The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (22 page)

She takes out Sasha’s collection of pins, which look like the kind of pins any little boy growing up in the Soviet Union might collect. There are pins commemorating the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, pins with Leo Tolstoy’s silhouette, Lenin pins, a pin from Minsk, a pin from the Russian Far East—92 pins in all. She is trying to describe her son. She has photographs of him when he was a little boy, but those are too precious to give away. “You should take them,” she says of the pins. “What can I do with these things?”

What else did Sasha like to do? She says he had a cat named Mursik and a fish tank. She says he liked frogs. Echoing Suprunenko, the detective, she stresses how “ordinary” he was. She says he liked Soviet movies, and he loved the television adaptation of Alexander Dumas’
Countess of Monsoreau
. (During the trial, Pichushkin said he sometimes had to hurry up and finish off a murder before he could rush home, undress, shower—in some cases, scrubbing the blood out of his hair or from under his fingernails—and watch the latest installment of
Countess
, usually with his mother.) She’s says he’s very brave and has a “strong personality” and always does what he wants. Corroborating her son, she says he never lies. Then she tells a story about a lie he once told. One night, Sasha announced he was going for a walk in the park. There were men disappearing almost every week back then, and she and her daughter, Katya, pleaded with him not to go, but Sasha said he wasn’t going to let the Maniac stop him.

Does she know why her son became the Maniac? Was it his father abandoning the family? Did something happen when he was little? This is the question that keeps surfacing and resurfacing. It’s an impossible question, and the only question that really matters now, and every time it comes up, Natasha Pichushkina cries and shakes her head and stares through a window at the darkened courtyard below. “I know now that I raised my son very poorly,” she says. “I can’t say what I did wrong. I just tried to raise him like a normal mother.” She glances at the photographs of Sasha, which have been taped to the refrigerator. In both pictures he stares straight at the camera, unsmiling. She shakes her head, covers her face. After a long time, she looks up and turns her gaze to the television set. Finally she says, “I think I didn’t know my son very well.”

Now she sees her son every two weeks, when she visits him at the prison in the center of the city, about a forty-five-minute metro ride from Khersonskaya Street. This is a temporary routine. Soon, Pichushkin will be transported to a permanent facility far from Moscow. She says she brings him Zolotaya Yava Classic cigarettes, cheese and
salo
, or salted lard. She says that visits are for one hour, and that they never talk about what he did or why he is there. Sometimes, she says, she runs out of things to say. “If I don’t think too much about everything that’s happening, I can go on,” Natasha Pichushkina says. “But what happened is never going away. It will never be the same.” He loved her, she says, and still loves her, but the enormity of his crimes makes it hard to restore any sense of normalcy. When Natasha Pichushkina takes her grandson to the playground most mornings, she almost always sees someone related to someone her son murdered.

N
ATASHA
F
YEDOSOVA LIVES
with her mother and daughter in an apartment, at 8 Khersonskaya, that is identical to Natasha Pichushkina’s, at 2 Khersonskaya. The kitchen, which is no more than 25 square feet, has a table, a gas-lit stove and two chairs. Natasha, 26, is smoking Vogue cigarettes and wears a T-shirt that says JUICY. She has been talking about her father, Pichushkin, Khersonskaya Street, the cops, the investigation. She serves instant coffee. Luydmilla Fyedosova, her mother, comes in and out. She is watching something on television with her granddaughter, Natasha’s daughter, 8-year-old Nastia.

Until Zakharchenko, the first body they found, the Maniac had a routine. He would single out his victim, then hover, circle, watch. He was religious about this. “Pichushkin would wait for hours until his victims were all alone, and then he would approach them,” says Fyedosova, whose father, Boris Fyedosov, was victim No. 36. (Fyedosova, who attended all 46 days of the Maniac’s trial, has become something of a Pichushkin authority.) He would usually begin with small talk, something Russians tend to avoid, or questions about a mutual acquaintance or a family member. (During the trial, victims’ relatives were permitted to ask the Maniac questions. Natasha Fyedosova asked Pichushkin what he talked about with her father before he killed him. The Maniac replied that they talked about her.) Fyedosova, who has a pale, round face and dirty blonde hair, is nearly expressionless as she talks. She recites the many things she has learned about the Maniac with an almost robotic straightforwardness that is disarming and sad. “There was total shock when we heard it was Sasha Pichushkin,” Fyedosova says. “He was always very calm, always by himself.” She says she was upset by the Maniac’s choice of victims. “I thought it was strange that he only wanted to kill people he knew,” she says. “If he had killed people he didn’t know, in another neighborhood, it wouldn’t have been as bad, but he killed people he knew.” Indeed, the Maniac befriended people—he acquired them—so he could kill them. Among his favorite books, says his mother, was an aging Russian translation of Dale Carnegie’s
How to Win Friends and Influence People
.

Victim No. 32, an unidentified middle-aged man who disappeared in the late spring or early summer of 2003, was typical of the Maniac’s victims, Fyedosova says. Pichushkin had been watching him for at least an hour. He had been smoking and drinking on a bench, legs crossed, next to a bus stop around the corner from Pichushkin’s apartment. He was an obvious target, but it was warm outside, and there were too many people, perched on their apartment stoop or peering out of an open window or simply strolling down the street, for Pichushkin to approach. Finally, everyone but his target disappeared, heading inside to their apartments or ducking into the grocery store, and for a few minutes No. 32 was all alone, sitting, smoking, scanning the Ladas heading past the grocery store and kiosks toward the wall of birch trees: the park. Pichushkin, filled with an enormous excitement, came up to the man and began talking.

A few minutes later, they were strolling down the two-lane road toward Bitsevsky Park. It was early evening, and the trees loomed over the power lines on Balaklavski Prospekt, and a red-blue sky stretched across the forest. No. 32 must have been in a sour mood, or perhaps he was just hung over. The Maniac, during the trial, described him as distracted, irritable. As they neared the park, Pichushkin tried to placate him. Perhaps he was worried No. 32 would do something that might disrupt his own death. The excitement had been building inside him for so many hours, the anticipation of this final release was so great, that it would have been painful—unjust—if the inebriated, foul-smelling, melancholy crank had somehow escaped. Pichushkin studied No. 32’s profile as they crossed the
prospekt
. Now they were finally entering the last, abbreviated chapter of this little man’s life, and a bottomless rage filled up the Maniac. He was absorbed by a terrible, almost unimaginable fear that his soon-to-be victim would somehow do something to save himself—and deprive the Maniac of what belonged to him—and he wanted to tear off the little man’s head right there, but he had to wait, just a few minutes longer, until they were inside the protective cloak of trees. As they were about to enter the woods, Pichushkin recalled, he asked the man if he had any wish. “‘My wish is to stop drinking,’” the man said, according to Pichushkin. And Pichushkin replied: “‘I promise you, today will be the day you stop drinking.’”

He always took them to one of two wells that burrowed deep into the ground to a feeder pipe that was part of the city’s sprawling sewer system. He knew exactly how to get there and how long it would take, how many words would need to be spoken before he could attack. As he trudged through the woods, toward the well, No. 32 apparently did not ask too many questions about where they were going or why. He walked or, more likely, stumbled. He was still a little drunk. Sometimes, when they would arrive at the well, Pichushkin would offer his prey another drink and then propose a toast to his dead dog. Pichushkin did not say what he talked about with No. 32 before he killed him. (Being one of the Maniac’s anonymous victims, he was unrepresented at the trial by any family members who could have pressed the Maniac about the details surrounding his death.) And then, suddenly, he took out a hammer or wrench used for removing nails—he is believed to have worn a jacket on each of his hunting expeditions—and struck No. 32 once or twice in the head, hard, but not hard enough to kill him. He wanted his victims to see the person who was taking their lives. Sometimes he would force shards of a broken vodka bottle into their skulls before pushing them down the well. If they weren’t dead before they plunged thirty feet into the ground, the fall killed them. The Maniac did not say what condition No. 32 was in before he pushed him down the well. Later, some of the bodies turned up at a waste-water treatment center about five miles away, having meandered in a northeasterly direction through the underground tunnels, but no one ever connected the bodies to the disappearances near Bitsevsky Park. Many bodies never turned up. At least 13 corpses, including, presumably, that of victim No. 32, became clogged in one of the feeder pipes. Sewage authorities, who said the corpses posed no threat to public drinking water, said they have not removed the bodies because that would require shutting down the city’s waste-water system for several hours, if not longer.

H
E PREFERRED MEN
. Only two, or maybe three, of his victims were women. Unlike Andrei Chikatilo, the sexually dysfunctional sexual predator, or Bundy, who preferred college co-eds, or Bianchi, who raped his victims before strangling them, Pichushkin didn’t want sex. Sex was beneath him. He sought something more pure: an untainted death. What he loved was the leeching away of life, the quiet terror surrounded by trees, shadows, birds. This is not to say that killing was not sexual for Pichushkin. The way the Maniac talked about killing—he would tell the court that one’s first murder is like “first love”—made it sound like killing was a biological imperative. He has said he sometimes ejaculated when he killed. “For the serial killer, the process of preparing to kill and killing is an erotic experience,” says Alexander Bukhanovsky, a psychiatrist and serial-killer expert famous in criminal-justice circles for helping authorities find Chikatilo in the early 1990s. But sex—sexual intercourse with other people—is not erotic for serial killers, Bukhanovsky says. What is erotic is killing and all the associations, the mental links and scents and symbols of taking someone else’s life. For Pichushkin, the biting wind in winter, in the early evening, the birch trees, the blood of old men, a fresh snow, splattered, kaleidoscopic, the crunch of ice and branches, the reverberations of a distant laughter…these were the sources of his sexual energies and the vessel that brought these stirrings to their natural and gruesome apex.

Natasha Fyedosova, who has known Pichushkin’s sister, Katya, 26, since they were little, says Pichushkin never had any interest in girls, never talked about sex or made jokes or looked at women the way boys or men often look. Could Pichushkin have been gay? She shakes her head dismissively. When the subject of Pichushkin’s sexual orientation comes up with his mother, Natasha Pichushkina, she interjects, “My son was actually going to marry someone.” Whom did he plan to marry? She shrugs. She says she never met her. Suprunenko, the detective, also rules out the possibility that Pichushkin is homosexual. He says Pichushkin didn’t have any sexual longing for men; he just didn’t care about women. Bukhanovsky agrees. So does Pavel Kachalov, a psychoanalyst at Moscow’s Serbsky Institute, where Pichushkin was evaluated after being arrested and ultimately found competent to stand trial. No one, it seems, considers it even remotely possible that Pichushkin was gay. And maybe they’re right.

But there’s something else: In Russia, which remains violently homophobic, it may be that people have a hard time believing a gay man is capable of the kind of power or force of will that defined the Maniac. The Maniac is a maniac, and he’s evil, and everyone says so, but he is also very much a man in the way that Russians think of men. He is, in fact, a frighteningly ordinary man: rough, crude, prone to heavy drinking, a smoker, without any future or sense of his place in the world. He works because he needs money, but not a lot. He unloads canned vegetables, moves boxes, talks to almost no one. He has no trajectory or forward momentum. He is not exactly disdainful of those with goals; he is unaware there are any goals to strive for.

So he kills. He follows his passions, like adolescent currents. He does this when he feels like it, which is often. The first time he was 18. That was July 27, 1992. The victim was Mikhail Odichuk. They’d been classmates, and Pichushkin had invited Odichuk on an outing. He was very open. He told Odichuk he wanted to kill someone; they could do it together; he said it would be a joint introduction into the art of life-taking. Odichuk had tagged along, half in jest, not sure what to expect. When Pichushkin realized that Odichuk wasn’t serious about killing anyone, he killed Odichuk instead.

Then he waited nine years. He’d been questioned by the police about Odichuk’s death, and the police let him go because Pichushkin was utterly unremarkable, Pichushkin was like them, Pichushkin was like everyone, and only someone who was unlike everyone else, who was remarkable, singular, could kill. But nine years is a long time to wait, especially for someone who says killing is as important to him as eating is to other people.
There is another consideration: Pichushkin understood very well that when he started killing, not dabbling or experimenting à la Odichuk, but really killing, and killing wantonly, he wouldn’t stop and that this would be the last thing he did and that even though it might last a long time—there would be pauses, codas, like a sonata—he was embracing his fate and this fate would be monumental and irreversible. He must have been enthralled by this idea. But perhaps he was afraid of it, too. He may even have tried to quash it. There is a story (unverified) that has circulated through the apartments on Khersonskaya that in late 2001 or 2002, after he had resumed killing but before most of his victims had died, Pichushkin wandered into one of the police stations near the park and declared for all to hear that he killed people, not once or sometimes but on a regular basis, as if this were his chosen métier. “Because that is what I do,” Pichushkin is said to have said. As the story goes, the cops laughed in Pichushkin’s face and called him a drunk and told him to go home, which he did.