Murder Monday #2 Alexander Pichuskin

  Keeping on the trend of "goal setting killers," let's talk about Alexander Pichuskin, although most people know him as the Chessboard Killer. Pichuskin was on April 9, 1974, in Russia and was known as a fairly sociable child although at the age of four he fell off his swing, resulting in damage to his frontal cortex. Once he was in school, he was physically and verbally bullied, which intensified his anger, and eventually, his mother put him in a school for disabled children, I couldn't find anything about Pichuskin's father just btw. Anyways, his grandfather though, was kind of his father figure and believed that Pichuskin was much smarter and the school wasn't engaging him enough so he taught him how to play chess and for a while, this was his outlet for aggression.
  However, his aggression never went away and in 1992, Pichuskin committed his first murder when he pushed a boy out of a window, killing him. Pichuskin was questioned but eventually, the police declared the death a suicide and Pichuskin just got away with murder for the first time. It wouldn't be until the early 2000s when he would strike again. His methodology would be to lure people, usually the elderly or destitute, to "drink at his dead dog's grave," now technically he did get a dog when his grandfather died but whether this was actually his dog's grave or just a ruse we're not sure, and once he lured his victim away, he would hit them repeatedly over the head with a blunt object and then dump the bodies in a sewer pit to conceal the body; for some of his victims, the blow to the head did not kill them and instead the drowned in the sewer pits. The more he killed, the more brazen he got. He stopped dumping the bodies and would leave them in the open and even would even leave vodka bottles sticking out of his victims' skulls. It wouldn't be until June of 2006 when he killed a coworker of his, however, she left her son a note saying that she was going for a walk with Pichuskin and so when she didn't come back,  the police had a suspect right away.
   After he was arrested police found a chessboard in his apartment with dates on almost all 64 of the tiles, dates of his murders. His goal was to fill the entire chessboard with his murders. Unfortunately, the police were only able to charge him with 51 counts of murder and attempted murder, even though Pichusken would state that he killed 61 or 63 people. In October 2007, the jury found him guilty of 48 counts of murder and 3 counts of attempted murder and he was given a life sentence, although this case has given rise to potentially reinstating the death penalty in Russia.