Life sentence for "chess board killer"

A former grocery clerk was sentenced today to life in a hard labor colony for slaying 48 people in an effort to fill all 64 squares on a chessboard, luring his elderly, alcoholic victims with vodka and dumping them in a Moscow park. Alexander Pichushkin, who claimed to have killed 60 people, stood in a reinforced glass cage with his hands cuffed behind his back as a judge delivered the harshest possible punishment under Russian law.

When Judge Vladimir Usov asked Pichushkin whether he understood the sentence, the defendant replied: "I'm not deaf." The courtroom was packed with journalists and the victims' relatives, some of whom said life in prison was not enough. Experts at Russia's main psychiatric clinic found Pichushkin sane but Usov said he would have to undergo psychiatric treatment at the prison for "a personality disorder expressed in a sadistic inclination toward murder." He added, however, that Pichushkin was aware of the criminal nature of his actions.

Pichushkin killed most of his victims in southern Moscow's sprawling Bittsa Park from 2001 until his arrest in 2006. Prosecutors said Pichushkin drew in homeless, alcoholic and elderly people by promising them vodka if they would join him in mourning the death of his dog. He killed most by throwing them into a sewage pit after they were drunk, and in a few cases strangled or hit them in the head, prosecutors said.

(This funny-meant picture was published at this blog last week and seems painstakingly topical.)

Beginning in 2005, he began to kill with "particular cruelty," hitting his intoxicated victims multiple times in the head with a hammer, then sticking an unfinished bottle of vodka into their shattered skulls, prosecutors said. He also no longer tried to conceal the bodies. They said he killed 11 people in 2001, including six in one month. "Justice has been done," Moscow city prosecutor Yuri Syomin said after the sentencing. "The culprit has been held accountable."

Source: CBS News.

This report was put online by Russia Today on October 22:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehaX8ruxp2I[/video]

And this one, by the BBC, is of October 24:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnK8gl-zfOw[/video]