He did not kill again until five years ago, when the Bitzevsky Park murders started. Though he was originally under suspicion, Pichuzkin says police finally concluded that Sergei's death was suicide. When she dumped him up for a mutual friend named Sergei, Pichuzkin says he killed Sergei by throwing him out a window. At the time, he said he was conducting an affair with a girl named Olga, who lived next door. Pichuzhkin said he made his first kill when he was 18. The body of one woman was found with tiny stakes hammered into her skull and around her eyes. "I felt like the father of all these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to another world." At one point, furious that the police had cast their suspicion on another person, he promptly went out and killed two more derelicts. "For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you," he declared. Pichuzkin detailed his exploits in a televised confession that aired shortly after his arrest in June 2006, following a five-year stretch of killings that plagued the neighborhoods around Moscow's vast Bitzevsky Park. He has not been shy about admitting to his crimes. Chikatilo, a terrifying figure who found sexual gratification in the mutilation of innocents, was the grandmaster of murder Pichuzkin sought to defeat and replace. It was the same year that Pichuzkin's true rival, Andrei Chikatilo, the so-called "Butcher of Rostov," was tried and convicted for the murder of 53 women and children. The victims, mostly older men, were easy prey in a quest that began in 1992 when Pichuzkin, then 18, says he killed a romantic rival. Many of the grocery-shelf stocker's presumed victims were among Moscow's homeless, lured into a game of chess in a suburban park with glasses of vodka and mournful tales of Pichuzkin's beloved but deceased dog then they were clubbed on the head with a hammer and tossed into a sewage pit to drown, if they were not dead already. The police say they cannot find evidence for that number of bodies dead at Pichuzkin's hands. He may even point to the chess diagram he drew in a notebook, each square marked with a date: 61 were filled in, three short of the entire chessboard. He will almost certainly insist that he killed more.
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But one chess player saw a different kind of challenge in the board: each square prescribed a murder he had to carry out, and the rival he sought to beat was none other than the most prolific serial killer in modern history.Īlexander Pichuzkin, 33, is set to go on trial in Moscow for the murder of 51 people. Follow empty chessboard may inspire some players with visions of stunning checkmates, intricately choreographed ambushes, strategic feints and traps, elegantly winning responses to a competitor's subterfuge.