'Chessboard killer' gets life
Alexander Pichushkin – the chessboard killer – sentenced to life imprisonment
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Monday, 29, Oct 2007 11:08
A man who claimed to be planning to kill enough people to fill each square of a chessboard has been sentenced to life imprisonment in Moscow.
Alexander Pichushkin was convicted last month of 48 murders over the last 15 years in a park in the Russian capital that lent him his nickname 'the Bittsa Maniac'.
The 33-year-old had said he planned on killing 64 people – the number of squares on a chessboard – although he later said that he would have carried on killing if he had not been caught.
In court today the jury said that there were no mitigating circumstances in the former shop assistant's murders, and rejected a plea from defence lawyers, who were seeking a 25-year jail-term, to clear him of 18 killings.
Pichushkin, who claimed to have murdered more than 60 people, was said to have battered his victims to death with a hammer before dumping them in a sewage pit. Many were older homeless men, who he lured to their deaths with promises of free vodka.
He was caught when his last victim, a woman, left his mobile phone number with her boyfriend.
In his televised confession the killer said that, for him, "life without murder is like a life for you without food".
Russia has not executed anyone for 11 years, but the Pichushkin case has seen calls for the death penalty to be brought back.