Doomed to Fail - Ep 57: A Most Dangerous Game - Alexander Pichushkin - The Chess Board Killer

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

Today in True Crime we head to Russia for the story of Alexander Pichushkin - The Chess Board Killer. No, he didn't just kill Knights and Rooks - instead, he attacked the most vulnerable people in post-Soviet Union Russia and tried to fill his chess board by killing 64 people. Before he was finally caught he got pretty damn close.We love Russian History so it tracks that we would also find a great Russian True Crime Tale.Pics via NY Times & Wikipedia, & Midjourney Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail]  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortonthall James Simpson, case number B.A. 019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. And we're off. And we're recording. So we'll go ahead and kick things off. Welcome to Doom to Fail, the podcast where we cover things that are doomed to fail, whether true crime or historical. I'm Fars, joined by Taylor. Hi, Taylor. Hi, Fars. Hi, my axe. my hand in the axe from last week oh my god i was laughing just i listened to it and i was laughing about it again when i was trying to do my like outro and you're like itching your face with a freaking axe and i'm like farce you'll never you'll never learn um i'll never learn um so i

i you know it's funny i uh i told i just told taylor that my family was in talent visiting this weekend which was like incredibly stressful and borderline nightmarish and completely hellish i'm definitely not relaxed and not ready for the week but in addition of that it was actually my high school 20 year reunion this last weekend did you go um no because my parents were here oh right right and you're from wait party from dallas oh no you're in austin i'm back in austin yes exactly and so i live in austin reunions in dallas and you know like when i saw a couple of pictures start trickling in on social media i was like oh man i need to set a reminder for like 10 years to go to like the 30 year reunion reunion and then i saw like all these other pictures shooting

upload and i was like i will i'm so glad it didn't go oh my god i had the exact same experience because i'm two years older than you but they just did mine because my 20 year reunion was like during covid so they moved it and then like i saw pictures go in and i was like oh why didn't i get invited and then i remember that i blocked the facebook group about it because i didn't want to get invited yeah i was like oh right i chose not to do that and then And then also, I don't know half the fucking people there. I was like, I don't know who people are. I mean, that was the thing.

I was looking at pictures. I was like, so I'm so bad at names. I'm so bad at faces. Like I, there's so many people that I would run into like conferences. I'm like, I know your face. I think we met. I have no idea where. I have no idea when.

I don't know your name. I don't know who you work for. And look at these pictures. I'm like, I recognize a lot of them. But I'm like, man, like a lot of I don't recognize. And what do you do? You just walk up and say, oh, also, I used to go. I used to go by Farmer's. I used to go by my full name. And I would go by Farz. And it's like, hey, I'm Farmer's. And it's like, I don't. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Also, I don't really want to, like, hang out with any of these people. I know. I feel like, it was fun when it was a mystery. Like, I know my dad, like, when he went to his, like, tenure, his reunion, there was a guy that he was good friends with who was dead. You know, like, he didn't know. Because, like, you didn't know because it was the 80s, you know. But now, all right.

I mean, I talked to who I want to talk to. Yeah, exactly. It's curated my friendships from high school. And this whole experience is where you know, my family being here and just fucking annoying the shit out of me, it just reminded me like, dude, I don't have to spend time with people I don't want to fucking spend time with. Like, I've earned the right to be like, dude, I'm going to fucking check out and do my own thing. And I'm within my rights to do that. It's also like during the pandemic when I blocked a bunch of my cousins on Facebook because they were being ridiculous and embarrassing. And then one of my cousins was like, I saw my mom the other day.

and he was like so Taylor blocked me and she's like well Taylor has strong opinions and I'm like yeah a strong opinion it is he's fucking dumb and I'm a grown up I don't have to know him exactly exactly like we're allowed we're allowed to do that like it's okay to do that so anyways yeah like that was that was literally the experience I had of this weekend and now this talking through here but we can go ahead and dive right in and start chattering away Taylor who goes first today you do I believe cool I think I have a relative straightforward and short one because my topic is not very well covered despite being relatively recent so I'll go ahead and why don't you tell you where you're drinking I can dive right in yeah let me just make sure you go first I think you do because the last thing we did was yeah let's you know was the axe murders I did not think of a drink I forgot I'm gonna say ice water nice and healthy stay hydrated yeah lots of ice water cold cold cold cold water lovely lovely ice water awesome oh what oh shit but it's in a bad way i didn't do the thing you told me to do oh that's fine i want to

talk about it because i didn't like it so we'll talk about it in a minute great okay uh so bypass that okay my drink is going to be bloody vodka because we're going to the motherland again of russia Is that like a Bloody Mary with, or like just vodka with like literal blood in it? I mean, it would be better if you have literal blood, preferably the blood of like a very old man that you can like pour in. But if you don't, you can also make a Bloody Mary. Sweet. Get some cloud of juice. Which I enjoy.

You do love, you do love that. So, you know, as we already learned, you stole my whole idea, giving that it's October to do like a Halloween theme. I try to steal your ideas whenever possible. I know, I know. But this guy is actually more Batman themed than Halloween named. Amazing. I'm going to be covering a guy whose name, I would assume you would know, Taylor. His name is Alexander Petushkin. I think so. Keep going.

He's also known as the chessboard killer. Ooh, that's exciting. I feel like maybe I know a little bit, but not a ton. So tell me more. So I looked up the Batman universe. and in the D.C. pantheons, there is a gang known as the chessmen. Okay. They operate in Gotham and the narrows, which I don't know what the narrows are, but it comes up a lot in the Batman movies.

And the way that they communicate with each other is they give each other different chests, or different colored squares. And then each member can only go a certain direction, kind of like a chest piece. And so they're like, hey, Bill. here's your square and bill can only go diagonal so he just has to run diagonal to get to the next crime spot that's the whole idea between behind the chest men and that's how they evade authority so that was i heard like the chessboard killer and i was like that's kind of cute this one's this story is not that cute though it's a lot less cute than that than the dc universe

yeah it doesn't it doesn't sound cute when you put the word killer at the end of it unless it's like a puppy the puppy killer no no not the puppy killer like this puppy's named killer. He's a puppy, but get it because he's a puppy. That was on me. I said that they're on it. Got it, got it, got it. The only time the word killer is cute is if you name your puppy killer, continue. Got it, got it, okay. I heard it the other way around. Don't kill puppies, go. Nobody killed puppies. So Alex, I'm not referred to him as Alex. So he was known as a chessboard killer because he was super good at chess and because he wanted to kill as many people as there were

squares on a chessboard how many squares on a chessboard taylor pop quiz 26 45 64 64 i have no idea um i thought you were going to say maybe he only wanted to kill like kings and queens and knights because that'd be fun that would be fun that would be a little cuter i think yeah no he killed he killed elderly old men oh yes not cute not cute is getting less cute the more we talk about it i know i know that's that's the case of all my stories i i was trying to research if this guy's actually good at chess so there's a there's a rating system in chess called the elop rating and so a really good chess player like an exceptional chess player is given like a 2000 a pretty good chess player is 1700 by all accounts like what people were saying about this guy is this

is relatively recent history is that he was ranking somewhere around a 1200 which was like a little bit better than a beginner so he was okay like you'd beat a lot of people but he wasn't like a a chess master and all he would do is just play retired old men not retired homeless old men who are kind of retired i guess in the park yeah we'd say that just in the park can we say that like homeless men are also retired yeah they're not working there you go all right there we go so he was playing retired men so that's the way he usually got his practice in so regardless as i said his goal was to kill 64 people which is the number of squares on a chessboard later on he would argue that his motives had more to do with another incredibly famous serial killer in

russia called andre chikotillo saying that he wanted to yeah saying he wanted to like basically andre got caught the year this guy got started killing and so he like came up with him in his like it was a common thing in russia to talk about this guy yeah he like beat him so handedly like Andre killed eight people in total. This guy at the time he was caught, he killed 49, that they know of. But it was actually like probably closer to 60 that he actually killed. He's pretty close. Yeah, he like actually almost achieved his dream, which is kind of blotable in a lot of ways.

Wow. So the doomed to fell part here is that I'm lying when I say this, but can we just blame chess on this? something happens to your brain when you get really good at chess I think I mean look at the Fisher guy who turned into an opposite like a weird type of person is really good at chess oh I don't know maybe like causation corollization correlation okay fine there's no due to fail component here because he'll just killed the theory I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm just having conversation and are you mad also because you didn't finish checking chess classes

with those kids all right okay so long story short where else I was living in L.A. I went and took like a chess class because I was trying to get really good at chess. And I went to stay at Monica. I took a chess class. It was free. And I walked in and they were like, okay, your first task is going to play this like fucking toddler. That's like, okay, not a toddler. He was like maybe like seven years old. Okay. It was a seven year old kid. This kid, like he, he wouldn't even pay attention when I moved. Like you just come, do a move. He'd run around, like, jump him and down. And then he'd have like a snack pack. And then he'd come back and do another move. And then he'd beat me in like four moves. He was like. crazy i was like he was playing like four games at the same time oh my god so funny yes i'm upset that my chess career never panned out unfortunately so let's we'll move on we'll move on for this so getting the life of alex so he was born in moscow in 1974 this is during the usssr era of russia where poverty and being completely destitute is basically a way of life in his childhood he was apparently pretty outgoing and sociable as a child until when he was four years old he was on a park swing he fell backwards on a swing when he came up the swing it smacked him hard

in the head it doesn't sound like it should have been that bad but by all accounts it's like really really bad but by all accounts his personality like changed that day from it's like precocious outgoing child to like someone who's very introverted and kind of hostile to people which I don't always happens does it do you always have a thing so many serial killers have head injuries when they're kids yeah like 80 90% of them do and it's crazy how like your brain is you know so it's kind of important fragile you know like you like shake one piece up and you like you forget you forget how to read you know or like so what they were saying was because he was four years old they were like okay so if this had happened when he was like close to like his 18th first

nothing would have gone wrong because his skull would have been so hard at the front like adults skulls are like super hard apparently and so your skull is like in a lot of pieces when you're a baby it's like a tectonic plate stop putting your axe near your head I feel like I'm also worried because your axe no longer in your bedroom so now what are you going to do I'm not going to protect myself yeah I'll throw Luna at the intruders but yeah you know how babies have a soft spot on their head do you remember that yeah it's the middle right yeah because they're heads aren't fully to get out their head has to squish a little bit so it can get out of that hole and so yeah so it doesn't get fully hard until later which makes sense that hitting your head when you're a kid can really fuck you up so around 13 or 14 Alex left his mother's home and went to live with his grandmother and grandfather mostly that sounds like the mom just wasn't like able to cope with having a kid that's like probably has a little bit of autism mostly it sounds like and the grandparents were fucking awesome this is like one of those rare cases where like the upbringing of this kid was like great like his grandfather was like hey

we just like basically the mom put him in like a remedial school for like kids with learning disabilities and all they would do is like try to teach him how to be quote unquote normal and Alex's grandpa was like no there's nothing you are the way you are there's nothing wrong with the way you are we're not going to try and keep trying to change you to be like this version of yourself that you're never going to be we're just going to try and find and accentuate the better qualities that you could have if you were given the opportunity to do so and so this is how he yeah this is how he got into chess so the grandfather would take him to this park next to their house and teach him chess and then have him play with

other people and like it just like it gave him that outlet it gave him a thing to do that he became really good at so that was basically it you would play chess with these like elderly men he played just with grandpa and that would be what would occupy his time when he wasn't in school and apparently this kind of diminished his hostile behavior and his like outwardly introverted uh nature and so around like a little bit around 18 years old his grandfather died of natural causes and this basically sent him spiraling because like thinking about this kid was like he basically had nobody for like all this time and then he finally found this elder guy who's like really nice to him and and loves him and then he goes away and he ends up dying and so

Alex would still play chess in the park but he would also supplement that was something new that happened as his grandfather died so there are two things that came came along which actually sound like pretty common Russian pastimes the first one was he was started drinking a shitload of vodka who's always drinking vodka which feels customary and the second thing which also feels kind of customary is he would film himself basically assaulting children so there's like one story i read where he held a kid by his like legs outside of a window saying he's going to drop him and like that sounds like what putin does like recreationally that's fair i don't feel like that's a russian stereotype as much as vodka is but i too but sure i'm overgeneralizing

perhaps a little bit just a smidge of overgeneralization so in july of 1992 when Alex is 18 years old. He arranged to meet a classmate named McKell, and I can't really pronounce his last name, so I'm just going to leave it at Mikhail. And they were supposed to be in the park where Alex would play chess. And when they got together, Alex basically told McKell, hey, I have this idea, I'm going to kill 64 people. Alex basically was like uncomfortable and was like, this is like what, I thought we're looking at Leafs. Like, why are you talking about this? Yeah, McKell is uncomfortable. Yeah. And so again, Alex strikes people with like a version of autism or something.

He basically interpreted McHale's, like, reticence to get involved in his, like, Let's Murder 64 people plan as him making fun of him and laughing at him. And so Alex got mad and strangled McHale and threw his body into a ditch. He went home to his mother's house. It was right down the street. Witnesses placed McHale with Alex that night. So police immediately questioned him. There was no direct evidence.

It was just like people saying, hey, like I saw them walking into the woods. Like, there was no, doesn't it? like i mean also it's like russia it's like russia right after the ussr collapse like they're not going to like be that diligent anyways right there's other shit going on there's other shit going on yeah i'm trying to figure how they're going to survive yeah where they're going to get toilet paper tomorrow so yeah it's cold at this point Alex takes a long break between killings it isn't well understood exactly like a how long a break that he took or why he ended up taking such a long break some things go ahead sorry can i speculate before

you say something yes it sounds like he didn't mean he didn't plan to do the first one that day right yeah yeah he wasn't planned to play and do it just like flew off the handle yeah yeah yeah yeah it's like it was accidental murder he got his it's scratched and that was it could be that yeah yeah but some actually think that there wasn't that long a break so there's some speculation that Alex was in love with a girl named olga and olga had a boyfriend who like threw himself off a building so we know that this boyfriend threw himself off a building and then we we know that Alex knew a girl named Olga that lived their building together and some argue that Alex is the one who basically coax the guy up there and threw him off the building but we don't know for sure

it's kind of like an unsubstantiated death but it's worth noting that Alex never had any romantic partners that we know of nor express any sexual interest in men or women okay so my bet is that Olga's boyfriend killed himself and had another yeah that's my guess yeah so I'm gonna go into like a little bit of a side thing here have you have a thing called the council of europe no okay i haven't either so it's kind of like the u.n but for like european countries only but it's not like the e u because it has no governing power like the e u has it's basically like a recommendation thing it's like a it's like a preceding you join you make recommendations maybe the u.n listens to you maybe the u.s listens to you but the council of europe has no enforcement capabilities on its own

but regardless like i mentioned just now this is like right after the collapse of the usssr and so Russia is trying desperately to figure out, like, its place and position in the entire global community. And so one thing that their president really wanted to do was join the Council of Europe. And this is in 1996. And in 1996, a prerequisite of joining the Council of Europe was the abolition of the death penalty. And so, yeah. So the theory was, one of the theories is that Alex stopped killing or yeah sorry Alex took a break and then when the council of Europe formed and or sorry the the Russia started applying to the council of Europe and then death penalty was out of contention form that's when he started wanting to kill again that's one theory but the

other theory is by an FBI report where it said that basically serial killers typically take long cooling off periods either because a new outlet is discovered that replaces the act of killing or the circumstances that caused distress which resulted in killing go away or to your point taylor could's been an accident it was an accident and he was like hey remember that idea i had forever go maybe i should go back to that i hate i mean like i'm i'm not i'm against the death penalty because you know there are people who are not guilty who you know get it and in all those things but I think it's such a, such a dick move when a killer is like, oh, please don't kill me. Fuck you.

I know, I know. You know, like, oh, you don't want to die because what you're afraid of death. You just killed people. That's funny because I actually came up with Andre Chigatello, where he was like, he was like, oh, please, like, spare my life, spare my life. Like, it was like, oh, so you know what the value of life is, which is like crazy. Exactly. Yeah, you know.

Yeah, really gross. So we don't totally know what happened in this time period between him killing Mikhail and when I'm going to talk about his next round of prime sprees. All we really know is that this time he'd moved back in his mother and his sister in a two-bedroom Soviet-era apartment where the living room is also a bedroom. And his job was to stack shelves at a local supermarket. So I doubt the stressors had been removed. And that's why he stopped. Yeah. It's such a weird life. Like I was seeing what that was like, what kind of life is that? Like, God, you're like 30 years old and you live in a fucking, or at this point I've been 27 years old and you live in like a tiny little dingy

apartment and you've had you worst all the time. Potatoes, a lot of potatoes. I mean, they probably even have fried pickles. Probably not. Or ranch. Probably don't even have that today. Probably don't even have that today. I know.

So if you want to become rich, start a fried pickle franchise in Russia. Oh, so in the mood a little bit. Yeah, yeah, I'd be less fried pickles. Everybody calm down. Here's some fried pickles. As far as this fried pickles, right? itself oh i like it um so on to the next crime spree and the next round of murders ended happening okay it's kind of shitty to say but a ton of the details around who these people were

outside of their names and manner of death is a little bit obfuscated the reason being that they were mostly just old homeless men so nobody gave a fuck about them anyways also this is russia right after the soviet union like i said earlier like things weren't good back yeah like things were really really bad because they collapsed because they had no money so the ruble collapsed and they're trying to figure out how they like sustain themselves as a country what we really know is that his standard method of trying to find people was to convince some poor unsuspecting and super vulnerable vulnerable person to drink vodka with him in the park and then bash them in the skull repeatedly with either the vodka bottle or a hammer and then he had a habit of like shoving

the bottle into the hole that he created in their skull like into their brains to ensure they were dead like he was kind of it's kind of intense yeah yuck his first victim this is in 2020 or sorry this is in 2001 so we went from 1982 from mikhail to 2001 this guy was a 52 year old homeless man named eugenie pronin and he was one of the guys that he would play chess with in the park that's one common thing without his crimes that he kind of sort of knew all about them like he had some relation with them even if it was something as simple as playing chess in the park with them what he told yvgeny was that that day was the anniversary of his dog's death which is true and to come visit his burial spot with him deep into the woods and if guinea

obliged she goes yeah let's go have a drink to your dog it was sad it was like he like he like made a toast for his dog on behalf of his dog you know he was trying to like very very supportive and stuff and And they had a drink in the middle of this. Alex attacked him in the vodka bottle, beat him to death through his body in the ditch. Yikes. And this is like, this happens so many times. There's so many murders. And all of them kind of fall this MO.

And like I said before, mostly feel nobody gave a fuck about it. So all we know is like their names. And so I'll just summarize the remaining part of this mostly, which is like over the span of 52 months, he killed 33 people that we know of. So he killed these two, so we're at 35 right now. And first off, that's a lot of people to kill in 52 months. Like that feels like you're kind of going nuts a little bit. He attacked another three that we know of that ultimately ended up surviving. We know that because he reported him to the police and nobody gave a shit, but I'll get into that here in a moment.

One of the three that he attacked was a girlfriend of one of his, I don't want to call him a friend. It's more like just an associate, this guy named Sergei. This girl was named Marina Marichiba. She was 19 years old and she was pregnant with Sergei's child when Alex Wainan to her at a train station in Moscow. You look like you're going to say something. No, I'm just frowning because that sucks. Yeah, yeah.

You haven't even told me how she dies, but it sucks. Keep going. Yeah. She's not going to die, thankfully. So it was for her. Yeah. So Maria was distraught of her fight that she'd had with Sergei. Alex ran into her and he was thinking.

him pretty quickly and realized that even in Russia trying to convince a pregnant woman to come to the park to have drinks with you probably wasn't going to work out very well and so what he told her instead was he had some expensive camera equipment in the park that he wanted help moving if she helped him he would give her half the equipment so that she could sell them and be financially relieved the pressure with being a pregnant single woman basically that makes no sense but yes sure i mean it's i guess in 2001 were cameras common yes i mean that's a question i do i did go to i studied abroad in 2002 and i got all of my pictures developed so it wasn't like a digital camera but like also why would you have your why would your stuff just be like sitting in the park take better care

if the story doesn't make sense yeah it's not true yeah it's jacking the giant bean socks why are they magic it makes no sense so oops let me mute that so maria agreed and went with him to the park and obviously there was no camera equipment in the park instead alex tells takes a manhole cover off of things saying that hey the cameras are inside this manhole cover which also makes even less sense than being in the park no they're not they are not and he he asked me to put like come close to help him grab it as she gets closer he grabs her head and sort of bashing to the side of this manhole the opening the manhole cover oh my god it happens quite a bit to the point where she

consciously she was still conscious she consciously decides that it's better to go into the hole that is to stay up there with him so she like throws herself bloodied and battered into this hole because he can't get her anymore or unless he that goes on there but Exactly. Exactly. And so she does that. And this time, it's wintertime. So she's wearing thick, you know, clothing. And so she starts getting sucked under her into the water, into the current. So she thinking incredibly quickly, fast than I would probably think in this moment, she ended up getting naked so that she could actually like weight up. And she did. She ended up getting pushed out to a different part of the underground tunnels that make of the sewer system, which is like so fucking scary. Like it's so terrifying to me. And she grabs a hold somehow over. ladder and starts climbing a ladder to another manhole cover apparently she the manhole covers weigh about 90 pounds and so she kept trying to push his manhole cover up and it wouldn't budge well she had budged enough to where some woman saw it and then screams and runs and grabs two security guards they come back and they remove the manhole cover off her

wow i have chills i have chills that's amazing good for her very very very very fortunate woman Wow. So she's taken to the hospital, and police come to the hospital room, and they question her and ask what she's been up to. How was your day? Hey, we found all this clothing that's just soaking the sewer. But she immediately names Alex as the perpetrator, because again, her boyfriend was friends with Alex or acquaintances, whatever you want to call him. This is like a weird thing I didn't know, but apparently back in this time, if you want to live in like a really, cool, hip, populist part of Russia, you had to get special permission to live there. You had to get like special papers that allowed you to live there. So in this case, Maria came from a rural

family in a rural part of Russia. And so she didn't have any paper. She actually immigrated in there illegally for economic activity and opportunity, obviously. Yeah. The cop, as she's in the hospital, bloodied and bandaged asked her for papers and maria's like i don't have my papers yeah and the cop goes look we can either track this thing down and you can be basically deported to your own rural village or you can let this go and we'll just call it a day jesus that sucks i'm sure that happens all the fucking time yeah yeah and so obviously she was like i don't i want to stay where on that and so she didn't say anything and or she said nothing happened the cop was like cool then let's all go about our day and so that's so alive how she's doing is she better i bet she's still alive i mean she was

19 in 2002 so yeah she's our age yeah yeah wow we should try and find her yeah we should keep going so i say this would this emboldened Alex but in his mind maria was dead because he just saw her body float away in the underwater sewer but it did validate him on two things that would come in handy later one is he can kill someone who's not a homeless man and get away with it two he doesn't need to stick with his vodka slash dead dog's way to convince people to go with him he can actually improvise so he gave him a lot of confidence in this so like i mentioned before by this time uh he was living in this two-bedroom apartment mom sister him sounds like absolute fucking trash like i can't imagine how anybody lives like that and it actually gets surprisingly

worse because Alex has another sister who has just gotten married and then the husband and the additional sister moved in to the actual bedroom yeah yeah so so now it's Alex a sister and a mom living in the bedroom slash living room that sounds terrible i had four people here in my like four bedroom house and i know you have a lot of guests i was like how do people do this i was like how do people do this like i can't i can't imagine so again not a stress-free environment not great the one time that his modusop ronde basically changed in his victim profile really changed outside of maria was when he it was actually the time he ended up getting caught so this was when he approached a lovely 30-stitual woman named marina muskelojova

nailed that shit and marina like immediately got creepy vibes off alex but you know she like single had a kid was like cool i'll go hang out of this guy let's see what he's about and so she ended up going out with Alex one night and they ended up taking a stroll to the park marie marina had had enough creepy vibes to where she'd given the reports differ some say she gave her son some say she gave a friend uh Alex's name and phone number so that in case anything goes wrong somebody would know yeah and obviously something went wrong he beat the shit out of her he shoved the vodka bottle into her brain cavity that he left open and that's actually how police discovered her on june 14th of 2006 oh my god yeah so on her body police found a metro ticket which

traced her back to a railway station in moscow which is where her and alex were seen on surveillance camera boarding a train so they knew something was going on with this they ended up questioning Alex And they say he admitted to the crime, but I think they probably beat the shit out of him. Most likely. Probably both. Maybe a little bit of both. Because later on, like when I explained where Alex ended up getting sent after spoiler alert, getting convicted, they also opened an investigation on them because there was like 190 cases where people confessed to crimes, which was like out of the size of the number of people that were being arrested was like way outside the number of the number of people that were being arrested was like way outside the number of. warm and they concluded that they were being the shit out of these people and that's the only way they were getting confessions out of them so i bet alex was was beat up but it was all true like it was like you know he might not have confessed on his own but he did do it because he ended up

leading every all the cops to the bodies that he left over the ones that didn't end up in the sewer he took it directly to them so it was obvious he did this yeah he explained that a he did it for the chessboard reason which is like the nerdy thing in the world but the other thing was he basically just felt powerless he felt powerless nothing and he was like like this made me feel it's like the whole holding a kid out of a window and saying i can kill you at any time like it's a power it's all that's all that's all going to that's basically what he wanted he said he made it feel like he's their father being able to like kill them whenever he wanted to and so that was basically what he what what drove him to commit his

crimes uh he was convicted on 49 counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder and again at this time there's no death penalty. There's still a death penalty in Russia. This was crazy how many people just randomly die there. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, along with 15 years in solitary confinement. He, he again, just like Andre Chiquotilla, also, like, appealed this over and over again saying this is unfair. We're just like, you did it. Like, we know you did it. You took them to the bodies. You terribly murdered people. Like, I don't, I mean, there's a little bit of like, yeah, like, I don't know. yeah yeah we know you're a bad guy we know you're a bad guy he didn't be any sent to a super cute

called named place so he got sent to polar owl oh that is cute which is a penal colony i left the penal colony part out you're supposed to say polar owl penal colony but i said i thought if i just said polar owl you think it's really cute and that means that means gulag which is bad basically yeah essentially and like and this is i looked up the list of prisoners at polar owl it is a who's of absolute fucking maniacs. It's like the, it's like the prison that they kept Magneto in in X-Men. Yeah. It's like their version of like Alcatraz.

It sounds terrifying. Like so many people there, I just run to the roster. Russia's still a killer, Russian-sodied killer. It's just right after the other. And so he's there. He's still alive. He's still in prison. He's not that old here in 49.

Yeah, he's not that old. So he, there's like some quotes. I read those like, again, it gives you a, gives you a sense of what his life was like outside. Like he was so thrilled at the prospect of having hot water in prison. Like he talked about it. He was talking about how he asked, like, sometimes he even has to like dilute it with cold water because the water is so hot. Because I guess he just didn't have access to it when he was free.

And it's like that impressive to have hot water. So he's living his best life. I mean, I kind of jealous with the guy. I mean, I'm sure it's not great in there. but also yeah it probably wasn't great out of there either exactly exactly what's really interesting is like like with like with so many of these other guys there's a lot of facts out about them this guy there's really not that much out there yeah which i think might have someone to do with the fact like the soviet union was there and then collapsed and people just

memories i don't know there's so many other things that people were focused on well it doesn't like they were looking for him at all yeah they also weren't looking for him well so it was it was also like so this apartment complex that they lived in everybody kind of knew each other right and so there was chatter at the apartment complex of something's going on because 10 of the people he killed they were his neighbors oh okay yeah and so there was some talk about like hey there's something weird going on like we don't know what but yeah um yeah also it made me think of like dude he's a stock clerk like can you imagine going to your local grocery store and like it's your stock clerk that's like dumping bodies left and right i mean i'm sure that i've like talked to people who kill people right there's no way i haven't it's like at the store or like on the bus like i don't know is there wasn't some stat that says that the average person will in their lifetime interact with four serial killers i don't know maybe there's some stat i read like that but luckily we haven't yet or if we have we don't know it yikes yeah well that's awful that's it that's

the chessboard kill that's alex pachoshkin pitch uh and uh and yeah the doom to fail part i don't know what it is exactly i think it's probably just don't play chess no i don't think that's it but go just don't avoid chess of that kid yeah i should figure out with that kid's name was probably so famous right now he was an indian kid little little rich kid it's really good you run to a sippy cup and then come back and just fucking smoke me you got to learn when you're young i feel like was my joke i made a hilarious joke because i was leaving i was like i was like whatever kid at least i can't drive you know well you can't do that yeah fuck you dude fuck you child who's good at chess whose parents care for him and brought him to this place so well that's awful that's my lovely story this is my

lovely axe and uh yeah uh let us know if you are a fan of alex patushkin or not i don't think you will be a fan necessarily most of it should not be fans of alls that's a weird word awesome well thank you ours. Thanks to everyone who is a new listener. We have a whole bunch of people. We're almost at a thousand followers on Instagram, which is very exciting. And thanks to everyone who is listening. Please like and share and send it to your friends. If you have any questions or ideas or any feedback, email us at doomed to philipot at gmail.com and find us on social media at doomed to philpod. Do we have any listener mail today? Nope. damn come on people right in oh i have something actually september our friend from

instagram sent us some fun stories are at haunted lakes so i'm going to look at those they were cool so it's fun thank you september sweet yeah next series awesome okay well go ahead and cut this off and we'll join y'all on wednesday see you soon bye all