Russian serial killer sentenced

MOSCOW -- A former grocery clerk who imagined himself as "almost God" while murdering 48 people during a methodical hunt to kill produce one body for every space on a chessboard was sentenced Monday to life in a hard labor colony.

A Moscow court handed down Russia's harshest possible sentence for Alexander Pichushkin, 33, who mostly preyed on residents of his poor Moscow neighborhood.

Pichushkin stood in a reinforced glass cage, his hands cuffed behind his back, while the judge read the sentence in a room packed with victims' relatives. Asked whether he understood the sentence, he replied: "I'm not deaf."

Pichushkin, who had been unrepentant and defiant during the trial, looked subdued and depressed. Some of the victims' relatives wiped away tears as they listened.

Pichushkin became known as "the chessboard killer" because he said he wanted to kill 64 people to match the spaces on a chessboard.

He had boasted of killing 60 people and trying to kill three others. However, prosecutors could find evidence to charge him with only 48 murders and three attempted murders. After a five-week trial, a jury found Pichushkin guilty on all counts last Wednesday.

Prosecutors said most of the killings were in Bittsa Park in south Moscow from 2001 until Pichushkin's arrest in 2006. They said he lured most of the victims -- many homeless, alcoholic and elderly -- by promising them vodka if they joined him in mourning the death of his dog.

Pichushkin killed 11 people in 2001, including six in one month, prosecutors said. Most died after he threw them into a sewage pit after getting them drunk and in a few cases strangled or hit them in the head, prosecutors said.

Beginning in 2005, Pichushkin began to kill with "particular cruelty," hitting his victims multiple times in the head with a hammer, then sticking a bottle of vodka into their shattered skulls, prosecutors said. He also stopped trying to conceal the bodies.

He was arrested in June 2006 after a woman who left a note at home saying she was going for a walk with Pichushkin was found dead.

"Justice has been done," city prosecutor Yuri Syomin said after the sentencing. "The culprit has been held accountable."

Pichushkin is to serve his term in a hard labor colony and to undergo psychiatric treatment for "a personality disorder expressed in a sadistic inclination toward murder," said Judge Vladimir Usov. He added, however, that Pichushkin was aware of the criminal nature of his acts.

Tatiana Vlasova, whose son Vladimir was among the victims, said Pichushkin would never understand what he had done. "He should have been treated as an exceptional case and given a death sentence," she said, holding a photograph of her murdered son.

Russia has maintained a moratorium on capital punishment as part of its obligations to the Council of Europe.

Pichushkin said in his final statement to the court Thursday that he felt he was "almost God" in picking victims. "I was prosecutor, judge and executioner. I decided who was to live and who was to die," he said.

Investigators found a chessboard in Pichushkin's home with numbers cut from newspapers glued to its squares.

Prior to Pichushkin, Russia's most notorious serial killer was Andrei Chikatilo, who was convicted in 1992 of killing 52 children and young women over 12 years.

Police missed a chance to get Pichushkin in 2002, when an officer chose to do nothing when he was reported by a woman who survived an attack. The policeman is currently under investigation.