Another reason not to visit Russia:
Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/13/news/slay.php[/quote]
MOSCOW: The trial of a grocery store shelf-stocker accused of trying to become the most prolific serial killer in post-Soviet Russia began Thursday with the man glaring from a cage and dismissing a defense lawyer while relatives of victims called for his death.
The accused, Aleksandr Pichushkin, 33, has been charged with 49 counts of murder, part of what the authorities describe as a macabre and sustained scheme to kill one person for every square on a chess board.
The charges include one count for each for the dozens victims that prosecutors say they have linked to a six-year spree in a densely forested Moscow park that ended with his arrest last year. He is suspected as well of the killing of a rival for a girlfriend's affection by pushing the man from a window in 1992.
Pichushkin appeared in Moscow City Court - pale, scarred and coldly defiant - and paced slowly in a cage while victims' relatives and potential jurors filed into the room.
When the judge asked him to sit, one of the victims relatives shouted, "On the needles!"
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Pichushkin sat on a bench quietly, looking contemptuous and bored. Minutes later he asked the judge to dismiss one of his two defense lawyers, saying the lawyer was collaborating with prosecutors. "He has no intention of defending my interests," he said.
The judge granted him his wish. The lawyer quickly left the room and declined to comment later. His other lawyer also declined a request for an interview.
Pichushkin's case has attracted fascination and revulsion here, in part because of his grisly boasts on national television but also because of his mercurial air.
He was originally known as the Bitsevsky Maniac, a nickname derived from the park where he is accused of luring people into drinking sessions that ended when he drowned them in a sewer or pounded them to death with a hammer or other blunt object.
After his arrest last year, investigators said he claimed to have marked off the squares on a chess board, a square for every victim, with a goal of filling all 64 squares. The Russian news media promptly assigned him a new name: the Chessboard Killer.
In a television interview after his arrest, Pichushkin spoke of killing as if it was both ordinary and required. "For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you," he said.
But this year he demanded a jury trial and has appeared satisfied by the spectacle that has surrounded him.
One of his main deceptions, the authorities said, was to befriend pensioners and alcoholics, and tell them that he was grieving the death of his dog. Then, they said, he would invite them for a drink in the woods at the dog's grave.
After drinking vodka with them, the authorities said, he would pounce.
Relatives of victims wept and vented their hatred for him outside the court. Nadezhda Bychkova said her brother, Nikolai Zakharchenko, was killed by Pichushkin in November 2005. He lived four doors down from Pichushkin and often walked in the park.
When Zakharchenko's body was found, his skull was so broken that little of his head remained.
The authorities also say that Pichushkin claimed to have killed at least 61 people, but so far they have not found evidence for more than 49 murders and three attempted murders.
But one indicator of the resonance of Pichushkin's claims of more murder was evident outside the courtroom, where two people sat and said that there relatives had disappeared. They suspected that Pichushkin had killed them as well.
One of Pichushkin's goals, prosecutors have said, was to kill at least 53 people, one more than the number of victims of Andrei Chikatilo, the so-called Rostov Ripper. Chikatilo was convicted of 52 murders in 1992 and executed by firing squad in 1994.
Russia put a moratorium on the death penalty in 1996. Pichushkin faces life imprisonment if convicted.
Bychkova proposed a harsher fate. "I would chop off his limbs myself, limb by limb, and do it publicly," she said.
"He does not deserve to walk on this earth."
Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/13/news/slay.php[/quote]