A Russian man who has confessed to killing 63 people with the goal of marking all 64 squares on the chessboard showed no remorse Monday as his murder trial wrapped up, mocking both prosecutors and his own lawyers.
Alexander Pichushkin, who is charged with 48 murders, refused to make a final statement from the glass cage where he was held in the courtroom: “A final statement? It sounds grim. I donate my final statement to all the deaf and mute.”
“All that is being said here by the prosecutors and lawyers is so pitiful,” he said, speaking through a microphone.
Moscow city prosecutor Yuri Syomin told the jury in closing arguments that investigators had proven that Pichushkin killed 48 people and attempted to kill three others and he “deserves the severest punishment as a serial killer.”
Most of the victims were killed over the course of five years in sprawling Bittsa Park on the southern edge of Moscow, and the serial killer became known as the “Bittsa Maniac.”
Pichushkin’s lawyers questioned the evidence in 23 of the killings — in some cases no body was found — and asked that he be cleared on those crimes.
“I would not want him to be blamed for someone else’s crimes,” lawyer Pavel Ivannikov said.
Jury mulls verdict
The jury in the Moscow City Court could deliver its verdict as early as Tuesday. Russia has had a moratorium on the death penalty since 1996, although it has not abolished it.
“I would give him death by firing squad,” said a woman whose sister was one of the victims. She declined to give her name for family reasons.
Prosecutors said Pichushkin lured his victims — many of them homeless — to the park by promising them vodka if they would join him in mourning the death of his dog.
They say he killed 11 people in 2001, including six in one month. He killed most of victims by throwing them into a sewage pit after they were drunk, and in a few cases strangled or hit them in the head, prosecutors said.
Beginning in 2005, he began to kill with “particular cruelty,” hitting his intoxicated victims multiple times in the head with a hammer, then sticking an unfinished bottle of vodka into their shattered skulls, prosecutors said. He also no longer tried to conceal the bodies.
Man: 'I'm a professional' killer
Prosecutors said Monday that Pichushkin had admitted killing one of his last victims in February 2006 to demonstrate that he was still at large following inaccurate reports in Russian newspapers that the “Bittsa Maniac” had been caught.
Pichushkin was arrested in June 2006 after a woman left a note at home saying that she was going for a walk with him and was then found dead.
Pichushkin said he was aware of the note but killed her anyway.
“I burned myself, so there’s no need for the cops to take credit for catching me,” he said during the trial. “I’m a professional.”
At the cramped apartment where he shared a bedroom with his mother, police found his chessboard with numbers attached to its squares — all the way up to 62. He boasted he had nearly reached the last square, No. 64, by the time police captured him.
During the trial, which began Sept. 13, Pichishkin also reveled in the memory of his first murder, saying “it’s like first love — it’s unforgettable.”
Experts at Russia’s main psychiatric clinic have found Pichushkin sane. The media have speculated that Pichushkin may have been motivated by a macabre competition with Russia’s most notorious serial killer: Andrei Chikatilo, who was convicted in 1992 of killing 52 children and young women over the course of 12 years.