Pod Insights Crime, Conspiracy, Cults and Murder Ep. 118 | The Most Prolific Serial Killer You've Never Heard Of | The Chessboard Killer About this episode Go to https://surfshark.com/kallmekris and use code kallmekris at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark!
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He wasn't killing at random - he believed he was playing a game. As the body count climbed, investigators uncovered a chilling obsession that turned one of Russia's deadliest serial killers into the infamous Chessboard Killer.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 A forest at dusk at the edge of Moscow. Somewhere out in the trees, a chess clock ticks. And this is where the story ends and where it begins. A man comes here to play. He's good at the game, very patient, very calm. He also is keeping score, but not of the wins of something else entirely. Because he keeps a chessboard at home with 64 squares. And after each murder, he fills in a square. And his plan is to fill all of them. This is the story of the Chessboard Killer. Crime, conspiracy, cults, serial killers and murder. All things that I love to consume, and I know you do too. You sick, twisted, beautiful, intellectually minded.
0:44 Speaker 00 Today, we are talking about a very little known serial killer whose murders involved a very popular game. So without further ado, let's unbuckle our seatbelts, go Mach 5 down the highway, slam on the brakes and bust through the windshield into this case together.
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1:42 Speaker 00 So in the Soviet Union, chess was a national obsession. The government even funded it and politicians promoted it. And on the international stage, it became the measuring stick for Russian intellectual power. And the Soviets had poured resources into the game since shortly after the 1917 revolution. Because it mirrored what they valued most. Precision, skill and strategy. And for decades, they dominated. In the parks of Moscow, it was practically a spectator sport. Old men hunched over wooden boards while small crowds gathered to watch, and argue, and second-guess every single move. And for millions of Soviet citizens, chess was a language.
2:26 Speaker 00 It was taught in schools, celebrated in newspapers, and debated over meals. And that culture filtered into daily life across the country, and even in cities where most people wouldn't even think to visit. Cities like Matishi, which sits northeast of Moscow. And it grew along the historic road connecting the capital to the Trinity Saint Sergius monastery. And for much of its history, it supplied the capital's drinking water. And by the early 20th century, the city had reinvented itself as a center for machine-building and transport manufacturing, functional, industrial, and pretty much unremarkable. And on the opposite edge of Moscow, on the city's southern fringe, there's a forest.
3:07 Speaker 00 Bitsevsky Forest Park, to be exact, known to most simply as Bitza Park. And it covers more than eight square miles of silver birch, streams, and rolling terrain, making it the second-largest green space in the entire city. And ancient settlements and burial mounds sit alongside three historic estates, all remnants of a much older world hidden beneath the canopy. And in winter, cross-country skiers carved fresh trails through the snow. And year-round, joggers threaded along the paths. And on warm days, families spread blankets in the grass while children ran between the trees. And at tables under the branches, elderly men gathered over bottles of vodka to play chess, turning patches of forest into open-air arenas
3:51 Speaker 00 where a single match could last all afternoon. And for the residents of southern Moscow, Bitza Park was a refuge, a place to walk, to sit, and just to be. Alexander Yorievish Pichuskin was born on April 9, 1974, in Matishi. And his father disappeared from the picture almost immediately. And one version of the story has his father leaving before Alexander was old enough to even remember. And others describe a divorce when Alexander was very, very... Young. Either way, the result was the same. And by the time he was old enough to ask, there was really nothing to remember. The kind of absence that really shapes a kid quietly. And his mother, Natasha, raised her son alone. And she'd called the same place home since she was 11 years old.
4:36 Speaker 00 And they lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Kershunskaya Street in Moscow. And the building went up during one of the Soviet Union's first waves of public housing construction. And it was about what you'd expect from that description. Cold walls, tight rooms, and nothing about the place that made you really want to stay. Two small rooms for a young, single mother and a growing boy in a building that had never been built with comfort in mind. And in 1982, when Alexander was eight, Natasha would give birth to a daughter, Katya, Alexander's younger half-sister. So the apartment that was already pretty tight started to feel like it was closing in on them. But the family had one thing working for them, even if they probably didn't think much of it.
5:19 Speaker 00 Because from their front door, it was about a six-minute walk to the edge of Betsa Park. And Natasha and Alexander's grandfather took him there all the time. Going for walks beneath the birch trees, lazy afternoons on the playground, space to move that the apartment just couldn't provide. So for a kid just boxed into a Soviet flat, the park was an escape, to say the least. So it would become a big part of Alexander's world very early on. And some accounts describe Alexander as a sociable boy. Now, the people who knew Alexander described him as a pretty quiet kid. And making friends didn't come naturally to him. And at school, he spent most of his time alone, and his classmates mocked him for how withdrawn he was.
6:01 Speaker 00 But at home, the people around him saw someone different. Not popular or loud, but not the hostile loner his classmates seemed to think he was. Like a woman in their building named Svetlana knew him as a pretty well-mannered kid whose whole world revolved around animals. He seemed to feel more at ease with them than with other people. And everyone who knew him said the same thing, basically. He'd rather spend his time with animals instead of people. Because animals didn't tease him. Or pull away from him, you know? They were just there. When the world outside felt cold, animals were the one thing that felt safe. Now, one afternoon, Svetlana walked into the stairwell, where she found Alexander just
6:43 Speaker 00 sitting there, and he couldn't stop crying because he'd lost his cat that morning and he was wrecked from the loss. Svetlana said the grief was so total, he couldn't even form words, just completely inconsolable. So, a pretty normal reaction for a kid to lose their pet. So, Alexander, as a kid, by all means, was a pretty normal kid. He was lonely, awkward and shy, but otherwise, pretty normal. But that was until the accident. So, he was young, and he was playing on a swing, when he lost his balance and tumbled backward off the seat. And before he could get off the ground, the swing arched back and caught him right in the front of the skull.
7:25 Speaker 00 And the impact landed on the worst possible spot, his frontal cortex. Now, for those of you who don't know, we've talked about this in previous cases, especially of serial killers. It's the part of your brain that keeps you from acting on every impulse, helps you think through consequences, and plays a direct role in shaping who you are. And in an adult, that kind of blow can cause lasting damage. And in a child, whose brain is still developing, the consequences can be far worse. And that moment on the swing was the moment that changed everything. Because what came next was a completely different boy. And according to the people who knew him best, the boy they raised was gone.
8:08 Speaker 00 And the quiet, withdrawn kid from the stairwell was gone. And in his place was someone hostile, impulsive, and completely unpredictable. And family members who'd known him his whole life barely recognized the child standing in front of them. And his mother had to make a difficult decision. Because Alexander's behavior had become aggressive enough that she pulled him out of his regular school and enrolled him in a school designed for children with learning disabilities. But the school was built to help get kids past what held them back. Rather than focus on what helped them excel, if that makes sense. So whatever intelligence Alexander had was left sitting kind of idle. But the problems he faced with other kids didn't stay behind at his old school.
8:52 Speaker 00 The bullying he faced continued at his new school as well. And other kids beat him up and he was verbally targeted again and again. And each incident fed the same fire. Just the anger that the swing had unlocked kept growing. And every taunt, every shove, every cruel word poured fuel on that fire. And nobody seemed to be stepping in and nobody seemed to be listening. And the rage building inside him had nowhere productive to go. But then, someone would finally see him, and that would be his grandfather. Because Alexander's grandfather looked at Alexander and didn't see a problem child. But instead, he saw a boy who was sharper than anyone around him realized.
9:35 Speaker 00 A boy whose potential was being buried in a school that had no idea what to do with it. So his grandfather made a choice that changed everything. And he would take Alexander into his home and from that point on, they were together constantly. Though, that didn't stop the bullying necessarily. Because even after the move, other kids continued to make fun of him. But at least, he was away from that cramped apartment with his half-sister and his mother. And he was away from the schools that had failed him. So Alexander finally had something he never really had before, which was structure and attention. And someone who believed he was worth investing in. And his grandfather began to steer him toward things that would actually challenge his mind. And one of them stuck immediately, and it was chess.
10:19 Speaker 00 Alexander didn't just learn the game, he absorbed and immersed himself in it. He showed real skill from the beginning and his grandfather witnessed the obsession grow stronger. And before long, the old man started bringing him to Bizza Park. The same tables where elderly men gathered to play and drink vodka and whatever. And Alexander sat down across from opponents decades older than him and outplayed them all the time. Chess just gave him something nothing else had, a way to dominate. Without destroying. A way to turn aggression into strategy and rage into focus. And every match was a controlled battle and he was winning for the most part. And for a while, it seemed to work as he grew older.
11:04 Speaker 00 He had a home that felt stable and he had a grandfather who anchored him. And he had a game that absorbed the worst parts of his mind and turned them into something almost productive. But unfortunately, that wouldn't last because his grandfather would pass away. And that loss hit Alexander hard. He'd lost the only father figure he'd ever known. The only person who ever guided him with any sort of consistency. So with no reason to stay, he would move back into that cramped apartment with his mother and his half sister. And he would enroll in school again, but that foundation that was beneath him was just gone at this point. The structure his grandfather had built and the discipline and the purpose, just all of it collapsed the moment his grandfather died.
11:49 Speaker 00 To cope, Alexander would start drinking large quantities of vodka day after day, just trying to dull the grief and quiet the aggression that had never really left him. And he would keep drifting back to Beets Park. But now, he wasn't the prodigy kid sitting across from old men. He was now a young man filling the hours with vodka and chess. So the park had once been this really positive escape for him, but now it was just a place where he coped. And then somewhere in his late teens, something darker started to surface. And he started carrying a video camera around children to threaten them. He'd approach kids and use the camera as a prop at a power game. And the thrill for him wasn't the recording.
12:34 Speaker 00 It was in the control, the fear in their faces, the knowledge that he could do whatever he wanted and they couldn't stop him because he was basically an adult at this point and these were just little kids. And once, he grabbed a kid by the ankle, flipped them upside down and spoke to the camera saying, quote, "You are in my power now. I am going to drop you from the window and you will fall 15 meters to your death." Now, he did not drop the child. He just wanted the feeling of holding a life in his hands, of being the one who decided what happened next. Basically, playing god, which is scary. So every threat he made and inevitably got away with told him the same thing.
13:17 Speaker 00 And that was that no one was watching and no one was gonna stop him. So by 1992, Alexander was 18 years old. And his heavy drinking, chess-playing, and free time fucking terrorizing children for the rush of dominance just wasn't enough anymore. So Mikhail Odichuk was Alexander's classmate. And some sources call him a school friend. But beyond that, almost nothing about his life survives in the public record. And who he actually was got buried under what happened to him. And it will be a pattern that repeats across this entire case. So on July 27, 1992, Alexander arranged to meet Mikhail in Betsa Park.
14:00 Speaker 00 And the reason for the meeting was a proposal. Alexander wanted to kill 64 people, one for every square on a chessboard, and he wanted Mikhail to help. Now Mikhail wanted no part of it because he wasn't a murderer. So he would listen, but he would refuse. And that refusal would cost him his life. And Alexander strangled him with a rope right there in the park. And then he dragged his body to a sewer opening and dropped it in. And Mikhail was never found. He was reported missing, and that was all the world would ever officially know. But naturally, the disappearance didn't go unnoticed
14:42 Speaker 00 because people had seen the two of them together shortly before Mikhail vanished. And that information reached Moscow police with Andrey Supernenko as chief investigator. Now, the Moscow police investigators brought Alexander in for questioning, and he would just tell a simple story. He admitted he'd met Mikhail that day, and they hung out, and they parted ways. And Mikhail was perfectly fine when he walked off. And that was it. And it worked because since there was no body and no- No physical evidence tying him to a crime, witnesses could only place them together and nothing more. Because that just proved a meeting, not necessarily a murder. And without something concrete, investigators had nothing to hold him on. So Alexander walked free.
15:24 Speaker 00 So the system had its first chance to stop him there, but they couldn't. So after the murder of Mikhail, nearly a decade passed with no known killings. And on the surface, Alexander's life looked unremarkable during this stretch. He held down a job, kept drinking, and kept playing chess in the park. And to anyone watching from the outside, he was just another man grinding through post-Soviet life. But something was building underneath. Because during those years, Alexander developed a fixation on one man in particular, Andrey Chikatilo, known as the Rostov Ripper. And Chikatilo was Russia's most notorious serial killer, killing 52 women and children across 12 years.
16:08 Speaker 00 His case is utterly disgusting. He is a monster. And that was the final tally when a court finally convicted Chikatilo in 1992. And he would be sentenced to death and then executed in February of 1994. But his rampage had stretched across the Soviet Union, and Chikatilo became a dark landmark in Russian criminal history. And for Alexander, Chikatilo became something else entirely, though. And that was an obsession. Meanwhile, the country around him was shifting. And Russia became a member of the Council of Europe in 1996. And with that membership came a pledge to stop executing prisoners.
16:51 Speaker 00 And a moratorium on the death penalty took effect that same year. And the groundwork for it had been laid three years earlier. And the 1993 constitution allowed the death penalty only as a temporary measure, restricted to "exceptional cases," quote-unquote, "until its complete abolition." But the 1996 commitment made it official. So from that point forward, no one in Russia would be executed. And life imprisonment became the ceiling. So the years started to blur together for Alexander. What with work, vodka, chess, and park? These were his constants. Though the routines that he built after his grandfather's death hadn't changed, whatever restraint had kept him from killing again was starting to erode.
17:34 Speaker 00 And then, in the summer of 2001, the silence broke. And Alexander described the moment in his own words, saying, "It dawned upon me on that day that I would murder someone." Which is so chilling to just think of a man playing chess in a park and realizing he could just murder whoever he wants. So just like that, the gears of quiet were over. So Evgeny Pronin was 52 years old, and he played chess with Alexander in Biza Park. He was an older man, a casual acquaintance, if you will. And on May 17, 2001, the two finished a game of chess. And Alexander asked Pronin to take a walk with him. He had a story on the ready.
18:17 Speaker 00 His dog had died, and he wanted to pay respects at the grave. So, not thinking anything of it, because he's played chess with Alexander for, you know, years at this point, Pronin went along. And they walked to a remote stretch of the park, far from the paths and the crowds. And Alexander opened a bottle of vodka, and they raised a toast to the dead dog that didn't exist. And then, Alexander would attack him. And he would bludgeon Pronin, unconscious, and dump him into a sewage well. So everything that would define his method was present in this single killing. The ruse, the vodka, the toast, the ambush, and the well. It was the birth of a pattern of his MO.
19:01 Speaker 00 And within eight weeks, Alexander killed nine more people. And in 2001 alone, he murdered 11 people. Six of them in a single month. So whatever had broken open inside him that summer wasn't slowing down. But his targets were almost always the same. Primarily elderly homeless men in and around Biza Park. People he could approach with a bottle and a story, and who had no reason to say no to a free drink. And the routine became a ritual. He'd sit with them first, talking and listening, sometimes for over an hour. He was never in a rush. And he believed that the closer you are to the person who is about to die, the more pleasant it is to kill them.
19:45 Speaker 00 His words, not mine. And one of his favorite books was Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. But the friendships were never real. He just built up those friendships for one reason, and that was to get close enough to kill them. And because it felt better killing someone he knew a little better. And when that moment came, he always struck from behind, partly to catch them off guard and partly to keep blood off his clothes. His words, not mine. And his weapon of choice was a hammer. And in some cases, he used the bottle of vodka that they drank from right before their death. But a handful of victims were also strangled, and a few others were shot in the head with a homemade weapon he rigged from a pipe.
20:30 Speaker 00 Because he didn't swing to kill, he just hit hard enough to drop them, but not hard enough to finish them off. The point was consciousness. He needed them to know what was being done to them. And then came the disposal. And Wells, at the edge of the park, gave him access to Moscow's sewer network. And the fall was about 30 feet. So if the blow hadn't killed them, the impact at the bottom would. So the sewers just did the rest for him. And a current pushed remains through miles of underground pipe, and some washed up at a treatment facility on the far side of the city, and others never surfaced at all. And investigators believed at least 13 bodies remain lodged in the tunnels to this day.
21:15 Speaker 00 So between May 2001 and September 2005, Alexander attacked 36 people. And three of them survived, but the rest obviously wouldn't. And almost all of them fit the same profile. Older, homeless, living on the margins. They were basically invisible to society long before Alexander found them. People who could vanish without anyone filing a report without anyone raising an alarm. And 20 of the people he murdered were men he'd played chess with in the park. People who knew his face, his name, his habits. But not all of them fit that profile. He also killed younger men and women and at least one child.
21:59 Speaker 00 And many of his victims will never be identified. Their names and stories are gone. And I feel awful that I can't tell you who they were. But the information just doesn't exist because these people just had no record of who they were, especially because a lot of them were homeless. And that just adds to the horror of this whole situation. Because they were basically erased twice. Once by Alexander and once by a system that never looked for them. But the first survivor was Maria Varishiva, a pregnant saleswoman. So on February 23rd, 2002, Alexander got Maria into Betsa Park and forced her down one of the wells.
22:42 Speaker 00 But she would grab the walls on the way down, doing anything she could to hold on. But he would grab a fistful of her hair and drive her head into the concrete walls again and again. And when he left, he was sure she was finished. But she wasn't. And she lived. And somehow she pulled herself out of the well, saving the baby's life too. Which is such a miracle. Like what a, oh, I'm just, I'm so happy that that was able to happen. And I mean, like, a mother's will. And after she got herself out of the well and was beaten bloody, she went to the police and they offered her a deal.
23:21 Speaker 00 Keep your mouth shut about what happened and we won't ask about your registration papers. Yeah. So she stayed quiet. And in the two weeks after her attack, Alexander killed three more people. So the system was absolutely fucked. Guy tries to kill someone, a woman, and they're just like, we don't really want to deal with this right now. So just like, shut up and leave. What?
23:51 Speaker 00 Stol? And another survivor was Mikhail Lobov, a teenager. And on March 10th, 2002, Alexander got Lobov to follow him into the park. Again, just like Maria. And the bait was either a job carrying a printer or cigarettes and vodka, depending on the account. But Alexander cracked him over the head and sent him down the well shaft. But on the way down, his jacket thankfully snagged on a metal edge jutting from the wall, and it held, ensuring he never hit the water. And Mikhail Lobov climbed out alive. He found a police officer and told him what happened. But the officer told him to go home. Which, like, what is happening?
24:36 Speaker 00 What was happening in Soviet Russia at this time? This is insane. This is insane, in the early 2000s. But seven days later, Lobov was hanging around the metro station, and there was Alexander, right in front of him. And the kid lost his shit, rightfully so. He was yelling, pulling at one of the officers posted outside, pointing straight at the man who'd thrown him down a well. And the officers told him to leave. So, nothing happened. Alexander didn't go to jail, wasn't even questioned. They just told him to go away, like he was a pest, this kid, who was near murdered. So that was now two reports of attempted murder and two dismissals.
25:19 Speaker 00 A child pointing at his attacker in broad daylight, and nobody listened. And Alexander knew it, because no one would believe a punk that liked to hang out at metro stations, you know? And at this point, everybody he knows thinks he's a pretty well-respected man who just plays chess in the park. Yeah, he drinks a lot, but other than that, he seems pretty harmless. But then there was a third survivor, who was Konstantin Polikarpov. And they were 31 years old, attacked on November 15th, 2003. And not much is known about this event, but there's another survivor, and nothing happened, again. But after this attack, something...
26:00 Speaker 00 shifted and Alexander stopped killing for 15 months that we know of and he didn't resume until February 22 2005 when he murdered 57 year old Peter de Duncan and the killings would come slower now one in June and one more in September but the hiatus was just that only a pause not necessarily an ending so for years people simply vanished and in the rare cases where a family member filed a missing persons report police rarely acted on it because they're just standing there with their dicks in their hand I don't really know because Moscow police had a reputation for corruption and heavy drinking and a missing
26:41 Speaker 00 homeless man wasn't anyone's priority and Alexander being the smart man that he is albeit a monster understood this so that led him to choose victims who wouldn't be missed people without a close family without stable addresses without anyone who would sound the alarm quickly enough to matter but that didn't even matter because people who survived an attempted murder yelling at the police didn't even matter to the police so but that brought him a buffer of days sometimes even weeks before anyone even wondered where these men had gone and the sewer system handled the rest like we talked about because you can't build a murder case without a body and the sewers were swallowing that evidence
27:24 Speaker 00 but the police already had the evidence because victims hand delivered this evidence right to them but they just chose to bury it and more than 40 people disappeared before anyone in a position of authority acknowledged that a serial killer was operating in Moscow so the families started connecting the dots on their own and one missing person led to another and then another and they were asking the same questions could it be someone that they knew too many people were dying from the same neighborhood the same park in the same circles it couldn't be a coincidence so like what happens in every small town rumors started to spread and some said it was psychiatric patient Chechens and some said the mafia
28:08 Speaker 00 and everyone had a theory but no No one had the answers, and the sewage wells were nearly a perfect system. As long as the bodies went underground, no one was looking. But eventually, the bodies stopped going underground, and they started appearing in the open. And once that happened, the killings could no longer be ignored. So on October of 2005, something changed, and Alexander stopped using the sewage wells that had served him for years. And the killings became more brutal, and he struck victims multiple times now, hammering their skulls with a violence that went beyond what was needed to kill, just complete overkill. And then he would take an unfinished bottle of vodka and would shove it into their open
28:52 Speaker 00 wounds, which was a signature that was meant to be seen clearly. And Alexander, at this point, was just being so blasé and overconfident about it, because he was just leaving the bodies where they fell. No more dragging them to wells for disposal, no more sewer systems, the corpses just stayed in the park, out in the open, waiting to be found. And for years, people had been disappearing across southern Moscow, and the world hadn't noticed, and that silence just kind of ate at him. He kind of wanted to be noticed now. He wanted people to start talking about him. So he would make the deaths impossible to ignore, and he would just display them in public.
29:34 Speaker 00 And with every killing he got away with, his confidence would just swell. His head got big, and the caution that had kept him underground for years gave way to something reckless. And he wasn't hiding anymore, he was just kind of daring someone to find him. So Alexander killed ten people from the very buildings where he lived, the same cluster of buildings on Kurskaya Street, where he'd grown up, where his mother still lived, where he walked in and out of every day. And he did it with the same playbook he used on everyone else: a bottle, a conversation, and a walk into the park. And once they were alone in Betsa, he'd beat them to death.
30:15 Speaker 00 And on his off time from killing, he would just work at a grocery store, and he started... Shoved shelves, chatted with shoppers and smiled at faces all day long and made conversation. And his coworkers thought he was just quiet, maybe a little odd, but nobody would call him dangerous. And nobody looked at him and saw what he was doing after hours. So, nobody would look at him in real life and assume that he was a serial killer. He didn't really make it obvious. Besides, you know, leaving bodies out in the open and the police doing nothing. But the first body of the open period surfaced on October 15th, 2005. And it was Nikolai Virobyev, who was 31 years old. Moscow police found
30:55 Speaker 00 him with a catastrophic head wound and a bottle lodged into his skull. And he was among the first victims discovered bearing this new signature. And a month later, a second body would appear. And he would be Nikolai Zakarchenko, a former police officer. He's killing police officers. And his body was also left in the open as a taunt. And at this point that we know of, this would be victim number 41. And the bodies just kept coming. An unarmed 60-year-old man found roughly a month after Nikolai Vladimir Dydinkin discovered about two weeks after that. And another unidentified victim surfacing a week later. And by Christmas of 2005, seven bodies had been recovered. And police
31:39 Speaker 00 found that nothing had been stolen from any of them. But everybody would tell the same story. Catastrophic skull damage with a vodka bottle or a wooden stick jammed into the wound. The pattern was undeniable. And Russian police knew they were now hunting a serial killer. Moscow's elite murder squad caught the assignment. And in February of 2006, they assigned a senior investigator to lead the hunt. And his name was Andreya Suprenenko. If you remember, back in 1992, he'd been the one assigned to Mikhail Odinchuk's disappearance. The investigator that would question 18-year-old Alexander and let him walk. And this was the first victim Alexander had ever killed that we know of, of course, but his friend
32:24 Speaker 00 from school. So, it was coming full circle with the same investigator now on the case again. But he had no idea the- killer he was chasing was the same teenager he'd questioned and released 14 years before. So Andrea's team found almost nothing at the crime scenes. No fingerprints, no traces, because the killer was meticulous about what he left behind. The team turned to forensic scientist Professor Vladimir Verunstov for answers. Now Vladimir catalogued the injuries. Repeated blows to the back and sides of the head, strikes to the face, and consistent pattern across every victim. And based on the wound patterns alone, Vladimir identified the weapon as a hammer. So 200 officers flooded Bizza Park, and every person walking through the park was approached
33:09 Speaker 00 and interrogated. A psychiatric sanatorium sat near the edge of the forest, and investigators theorized an escaped patient had gone to the ground in the woods, killing from the shadows, potentially. And they questioned everyone connected to the facility, but no one fit, and the theory collapsed. And then they thought they had a break, and one suspect caught their attention, because he had a hammer on him, and he said he just carried it for protection. But after 24 hours of questioning, it really just went nowhere, and his alibi was solid and he would walk. And only a week later, a woman's body would be found, and that brought the body count for the forest killings to 12. But as we know it right now, there's a lot more, because they don't know about the sewers yet.
33:54 Speaker 00 And in April of 2006, another victim was identified, Larissa Kuligina, and she worked with Alexander. She was the first confirmed victim pulled from his own workplace rather than from the park benches and housing blocks. So the circle around him was tightening, and it was his own fault, because he enjoyed killing people that were very close to him. And he's so arrogant at this point, he just thinks he can get away with anything, which, at this point, obviously, he's a monster, and he's, you know, a shit stain in society, but I don't blame him, because the police are failing in every way, shape, and form. And a big part of it is that most of the people killed during these months have never been publicly identified. A lot of them are unidentified, because people don't know who they are.
34:39 Speaker 00 And even with 200 Officers in the park and a forensic team analyzing wound patterns, a senior investigator with a decade and a half of experience, and still, the man they were looking for walked to work every morning, rang up groceries, and came home to the same street where his victims had lived. Now Marina Moskaliova was 36 years old, and she was a single mother raising a 15-year-old son named Sergey. And it was just the two of them. She worked at the same supermarket as Alexander, and he was a warehouse worker, and she was a colleague. And they saw each other regularly. Now Marina didn't fit the usual profile of a fringe person no one would remember. She was a woman with a job and a child,
35:22 Speaker 00 and a daily routine that overlapped with his. But on June 13, 2006, Alexander asked Marina to join him for a picnic. And some reports suggest she already had a bad feeling about him. But whatever her reservations were, she did agree to go. And before she left, she tried to call Sergey, but she couldn't reach him. So she wrote a note instead. And she wrote down who she'd be with and where they were going. And she added Alexander's phone number and left the note where her son could find it. And then she walked out the door. And Alexander even knew about the note. And at this point, killing a coworker was the riskiest thing he'd ever attempted, and he knew it.
36:06 Speaker 00 She could be traced back to him in hours, and the connection was obvious. But still, he went ahead anyway. The arrogance of this guy. They walked into Betsa Park, allegedly spending hours together there, just the two of them. No one else was around. And he spent that time turning the decision over in his head, whether to go through with it or to just let her walk away. And he decided that he couldn't. And sparing her would have made his life unbearable. The compulsion was stronger than the risk, and he would kill her there in the park. And the wounds would match his MO. And Alexander knew that killing her was different from killing the others, but that did not matter to him this time. So Marina's body was found in Betsa Park on June 14.
36:50 Speaker 00 And the injuries were unmistakable. Investigators recognized them immediately as the work of the killer they'd been hunting for months. And Sergey came to identify his mother, because his mother left the apartment that day with someone she'd been spending time with, someone that she called Sasha. And then Sergey handed the police the note she'd written before she left, and they found that the phone number belonged to a 32-year-old man named Alexander Pushishkin. And he worked at the same supermarket as Marina, and Sasha is the common Russian nickname for Alexander. So the name Sergey had given them had matched. But the note wasn't the only thing Marina left behind, because inside her coat pocket, investigators found a Moscow Metro ticket.
37:34 Speaker 00 Investigators started combing through Moscow Metro's security cameras, looking for anything that could show them where Marina had been before she died. And the footage was pretty clear, showing Marina on a metro platform with Alexander right beside her, just hours before her death. So police had the note, the phone number, the coworker connection confirmed by the supermarket, and now video evidence placing him with the victim on the day she was killed. So for the first time in years of hunting, investigators had a face, a name, and proof. So on June 16th, police arrested Alexander Pushishkin, and they raided his apartment in Moscow. And investigators were hoping to close the Betsa Park case, and they believed they'd
38:17 Speaker 00 caught the man responsible for the string of killings that had terrorized southern Moscow. And they were right, but nothing prepared them for what came next. His Alexander confessed to 60 murders, years of killing stretching back to 2001. Because investigators had been hunting the Betsa Maniac, and they found something far worse than they imagined. And in his words, taking a life was the only thing that made him feel like he existed for a reason, that it was the thing that made his life feel like it meant something. And inside the apartment, there was a chessboard. 61 of the 64 squares had been filled in and numbered, and each number corresponded to a victim.
39:00 Speaker 00 So it was a scoreboard, a ledger of the dead organized on the same grid he'd played on since childhood, and three squares remained empty. Moscow police made an unusual decision and allowed MTV television cameras to be brought into the station. So every word of Alexander's confession was recorded. So by recording everything, they could prove the statements were voluntary, and the news rippled outward from the precinct, and the city was only now beginning to understand what had been living in its shadow. So before the trial even began, Alexander gave the country a preview of what it was dealing with.
39:40 Speaker 00 And his confession aired on national television, not just like a leak or a clip, but a full, filmed declaration broadcast across Russia. And he sat in front of cameras and spoke about murder the way most people talk about, like, a meal they enjoyed, saying, quote, "I was like the father of these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to another world," unquote. He was just disgustingly proud, and he described befriending victims over chests, luring them with vodka, attacking with a hammer, and disposing of their bodies in sewage wells. And each step delivered with the calmness of someone just recounting their daily routine.
40:23 Speaker 00 And what bothered him was the anonymity, saying, quote, "I was dismayed my work had been attributed to others," unquote. So it was literally his ego that got him caught. He wanted the credit for it. And he'd spent years watching police chase theories that had nothing to do with him, and it aided him that someone else might get the credit. So he made sure no one would, saying, quote, "I burned myself, so there's no need for the cops to take credit for catching me. I'm a professional," unquote. Oh. It's just the fact that he, he chose to get caught. You know, he chose to get caught. He, he, there's a good chance he could have just walked about life without getting caught, which is horrifying.
41:08 Speaker 00 I'm so glad his pathetic, disgusting ego took over and allowed him to get caught. But after the confession, investigators brought him back to Betsa Park. Scene by scene, he walked them through the killings. The reenactments were filmed and his recall was disturbingly precise. He was unfortunately a really smart guy. And he pointed out where he'd sat with the victims, where he struck them, where the bodies went. And the fixation on Andrea Chikatilo had never faded and actually had sharpened into something kind of competitive because Chikatilo had been convicted of 52 murders, the worst in Russian history, remember? And Alexander wanted to surpass him. But the goal was more than the numbers.
41:53 Speaker 00 It was about structure and the number he'd chosen was 64, matching the 64 squares of a chessboard. The game that had once saved him became the framework for everything he destroyed. And he was blunt with the court that if the police hadn't caught him, he never would have stopped, saying, quote, "In one week, I killed two people. If they hadn't caught me, I would have never stopped. Having caught me, they saved many lives," unquote. And he described the compulsion like a physical need, saying, quote, "I killed so I could live myself." You kill someone and immediately feel relieved. Your shoulders straighten up and you want to live. For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you. Put this man in a hole underground and, and close it."
42:38 Speaker 00 He left no room for misunderstanding. He just called himself almost God because he had the power over life and death that belonged to him. And in his final statement to the court, he offered one last declaration, saying, quote, "The notions of good and evil are relative things," unquote. And he, he absolutely believed every single word of what was coming out of his fucking vile mouth, or at least he needed the court to think he did. However, his defense- lawyer Pavel Ivannikov saw something else beneath the performance. And Ivannikov told the Associated Press, quote, "He wants to convince us that what he was doing was right. He imagined himself to be God, the one who decides who is to live and
43:20 Speaker 00 who is to die," unquote. But he added a crucial detail, that despite the defiance and despite the gloating, Alexander, quote unquote, "is afraid and wants to wiggle himself out." Awww. So the bravado was probably real, but so was the fear underneath, the scared little pathetic boy that he was. The psychiatric team from Russia's top clinic assessed him and concluded he was sane. And the judge agreed there was a disorder, but that didn't matter. And Alexander knew exactly what he was doing and no diagnosis was going to shield him from what he owed. And he also acknowledged that he knew about the note Marina had left
44:00 Speaker 00 behind. And he still said, quote unquote, "I could not stop myself from killing her." So the trial opened on September 13th, 2007 in Moscow. And the courtroom had reinforced glass cage built into it. And Alexander was locked inside for all five weeks, like a gerbil in a cage. And he had 48 murder charges, three counts of attempted murder. Remember the people that came up and told the police that, hey, this guy tried to murder me, but they didn't do anything about it? Yeah, they're finally getting some justice there. But depending on when you asked him, the number was 60, and other times it was 63. But the evidence held up for at least 48 murder charges and three counts of attempted murder. And the
44:43 Speaker 00 gap between what he claimed and what could be proven hung over the entire trial. And throughout those five weeks, Alexander treated the courtroom like a stage. He bragged about what he'd done. He mocked the detectives who spent months trying to find him, and he showed zero remorse and made no apologies. And the prosecution laid out the escalation in painstaking detail. And prosecutors told the court that, starting in 2005, the violence crossed into a new category. They used the phrase "particular cruelty" because he'd wait until his victims were drunk, then bring the hammer down on their heads over and over, and then he would just leave them where they fell. And Chief Prosecutor Yuri Seo Man told the court that Alexander drew "particular
45:26 Speaker 00 pleasure and satisfaction" from finishing off his victims as they "pleaded for mercy." And then came an unexpected moment. Former employers had submitted glowing references on his behalf, and the words read aloud in court were "disciplined and diligent and polite and tactful," just written by people who had worked alongside him and never suspected a thing. And Alexander listened from behind the glass and responded, "Why are you studying me so thoroughly?" Just, "Shut up." Why is he even allowed to talk? And then the families came. The people who'd buried someone because of the pizza maniac showed up to the courtroom. And there was weeks of testimony, and every method, every victim, every detail read aloud,
46:10 Speaker 00 while the people who loved them listened. And then, on October 24th, 2007, the jury returned its verdict. And deliberations lasted roughly two to three hours, and he was guilty on all counts. Reading the full verdict out loud took the foreman close to an hour. And the whole time, Alexander had his back pressed against the glass, eyes on the floor, and he did not look up. And every seat in the courthouse was taken. And press filled the room, and around 20 family members were there as well. And during a recess after the verdict, a young woman broke down crying, and a reporter approached her, and she wouldn't say a word. She just shook her head and turned away. And then, five days later, on October 29th, Judge Vladimir Usov handed down the sentence:
46:55 Speaker 00 "Life imprisonment, Russia's harshest possible punishment." And he was on his feet behind the glass, wrists locked behind him, while Judge Usov delivered the sentence. And the court directed him to a hard labor colony, and it also mandated psychiatric treatment for what is described as "a personality disorder expressed in a sadistic inclination toward murder." But the judge wasn't offering him shelter, and Alexander knew full well, and the disorder changed nothing about his guilt. The prosecutor had pushed for something extra in the form of 15 years of total isolation at the start of the sentence because of how dangerous Alexander was. And when the judge asked whether Alexander understood the sentence, his reply was short, saying, quote, unquote, "I'm not deaf."
47:39 Speaker 00 I fucking hate this man so much. And Russia's moratorium on capital punishment meant life behind bars was the ceiling, like we talked about before. Not everyone in the courtroom accepted that. And Tatiana Vlasova stood holding a photograph of her son, Vladimir, one of the 48, and she told reporters he'd never grasp the weight of what he took from her, saying, quote, "He should have been treated as an exceptional case and given a death sentence," unquote. And after the sentencing, Moscow city prosecutor Siohman addressed the press, saying, quote, "Justice has been done, the culprit has been held accountable," unquote. And the glass cage was emptied, and the courtroom was then cleared, and Alexander was dealt with in one of the only ways Russian law allowed.
48:23 Speaker 00 But to reach the place where Alexander will spend the rest of his life, you need two days on a train heading north, then a crossing over the Ob River, and then 50 kilometers of frozen, featureless ground, so there's no roads and nothing to navigate by. And eventually, a settlement appears, named Karp, and it's an urban-type settlement in Russia's Yamalo-Nenyets Autonomous District, above the Arctic Circle. So, basically frozen hell, essentially. And fewer than 5,000 people live there. And the Polar Owl Special Regime Colony sits at the edge of it, which is one of the harshest penal facilities in Russia.
49:02 Speaker 00 And it's built to hold just over 1,000 inmates, and it currently houses roughly 450. And Polar Owl operates across three distinct sections. Lifers go to the special regime wing, long-term inmates serve under the strict regime, and the last is a settlement colony, which is the closest thing to lenient that the facility offers. And the main compound has four housing blocks, and every one of them holds inmates serving life sentences. And several rows of fencing ring the perimeter. High voltage, wire runs between them, and cameras watch- From every corner and guards carry automatic rifles along the outer walls. And every day plays out inside four square meters of concrete. A metal bed, a table, a sink, and a toilet.
49:46 Speaker 00 I think they should have bucket, but that's just me. But you could basically touch every surface without moving your feet in that cell. And that cell holds two inmates. And there's also a barred window, but no one is allowed near it. And standing back, all you can see through it is a narrow strip of sky. And any speaking above a whisper is not allowed. And the daily routine never changes. You wake up at six in the morning, exercise at 6:10, roll call at 6:30, breakfast at seven. Outdoor time runs about two hours. The exercise yard is concrete on every side, topped with a metal grate inside of an open sky. Only inmates with 10 spotless years earn the right to work. And everyone else reads, writes, home, and waits. And no one has ever escaped out of the Polar Owl Colony.
50:30 Speaker 00 The facility hasn't logged a single violent incident between inmates in over a decade. And the men held alongside Alexander are among the most notorious criminals in Russian history. So needless to say, he is rotting in a quite literal frozen hell. The closest thing you could come to it. But that April, Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service announced that Alexander had told investigators he wanted to confess to 11 additional killings, men and women, currently unsolved cases. And a month later, he asked to be moved from Polar Owl to a prison in Mordovia. And the Federal Penitentiary Service luckily said no. And by August, prison physicians had evaluated him and cleared him to stay.
51:12 Speaker 00 No medical grounds for a transfer, though video link hearings. He went after the Federal Penitentiary Service for 100,000 rubles. And he called it compensation for moral suffering and blamed the Arctic conditions for wrecking his health. And at September of 2025, his appeal of the verdict reached the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation. And he wanted the life sentence replaced with 25 years, pointing to what he called mitigating factors, a full confession and willingness to cooperate with investigators. And the Supreme Court did not. Not grant the request. And the man who once called himself almost God now lives in a cell where he can't speak above a whisper. And the man who killed for recognition exists in a place designed to erase every trace of
51:57 Speaker 00 individuality. And whether that constitutes justice or simply containment is left for you to decide. And unfortunately, I don't think we'll ever know how many people he truly killed, but I'm just glad he's rotting in that prison personally. But that is it for the chessboard killer case. Please let me know if you want me to deep dive into any other cases down below. And until then, I will see your beautiful face. Okay. Stay safe out there. Thanks. Bye.
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