MOSCOW — A man who once boasted he wanted to kill one victim for each of the 64 squares on a chessboard was found guilty of 48 murders Wednesday.
Although Alexander Pichushkin claimed to have killed 63 people — most of them in southern Moscow’s Bittsa Park — prosecutors could only find evidence to accuse him of murdering 48 over five years.
Chief Prosecutor Yuri Syomin recommended the judge sentence Pichushkin, 33, to life imprisonment, with the first 15 years to be spent in isolation. Russia has a moratorium on the capital punishment.
Prosecutors said the “Bittsa Maniac,” as the serial killer came to be called, lured his victims — many of them homeless, alcoholic and elderly — by promising them vodka if they would join him in mourning the death of his dog.
They said he killed 11 people in 2001, mostly 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.
“For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you,” he has said.
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