Russian serial killer: "I felt like God"

By Chris Baldwin

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Russian supermarket worker found guilty of murdering 48 people told his trial on Thursday he felt like God as he decided whether his victims should live or die.

"I took the most valuable thing, human life," Alexander Pichushkin said. "I didn't take anything else of value from them. Money, jewellery, I didn't need it. I felt like God."

He described his motives for murder, taunting the court and smirking as journalists recorded his every word after the judge invited him to make a final statement at the closing session of his trial. He will be sentenced next week.

Pichushkin also said he felt like lawyer, jury, judge and executioner presiding over his helpless victims.

The victims' families sat in room 507 of the Moscow City Court listening to Pichushkin.

He claimed to have killed 63 people by inviting them to drink vodka in Bitseksvy Park in southern Moscow. He smashed his victims' skulls and threw their unconscious or lifeless bodies into a swift-moving sewage canal.

"I didn't torture anybody, that was my style, my signature," Pichushkin said, disputing court charges that he first rendered his mostly elderly victims helpless and then killed with extreme cruelty.

"The only criteria I had was that the person was maximally familiar to me. Age played a secondary role."

Pichushkin, 33, preyed on the margins of society -- drug addicts, alcoholics, the poor and elderly. Police often went months without knowing the victims were missing because no relatives came forward.

His first victim was Misha Odiichuk, a classmate who refused Pichushkin's plan at age 18 to commit a murder together.

Odiichuk's father Pyotr sat in the front row clutching a small folder of fading school photographs that showed an unsmiling Pichushkin posing with Misha and other classmates.

"What did he kill my son for? He didn't drink, didn't smoke. All he wanted to do was take pictures," Odiichuk said after the session in court.

Pichushkin admitted to killing 63 people when police contacted him about the disappearance of a female co-worker, but was charged with 49 murders. One charge was withdrawn last week.

For his claimed murders, local media began calling him "the chessboard killer", after police said they found a collection of bottle caps covering all but one of the 64 squares of a chessboard in the apartment he shared with his mother.

"I alone was prosecutor, I was the lawyer, jury, judge. I was whoever it needed to be. And I decided who was going to live and who wasn't. I was just like God," Pichushkin told the court.

He appeared lucid and well-tempered on Thursday. He disputed some court procedures, objecting to descriptions of what went on in Bitsevsky Park by prosecutors who were not present.