Buzz Mills
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Alleged chessboard killer faces trial
MOSCOW - One by one, the squares on the chessboard filled up with numbers each commemorating a murder. Alexander Pichushkin allegedly killed most of his victims in a sprawling Moscow park, smashing their skulls with a hammer or throwing them into sewage pits after getting them drunk. He boasted he had nearly reached the last square, No. 64, by the time police captured him last year. "For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you," he told investigators in a nationally televised confession. "I felt like the father of all these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to another world."
Pichushkin, 33, looked calm and aloof Monday as he sat in the defendant's cage of the Moscow City Court during a preliminary hearing in which a judge accepted his request for a jury trial and ruled it would start Sept. 13.
After his June 2006 arrest, Pichushkin claimed he had killed more than 60 people over several years, but prosecutors said they had evidence to charge him with only 49 murders carried out in Moscow's Bittsa Park between 2005-2006.
At the cramped apartment where he shared a bedroom with his mother, police found his chessboard with numbers attached to its squares all the way up to 62.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070813/ap_on_re_eu/russia_serial_killer
MOSCOW - One by one, the squares on the chessboard filled up with numbers each commemorating a murder. Alexander Pichushkin allegedly killed most of his victims in a sprawling Moscow park, smashing their skulls with a hammer or throwing them into sewage pits after getting them drunk. He boasted he had nearly reached the last square, No. 64, by the time police captured him last year. "For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you," he told investigators in a nationally televised confession. "I felt like the father of all these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to another world."
Pichushkin, 33, looked calm and aloof Monday as he sat in the defendant's cage of the Moscow City Court during a preliminary hearing in which a judge accepted his request for a jury trial and ruled it would start Sept. 13.
After his June 2006 arrest, Pichushkin claimed he had killed more than 60 people over several years, but prosecutors said they had evidence to charge him with only 49 murders carried out in Moscow's Bittsa Park between 2005-2006.
At the cramped apartment where he shared a bedroom with his mother, police found his chessboard with numbers attached to its squares all the way up to 62.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070813/ap_on_re_eu/russia_serial_killer