Alexander Pichushkin

Pichushkin is remembered to have been an initially sociable child. However, this changed following an incident in which Pichushkin fell backwards off a swing, which then struck him in the forehead as it swung back. Experts speculated that this event damaged the frontal cortex of Pichushkin's brain; such damage is known to produce poor impulse regulation and a tendency towards aggression. Since Pichushkin was still a child, the damage would have been more severe, as a child's forehead provides only a fraction of the protection for the brain compared to an adult's.[2] Following this accident, Pichushkin frequently became hostile and impulsive. His mother soon decided to transfer him from a mainstream school he was attending to one for children with learning disabilities. Prior to this transfer, children from the mainstream school were known to have physically and verbally bullied Pichushkin, referring to him as "that retard". This abuse served to intensify Pichushkin's rage and hostility. Upon reaching early adolescence, Pichushkin's maternal grandfather recognized that Pichushkin was highly intelligent, and felt that his innate talents were being wasted, as he wasn't involved in any activities at home, and the school he was enrolled in focused more on overcoming disability than on promoting achievement.

Pichushkin's grandfather took Pichushkin to live in his home and encouraged him to pursue intellectual pursuits outside of school. The deepest of these interests was chess. Pichushkin was taught how to play, and after demonstrating his ability, was introduced to the exhibition games against elderly men who played publicly in Bitsa Park. It turned out that Pichushkin was an outstanding chess player, and, for the first time, he found a channel for his aggression when dominating the chessboard in all of his games. Pichushkin continued to be bullied by mainstream school children throughout his adolescence, and he suffered an emotional blow when, toward the end of this period, his grandfather died. Pichushkin was left to return to his mother's home, after which he enrolled as a student. According to reports, the death of his grandfather greatly affected Pichushkin. In an effort to both dull the pain of the loss as well as to calm his severe aggressive tendencies, he began to consume large quantities of vodka. He continued to play chess both at home and in the exhibition games in Bitsa Park, now joining the other men in drinking vodka, though unlike them he could play without being greatly affected by the alcohol. It was at this time that Pichushkin began to develop a more sinister hobby that, at the time, remained unknown to anyone: whenever he knew he was going to come into contact with children, he would take a video camera along and proceed to threaten them. On one disturbing and alarmingly prophetic occasion that has since been made public, he held a young child by one leg, upside down, and said to the camera: "You are in my power now... I am going to drop you from the window... and you will fall 15 meters to your death..." He then watched these videos repeatedly to reaffirm his power. However, by 1992 this practice had become insufficient to satisfy his urges.

Pichushkin grew up on 2 Khersonskaya Street in Moscow. He lived there with his mother, younger half sister, her husband, and their son in a two-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor a six-minute walk from the north end of Bitsevsky Park.[3] This house is a typical example of khrushchyovka, the Soviet Union’s first large-scale public-housing projects.

Russian media have speculated that Pichushkin was motivated, in part, by a macabre competition with another notorious Russian serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, the 'Rostov Ripper', who was convicted in 1992 of killing 53 children and young women over a 12-year period.[4] Pichushkin has said his aim was to kill 64 people, the number of squares on a chessboard.[5][6] He later recanted this statement, saying that he would have continued killing indefinitely had he not been stopped.[7]

He was arrested on 16 June 2006, and convicted on 24 October 2007 of 49 murders and 3 attempted murders.[14] He asked a Russian court to add an additional 11 victims to his body count, bringing his claimed death toll to 60, and 3 surviving victims.[15] During his trial, as with Andrei Chikatilo, Pichushkin was housed in a glass cage for his own protection.[16] It took Judge Vladimir Usov an hour to read the verdict: life in prison with the first 15 years to be spent in solitary confinement.[14] Pichushkin is spending his days in solitary confinement at the Arctic penal colony "Polar Owl".[17]

• Alexander Pichushkin is from the same Zyuzino District in Moscow where Maria Petrova, a female spree killer, lived and killed her victims.

• List of Russian serial killers
• List of serial killers by number of victims

• Interview with Pichushkin via Wayback Machine
• Russian serial killer convicted October 24, 2007
• CrimeLibrary.com via Wayback Machine
• Criminal Brief
• Yahoo News via Wayback Machine