THEY met in early 2001 near Kakhovskaya metro station on the southern outskirts of Moscow, a spot where the local drunks hung out.

Marina Viricheva, 19, and recently up from the provinces, was six months pregnant and struggling to make ends meet. Alexander Pichushkin, a nondescript brown-haired man eight years her senior, offered her some alcohol at a good price.

“Come with me, I have got some contraband stuff hidden away in the woods,” he told her. She paused for a moment but then agreed.

They had taken only a few steps into the nearby Bitzevsky park, a vast, densely wooded area, when Pichushkin grabbed Viricheva by her hair, hit her several times and flung her into a well more than 20ft deep.

She struggled for more than an hour before finding the strength to claw her way out. When she was spotted the following day by a group of women out for a walk, she was so afraid of her assailant that she told them it had been an accident.

Viricheva, who was able to give birth to her child, was one of the lucky ones.

Pichushkin, 33, a supermarket shelf stacker, went on trial in Moscow last week accused of killing 49 people during a spree that lasted 14 years. Far from denying the charges, he has claimed to have murdered 63.

“I’m a great fan of chess,” he told police. In his flat, they reportedly found a chessboard with all but one of the 64 squares covered with a coin.

Viricheva will be one of more than 90 witnesses called in a two-month trial expected to confirm the reputation of the man known as the “chessboard killer” as one of Russia’s most prolific serial killers.

Pishushkin, following proceedings from a glass cage in the courtroom, claims to have begun his grisly career in 1992 – the year Andrei Chikatilo, the so-called Rostov Ripper, was convicted of butchering 52 women and children in southern Russia and Ukraine. He is said to have told police he had decided to beat Chikatilo’s record.

Pichushkin’s first victim, according to prosecutors, was Mikhail Odychuk, a classmate. Angered by his friend’s refusal to become a partner in crime, Pichushkin strangled him and threw him into a sewage pit.

It was nine years before he struck again, but he soon turned the Bitzevsky park into his killing field. That year alone, prosecutors claim, he murdered 11 people. Most were men, lured to the park with the promise of a glass of vodka to mourn the death of his “beloved” but nonexistent dog.

Viricheva was not the only one to get away: later in 2001, Mikhail Lobov, a 14-year-old orphan, claimed to have been lured into the woods by Pichushkin and thrown into the same well as Viricheva. He too escaped and the next day went back to the metro station where he saw his assailant. Pichushkin was not worried. “I knew no one would believe the kid,” he told prosecutors subsequently. He was right.

As the years passed the murders became more violent as Pichushkin began to kill with “particular cruelty”, cracking open the skulls of his victims and stuffing them with empty bottles or twigs. He no longer tried to conceal the bodies.

His choice of victims also became broader, among them Stepan Vasilchenko, 68, a prominent philologist, lured into a walk in the forest in March last year, whose skull was crushed with a hammer.

In June last year Pichushkin made what was to prove a crucial error after inviting Marina Moskalyova, 36, to the woods.

After they had shared several beers, she warned him she had left a note for her son telling him where and with whom she had gone for a late-night stroll.

Pichushkin hesitated but, as he admitted later, he was “in the mood” and took the risk. He killed Moskalyova, pushed a stick into her head and went home.

When she failed to return home her son handed the details to the police. Pichushkin initally denied involvement, but confessed when video footage from the metro station was produced, showing him walking with his victim.

“For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you,” he said in a subsequent taped confession. “I felt like the father of all these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to another world.”

Doctors at the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, the country’s leading psychiatric institution, have declared Pichushkin sane. His motives remain unclear: there have been suggestions he drew pleasure from manipulating his victims like chess pieces or derived sexual satisfaction from the act of killing.

Chikatilo, whose record Pichushkin tried to beat, was executed with a single bullet to the back of the head. But the death penalty has been suspended in Russia since 1996 so, if convicted, he will face life in prison.

For relatives of the victims outside the courtroom last week, it will not be enough. “He does not deserve to walk on this earth,” said Nadezhda Bychkova, whose brother Nikolai Zakharchenko is believed to have been killed in November 2005. “I would chop him up myself, limb by limb, and do it publicly,” she said.

Additional reporting: Anna Mikhailova

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