80 women wrote to brutal serial killer in Siberian jail saying 'love, want, kiss you'

An extraordinary new behind-bars interview with monster Alexander Pichushkin - known as the Bitsa Park maniac after being convicted of killing 49 people - sees him admit that if he was released he would immediately 'kill couple of people, just to get rid of stress, then I will rape a woman and drink some vodka'.

In fact, the 42 year old will never be freed from remote Polar Owl penal colony in Yamalo-Nenets autonomous region where he is serving a life sentence imposed in 2007 for his murderous reign of terror in the Moscow park.

Yet his interview suggests Pichushkin - who aimed to kill one person for every square on the chessboard - holds a strange fascination for many women. 'About 80 women wrote to me within these years,' he boasted. 'What did they write? 'Love, want, kiss you.'

The mass murderer - believed by many to have killed a total of 60, four short of the 64 chessboard squares - revealed that he has never met a woman known as Natalya (Natasha), 29, who he says he proposed to. She has used his surname as called herself his bride. 

Now kept in solitary confinement because other inmates are too scared to share a cell with him, he said: 'I proposed to Natasha. It was spontaneous. But I proposed to her, like a man should do. She immediately agreed. 

'Maybe if I were free, I would not have paid any attention to her but here she is ideal for me. I have been here since 2008 and I need her.'

She got in touch with him, writing to the jail, he said. 'We started communication. And now I know 100% about her,' he said. While Natalya has suggested they did meet, Pichushkin denied it. 

'No, we were not allowed to meet,' he said. 'I am saying, I know her, I feel her. Now they don't allow us to exchange letters. At first they did but not now.'

Asked if she had stopped writing, and dumped him, he replied: 'It is excluded. Her letters do not reach me. And my letters do not reach her. I wrote one more letter to her last week but it was not posted. The administration is putting up obstacles.'

Natalya has described the 'love at first sight' she felt for Pichushkin. 'I go to bed thinking about him, I wake up thinking about him,' she told TV channel NTV, which reported she was proud of im 'as if he was a Hollywood star'.

'My husband was beating me and cheating on me with a friend of mine,' she explained. 'I was trying to forget about it by getting myself drunk, sometimes it was going on for days, weeks, months. 

'Everything changed when they showed the Bitsa Maniac on TV. It was love at first sight. He became my ray of sunshine. I began writing, he answered, and we exchanged letters. In his letters, he told me in detail about the murders he committed, and how it was 'interesting for him to turn the living into the dead'.' 

Asked by journalist Eva Merkacheva from Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper how he could be sure Natalya had not stopped the correspondence relationship, he said: 'Just because I am the only one.'

The prison deny that they blocked letters between the pair. Natalya works in a children's shop in Nyagan, the Siberian birthplace of fallen tennis star Maria Sharapova. 

Polar Owl is a jail from which no-one has ever escaped since it was established in 1961. In winter it's a furnace of cold, and in the brief, bleak summer, the marshmallowy tundra offers no route out. The hungry German Shepherd dogs guarding this lonely penal outpost discourage any thoughts of escape.

There are claims that his true victim total was as many as 60, making him just four short of the 64 squares on the chessboard. He is permitted TV once a week, for two hours, and he is morose and evidently lonely. 

Asked about life in jail, he said: 'Grey days. All impressions are bleak. All bright impressions were left outside.'

He finds the hardest thing the 'inability to be in charge of myself. A slave dependence on Mr Commander. It is hard to accept that it is a life sentence. My opinion is an illusory one but I think that a life sentence is unnatural.'

This appears an outrageous comment given he he snuffed out so many lives. He goes on to say he is against the death penalty. 

'The death penalty is a murder. I have always been against murder, so I am against the death penalty.' He was asked: 'How can you be against murder if your hands are covered in blood of so many people?'

He replied that 'what you are talking about was not murder. It was  fate, the hand of God.'

Pichushkin has no repentance. 'In my case repentance is not just unnecessary, it is wrongful,' he said from a cage in the prison psychologist's office. I killed because I did not have any other choice. It was such a situation, there was no other way but  murder.'

In prison he said he is learning philosophy. 'I have studied life,' he said. 'If I could have improved my childhood and youth, I would not have committed murders, it would not have been necessary. It is not about family. My family was basically normal, although there were difficulties. It was the society that damaged me.'

His ramblings included claims that 'there was total negative in my life. I felt myself a stranger. And I was alive, I wanted some fun. But all pushed me away.' He admitted that he dreams of his victims - and they are alive, but he then kills them again in his sleep. 

'I have beautiful dreams and all is so wonderful there that I can hardly describe it. I saw nightmares only in Moscow,' he said. In his dreams he sees 'the killed ones'.

'I see them. In my dreams. I am surprised that they are alive. I am talking to them in the same way I was talking in real life and then kill them. There is no repentance, I am saying to you. 

'If you let me out now, first of all I will kill couple of people, just to get rid of stress, then I will rape a woman and drink some vodka. And then it will go how it goes. All your religions are a lie. Evil rules this world. I am realistic about the things.'

Pichushkin killed women and children but most of his victims were elderly men he befriended often using chess or vodka in Bitsa Park. Often he would leave them for dead with a bottle wedged into their cracked skulls, which is seen as his signature. 

Notoriously, he said: 'For me, life without killing is like life without food for you. I felt like the father of all these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to another world.' He added: 'In all cases I killed for only one reason. I killed in order to live, because when you kill, you want to live.'

Bullied and taunted as a 'retard' when he was at school, he  was taught chess by a grandfather who he loved and whose death may have triggered his fearsome killing spree. 

His victims were often killed with repeated hammer blows to the skull. His final victim Marina Moskalyova, 36, in the spring of 2006, was his last. She had left a note for her son with his name and phone number on it when she went on a date with him.. A metro ticket found on her body also led police to track her journey and he was seen with her on surveillance tape footage.

He confessed at once, his only condition was doing it in front of TV camera, which investigators staged for him. The confession was then shown on NTV channel. 

He was convicted on 24 October 2007 of 49 murders and three attempted murders. He asked for 11 more victims who he confessed to killing to be added to his gruesome death toll.