From Russia, With Love

They call the kind of building where Alexander Pichushkin grew up a "Khrushchevka." It's a shoddily built five-story apartment block put up, like thousands of others, under Khrushchev—its nickname is an ironic echo of the Russian word trusheba, meaning "dump." Pichushkin's parents divorced when he was nine months old, and his mother brought him up alone in a two-room apartment at Khersonskaya Street No. 2, apartment 38, in Moscow. Neighbors say they liked the building because of its proximity to Bitsa Park, a 22-acre stretch of greenery surrounded by identical suburban apartment blocks.

The park became Pichushkin's hunting ground. For years, according to his own confession, he murdered lonely people in these woods. Every time he struck he attached a number and a coin to a square on a chessboard. By the time he was caught last fall, Pichushkin had filled in 62 of the 64 squares. On Wednesday, a Moscow jury found him guilty of 48 murders and three attempted murders (prosecutors didn't have enough evidence to charge him for the other deaths for which he claimed responsibility).

Neighbors like Vera, 57, a construction worker who declined to give her last name, recall Pichushkin as a "quiet and kind" young man. "I am still shocked. I knew him for years; my daughter was friends with him and their family," recalls Vera, who lived in the same apartment building as the Pichushkin family. "It's difficult to believe that our neighbor Alexander could kill more than 60 people!"

During his trial, which began in September, Pichushkin, 33, told the court that he felt ready to kill as soon as he turned 18. He fantasized about murdering people with a schoolmate, Mikhail Odinchuk. But instead of becoming a partner in crime, Odinchuk became Pichushkin's first victim. Using a modus operandi which was to become the killer's signature, Pichushkin struck his friend over the head with a hammer before pushing his unconscious body into a well where the boys had planned to dispose of their future victims. "One's first murder, like first love, is impossible to forget," Pichushkin told the court as he recalled the murder. "I was always killing for one reason, because I liked life so much. As soon as you kill, you want to live more."

Three days after he killed Odinchuk, Pichushkin was questioned by local police. Even though he had not even washed his friend's blood off his hands, the investigator didn't bother to ask about the blood stains. The experience of sloppy Russia police work gave him a well-founded feeling of invulnerability which was to last for years. "I was looking at the dry blood on my hands and thought, I can kill anybody I want and never be caught," Pichushkin told investigators after his eventual arrest, in a statement read in court. "For 14 years I did whatever I wanted. The cops had no evidence against me."

Other neighbors noticed that Pichushkin was troubled from his teenage years on--and also remarked on a steep personal decline over the last four years. Kira, 36, who lives on the next staircase to Pichushkin, says that the alleged killer was an old playmate of her brother's. "He was always strange," she recalls. "Still waters run deep, it seems. Pichushkin was quiet and friendly, but he knew how to manipulate people from an early age." Soon after leaving school, Kira's brother quarreled with Pichushkin, who began to drink heavily, couldn't hold down a job and seemed "totally degraded," rolling in the apartment building's courtyard "dead drunk," and begging for money outside the local food store, according to Kira.

Pichushkin, by his own account, began killing systematically in 2001, when he made a list of 39 acquaintances he wanted to murder. "The closer the person is to you, the more pleasant it is to kill them," Pichushkin said. "It's more emotional." He befriended local pensioners and alcoholics, telling them that he was grieving after the death of his dog. He would then invite his new acquaintances for a drink in the woods at the dog's grave, then drink vodka with them before battering them to death. He would always try to be home at his modest two-room apartment on Kherson Street by 8:30 p.m. to watch his favorite soap opera, a French historical drama called "The Duchess de Monsoreau."

"For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you," Pichushkin said in an interview broadcast last month on national television. "I felt like a father to these people, since I opened the door for them to another world."

The rein of terror in Bitsa Park led to rumors that kidnappers were at work. Pichushkin boasted that "people thought someone was selling local people into slavery in the Caucasus." In reality, the spate of murders continued because the local police were slow to investigate the disappearance of pensioners and homeless alcoholics.

Several of Pichushkin's victims were neighbors—three from his own apartment building. Two middle-aged loners, Vladimir Konovaltsev and Viktor Volkov, disappeared in 2005, recalls local resident Vera. Volkov, 54, had walked out of his apartment one morning to get a drink of vodka and vanished. "A few days later we heard that another neighbor, Andrei Kudriavtsev, disappeared as well," she says. "There was a period, we now realize, when Pichushkin was killing almost every day, as if that were his work!"

Viktor, 46, lives in the next building and lost a schoolmate and neighbor, Oled Bayarov, to Pichushkin's murder spree. "Pichushkin never hung out with us neighbors openly in the courtyard," says Viktor. "He tried to come to people's house and talk to them about life. He would invite people to come with him to the park. Pichushkin killed people from almost every building on this street—the neighborhood is still terrified."

Pichushkin was finally arrested in June 2006 after his last victim, 36-year-old Marina Moskaleva, left a note at home for her son saying she was going for a walk in the park with a new friend—with Pichushkin's phone number on it. When she didn't return home her son raised the alarm, and Moskaleva's body was quickly found, her head shattered by multiple blows of a heavy hammer. Pichushkin was arrested, and confessed to the murder after police confronted him with closed-circuit television footage from a nearby metro station showing him walking with his victim toward the park.

Pavel Ivannikov, Pichushkin's lawyer, blames slack police work for the fact that his client was at large for so long. "Over the last 15 years my client murdered dozens of people," says Ivannikov. "Sometimes it seems that police forget they are supposed to catch criminals. Russian police do not do their job—instead, they are busy with things that I won't mention. People living in Russia know exactly what they are." The issue is not the lack of resources, explains Ivannikov, since "the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has enough money and people, and their number now is no less than in Soviet times." Yet it took police a decade to catch Andrei Chikatilo, Russia's most prolific serial killer, who was executed in 1994 for the murder of 53 women and children, complains Ivannikov, and 15 years to catch Pichushkin. "My client has confessed that he committed his first murder in 1992, yet the police only managed to catch him only now," says Ivannikov. "Even my client is ashamed of the police's laziness."

Pichushkin faces life imprisonment rather than the firing squad, because Russia declared a moratorium on the death penalty in 1996. The chief prosecutor recommended that Pichushkin spend his first 15 years in isolation.