The Chessboard Killer | GQRussia had never seen anything quite like the prolific serial killer Alexander Pichushkin, for whom “life without killing is like life without food.” How many lives did he take? More than Jeffrey Dahmer, Jack the Ripper, and the Son of Sam combined. The terrifying thing is, no one—not even Pichushkin himself—really knows for sure. The maniac lumbers through a silent forest. They are talking about something important. What is love? Is love for real, or is it a ruse, a make- believe ambrosia? The woman doesn’t know that the Maniac has had this conversation before. He is practiced. When he talks, he has an almost preternatural concentration. He wants to be understood, and he likes to say he never lies. In court he will declare: I always say exactly what I think. ![]() X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a 2009 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics fictional character Wolverine, distributed by 20th Century Fox. The estranged husband of Angelina Jolie and now semi-detached father to their six children has given his first divorce-era, post-therapy interview to GQ magazine. She had no idea he would be so serious. The Maniac, after all, is a clerk at the grocery store where they both work. He approached her maybe a half hour ago, started chatting, making jokes. He offered her a cigarette. She cupped it while he lit the match, then laughed at something he said. He suggested a walk in the park. She didn’t know him all that well, but well enough, and she wanted another cigarette. She accepted. Now they’re walking over branches, wrappers, cigarette butts; past bottles, a stuffed animal, a used condom. He’s talking about intimacy, of all things. During the trial he’ll have this to say about intimacy: “The closer a person is to you and the better you know them, the more pleasurable it is to kill them.”) They can hear trails of moving laughter somewhere far away, other people carousing, but here, in this particular swath of woods, there are only trees and shadows. They can no longer see the road.
He says something—later he will try to remember exactly what it was he said—and then he smirks. He sees something flash across her face, like many disparate pieces of information coalescing into an anticipation of…what? She knows, of course, about the disappearances. Everyone does. By this point—spring 2. There are bodies, cops, sketches of suspects. She knows about the park, the Maniac, the faceless animal no one has seen or is even sure is one man or two or many. He is part of the daily chatter coursing through the apartment blocks that ring the park. They talk about him on TV every night. But the grocery clerk? The grocery clerk. Now she seems certain that this man with sturdy hands and thick wrists, this co- worker, is the Maniac. Suddenly she looks very, very tired. She throws her arms around a tree trunk and falls to the ground sobbing, squeezing her eyes shut tight. The Maniac is startled. How could she have known? There are pieces of bark pressed against her cheek, a scratch on her neck. She begins talking to herself. In court he won’t be able to recall what she was saying, or trying to say, but he’ll remember the penultimate moment with absolute clarity. As the woman, Larissa Kulagina, clings to the tree, he can’t help it, but he smirks again, and when she says, “Are you going to kill me?” he has no choice but to reply: “Yes.”In the months following his July 2. Alexander Yurievich Pichushkin, now 3. Around the world, he was hailed as a monster. All the big news organizations—CNN, The New York Times, the BBC—aired or published long stories about the deadliest man in Russia. Criminologists, psychologists, and serial- killer aficionados weighed in online with theories and speculation. Pichushkin had transcended Pichushkin. He was now the Maniac. The fascination surrounding the Maniac reflected the enormity of his crimes, which seemed deeply Russian: oversize. Ted Bundy committed about thirty homicides; Jeffrey Dahmer, seventeen; Ken Bianchi, the Hillside Strangler, twelve. Jack the Ripper is believed to have been guilty of at least five murders; David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, six. The Maniac killed at least forty- eight, putting him in rare company. Only a few recent serial killers have been as prolific, including Andrei Chikatilo, also Russian, convicted of fifty- two murders in 1. Yang Xinhai, who took sixty- seven lives in central China from 1. The press dubbed Pichushkin the Bitsevsky Park Maniac and then the Chessboard Killer, because the police allegedly found a chessboard in his apartment on which he had recorded his murders, one per square. Bitsevsky Park is a long, rolling forest filled with trees, streams, and clearings. In the winter, it’s popular with cross- country skiers. The grounds extend from Balaklavski Prospekt, a boulevard on the north end, to the MKAD, the multilane beltway that encircles Moscow, four miles south. The park is enormous, encompassing more than 2,7. New York’s Central Park covers 8. Surrounding it are tens of thousands of people living in sprawling, rusting apartment blocks speckled with satellite dishes. Many people call this part of Moscow—grim, concrete, a half hour by metro from the center of the city—the zhopa mira, or “asshole of the world.”Natasha Pichushkina, the Maniac’s mother, moved into a two- bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of 2 Khersonskaya, a six- minute walk from the north end of Bitsevsky Park, when she was 1. That was in 1. 96. The five- story buildings, or _khrushchovki, _named after then premier Nikita Khrushchev, were the Soviet Union’s first large- scale public- housing projects. They were dank, charmless, and overflowing with tenants, but they were the first single- family homes most of these people had ever lived in. They were an improvement. Natasha grew up on Khersonskaya Street, and so did her son. Until the night he was arrested, he lived most of his life at 2 Khersonskaya, where he slept on a couch in the first bedroom, which doubled as the living room. Natasha slept alone on a queen- size bed ten feet from her son. Her husband, the Maniac’s father, moved out before Alexander turned 1.) In the master bedroom were Pichushkin’s younger half sister, Katya, now 2. Alexander; and their son, 6- year- old Sergei, or Seriozha. Ten of the Maniac’s victims lived in the same four- building complex where he lived—four from 2 Khersonskaya; two from 4 Khersonskaya, next door; three from 6; and one from 8. The khrushchovki are separated by single- lane roads and narrow strips of park. It takes two minutes to walk from 2 Khersonskaya to 8 Khersonskaya. Everyone knows everyone else: the babushkas gossiping on their apartment stoops, the kids kicking soccer balls in the courtyard, the old men smoking cigarettes. In the beginning—2. Pensioners. Bums. Hardly anyone noticed. Or in some cases, family members waited the requisite three days and then filed a missing- person report with the police, but the police, who are known for drinking and taking bribes, rarely did anything. No one made any connections. And then, as the disappearances mounted, the families found one another. There was fear, which led to speculation. Nobody knew anything; therefore, everybody did. The babushkas wondered aloud about the vanishing Lyoshas, Nikolais, Viktors. Lyosha gdye? (Where’s Lyosha?) Nashyol rabotu v Khimkax. He found a job in Khimky.) _Da, ladno. On pyanitsa. _(Bullshit. He’s a drunk.) _Vozmozhno on umer. Maybe he died.) The rumors metastasized. Could it be a psychiatric patient who’d escaped from the institution in the park? Could it be the Chechens? The Mafia? By early or mid- 2. There were too many connections between the missing. By then the count was approaching thirty. No one had come back. No one expected much to be done about it, either. That’s because the people on Kherson- skaya, like so many Russian peasants in their crumbling urban hives, understand that in their country only certain people matter, and that they are not among them.“There was total shock when we heard it was Sasha Pichushkin,” says Natasha Fyedosova, a pale blond woman of 2. Boris Fyedosov, was the thirty- sixth victim. He was always very calm, always by himself.” Fyedosova, who has known Pichushkin’s half sister, Katya, since they were little, attended all forty- six days of the Maniac’s trial. Now she is sitting in her apartment at 8 Khersonskaya, which is identical to Natasha Pichushkina’s at 2 Khersonskaya, smoking Vogue cigarettes and talking about him.“I thought it was strange that he only wanted to kill people he knew,” she says, sipping instant coffee. If he had killed people he didn’t know, in another neighborhood, it wouldn’t have been as bad, but he killed people he knew.” Indeed, the Maniac befriended people so he could kill them.
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