<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"The maniac lumbers through a silent forest. he is a sallow-faced man with a stout physique and a deep, low voice. he's with a friend, a woman, and they are enveloped by birch trees rising fifty, sixty feet into a pale gray sky.\n\nThey 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.\n\nShe 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.\n\nNow 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\u2014later he will try to remember exactly what it was he said\u2014and then he smirks. He sees something flash across her face, like many disparate pieces of information coalescing into an anticipation of\u2026what? She knows, of course, about the disappearances. Everyone does. By this point\u2014spring 2006\u2014something like fifty people have vanished into the woods. 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.\n\nBut the grocery clerk?\n\nThe 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?\n\nThere 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.\"\n\n\n\nIn the months following his July 2006 arrest, Alexander Yurievich Pichushkin, now 35, achieved his only goal: Around the world, he was hailed as a monster. All the big news organizations\u2014CNN, The New York Times, the BBC\u2014aired 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.\n\n 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 1994, and Yang Xinhai, who took sixty-seven lives in central China from 1999 to 2003. 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.\n\nBitsevsky 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 2,700 acres. (New York's Central Park covers 843.) 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\u2014grim, concrete, a half hour by metro from the center of the city\u2014the zhopa mira, or \"asshole of the world.\"\n\nNatasha 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 11 years old. That was in 1963. 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.\n\nNatasha 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 27; her husband, also named Alexander; and their son, 6-year-old Sergei, or Seriozha.\n\nTen of the Maniac's victims lived in the same four-building complex where he lived\u2014four 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.\n\nIn the beginning\u20142001, 2002\u2014people just disappeared. 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?\u00A0\n\nBy early or mid-2003, the families had begun to wonder whether it was someone they knew. 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.\n\n\n\n\"There was total shock when we heard it was Sasha Pichushkin,\" says Natasha Fyedosova, a pale blond woman of 27 whose father, 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.\n\n\"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. Among his favorite books was Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.\n\nVictim number 32, a middle-aged man who disappeared in late spring 2003, was a typical target. \"Pichushkin would wait for hours until his victims were all alone,\" Fyedo-sova says. The Maniac eyed 32 for at least an hour before he made his move. The man had been smoking and drinking on a bench, legs crossed, next to a bus stop around the corner from Pichushkin's apartment. It was warm outside, and there were too many people around. Finally, everyone but 32 disappeared, heading inside to their apartments or ducking into the grocery store. Pichushkin, filled with an enormous excitement, made his approach.\n\nA few minutes later, the men were strolling down the two-lane road toward Bitsevsky Park. It was early evening. The trees loomed over the power lines on Balaklavski Prospekt, and a red-taupe sky stretched across the forest. Number 32 was in a sour mood. As they neared the park, Pichushkin tried to cheer him up. The Maniac was worried that this foul-smelling, inebriated little man would change his mind and turn around, depriving Pichushkin of what he believed was his. A balloon of rage began to expand inside him. As they were about to enter the woods, the Maniac asked the man what he would wish for if he were granted one wish. \"To stop drinking,\" the man said.\n\n\"I promise you,\" Pichushkin replied, \"today will be the day you stop drinking.\"\n\nHe always took his victims to one of two wells that connected to the city's vast sewer system. As they trudged through the park, 32 didn't ask any questions about where they were going or why. He just walked or, more likely, stumbled. Sometimes, when the Maniac and his prey reached the well, he would propose a toast to his dead dog. In this case, he did not say what he and 32 discussed before he attacked. But he did describe how he did it. He removed his weapon\u2014sometimes a hammer, sometimes a wrench with a tool used for removing nails; in this case he didn't specify\u2014from his jacket and struck 32 on the head, hard, but not hard enough to kill him. This was his routine. He wanted his victims to know what was happening. Sometimes he would force shards of a broken vodka bottle into the victim's skull before pushing him down the well. If the victim wasn't dead before he plunged the thirty feet to the bottom, the impact would finish the job.\n\nEventually some of the bodies turned up at a wastewater-treatment center about five miles away, having floated through the network of underground tunnels. But it wasn't until much later, after those corpses had been disposed of, that the authorities connected them to the disappearances near Bitsevsky Park. Many bodies never turned up at all. At least thirteen corpses (including, possibly, that of victim 32) are believed to be stuck somewhere in the sewage system.\n\n\n\nThe maniac preferred men. Only two, or possibly three, of his victims were women. Unlike Andrei Chikatilo, a sexually dysfunctional sexual predator, or Ted Bundy, who preferred college girls, Pichushkin didn't want sex. He sought something purer: an untainted death. This is not to say that killing was not sexual for him. The way the Maniac talked about killing\u2014he would tell the court that one's first murder is like \"first love\"\u2014made it sound like a biological imperative. He said he sometimes ejaculated when he killed.\n\n\"For the serial killer, the process of preparing to kill and killing is an erotic experience,\" says Alexander Bukhanovsky, a psychiatrist and serial-killer expert who helped authorities find Chikatilo in the early 1990s. But the sex act itself is not erotic for serial killers, Bukhanovsky says. What is erotic is killing and all its associations, the mental links and symbols of murder. For Pichushkin this meant the biting wind in the evening, the shadows and birds and birch trees, the crunch of ice and branches, the kaleidoscopic splatter of an old man's blood on fresh snow.\n\nNatasha Fyedosova says Pichushkin never had any interest in girls, never talked about sex or looked at women the way boys and men often look. Asked whether Pichushkin might be gay, she shakes her head firmly. Natasha Pichushkina is equally dismissive. \"My son was actually going to marry someone,\" she says. Whom did he plan to marry? She shrugs. She never met the bride-to-be. Andrei Suprunenko, the detective who led the Pichushkin investigation for the prosecutor general's Department of Homicide and Armed Robbery in Moscow, also rules out the possibility that the Maniac is homosexual. He says Pichushkin doesn't have any sexual longings for men; he just doesn't care about women. Bukhanovsky agrees.\n\nBut there's something else: In Russia, which remains violently homophobic, it may be that people have a hard time believing a gay man is capable of the kind of power or force of will that defined the Maniac. The Maniac is a maniac, and he's evil, and no one disputes this, but he is also very much a man in the way Russians think of men. He is, in fact, a frighteningly ordinary man: rough, crude, a heavy drinker, a smoker, with no expectation that his life will ever get any better or easier. He expects to die in his late fifties, the average life expectancy for Russian men, who are prone to all kinds of self-abuse and have, at best, spotty health care. He doesn't have a career. He has a job. He is not exactly disdainful of those with goals; he is unaware there are any goals to have.\n\nExcept killing. He was 18 when he took his first life. July 27, 1992. The victim was Mikhail Odichuk. They'd been classmates, and Pichushkin had invited Odichuk on a killing expedition. He was very open about it. He told Odichuk he wanted to kill someone. They could do it together, he told him. Odichuk had tagged along, half in jest, probably not quite sure what to expect. When Pichushkin realized that Odichuk wasn't serious about killing, he killed Odichuk instead.\n\nThen he waited nine years. The cops had questioned him about Odichuk's death, an experience that must have spooked him. But nine years is a long time to wait, especially for someone who would later tell the court that \"for me, life without killing is like life without food for you.\" He must have understood that once he started killing\u2014not dabbling or experimenting but really killing, and killing wantonly\u2014he wouldn't stop. He must have been enthralled by this idea. But perhaps he was afraid of it, too. He may even have tried to quash it. There is a story (unverified) that in late 2001 or early 2002, Pichushkin wandered into a police station near the park and declared for all to hear that he killed people\u2014not once or sometimes but regularly. \"Because that is what I do,\" Pichushkin supposedly said. As the story goes, the cops laughed in Pichushkin's face, called him a drunk, and told him to go home, which he did.\n\nIn any event, his nine-year hiatus ended May 17, 2001, when he killed Yevgeny Pronin. Over the next eight weeks, he killed nine more people. This spree within a spree culminated on July 21, when victim 11, Victor Volkov, disappeared. That fall and winter the killing continued, but it was less feverish; five or more people were murdered during this stretch. Then, on February 23, 2002, Pichushkin tried to kill Maria Viricheva, a pregnant woman. He pushed her down the well, but she somehow managed to climb out and get to a hospital, where she reportedly told the police about the attack. The cops asked for Viricheva's registration papers. (Millions of Russian citizens live in Moscow quasi-illegally; jobs outside the capital are scarce.) Viricheva said she didn't have any papers. The cops told her that if she stayed quiet about her attack, they'd overlook her \"illegal habitation.\" Viricheva stayed quiet.\n\nPichushkin killed three more people in the next two weeks. Then he encountered Mikhail Lobov, age 13. It's unlikely he knew Lobov, who didn't come from one of the apartment houses on Khersonskaya, and it's unclear exactly where they met\u2014probably on Kakhovka Prospekt, near the metro station, where the kids with leather jackets and multiple piercings drink vodka from plastic cups and hang out next to the flower stands and dumpling kiosks. But once the pair entered the forest, Pichushkin did not stray from his script. A twenty-minute slog through the snowy woods. Cigarettes. Some faux camaraderie\u2014\"You respect me, and I respect you, so let's drink!\"\u2014and then a surprise blow to the head, followed by a shove down the well.\n\nPichushkin turned and exited the park\u2014but didn't notice that Lobov's jacket had caught on a piece of metal inside the well. The boy managed to crawl out. Once outside the park, he found a cop and reported the incident. The cop told Lobov to go home. A week later, Lobov was back at the metro station when he happened to see Pichushkin, who would tell everyone in court that it didn't matter what Lobov claimed because nobody would believe a punk who hung out at metro stations, which is true everywhere and especially in Russia. But Lobov began screaming and clawing at his hair, and he grabbed one of the officers standing outside the station and started pointing and shouting and telling the cops they had to do something. And still they did nothing. Again they told him to leave.\n\nIt would be four more years\u2014and several dozen more bodies\u2014before Pichushkin was finally stopped.\n\n\n\nA cold night in December 2007. Outside it's snowing and perfectly black. Natasha Pichushkina is sitting on her son's bed in the family's apartment, and she is crying. She's a small woman, about five four, with dyed reddish-purplish hair, a weak voice, and a sickliness that seems ironed into her face. An odor\u2014sweat, cooking oil\u2014pervades the apartment, which is cluttered with DVDs, old furniture, and an ancient refrigerator bearing two faded photographs of her son at age 8 or 9. On the other side of a narrow doorway, her grandson is playing a video game that involves shooting barnyard animals. Natasha is saying that Sasha\u2014Alexander, the Maniac\u2014used to be close with his nephew, but Seriozha hasn't seen him in almost eighteen months, and he's beginning to forget him. \"He used to ask, \u2018Where's Sasha?' \" she says. \"But now he doesn't. He doesn't know where he is. He doesn't know who he is.\"\n\nShe takes out Sasha's collection of commemorative pins, which look like the kind of souvenirs any boy growing up in the Soviet Union might collect. There are pins commemorating the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, Tolstoy pins, Lenin pins, a pin from Minsk\u2014ninety-two pins in all. \"You should take them,\" she says. \"What can I do with these things?\"\n\nShe is trying to describe her son. She stresses how \"ordinary\" he was. She says he had a cat named Mursik and a fish tank, and that he loved the TV adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's Countess of Monsoreau. (During the trial, Pichushkin said he sometimes had to hurry up and finish someone off so he could rush home and shower\u2014in some cases, scrubbing the blood out of his hair or from under his fingernails\u2014and watch the latest installment of Countess, usually with his mother.) She says he's very brave. Echoing her son, she says he never lies. Then she tells a story about a lie he once told. One night Sasha announced he was going for a walk in the park. There were men disappearing almost every week back then, and she and Katya pleaded with him not to go. Sasha said he wasn't scared of any maniac.\n\nDoes she know why her son became a serial killer? Could it have been his father's abandonment of the family? Did something happen when he was little? These are the questions that keep surfacing and resurfacing. They're impossible questions, but they're the only ones that really matter now, and every time they come up, Natasha cries and shakes her head and stares through a window at the darkened courtyard below. \"I know now that I raised my son very poorly,\" she says. \"I can't say what I did wrong. I just tried to raise him like a normal mother.\" She glances at the photographs on the refrigerator. In both pictures he stares straight at the camera, unsmiling. She covers her face. After a long time, she looks up and turns her gaze to the television set. Finally she says, \"I think I didn't know my son very well.\"\n\n\n\nIn November 2005, a 63-year-old ex-cop named Nikolai Zakharchenko turned up dead in the woods. Zakharchenko was the first person who hadn't just gone missing but was discovered, tagged, and determined beyond any doubt to have been murdered. But this is not the most important fact about him. The most important fact about Nikolai Zakharchenko is that he was the forty-first victim. That means that at least forty people vanished before the police, and then the detectives at the Interior Ministry and the prosecutor general's office, realized there was a serial killer in Moscow.\n\n\"Before perestroika the system was better,\" says Alexander Bukhanovsky, the serial-killer expert. \"There was a process. It was more methodical. Now the police don't know very much.\"\n\nThe simple fact is that the Maniac's desire to kill vastly exceeded the system's capacity to stop him, or even recognize that he existed. Had he hewed to his own routine\u2014tossing his victims into sewage wells\u2014the Maniac may never have been caught. It was only after the bodies started turning up in the forest that the Interior Ministry took over the case and that people like Andrei Suprunenko\u2014people who actually know how to find serial killers\u2014started looking for him.\n\nZakharchenko's death marked a turning point for the killer, too. All along, or at least since he began killing in earnest in 2001, Pichushkin had been torn by an irreconcilable conflict. He wanted to kill, but he also wanted everyone to know he was the killer. He wanted recognition and respect. One night he was watching TV with his mother and sister, and there was a report about the Bitsevsky Park killer. His sister exclaimed: \"This madman, he's so fascinating. Who is he?\" And Pichushkin had to fight very hard\u2014he was practically bursting\u2014not to tell her she was sitting right next to him.\n\nBut after Zakharchenko, the conflict inside the Maniac began to seethe and overflow. Now he killed recklessly. He no longer pushed his victims down the well. He left bodies in the snow, the mud, tucked between trees. The worst, says Natasha Fyedosova, was the corpse they found by the side of a stream. The victim had been killed at least two days earlier, and some wild dogs had found him first. \"There was a doctor walking his dog,\" she says, \"and he saw one of these wild dogs with a bone in his mouth. The doctor knew the bone was human.\"\n\nBeginning with Zakharchenko and continuing into early 2006, the people on Khersonskaya and up and down the icy boulevards began to grasp the threads connecting the people who had vanished. That was when the terror began rippling through the apartment blocks and metro stations that hug the park, which was now a haunted place. Children were forbidden to venture into the woods. People talked about hearing shouts and cries echoing through the trees. That was when the moniker Bitsevsky Park Maniac entered the local lexicon and then the national discourse and then the global airwaves, the Internet message boards brimming with anonymous posters waxing cryptic about the invisible monster prowling the wilds of southern Moscow.\n\n\n\nPichushkin must have known the end was near. He must have sensed that the civil war inside him was reaching its apex and that soon he would do something stupid and they would find him. Now that corpses were appearing regularly, there were police\u2014some in uniform, some in plain clothes\u2014scouring the park twenty-four hours a day. They were narrowing their search, talking to everyone, compiling sketches of suspects.\n\nBut in the very end, it was the Maniac's decision to get caught. All the victims' family members, the prosecutors, almost everyone with any connection to the case, say Suprunenko and his team did a superb job. But it was Pichushkin who delivered Pichushkin to the police.\n\nHe had gone on a walk with Marina Moskalyeva, another co-worker. She had told him that she'd left a note for her son saying she was with Sasha Pichushkin. He kept saying to himself that he shouldn't kill her because they'd know it was him. But he wanted to kill. So Moskalyeva had to die.\n\nA few hours later, when Moskalyeva hadn't come home and her son was watching TV and saw that they'd found a woman's body in the park, he called his father, who then called the police. \"We had the note,\" Suprunenko says, \"and we had video footage of Pichushkin and this woman getting on the metro at Novye Cheryomushki and getting off at Konkovo\"\u2014 which is to the immediate west of the park\u2014\"so we naturally suspected Pichushkin.\"\n\nIt's worth pointing out that the Maniac, so proud of never lying, lied about killing Marina Moskalyeva. There had been other lies, of course, countless tiny deceptions meant to lure his victims into the park, but no one had ever asked Pichushkin point-blank if he had ever killed anyone. But then Moskalyeva's son\u2014before calling his father\u2014rang Pichushkin. Pichushkin, after all, was supposed to be taking a stroll with his mother. But when he reached him, the Maniac said, \"I haven't seen her in two months,\" which was a strange thing to say about a woman he worked with every day. He lied, knowing everyone would know he was lying. Then he said he was busy and hung up.\n\nTwo nights later, on July 16, 2006, close to midnight, everyone at 2 Khersonskaya was about to go to sleep when someone knocked at the door. This was strange; usually you had to hit the buzzer to get into the building. Pichushkina says she opened the door very slowly, and when she did, a column of men in uniforms pushed through the narrow corridor crammed with jackets and old bos and into the little bedroom/living room where Alexander Pichushkin was about to turn in for the night. In less than a minute, the apartment was flooded with armed riot police: boots, automatic rifles, handcuffs. \"They were kind to me,\" she says. \"They said they just wanted to talk to him about some burglaries, but I thought there were a lot of police for a burglar, and I asked Sasha, \u2018Did you rob someone?' and he said, \u2018No.' \"\n\nAfter Pichushkin was escorted from the building\u2014he did not resist\u2014they gave her some documents stating exactly what he was being accused of. After that she had a hard time saying anything. She couldn't move. She couldn't focus. They stayed all night\u2014the cops, detectives, forensics experts\u2014turning her home upside down, looking for things that might send her son to prison forever.\n\n\n\nAndrei Suprunenko, a trim, balding man with a blond mustache and large eyes, is sitting behind his cluttered desk, wearing a black turtleneck and a charcoal jacket, smoking prodigiously. The investigator has a protean personality that shifts quickly from irritable to angry to sarcastic. Asked why Pichushkin preferred the woods, he says, \"Have you ever tried killing someone on the street in broad daylight?\"\n\nSuprunenko spent months questioning the Maniac and probably knows him better than anyone else, including Pichushkin's family. \"We were in shock when we realized how many people he'd killed,\" he says. \"In the beginning, we only had thirteen bodies. And then Pichushkin began to tell us that he'd killed more than sixty people.\" Pichushkin told him about the park, the sewage well\u2014his entire m.o.\u2014and Suprunenko began to understand the fates of all those people who had disappeared. \"He wanted to talk,\" Suprunenko says. \"All maniacs want to talk.\"\n\nThey would sit in one of the holding cells, Suprunenko on one side, Pichushkin on the other, under fluorescent lights, smoking. Pichushkin wandered when he spoke, meandering in and out of his exploits. Suprunenko says he always stared straight at Pichushkin. \"It made him feel important,\" he says. \"I told him I admired him, and he liked that, and then he opened up. It was very important for Pichushkin that people think he was a hero, so I made him feel like a hero.\"\n\nWhat emerged from months of plying Pichushkin with sandwiches and cigarettes, months of pretending that he was an evil genius, was not the Hollywood-style maniac everyone had imagined but an empty vessel, someone no one could organize into a tidy psychological portrait. Even \"Chessboard Killer\" is misleading, Suprunenko believes, because it suggests Pichushkin would have stopped killing when he reached sixty-four, the number of squares on a chessboard, as if his mission was to fill up a chessboard of death, as if he thought of murder as a game. Neither Suprunenko nor anyone else close to the investigation believes this.\n\nIn the end, the Maniac was what his mother and Suprunenko say he was: ordinary. He didn't have strong opinions. He lacked preferences or ideas about other people, God, art, beauty. He could talk about these things, and did, but these were simply words in the service of killing; they were bits of theater; they were nothing.\n\n\n\nValentine's day, 2008. The Maniac is in a cell on a closed-caption screen, laughing, posing unwittingly in his televised cage. Actually, there are five television screens\u2014four medium-size sets and one large flat-screen. Except for his mother and Suprunenko, almost everyone else is here at the recently renovated Supreme Court of Russia, on Povarskaya Street in the center of Moscow: Natasha Fyedosova, Pichushkin's lawyer Pavel Ivannikov, the panel of three judges, the prosecutor in his royal blue military-style uniform, the babushkas who lost sons and husbands, the younger men and girls whispering into their cell phones, too scared to look at the Maniac, who looks bored, then amused, then angry. He never looks directly at the video camera in his cell. He is talking to someone we can't see. With his black button-down shirt and black T-shirt, he looks almost fashionable. He laughs for a moment\u2014his laughter is brief and infrequent\u2014and then the grin morphs into a frown, which morphs into a look of incredulity, which morphs into another stare. Now he is talking, but it's impossible to make out what he's saying.\n\nOn October 24, 2007, Alexander Pichushkin was found guilty of murdering forty-eight people. Throughout the trial, he insisted that he'd actually taken sixty-three lives, but authorities could muster evidence to prosecute him for only four dozen. He was sentenced to life in prison. (Russia doesn't have the death penalty.) A week after his conviction, Pichushkin's attorneys filed an appeal, requesting a more lenient sentence. The judges will hand down their final decision today.\n\nThe hearing room is filled with television correspondents, newspaper reporters, Internet scribes. Flashbulbs explode. A babushka wails, \"Where is my body?\" She's talking about her husband, who disappeared one night down a snowy path in the woods. The babushkas look uneasy in this place, a majestic building made of steel, glass, and marble. The judges ask Pichushkin if he wants to say anything. \"Nyet, nyet, nyetuy,\" he says. \"No, no, there's nothing.\" That's all he says during the whole proceeding. Pavel Ivannikov loosens his tie and asserts that even though his client has been convicted of some very heinous crimes, the judges should have mercy and reduce the sentence to twenty-five years. He says what he has to say.\n\nThe judges disappear into their chambers. Forty minutes later, they reemerge and declare that the sentence stands. Pichushkin will never go free. Soon he will be moved from his jail in Moscow (where his mother has been able to visit twice a month, bearing gifts of cigarettes, cheese, and salo, or salted lard) to a maximum-security prison, probably in the north or maybe in the Ural Mountains, where he will spend the first fifteen years of his sentence in solitary confinement. They don't say where he will be sent; only his mother will know, and she will not be able to see him often. It will be at least a one-night train ride away.\n\nNow everyone is leaving the courtroom, and the Maniac is putting his hands behind his back so someone we can't see can handcuff him. He is disappearing. He is almost gone.\n\n\n\nPeter Savodnik is a writer based in New York."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/alexander-pichushkin-serial-killer-russia?currentPage=2>