Pichushkin, 33, who received a life sentence Monday for 48 murders, is one of the most prolific serial killers in Russia's history and claimed to have killed at least 60 people, but investigators have yet to find evidence for the other alleged killings. He was dubbed the "chessboard killer" for his habit of marking off his victims on the 64 squares of a chessboard.
"In the past week the maniac Pichushkin has been on our screens non-stop, he has not expressed any remorse for the murders and feels like superman," Dmitriyeva, who heads a government-owned center for social and forensic psychiatry, told Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a government daily. "You ask how people with mental disorders could react to this? Any psychiatrist would say it could provoke similar incidents."
She said the killer had achieved his goal "to become famous and to make the world shudder." "The media is free to write and show anything it thinks fit, but it is actually creating an image of a contemporary hero, a negative hero," Dmitriyeva said.
In previous court testimonies, Pichushkin said he needed to kill like others need food, that murder made him "almost a god," and that his first killing was like falling in love for the first time. Speaking in his final statement on Thursday, he denied he had killed with particular cruelty.
The Moscow City Court's sentence followed a verdict by the jury who found no mitigating circumstances. The court also ruled Monday that the defendant undergo compulsory psychiatric treatment.
Pichushkin's sentence is the maximum possible allowed under the Russian Criminal Code. The country imposed a moratorium on capital punishment in 1996.
