(AP)
Updated: 2007-08-14 10:07

MOSCOW -- One by one, the squares on the chessboard filled up with numbers - each commemorating a murder.

Alexander Pichushkin is escorted into a court room in Moscow on Monday, Aug. 13, 2007. [AP]

Alexander Pichushkin allegedly killed most of his victims in a sprawling Moscow park, smashing their skulls with a hammer or throwing them into sewage pits after getting them drunk. He boasted he had nearly reached the last square, No. 64, by the time police captured him last year.

"For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you," he told investigators in a nationally televised confession. "I felt like the father of all these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to another world."

Pichushkin, 33, looked calm and aloof Monday as he sat in the defendant's cage of the Moscow City Court during a preliminary hearing in which a judge accepted his request for a jury trial and ruled it would start Sept. 13.

After his June 2006 arrest, Pichushkin claimed he had killed more than 60 people over several years, but prosecutors said they had evidence to charge him with only 49 murders carried out in Moscow's Bittsa Park between 2005-2006.

At the cramped apartment where he shared a bedroom with his mother, police found his chessboard with numbers attached to its squares - all the way up to 62.

Most of the victims were men, many of them homeless, whom Pichushkin had allegedly lured to the park with a promise of vodka. To some, he proposed a toast in memory of the dog he walked in the park and buried there when it died, investigators say.

Pichushkin allegedly rammed sticks or vodka bottles into the shattered skulls of some of his victims. More than 40 were purportedly killed by being tossed into a sewage pit.

As the killings grew more frequent in 2005 and panic spread through the public, hundreds of police were sent to sweep the 6.6-square-mile park for suspects.

At one point last year, police thought they had a break in the case: Officers shot and arrested a man who had brandished a knife as he tried to flee a police patrol. To show they were on the wrong track, Pichushkin killed two more victims within a week, he told investigators.

Pichushkin said police in the area repeatedly stopped him for identity checks but let him go.

He was finally caught when officers found his name and phone number on a piece of paper in the apartment of his last victim, a woman who worked with Pichushkin in a food store. She had apparently become suspicious of Pichushkin and had left behind a note so police would be able to track him down.

"As we were heading to the park and talking, I kept thinking whether to kill her or take caution," Pichushkin said in the confession. "But finally I decided to take a risk. I was in that mood already."

He denied involvement at first, but then confessed to the woman's murder after police confronted him with subway surveillance camera footage that showed him with her. Pichushkin went on to confess to at least 62 murders and led police to the bodies of victims.

One of three men who survived being thrown into sewage dumps went on to identify Pichushkin as his assailant.

Russian media, including the government-run Rossisskaya Gazeta, have speculated that Pichushkin may have been motivated by a macabre competition with Russia's most notorious serial killer: Andrei Chikatilo, who was convicted in 1992 of killing 52 children and young women over the course of 12 years.

Pichushkin said in the televised confessions that he had killed his first victim, a classmate, in 1992 when he was 18. Police had questioned him then, but no charges were filed. The killings in the Bittsa Park began almost a decade later.

The Moscow Times quoted an unidentified law enforcement source as saying that Pichushkin grew up without a father and that his mother had placed him in a home for disadvantaged and troubled children. Later, she sent him to live with his grandfather.

Defense lawyer Pavel Ivannikov told reporters outside the courtroom Monday that Pichushkin had admitted guilt on all charges. Pichushkin faces life in prison if convicted; Russia has a moratorium on capital punishment.

Experts at the Serbsky Institute, Russia's main psychiatric clinic, have found Pichushkin sane.