Serial Killer Claims He “Felt Like God”
Posted October 26, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Alexander Pichushkin says he felt “like God” as he slowly choked the life from his victims. The man who may be Russia’s worst serial killer claims he enjoyed the power over life and death that his sick activities brought him during a decades-long murder spree.
“I took the most valuable thing, human life,” the 33-year-old former supermarket worker boasted in court. “I didn’t take anything else of value from them. Money, jewelry, I didn’t need it. I felt like God.”
Pichushkin became known as the “Chessboard Killer” after police raided the apartment he shared with his mother and discovered bottle caps he placed on 63 of the 64 spaces on a game board. He claims to have laid down a marker for each one of his victims, although he was actually convicted of killing 48 people.
His varied M.O. included strangling, hitting his prey with a hammer, throwing them off balconies or drowning them in a sewage ditch. He admits he invited his “guests” to drink some vodka with him in a Moscow park, then took their lives without a second thought.
And his revolting confessions were delivered with a smirk, as the suffering families of his victims listened in shock and fury. “I didn’t torture anybody, that was my style, my signature,” he proclaimed, almost with pride. “The only criteria I had was that the person was maximally familiar to me. Age played a secondary role.
“I alone was prosecutor, I was the lawyer, jury, judge. I was whoever it needed to be. And I decided who was going to live and who wasn’t. I was just like God.”
Pichushkin’s sentencing will take place next week.
Photo credit: Kostya Smirnov/AFP/Getty Images
