The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (23 page)

In any event, his nine-year respite ended May 17, 2001, when he killed Yevgeny Pronin, victim No. 2. Over the course of the next eight weeks, he would kill nine more people. This killing spree within a killing spree culminated on July 21, when victim No. 11, Victor Volkov, disappeared. That fall and winter the killing continued, but it was less feverish; six or seven people were snuffed out during this stretch. Then, on February 23, 2002, Pichushkin tried and failed to kill Maria Viricheva. Viricheva, who was pregnant at the time, fell down the well Pichushkin pushed her into, and then somehow got herself to a hospital. At the hospital, she was reported by Russian newspapers to have told the
militsioneri
, the police, about the attack in the park. The cops asked for Viricheva’s registration papers. (Millions of Russian citizens in Moscow live there illegally; jobs outside the capital are scarce.) Viricheva said she didn’t have any papers, and the cops told her that if she stayed quiet about her attack they’d stay quiet about her “illegal habitation.” Viricheva, now in prison for an unrelated incident, opted to stay in Moscow.

The Maniac killed three more people in the two weeks following Viricheva. Then, a month later, he encountered Mikhail Lobov, age 13. It’s unlikely he knew Lobov, who didn’t come from one of the apartment houses on Khersonskaya, and it’s unclear where exactly they met—probably on Kakhovka Prospekt, near the metro station, where the kids with leather jackets and multiple piercings drink vodka from large plastic containers and hang out next to the moveable flower stands and the dumpling kiosks. But once the pair entered the forest, Pichushkin did not stray from his script. A fifteen-, maybe twenty-minute slog through the snowy woods. Cigarettes. A few swigs of whatever they were drinking. Some faux-camaraderie—“
Tiy menya uvazhaesh, i ya tebya uvazhaiyu, tak davai vipe’em!
” or “You respect me, and I respect you, so let’s drink!” And then the surprise blow to the head, followed by a shove down the well.

Then Pichushkin turned and exited the park—but didn’t notice that Lobov’s jacket had caught on one of the metal fittings inside the well. Lobov managed to crawl out of the well and, once outside the park, found a cop. “This guy tried to kill me,” he told the cop, but the cop told Lobov to go home. A week later, Lobov was back at the Kakhovskaya metro station when he happened to see Pichushkin, who would tell everyone in court that it didn’t matter what Lobov said about him or what happened in the park or anything to anyone because nobody would believe a punk who hung out at metro stations with beggars and other punks, which is true everywhere and especially in Russia. But Lobov began screaming and clawing at his hair, and he grabbed one of the
militsioneri
standing outside the station and started pointing and shouting and telling the cops they had to do something. But they did nothing. Once again, they told him to scram. All this came out in the Russian press years later, after Pichushkin had killed at least another 25 people—about one a month, on average, from 2001 to 2006, before he was finally arrested.

T
HE MOST IMPORTANT FACT
about Nikolai Zakharchenko—the first body—is not that he was the first body. It’s that he was victim No. 41. That means at least 40 people vanished—were murdered—before the police, and then the detectives at the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor General’s Office, realized there was a serial killer in Moscow.

“Before perestroika, the system was better,” says Alexander Bukhanovsky, the psychiatrist and serial-killer expert. “There was a process. It was more methodical. Now the police don’t know very much.” Yuri Antonyan, a Moscow lawyer who teaches at the Institute for Humanities Education and co-authored a leading text on serial killers, says: “It may take about 30 or 40 murders until serial killers are found in our country. In Great Britain, it takes only seven or eight.” In the United States, he says, it usually takes about the same time as it does in Britain; sometimes, it can be a bit longer. The bottom line, Bukhanovsky says, is that the Maniac’s desire to kill vastly exceeded the system’s capacity to stop him—or even recognize that he existed.

The system, of course, is not really a system. That’s because Russia has never had a genuine rule of law. The only people who have ever mattered are the people who own the law, the power, or
vlast
, which is to say the Kremlin and its many clients. Until not so long ago, the southern precincts of Moscow, the asshole of the world, with their Martian-like apartment complexes and indistinguishable avenues peppered with gray facades and fast-food joints and a new, neon gaudiness, were a series of medieval villages teeming with peasants. Before the revolution, the peasants lived on postage-stamp subsistence farms that were muddy, crowded and reminiscent of a Bruegel canvas. Maybe they had a pig, some chickens, a goat. Then, after the 1917 revolution, the peasants were herded into
kommunalki
, or communal-housing projects, and they were forcefully urbanized and told that they were now members of the newly concocted proletariat even though they didn’t know what that meant. And then, about fifty years ago, they were given one- or two-bedroom
khrushchovki
, and they were happy inside their tiny hives with their dim lights and ceilings stretching seven feet high because they had never had anything that was theirs, and now they had somewhere to drink at night, and eat their slab of meat and procreate somewhere other than a common room they shared with their mothers and fathers and their children. Nina Asanova, a forensic psychiatrist who has spent years working in Russia’s criminal-justice system, calls these people “dead souls.”

That forty or fifty or a hundred or several thousand dead souls might disappear into a snowy wood probably bothered no one in the power. “These are people,” Asanova says, “without money surrounded by alcoholism and a kind of primitive, brutal sex. As for the bums, they’re not protected at all. The police aren’t going to worry about them. It was a very rational decision the Maniac made, killing these people.” Had he hewed to his own script—tossing his victims into sewage pipes—it’s unlikely the Maniac would have ever been caught. Of course, once the higher-ups at the Prosecutor General’s Office learned what was going on—once bodies began appearing in Bitsevsky Park, and a crippling fear enveloped the city, and the people crammed into their rusting dens on Khersonskaya Street and then their neighbors and then everyone else, all the urban peasants, began screaming for something to be done—it was only eight months before Pichushkin was arrested, which Suprunenko (correctly) notes is “excellent as far as tracking down serial killers is concerned.”

T
HE DISCOVERY OF
Z
AKHARCHENKO’S CORPSE
not only marked a turning point for the authorities or the people on Khersonskaya Street. It also pointed to something important going on inside the Maniac. In Pichushkin’s mind, Zakharchenko’s killing was a boundary of sorts, a dotted line that delimited the Maniac who wanted to kill from the Maniac who wanted to be known.

All along, or at least since he began killing in earnest in 2001, Pichushkin had been consumed by an irreconcilable conflict: He wanted to kill and he wanted everyone to know he was the killer. He felt an intense, almost overwhelming need to murder, and he deeply craved the respect and adulation of others. During the trial, Pichushkin treated the assembled to a story. One night, he was watching television with his mother and sister at home, and there was a report about the serial killer terrorizing Bitsevsky Park. His sister suddenly exclaimed: “It’s so fascinating. This mad man, he’s so fascinating. Who is he?” And Pichushkin had to fight very hard—he was practically bursting—not to tell her she was sitting next to him.

But after Zakharchenko, the conflict inside the Maniac began to seethe and overflow. Now he killed aggressively, openly, leaving bodies in the snow, the mud, sprawled across a grassy plain, tucked between the trees. The worst, says Natasha Fyedosova, was the corpse they found by the side of one of the streams that runs through the park. He had been killed at least two days earlier, and it was snowing, and some wild dogs had found him first. “There was a doctor walking his dog,” she says, “and he saw one of these wild dogs, and the dog had a bone in his mouth, and the doctor, because he’s a doctor, knew the bone was human.” The “permanent tension,” in Bukhanovsky’s words, pitting Pichushkin against Pichushkin was nearing its climax, and everyone on Khersonskaya could feel it. An awful quiet, a waiting, descended on the
prospekt
and the apartment-caves and the courtyards and the grocery store and the kiosks. People talked about hearing shouts and cries echoing through the forest. There were sightings, imaginings. Children no longer ventured into the woods.
The woods, the park, was now a blackened netherland, a symbol of something that was happening around them, something that was happening to them. The babushkas, the “voices of the old wisdom,” as Natasha Fyedosova says, talked about Satan paying a visit one winter’s night to Moscow.

After they found him, there were people, journalists, television commentators, who compared Pichushkin to Dostoevsky’s Rodion Raskalnikov, who killed because he needed the money but really because he believed he had a right to kill. This feels a bit too neat. Dostoevsky, after all, was railing against a Russia that had lost its faith. Pichushkin comes from a Russia that never had any faith to begin with. Raskalnikov found redemption after he reclaimed his God; Pichushkin had no God to reclaim. Post-Soviet Russia is a country that has been reengineered so many times that the old ideologies, traditions and religiosities are little more than old, mildewy, sapped of any application or relevance. Unlike Dostoevsky’s pre-Bolshevik, nineteenth-century Russia, in which those who believed battled those who did not, there is no battle in Pichushkin’s Russia. That battle ended several decades ago, and now there are very few people, irrespective of who they are or how much power they exercise, who believe in anything—God, truth, beauty, love—except for a raw and primal violence. The Maniac is their cause and effect.

P
ICHUSHKIN MUST HAVE KNOWN
the end was near. He must have sensed that the civil war inside him was erupting and that soon he would do something stupid and they would find him. Corpses were appearing regularly, and now that the Prosecutor General’s Office was involved and everyone knew there was a maniac out there, there were police scouring the park twenty-four hours a day—uniformed officers, plainclothes cops, cops on horseback—and they were narrowing their search, talking to everyone, compiling sketches of possible suspects.

But in the very end, it was the Maniac’s decision. All the victims’ family members, the prosecutors, most everyone with any connection to the case, say Suprunenko and his team did a superb job. But in the very end, it was Pichushkin who hand-delivered Pichushkin to the police.

He had gone on a walk with Marina Moskavalyeva, a coworker at the grocery store. She had told him that she’d left a note for her son saying she was with Sasha Pichushkin. He kept saying to himself, once they were in the park, that he shouldn’t kill her because they’d know it was him. But he wanted to. So Moskavalyeva had to die.

A few hours later, when Moskavalyeva hadn’t come home and her son was watching television and saw that they’d found another body in the park and that it was a woman, he called his father, and then they called the police. “We had the note,” Suprunenko says, “and we had video footage of Pichushkin and this woman getting on the metro at Novye Cheryomushki and getting off at Konkovo”—on the orange-line, which is to the immediate west of the park—“so we naturally suspected Pichushkin.”

It’s worth pointing out that the Maniac, who had made a point of never lying, lied about killing Marina Moskavalyeva. There had been other lies, of course, ten million tiny deceptions meant to lure his victims into the park, but these had been secondary prevarications about the details or circumstances surrounding the upcoming death, not death itself. No one had ever asked Pichushkin point blank if he had ever killed anyone. But then Moskavalyeva’s son, before picking up the phone to call his father, who would then call the police, rang Pichushkin. Pichushkin, after all, was supposed to be taking a stroll with his mother. But when he reached Pichushkin, Pichushkin said he hadn’t seen Moskavalyeva. He lied knowing everyone would know he was lying.

Two nights later, on July 16, 2006, close to midnight, everyone—Natasha Pichushkina, Katya, little Seriozh and, of course, the Maniac—was about to go to sleep at 2 Khersonskaya when suddenly someone was knocking at the door. This was strange; usually you had to hit the buzzer to be let into the building. Outside, they could hear voices, a radio dispatcher. They looked out the window and there were cars on the one-lane road; there were lights and noise, people circling around. Natasha Pichushkina says she opened the door very slowly, and when she did, a column of men in uniforms pushed through the narrow corridor crammed with jackets and sandals and old boxes, through the musty doorway into the little bedroom where Alexander Pichushkin was about to tuck in for the night. In under a minute, Natasha Pichushkina says, the tiny, two-bedroom
khrushchovka
was flooded with heavily armed riot police: boots, automatic rifles, handcuffs. “They were kind to me,” she says. “They said they just wanted to talk to him about some burglaries that had happened, but I thought there were a lot of police for a burglar, and I asked Sasha, ‘Did you rob someone?’ and he said, ‘No.’” Natasha Pichushkina added that her son did not resist when the police took him away. He didn’t say anything at all.

After Pichushkin was escorted out of the building, they gave her some documents stating exactly what he was being accused of, and she had a hard time saying anything or moving or sitting down or thinking. She couldn’t focus. They stayed all night—the cops, detectives, forensics experts—turning her apartment upside down looking for things that might send her son to prison forever.