To Be or Not To Be: Philosophical Serial Killers

Alexander Pichushkin, Russia's “Chessboard Killer,” made news recently over getting engaged to one of his groupies. In the interviews, he added that he now uses his time in prison to read philosophy. This made me think about other serial killers with such intellectual pretensions.

Pichushkin was convicted in 2007 of 49 murders and three attempted murders. He was adamant that he had 11 more, because he wanted to beat the record of his murderous countryman, Andrei Chikatilo (52 convictions for 56 claimed victims). Pichushkin had aimed for 64, the number of squares on a chessboard. Hence, his media moniker.

Currently, Pichushkin is serving his life sentence in solitary confinement in the Polar Owl penal colony. His fiancé apparently enjoys the letters in which he describes how he killed people as the “hand of God.” Aside from this mission, Pichushkin claims that he is “against murder.” He views his own acts as a response to a deific decree. “In my case,” he said, “repentance is not just unnecessary, it is wrongful. I killed because I did not have any other choice.”

The Maniac whines about prison life as full of “grey days.” What’s difficult is the “inability to be in charge of myself.” So, he turns to philosophy: “I have studied life. If I could have improved my childhood and youth, I would not have committed murder. It would not have been necessary. My family was basically normal, although there were difficulties. It was the society that damaged me.”

About his murders, he said, “In all cases I killed for only one reason. I killed in order to live, because when you kill, you want to live.”

He sounds like Ian Brady, the still-surviving member of the Moors Murderers, who also recently made news with his fake hunger strike. Brady and Myra Hindley killed several children together in England during the early 1960s.

At the time, Brady was a fan of Russian author, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote such classics as Crime and Punishment and The Possessed. Both books deal with someone obsessed with planning a crime. Brady also favored the Marquis de Sade and Friedrich Nietzsche.

In Crime and Punishment, the character of Raskolnikov seeks to prove that he is “superior” to laws that govern others. He believes he can kill someone without consequences. This inspired Brady, who believed that he, too, was morally superior.

After meeting Hindley, Brady convinced her that morality was relative. He proposed that they enrich themselves with crime. One day, Brady suggested that they kill a child. She complied. Then she complied again, and again.

After their arrest and convictions, Brady wrote The Gates of Janus, a book in which he describes crime as an exciting venture for the solitary explorer, "consciously thirsting to experience that which the majority have not and dare not." As for murder, "viewed scientifically, the death of a human being is of no more significance than that of any other animal on earth."

Serial killers, he thought, had chosen to “live a day as a lion, rather than decades as a sheep.” They are "unavoidably a failure in many normal walks of life." Such people lack patience and eschew boredom. Once they have committed homicide, they accept the act as “normal,” and the rest of humanity becomes "subnormal."

Another serial killer with an intellectual bent was jazz musician Melvin Rees, Jr., a.k.a., the “Sex Beast.” During the 1950s, when “deep thinkers” embraced jazz and existential philosophy, Rees took the ideas of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre to an extreme.

Sartre had argued that we are born with free choice, which makes us responsible for how we define our own identity. Rees had absorbed these ideas, adopting them as a mantra. Under the influence of amphetamines, Rees had confided to friends that he craved every intense experience life has to offer, from love to murder.

Soon, a family of four disappeared. They were found murdered, their bodies dispersed in Maryland and Virginia. These incidents were linked to other murders, and eventually to Rees. He was convicted and received a death sentence.

In prison, Rees immersed in Dostoevsky’s hefty novel The Brothers Karamazov and claimed to have found God. In 1966, he stated to a judge that he no longer wanted to appeal his death sentence; he’d leave it in the hands of Christ, his guardian. His attorney thought he was not competent to make this decision.

Rees was ordered to undergo extensive psychiatric testing, and each psychiatrist said that he might have been competent for his trial, but he was currently psychotic. Rees ended up on a mental health ward.

In 1985, Rees, now 56, gave an interview to reporter Bill McKelway for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Long-haired, bearded and nearly toothless, he often just stared out the window. After killing a woman, he admitted, he had looked at the sky, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, and challenged God to strike him down. But he’d remained on his feet. This was a sign that he could do as he pleased.

When McKelway asked if the murders weighed on his conscience, Rees dismissed this notion. “I’ve been forgiven for it,” he stated.

It seems that for killers interrupted, the consolations of philosophy can be a resource.