were still empty, which matched the 61 killings he claimed at the time. He said he had hidden most of the bodies in sewer wells and remembered only vaguely where.
Investigators were doubtful. In June 2006, Moscow prosecutors called him a crazed chess player and said the only crime of his not in doubt was the murder of his co-worker, Kommersant reported. At that point police had found 14 bodies in the park. A prosecutor's spokesman told reporters a few days later that eight killings could be considered proven, Radio Svoboda reported.
His attitude changed the picture. He took part in three investigative visits to the park, showing where he had killed people and where he had thrown away weapons, and a hammer and a device that fired cartridges were raised from the bottom of a pond, the prosecutor's spokesman Sergei Marchenko said. He had kept a diary with dates and names, and newspaper clippings about the killings and about Chikatilo, which he destroyed when he sensed arrest was coming, Radio Svoboda reported. In a televised confession he said, "For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you," the Associated Press reported.
His mother told Komsomolskaya Pravda she did not believe her son was the Bitsa maniac. He had promised her, she said, to stop drinking and start a new life at the New Year.
By July 2006 there was evidence for 12 killings, Lenta.ru reported, and on December 14, 2006, the Interior Ministry said he would face charges for 49. He insisted the true number was more than 60. In December 2006 he was sent to the Serbsky Center, Russia's main forensic psychiatric institute, for the maximum 90 days, and he attempted suicide there, according to Lenta.ru. The experts found him sane, but with a mental disorder that limited his responsibility under Article 22 of the Criminal Code, and recommended treatment. An expert finding described a schizopathic disorder with sadistic tendencies, Vesti and RTVI reported.
On June 29, 2007, prosecutors sent the case to the Moscow City Court. The file ran to nearly 37 volumes, RAPSI reported. He was charged under Part 2 of Article 105 of the Criminal Code, which covers the murder of people in a helpless state committed with particular cruelty. Kommersant reported in August 2007 that the charges covered 49 people killed between 1992 and 2006, 46 men and 3 women, and three attempted murders. Prosecutors counted 52 episodes, with 41 legal victims and 98 prosecution witnesses.
At a preliminary hearing on August 13, 2007, the Moscow City Court granted his request for a jury trial and ruled that the trial would be open to the public. His lawyer, Pavel Ivannikov, said the defense would argue that a sane man could not have committed such a series of killings. Asked by reporters in the corridor why he had done it, Pichushkin said only, "That's how it was," Kommersant reported.
A jury of 12 with six alternates was sworn on September 13, 2007. That day Pichushkin dismissed one of his lawyers, Roman Shirkin, saying Shirkin supported the prosecution's position. The state was represented by a group of prosecutors led by the Moscow city prosecutor, Yuri Syomin, with Maria Semenenko. Ivannikov told reporters his client admitted guilt.
The trial ran for about five weeks before Judge Vladimir Usov. Pichushkin sat in a reinforced glass cage. Prosecutors read out employers' references describing him as disciplined, diligent, polite and tactful, the Associated Press reported.
He did not make it easy. At a hearing on September 17, after relatives of three victims had spoken, he asked one victim's daughter whether she had asked the investigator how his confessions had been obtained; the judge disallowed the question, and MK wondered whether he planned to claim his confession had been forced. He called the investigators blockheads. In October he told the court that a district police officer had talked the pregnant survivor out of making a report, and that he had learned this from the investigators. He confessed during the trial to 15 of the killings in detail, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported.
Before the trial ended, the prosecution dropped one count. He had denied killing Vladimir Ushakov, and the charge was withdrawn, Vesti reported. That left 48 murders and 3 attempts before the jury.
Closing arguments came on October 22, 2007. Prosecutors told the jury that his confessions were voluntary and that the same pattern ran through all the killings. About 30 victims had been put into sewer wells, and 14 of those bodies were never found; 13 had been beaten to death with a hammer or a crowbar; and five had died in other ways, Kommersant reported. Syomin told the jury that life is the most precious thing a person has. He said Pichushkin had taken particular pleasure in finishing off victims who begged for mercy, the Associated Press reported. The defense lawyers, Ivannikov and Alexander Karyagin, asked the jury to acquit on 18 counts, 14 because no body had been found and four because they rested only on his own word, and to convict on the rest. Asked for his final word before the verdict, Pichushkin declined and said he dedicated it to the deaf and mute.
On October 24, 2007, the jury deliberated for just over two hours and found him guilty on all counts: 48 murders and 3 attempted murders. The jury was unanimous, Novaya Gazeta Europe reported, and it found that he did not deserve leniency. The foreman took an hour to read the answers. About a dozen relatives of the dead were in the courtroom.
The next day, in court, he said he had killed 60 people and that three more attempts had failed. "I was prosecutor, judge and executioner," he said. "I was almost God." Judge Usov replied that there was a difference: he had acted illegally. "I did not break any laws," Pichushkin said. "I was above them." He denied that he had killed with cruelty. He also said he had knowingly decided the fate of 60 people, and that he had not wanted their belongings; he had taken their lives, Rossiyskaya Gazeta reported.
Syomin asked for life imprisonment, with the first 15 years in isolation. Russia was observing a moratorium on capital punishment under its obligations to the Council of Europe. The defense asked for 25 years.
On October 29, 2007, Judge Usov sentenced Pichushkin to life imprisonment in a special-regime colony and ordered compulsory psychiatric treatment at his place of confinement. The court found that he had a mental disorder that did not exclude his responsibility. Lenta.ru reported that the defense challenge to 18 counts was rejected. Asked afterward about the death penalty, Syomin said the law did not provide for it and that the state used what was available. He said the case had been hard on a human level.
Lenta.ru reported that no profit or sexual motive had been found and that his motive appeared to be vanity. The psychotherapist Alexander Gonopolsky told Lenta.ru that he saw a hysterical sociopath with infantile traits and wondered whether the question of sanity had been settled too quickly.
After the verdict, Syomin said the killings might have been stopped earlier. On October 10, 2007, the Investigative Committee opened a criminal case against a district police officer who in 2002 had refused to register the pregnant survivor's complaint, and other material on police inaction was sent to investigators, he said. He had written to the Moscow police asking for measures to prevent a repeat, and he said mounted patrols would be introduced in Bitsa Park. "Of course, lessons have to be drawn from this, and very serious ones," he said.
On November 25, 2010, Vesti reported that a 54-year-old former police captain, a district officer, had been sentenced to three years in a penal colony for abuse of office. In February 2002 he had refused to open a criminal case over Pichushkin's attack on a woman, although she had given him enough information to find and detain the attacker, and so had kept a grave crime off the books.
Pichushkin thought the sentence too harsh. On November 2, 2007, Karyagin told Interfax that he had filed a cassation appeal at his client's request asking the Supreme Court to reduce the sentence to 25 years; it challenged only the sentence, not the jury's verdict. Karyagin said he had told Pichushkin the appeal would probably fail. On November 7 a judge of the Moscow City Court returned the appeal because it gave no reasons, and set a deadline of November 26 for a reasoned version. Ivannikov filed a separate appeal the same day asking for 25 years in a strict-regime colony.
On February 6, 2008, Syomin said the investigation of the 11 further killings that Pichushkin had confessed to at trial was finished. "Pichushkin's testimony was not confirmed during the investigation," he said.
On February 14, 2008, the Supreme Court of Russia heard the appeal. Pichushkin argued that the Moscow City Court had not weighed his full confession, his cooperation with investigators and his good references from work. Ivannikov asked for leniency on humanitarian grounds. Ilya Erokhin, for the Prosecutor General's Office, said no procedural violations had been found and that the life sentence was deserved. The court refused to reduce the sentence, according to ITAR-TASS as reported by Vesti. The verdict took legal effect that day. Vesti reported in June 2008 that the Supreme Court had dropped one episode under the statute of limitations, without changing the sentence. Neither report named the episode.
In September 2025, RIA Novosti, citing court documents, reported that he had asked the Supreme Court to replace the life term with 25 years, citing his confession, his cooperation with the investigation, his references and his lack of earlier convictions, and that the court had left the sentence unchanged. The report, as carried by Vesti, did not give the date of that ruling.
After the verdict he was held in Moscow's Butyrka detention center and was moved to a colony for life prisoners in early 2008; the penal service did not disclose which one, Vesti reported in June 2008. He is held at IK-18, the special-regime colony known as Polar Owl, in the settlement of Kharp in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, beyond the Arctic Circle. The colony holds about 450 men serving life, RTVI reported, and stands next to IK-3, where the opposition politician Alexei Navalny died, Novaya Gazeta Europe reported. Fontanka reported in 2025 that he had been moved to a single cell after threats from cellmates. Under current law, people serving life may apply for parole after 25 years, Novaya Gazeta Europe noted.
On April 5, 2025, the Federal Penitentiary Service said that its operatives and the Interior Ministry's criminal investigation directorate had received information linking Pichushkin to grave crimes still listed as unsolved, and that he was ready to confess to 11 killings of men and women in the Severnoye Butovo district of Moscow. The service gave no other details. Novaya Gazeta Europe noted that it was not clear whether these were the same 11 killings prosecutors had said in 2008 could not be confirmed.
Two days later Vesti, citing REN TV, reported that he had asked for a chessboard to be brought to the investigative reconstruction so he could place his markers again and recall each episode, and that the work in Moscow could take about a year.
Not everyone took the offer at face value. A Moscow investigator told Novaya Gazeta Europe that new confessions would oblige the authorities to move him from the colony to a pretrial detention center, that he was more than sure no new evidence would be found, and that Pichushkin had once tried to take on killings he had not committed before thinking better of it. He suggested the real aim was a transfer. Vadim Bagaturia, a former investigator, told AiF that he believed Pichushkin had confessed for a pack of cigarettes or tea, to make prison life a little easier. No new charge or conviction arising from the offer had been reported by October 2026.
In 2025 he asked to be moved to IK-6, a colony for life prisoners at Torbeyevo in Mordovia, closer to Moscow. The penal service's Yamal directorate refused, finding no grounds, RTVI reported. He then sued the Federal Penitentiary Service in Moscow's Zamoskvoretsky District Court, asking to be transferred and to be paid 100,000 rubles for his suffering. He said he had a circulatory illness that the Arctic climate made worse, and that his mother lived in Moscow.
He took part by video link from the colony and asked for the hearing to be closed because of media attention. His mother attended in person and also objected to the press being present. The court refused both requests and, on June 16, 2025, rejected his claim, RBC reported. A medical certificate from the colony, read by RIA Novosti in the court papers, said he had no health reasons that ruled out his being held there. His mother said she could not visit him because the colony was so remote, Vesti reported.
He appealed. The Moscow City Court upheld the refusal in December 2025, Vesti reported, and a cassation court rejected his complaint on May 30, 2026, according to RIA Novosti as reported by 360.ru. Eva Merkacheva, a member of the presidential human rights council, told AiF that his mother and sister did not keep in contact with him, so where he was held made little difference. On August 25, 2026, Vesti, citing RIA Novosti, reported that his complaint to the Supreme Court of Russia had been registered and that no date had been set to hear it.
On August 25, 2026, Vesti reported that Pichushkin was serving his life sentence at the Polar Owl colony in Kharp and that his complaint to the Supreme Court over his transfer request was awaiting a hearing date. No new charge, release or death had been reported by October 21, 2026.
Andrei Suprunenko, the investigator from the Moscow prosecutor's office who led the case, said in a 2025 NTV program quoted by MSK1.RU that Pichushkin's relatives had never believed he was a killer, and that if he were released there would be several bodies within a week.
Proven by final judgment: 48 murders and 3 attempted murders, found by the jury on October 24, 2007 and upheld by the Supreme Court on February 14, 2008. The first was the killing of Mikhail Odiychuk in 1992; the last was the killing of Marina Moskaleva in June 2006.
The count of 48 or 49: the jury, the sentencing court and most 2007 and 2008 reports give 48. Several later Russian reports (Novaya Gazeta Europe, Fontanka, Vesti in 2025, MSK1.RU, 360.ru) give 49, the number in the original indictment. Vesti reported in 2008 that one count, the killing of Vladimir Ushakov, was dropped before the verdict, and that the Supreme Court later dropped one more episode under the statute of limitations without changing the sentence. No revised total after that ruling was reported.
Claimed, never proven: his totals have varied. He claimed 61 in June 2006, 62 at another stage, 60 in his final statement in October 2007, and 63 in reports of the trial. Prosecutors said in February 2008 that 11 killings he described were not confirmed. In April 2025 he offered to confess to 11 unsolved killings in Severnoye Butovo. None of these has been tried.
The chessboard: Kommersant and Lenta.ru reported 61 numbered squares; the Associated Press reported numbers reaching 62. Lenta.ru reported that he kept the board in a diary; Kommersant reported a board with 61 pieces or bottle caps inside.
The date of the arrest: June 16, 2006 (360.ru; Kommersant reported he was detained on a Friday) or June 18, 2006 (Lenta.ru, Novaya Gazeta Europe).
Year of birth: 1974 (AiF, 360.ru, and the ages given by the Associated Press and RTVI) or 1972 (Lenta.ru, Novaya Gazeta Europe).
The 15 years in isolation: this was the prosecutor's request, reported by the Associated Press. Russian reports of the sentence describe life in a special-regime colony with compulsory psychiatric treatment and do not mention a 15-year isolation term. Lenta.ru wrote that he would spend 15 years in the colony and then be sent for treatment in a closed psychiatric hospital; no other report repeats that.
1972 or 1974: Alexander Pichushkin is born in Mytishchi, near Moscow (most sources give 1974).
1976: the family moves to Khersonskaya Street, Zyuzino, Moscow, near Bitsa Park.
1989: begins work as a laborer at a food store.
July 27, 1992: kills his classmate Mikhail Odiychuk in Bitsa Park; the body is never found.
May 17, 2001: the main series begins; 11 people are killed in 2001.
February 23, 2002: Maria Viricheva survives being pushed into a sewer well; a district officer talks her out of reporting it.
March 10, 2002: a 13-year-old boy survives the same well.
November 12, 2002: buys his first hammer; Valera Dolmatov is killed.
2005: begins using a hammer in every attack and stops hiding the bodies.
February 2006: kills a man after newspapers report the Bitsa killer has been caught.
June 14, 2006: Marina Moskaleva, 36, is found dead in the park.
June 16 or 18, 2006: detained at home; confesses and claims 61 killings.
December 14, 2006: the Interior Ministry says he will be charged with 49 killings.
December 2006: sent to the Serbsky Center for 90 days; found sane with limited responsibility.
June 29, 2007: case sent to the Moscow City Court.
August 13, 2007: jury trial granted.
September 13, 2007: jury sworn.
October 10, 2007: criminal case opened against a district police officer.
October 22, 2007: closing arguments.
October 24, 2007: jury finds him guilty of 48 murders and 3 attempted murders.
October 29, 2007: life sentence in a special-regime colony with compulsory psychiatric treatment.
November 2, 2007: cassation appeal filed.
February 6, 2008: prosecutors say 11 further confessed killings are not confirmed.
February 14, 2008: Supreme Court of Russia refuses to reduce the sentence.
Early 2008: transferred from Butyrka to a colony for life prisoners.
November 25, 2010: former district officer sentenced to three years for abuse of office.
April 5, 2025: penal service says he is ready to confess to 11 more killings in Severnoye Butovo.
June 16, 2025: Zamoskvoretsky District Court rejects his transfer lawsuit.
September 2025: RIA Novosti reports that the Supreme Court left his life sentence unchanged on his request for 25 years.
December 2025: Moscow City Court rejects his appeal on the transfer.
May 30, 2026: cassation court rejects his complaint.
August 25, 2026: his complaint to the Supreme Court registered; no hearing date set.
October 21, 2026: serving his sentence at Polar Owl; no later development found.