Souless psychopath "collected victims' souls"

JGeropoulas

The Living Force
Russian serial killer "collected victims' souls"
Wed Oct 10, 2007 1:17pm EDT

By Conor Sweeney

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian who says he murdered at least 60 people told a court on Wednesday that he collected the souls of his victims after falling in love with killing.

Branded the "chessboard murderer" by Russian newspapers because he wanted to fill the 64 squares of a chessboard with a coin for each murder, Alexander Pichushkin said he preferred to select victims he knew.

"I tried to collect their spirits, their souls," he said. "I felt no emotion when I killed them."

Pichushkin is charged with 49 murders but says he killed at least 11 more.

He killed his first victim, a friend, in 1992, an experience he said was like first love: "You never forget it." He killed an average of one victim a month from 2002 onwards, once taking three lives in 10 days.

Listening just meters away from the cage holding Pichushkin was Vera Konobaltsayeva, the elderly mother of one of his victims.

She raised her hand to ask how and why her son, Andrei, had perished in December 2001. But Pichushkin, a 33-year-old former supermarket worker, could give no clear explanation.

"We went for a walk, we drank vodka, we chatted. Then when he was drunk ... I threw him in the well," he said. "Your son, he felt no trauma."

Konobaltsayeva wept quietly.

Prosecutors say he lured most of his victims to secluded parts of Moscow's Bitsevsky Park. Some had their skulls smashed with a hammer. Other victims were strangled, drowned in a sewage pit or thrown off balconies.

If convicted, Pichushkin could be Russia's most prolific serial killer. Andrei Chikatilo, the "Rostov Ripper", was convicted in 1992 and executed in 1994 for raping, butchering and in some cases eating as many as 52 people.

Pichushkin's trial is expected to be lengthy, with testimony scheduled from at least 41 relatives of the alleged victims and another 98 witnesses.

"I have lots of time to answer questions. But I'm very tired -- my bed is not very comfortable," Pichushkin said.
 
This sounds a lot like the "Zodiac Killer" in the late 60s and early 70s in the U.S. In one of his rantings where he insisted on being published on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, he said (sic):

I like killing people because it is so much fun it is more fun than killing wild game in the forrest because man is the most dangeroue animal of all to kill something gives me the most thrilling experience the best part of it is that when I die I will be reborn in paradice and all I have killed will become my slaves I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife
 
It immediately made me think of the "Rostov Ripper", which you mention, he was portrayed in the movie Citizen X.

I found these chilling remaks and quotes about him (I do not certify that these quotes found in various online papers are true, it's just for information.)

"A life without murder is like a life without food," - those are the chilling words of Aleksandr Pichushkin.
"I will be back in the Bitsovsky park. My hand can still feel the hammer," Aleksandr Pichushkin, the suspect, said.
Pichushkin was reserved but amiable. He liked animals but wasn't popular with women. Nobody would suspect anything wrong in him. He liked to play chess.
Mr Pichushkin's mother said her son's errant journey begun when he was struck on the head by a swing at the age of four.
On the 14 September according to Russia today :

Alexander Pichushkin has been in custody for more than a year, insisting, adamantly, that he is the Bitsevsky Park killer. But three months ago news emerged that two more bodies had reportedly been recovered in the park, prompting speculation that that the real killer might still be at large.
Already a copycat ? or a convenient place to now blame other murders on Pichushkin ?
 
Laura said:
Jaw drops...
Me too, the whole Alexander Pichushkin affair sickens me. I talked to someone at work about him, how he killed without any feeling for his victims, how he then boasted about it, and not failing to mention the excellent point made by SOTT:

SOTT said:
Take note that psychopathic traits include boasting about their exploits.
Also, comparing killing with the same sort of feeling as "falling in love" shows how psychopaths don't have true emotions. It they did, there would never be a comparison like this. The psychopath only knows that love is supposed to be pleasurable, which is what this person equates to the feeling he had when he took someone else's life. It was most likely an adrenaline rush, which this sick person took to be a feeling of 'love'.
Like most people, he was shocked and appalled by this man, but walked away saying, “oh well, I’m glad he is in Russia…”

To which I thought, “Yeah well, there are people JUST like him who are in positions of immense power running nearly every aspect of our lives RIGHT NOW!”

Remember that essential psychopaths vary immensely in their aspirations, dreams, tastes, motives and intentions, but all have one thing in common:
They are incapable of empathising with human beings…

Now there's a sobering and chilling thought!
 
Some more on this guy:
Serial Killer Alexander Pichushkin May Have Killed Sixty-Two
By Katherine Ramsland
It was June 2006 before Russian officials stopped the fourteen-year spree of Alexander Pichushkin, 32. He had murdered a coworker from s supermarket, 36-year-old Marina Moskalyova, and left her body in the park. Video surveillance from a train showed Pichushkin walking with her and she had left a note for her son that she would be with Pichushkin, providing his phone number. The police arrested him at the apartment where he lived with his mother.

He initially denied his involvement, but after seeing the surveillance tape it did not take long for him to start talking. He even led police to some of the undiscovered bodies. Pichushkin claimed to have killed 62 people (61 by some sources) and his dream was to surpass the death toll of serial killer Andrea Chikatilo, whose official murder count was 53 woman and children. Pichushkin sought to make history, and the media had already dubbed him the Bittsa Maniac (or Bittsyeveskiy Beast). He said he'd known that killing Marina had been a risk, but he'd been in the mood that night, so he did it.

Pichushkin often targeted the elderly. The Moscow Times reported that he would invite his victim to drink with him in a secluded area of the park — supposedly the grave of his dog — and once they were drunk, he would bash in their heads with a hammer or pipe, and either leave them on the grounds or dump them into a sewer pit (sometimes alive but too inebriated to save themselves).

In his 2006 confession, televised to prove it was not coerced, Pichushkin said that he'd first committed murder in 1992 when he was a teenager (the year Chikatilo was tried and convicted). The victim was a boy that he'd pushed out a window. He was questioned but not charged and police had closed the case as a suicide. This only encouraged Pichushkin to consider himself invincible. Nevertheless, nine years passed before he committed murder again.

He started up again in 2001, killing people in the park. Most he tossed into sewer ducts but left seventeen lying where they were killed. He got away with it, because few of these people were reported missing. Nevertheless, the bodies did draw attention and police were on the lookout for the Bittsa Beast. In the interview, he stated, "A life with murders is a life without food." He also stated that he believed he had opened a door for his victims and given them a "new life." The killing had been "a necessity."

In the typical "poor me" manner of many psychopaths, he described what he viewed as a difficult life. He'd never known his father and his mother had placed him in a institution for the disabled before removing him to live with his grandfather. (Some sources say his grandfather, not his mother, rescued him.) When the grandfather died, Pichushkin would go walking in the park with his dog. But then the dog died and he buried it in the park. Then he grew depressed. (His mother would say that his problems began with a head injury when he was four.)

Psychologist Mikhail Vinogradov interpreted the attacks as the result of anger at his grandfather for abandoning him, although they also had a "sexual subtext" in that they were committed to produce pleasure. Pichushkin had actually described his criminal career as a "perpetual orgasm." It was his goal, he bragged, to kill 64, to match the number of squares on a chess board.

Three people did survive his attempts to murder them by throwing them in a sewage pit, and one of them identified him as the culprit. He confirmed how the Maniac operated.

At the Serbsky Institute, Pichushkin was subjected to several months of psychiatric evaluations and judged to be competent to stand trial. He was charted with 49 murders and three attempted murders. At the fifteen-minute preliminary hearing on August 13, 2007, from a glass cage he asked to be tried by a jury rather than before a panel of judges, and Judge Andrei Subarev accepted this request.

The judge also ruled that the trial, starting September 13, should be open to the public — probably what Pichushkin had hoped, given his desire for fame. However, being deemed just shy of Chikatilo's record probably irks him. He might just take the stand to make his claim for the record. When asked by reporters why had had killed, he only remarked, "Such is the situation."

Prosecutor Yury Syomin (or Semin, in a different source) is well versed in the case and keenly aware of Pichushkin's dark ambitions. "This is the first such case in Moscow," he declared. While the Maniac insisted there had been 63 (although at his arrest he claimed 61), the police had found no evidence to support a number that high.

"There are no bodies, no fragments, not even records of people gone missing," Syomin attested. However, among Pichushkin's effects investigators did find a drawing of a chessboard on which he had placed dates for 62 of the 64 squares. As with many serial killers whose ambition is to surpass others before them, it's difficult to know what to accept about Pichushkin's claims.

Pichushkin's attorney, Pavel Ivannikov, was aware that he faced a difficult case, and had not disclosed whether he had decided to have his client plead insanity. The decision to have a jury trial was made by the defendant, he said, but Pichushkin continues to admit his guilt. "My client understands that he is to blame for most of these murders."

In any event, there is a moratorium on the death penalty, so the maximum punishment, if convicted, is life in prison.

As to who was killing the young women in other areas of Moscow in recent years, that remains a mystery.

from here: _http://www.crimelibrary.com/news/original/0807/1502_Alexander_Pichushkin.html
Here's some pictures:

Alexander-Pichushkin(1)200.jpg

Alexander-Pichushkin(2)200.jpg


He does have a lot of your typical psychopathic traits: thrill-seeking, remorseless, egocentric, poor impulse control, and perhaps parasitic lifestyle.

The head trauma @ age 4 is interesting -
Lobaczewski said:
Brain tissue is very limited in its regenerative ability. If it is
damaged and the change subsequently heals, a process of reha-
bilitation can take place wherein the neighboring healthy tissue
takes over the function of the damaged portion. This substitu-
tion is never quite perfect; thus some deficits in skill and proper
psychological processes can be detected in even cases of very
small damage by using the appropriate tests. Specialists are
aware of the variegated causes for the origin of such damage,
including trauma and infections. We should point out here that
the psychological results of such changes, as we can observe
many years later, are more heavily dependent upon the location
of the damage itself in the brain mass, whether on the surface
or within, than they are upon the cause which brought them
about. The quality of these consequences also depends upon
when they occurred in the person’s lifetime. Regarding patho-
logical factors of ponerogenic processes, perinatal or early
infant damages have more active results than damages which
occurred later.
So it seems that the trauma occured early, however passed prenatal or infant stages. Perhaps it was the trigger for an inherited trait?
 
This sounds a lot like the "Zodiac Killer" in the late 60s and early 70s in the U.S. In one of his rantings where he insisted on being published on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, he said (sic):

His Name Was Arthur Leigh Allen
DescriptDocumentary covering every aspect of the investigation, including interviews with the original investigators and surviving victims. From the Special Edition DVD of Zodiac (2007) special features.ion
images

May 11, 2012
 
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Follow Up, Mike Savage on the ZK (Dec 9, 2008)

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SAVAGE & ZODIAC KILLER Caller PT 1 and Part Two
Michael savage zodiac killer caller san francisco lake herman berryessa suspect kliman murder elevator shaft talk radio
 
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