Russia's most FEARED criminal (*MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY*)

today's story sounds exactly like an urban legend it sounds too exaggerated too grotesque too terrifying to be real but it is this is the true story of the betsevke park maniac but before we get into today's story if you're a fan of the strange dark and mysterious delivered in story format then you've come to the right place because that's all we do and we upload once or twice every week so if that's of interest to you please offer to help build the like buttons new dresser they just got from ikea and as soon as you open it up immediately find all the screws strip them all and then leave also please subscribe to our channel and turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads alright let's get into today's story [Music] moscow russia which is one of the world's richest cities is home to more billionaires than any other european city but if you travel just 10 miles south of moscow's richest neighborhood the golden mile you will reach one of russia's poorest neighborhoods the southern moscow suburbs nicknamed jopamira which means the soul of the world these suburbs used to be a thriving neighborhood with tens of thousands of working-class russians and their families calling it their home but after the fall of the soviet union in 1991 the money and the jobs in this area dried up completely and even though the residents wanted to relocate and live somewhere with more opportunity they couldn't they didn't have the resources to leave and so they were trapped and since 1991 really nothing has changed in these suburbs today there are still tens of thousands of now very poor russian families that still live there living in these totally overcrowded soviet apartment buildings that are these big square identical looking things that are literally falling apart and most of the people who live in these suburbs either are unemployed or they work some dead-end job that barely pays them any money the police in the suburbs are completely underfunded and for the most part are corrupt and so crime over the years has really taken a dramatic uptick also drug and alcohol abuse are completely running rampant in this part of the world but despite their notoriously rough living situation in the southern moscow suburbs these residents do have one claim to fame and that is the betsevsky park vetsevsky park is comprised primarily of a massive lush green forest that is full of wildlife and beautiful streams and clearings and it sits right on the southern edge of the southern moscow suburbs in total the park covers a whopping 2700 acres and stretches four miles from top to bottom which makes it three times bigger than new york city's famous central park but sevsky park had always been a popular tourist destination for people living around moscow but after the fall of the soviet union the park's popularity skyrocketed specifically amongst people that lived in these southern moscow suburbs as their lives continued to become more bleak in the 1990s they compensated by going to the park as much as they possibly could they would take long walks in the woods they would play chess with their friends along the peripheries on the park benches and tables or they'd go cross-country skiing in the winter basically year round this park became their escape from their miserable everyday lives but that would not last starting in the early 2000s something totally unexplainable and terrifying began happening in the park specifically in the heavily forested area in the park and eventually this thing this unusual event that was taking place got so completely out of hand that the residents of these southern moscow suburbs stopped going in the park they were literally too scared to go inside the strange phenomenon began in 2001 from may to july that year 10 people went missing after having been spotted either in or right around the outside of the heavily forested area inside of batsebski park all of them were alone when they were last spotted and all of them were men now there was some precedent for people suddenly going missing in this part of russia every now and again people would try to flee these suburbs to try to make a better life for themselves somewhere else but time and time again they would just come back a couple of days or weeks later because it hadn't worked out but when these 10 men did not come back in a couple of days or weeks their families went to police and reported them missing but unsurprisingly the police did not launch an investigation instead they accused the ten missing men of just being drunk bums who probably wandered off somewhere and whatever trouble they were in it was their fault now the families and the locals did not buy this explanation but there really wasn't a better explanation these men really had just kind of vanished no one had any idea where they went and so given the kind of general grim outlook on life that lots of people held in this area people just kind of accepted that whatever happened to these 10 men happened and there's nothing any of us can do about it and they moved on but in october of that year so two months after the tenth man had gone missing in the park another man went missing in the park and then by the end of the year four more men had vanished inside of the park and all of them vanished under the same circumstances last spotted alone in or around the heavily forested area in the park the families of these five men would go to police they would report their family members missing but again the police did not launch any investigation and blamed the missing people for being responsible for whatever happened to them and then after that the families kind of mourned the loss of these five men not really sure what to make of it and locals kind of gossiped about it for a little while and started to speculate about what might have happened to them and kind of lumped them in with the 10 other men that had gone missing but after a while when no new news came out about what happened to them everyone just kind of moved on again and unbelievably this pattern would repeat itself for nearly four years from 2002 to late 2005 25 more people would go missing inside of pitsepski park 24 of them would be men one of them would be a woman although it wasn't clear if she was actually in the same category as the other 24 men but regardless that put the total number of mysterious disappearances inside of this forested area in the park up to 40. but still the police shrugged it off and eventually so too did the local population everyone just kind of moved on like this phenomenon wasn't happening that people were not going missing in droves inside of this forest but everything would change with missing person number 41 because unlike the previous 40 this missing person would be found again 63 year old nikolai zakharchenko was a retired police officer who lived in a tiny apartment in the southern moscow suburbs with his family he was a classic russian tough guy who chain smoked cigarettes and drank lots of vodka and even though he was well aware of the missing person phenomenon inside of this park that wasn't about to stop him from doing the thing he loved which was going on walks inside of this park he figured whatever was out there he could handle it so one evening in november of 2005 nikolai told his sister that he was going to go out for a walk in the park but that night he didn't come back and so his family was very worried about him but they decided they would wait until the next morning to see if maybe he showed up but the following morning when nikolai did not show up his family went to the police but per usual the police did nothing a few days later a local was walking fairly deep inside of the forest inside of pitsepski park when they noticed well off the trail off to the left side there was something unusual kind of tucked in the underbrush now this local was all alone they had kind of a bad feeling about whatever this was and so they called the police and they reported seeing something strange and surprisingly the police did actually come out and they went over to investigate and they found this unusual thing was nikolai zacarchenko he was lying face down he was fully clothed and he only had one injury but it obviously had been fatal he had a massive hole on the back of his head this was not from a gunshot this was from massive blunt force trauma he had been struck so hard that literally the back half of his skull was blown clear off the police searched the area in hopes they might find the murder weapon or some other clue as to what happened to him but there was nothing and so all the police could deduce was that nikolai had obviously been attacked either by a person or group of people or even an animal and that whoever his attacker was or whatever his attacker was had clearly snuck up on him given the location of his injury now that the police had a body and it likely looked like it was a murder they could no longer ignore the fact that so many people had gone missing inside of this park and it was looking like probably if they looked around the park they might find more bodies so the local police called in reinforcements from russia's criminal investigation department and they came to the southern moscow suburbs and with the local police they began searching every inch of this park looking for more bodies or just for any indication of who or what was behind this attack and behind all these missing people but after several days of a very extensive search where they looked everywhere in this park all over the forested area they found nothing at the same time this huge police search was going down inside of bitsebski park news about nikolai's death had spread amongst the southern moscow suburbs and people were now getting really scared before the fear of the park felt kind of theoretical because there were no bodies and so even though it seemed far-fetched it did seem possible that maybe all these people were getting lost on their own that they really were just drunks stumbling off but now with the discovery that one of these missing people had been horrifically killed that made the danger associated with this park feel very real and so it was around this time that most residents of these suburbs stopped going inside of this park in fear of whatever was out there in the forest and they would forbid their children from going in and they would tell their neighbors don't go in the park and they gave this evil thing that lurked in the forest that caused men to disappear and attacked nikolai they gave this thing a name they called it the betsevsky park maniac but despite the fear of this maniac causing so many people to avoid this park and despite the massive police presence that was in the park constantly looking for bodies looking for clues and just generally patrolling the area despite all that people still continued to go missing in this park starting just a week after the discovery of nikolai's body in november of 2005 all the way up to april of 2006 nine more men would mysteriously vanish in the forested section of bisebski park and just like nikolai just a couple of days after they were reported missing by their families they would be found lying out in the middle of the park with the backs of their heads caved in but unlike nikolai most of these nine victims had been found with a glass bottle jammed into the hole in the back of their head meaning almost certainly this was the work of a human not some animal by this point almost no one was stepping foot inside of the park because it was basically common knowledge that you know a serial killer is obviously on the loose in the forest but despite this there were still some very stubborn people who continued to go inside of the park and one of those people was 32 year old alexander pachuchin he had been born in the southern moscow suburbs and he still lived with his family in the same tiny apartment he had grown up in it's safe to say alexander's life had been more difficult than his peers when he was just four years old he fell backwards off of a swing and when he sat up he was okay but the swing came swinging back and smashed him in the front of the head causing brain damage now his family did not have the money to send him to a hospital and so when he stood up after getting struck and he was kind of able to walk around and he seemed okay they determined he was fine and they didn't follow up but alexander was not fine the injury had impaired his cognitive abilities and years later when he went to school the other kids would bully him for sounding dumb by the time alexander was in high school he felt like an outcast he didn't have any friends and he was miserable but his grandfather who lived in the same apartment complex as he did he noticed this about alexander and he decided he would take him under his wing and he would look after him and so the first thing he did is he asked alexander to come over and he taught him how to play chess believing that would be something they could bond over and when he taught alexander the rules of this game which are quite complicated it was like it opened up the secret portion of alexander's brain that had never been opened before alexander immediately absorbed all this information about chess and became a master of it practically overnight within a couple of days of being taught how to play he was beating his grandfather virtually every time they played together and so his grandfather was totally thrilled about this and was very proud of alexander and so he decided to bring alexander down to betsevsky park where all these old men who were total chess masters were always playing chess on all of the park benches and tables and so he brought alexander down there and he put him up against all of these incredible players and very quickly alexander was wiping the floor with them and they loved him for it he was their star he was their prodigy they totally adored him and they respected him and when they found out he was getting bullied at school they made a point of telling him that he would always have a place with them in this park and so for alexander this was like the best moment of his life he finally felt like he was accepted and he finally felt happy and so over the years even after alexander's grandfather passed away alexander continued to go down to pisepsky park to play chess virtually every day and he kept going to the park to play chess even when men began going missing in the park including some of the men he played chess with and alexander continued going to the park to play chess even after bodies began piling up in the park alexander's mother was terrified for him and felt like he didn't understand the risk he was putting himself in by going to this park all the time but every time she pleaded with him not to go just take one day off from playing chess alexander would say mom i'm gonna be fine and then he would leave anyways in april of 2006 alexander was 32 years old and worked for a local grocery store stocking shelves by this point at least 50 people had vanished mysteriously in the forested section of the park and 10 bodies had been found on the morning of the 12th of that month alexander showed up to the grocery store for his shift and right away he noticed there was a new employee it was this beautiful older woman he had never seen before and alexander while he was confident playing chess was not remotely confident around women he had never had a girlfriend before but he found himself looking at this woman across the store feeling like she was different that she was more approachable than other women and so he told himself that day he was going to go up to her and he was going to say hi and so all through his shift he kind of awkwardly watched this woman from a distance kind of building up his confidence and then at the end of his shift her shift was also ending the pair walked outside at the same time and alexander was about to say something but he just couldn't find his voice and then he noticed this woman had put a cigarette in her mouth but she was fishing around for her lighter like she couldn't find it and so alexander jumped into action and pulled his own lighter out and he held it out to her and said hey can i light your cigarette and so before long the two were chatting and they were walking together and smoking their cigarettes and over the course of their conversation alexander would learn this woman was named larissa caligina and she was 48 years old and she lived near alexander's apartment and so after they walked for a little while they arrived in front of her apartment building and at this point alexander knows she's about to go inside and so he suddenly feels bold and he asks larissa hey do you want to continue walking around with me for a bit and maybe do a pass through the park now at this point the bisepsky park was totally not a place you would bring people to this is a place that everyone in the area is basically terrified of but for alexander patsepski park was like his happy place and so naturally if he's going to take a woman on a date that's where he's going to bring her and surprisingly larissa was very quick to say oh let's go let's go to the park and so the two they lit up another cigarette and they walked across the road and they walked through the front gates of the park their first stop was the chess tables along the periphery of the park right outside of the forest and the tables were totally empty but at this point that wasn't surprising given the fact that even amongst die-hard chess players really alexander was the only one still willing to go back in there every single day and so after seeing where alexander spent all of his time it seemed like it was time to turn around and leave but neither alexander nor larissa wanted their date to end and so they decided to light up another cigarette and then follow a walking path that kind of looped into the forest and came back out again and as they entered the woods and got deeper and deeper into the forest the chest tables that were behind them faded from view and the sky began to get darker and darker as it was getting late but the pair just kept on walking maintaining their cheerful conversation but at some point as they talked and walked the path below their feet stopped looking like the path they had originally set out on now they're stepping over broken logs and they're ducking under low hanging branches and it's not really clear if they're on a marked trail anymore but neither of them bring it up they just maintain their kind of light conversation and continue walking as if nothing's going on however they both definitely began walking faster and faster to maybe speed up this loop but at some point when it was very obvious they were no longer on a path they both came to a stop as they had walked alexander had been in front and so when they came to a stop he turned around and he looked at larissa and right away he could tell there was just something wrong about her there was a look on her face that just didn't look right she looked exhausted or sad or something and then as he's looking at her she inexplicably kind of collapses into a tree right next to her and she grabs the tree with her arms and she slides down to its base and she presses her cheek and her chest up against its bark and she begins to cry alexander has no idea what's going on so he just stands there staring at her and in between sobs larissa looks up at alexander and says you're the maniac aren't you alexander couldn't believe it she was the first person to figure it out so quickly normally he would have to tell his victims before he killed them and so he smirked and he looked at her and he said yes i am and so larissa at this point she lets out this huge sob and she looks down and she keeps crying and then she looks back up again at him and she says are you going to kill me and without any hesitation alexander looks at her and says yes i am and then he reached into his jacket and he pulled out a hammer no one knows for sure why alexander became a serial killer or why he almost exclusively targeted men many people believe it might have something to do with the brain damage he suffered as a four-year-old when that swing hit him in the head that somehow that rewired his brain and made him more aggressive towards other people especially men but that's just speculation and other than that injury there really isn't much in alexander's life that stands out as a big red flag he just kind of floated about his life and followed the crowd but in 1992 when he was 18 years old he got this urge to kill and he actually decided to act on it he brought up this desire to a classmate of his named mikhail otichuk and surprisingly mikhail says to alexander i want to kill someone too let's do it together and so the two met up a couple of days later and they headed off to pitsepski park and began walking around the forest looking for a lone person that could be their victim and as they're walking along alexander he's fully committed but he can tell mikhail is not he's starting to get cold feet and he's talking about you know maybe let's let's stop for now and head back and maybe do this another time and alexander he's getting more and more angry and frustrated with mikhail until finally alexander decides my first victim will be mikhail and so he turns to mikhail and he says you know what if you want to head back you can kyle says okay you know maybe we can do this another time right and alexander says sure and so mikhail turns around and as soon as his back is to alexander alexander pulls out his hammer and he smashes mikhail in the back of the skull causing mikhail to crumple to the ground either dead or unconscious but either way he's laying on the ground and as soon as he is alexander remembers that they had passed a little while earlier this well kind of hidden in the middle of the forest and so he grabbed mikhail's body and he dragged him through the forest over to this well and when he got to the well he pulled the lid off of it and then he picked mikhail's body up pushed him up and over the edge and dropped him inside and mikhail fell 30 feet all the way down to the icy water below and then alexander put the lid back on the well he grabbed his hammer off the ground and he left an important part of alexander's killing was this well this well was not a drinking water well it was basically an access point to this deep underground sewer system that stretched all around the underside of this park and so when mikhail fell down this 30-foot shaft he didn't just land at a pit of water right at the bottom of the well instead he fell all the way down the shaft until it opened up like the bottom of a huge scientific beaker it was basically like this big cave at the bottom of the well that was full of very deep water and so mikhail would have splashed into that water which was icy cold and then after alexander put the lid on top of the well it would have been pitch black inside of that space now even if it had been lit up there was no ladder for mikhail to climb back out of and there was a current running through the swell because there were tunnels leading into it and then out the other side and so mikhail if he woke up if he was conscious when he hit the water he would have immediately been swept into another tunnel and many of the other tunnels that led away from this cave space were completely filled with water and so he would have had nowhere to breathe he would have been sucked into a tunnel and he would have drowned and so whether mikhail died from the strike on the back of the head or whether he drowned we don't know but he died after being thrown in the well and then his body was swept miles and miles away to some deep underwater recess where nobody was looking alexander would wait another nine years before he killed again but once he started up again he didn't stop his first kill after the hiatus was in the summer of 2001. his victim was a man he liked to play chess with in fact this was a man that loved alexander and was definitely one of alexander's friends they regularly played chess with each other and one day in may after a game of chess alexander asked the man if he wanted to head into the forest to pay respects to his dog who he had buried out in this forest and he told the man he was going to have a sip of vodka over his dog's grave and so this chess friend of his agrees to go with alexander because he loves alexander he's a good friend of his and says absolutely let's go pay our respects to your dog and so the pair began walking into the forest and at first they're on a trail but eventually alexander says to this man that you need to leave the trail in order to get to the gravesite so the man says yeah no problem and so they get off the trail and they're walking for a little while until they reach the well and when they get to the well alexander stops and he kind of points to some arbitrary spot on the ground and says oh that's that's where my dog was buried and so alexander pulls out a bottle of vodka and he takes a swig and then he hands it to the man who does the same thing to kind of do this commemorative drink for this dog and then afterwards alexander looks at his friend and kind of gestures with his arm to get the man to you know take them back out of the forest back out to the chest tables and so the man turns around and begins backtracking and as soon as he does and his back is to alexander alexander pulls out his hammer he walks up behind his friend and he smashes him over the back of the head and then just like mikhail he drags this man's body over to the edge of the well he pulls the lid of the well off and then he lifts this man up and he dumps him into the well shaft and then he puts the lid back on top alexander continued to lure his victims out to that well and all of his victims were people he knew they were his chess friends they were his neighbors in his apartment complex they were anyone he had a personal relationship with he would later say that that was his preferred victim he'd liked to know the person he was killing it made him feel like god amazingly it would turn out not all of alexander's victims who were chucked into that well actually died victims number 16 and 17 who were a pregnant woman and a 13 year old boy respectively after they had their heads smashed with the hammer and they got chucked into the well their clothing got caught on a snag poking out of the inside of that 30-foot shaft and it literally arrested their fall and kept them from plummeting all the way into the water and somehow in both instances alexander didn't notice he just put the well lid back on and walked away believing they were both dead but they weren't and after they regained consciousness they were able to kind of claw their way back up the well shaft and pulled themselves out of the well both victims would go to the police and both of them would positively identify who their attacker was alexander but the police didn't care in fact they told both of these victims that they needed to drop the charges and leave them alone and if they didn't they the police would come up with something to have both of them arrested the victims and so alexander got away with it and the victims were literally intimidated by the police to stay quiet and so that led to dozens and dozens more murders in april of 2006 after alexander told larissa he was the maniac and he was going to kill her he walked behind her as she cried and continued to hold onto the tree and he wound up his hammer and brought it smashing into the back of her head and then as she slumped to the ground he hit her several more times in the back of the head with the hammer and then he pulled out a vodka bottle and he jammed it inside of the hole and then he left two months later alexander would lure another woman out into the middle of the forest with him her name was marina she was 35 years old and she had met alexander while working at the grocery store with him she actually was hired to work at the grocery store to fill larissa's now vacant spot before alexander and marina began their walk out to the park which was alexander's suggestion marina said she just needed to stop by her apartment to let her son know where she was going and so they swung by her apartment marina went upstairs and she left a note for her teenage son saying where she was going and who she would be with and she even left behind alexander's name and his phone number on this note and so when she came back out again and she and alexander began walking towards the park alexander knew that if he killed her which was his intention that he would certainly be caught the police were on super high alert at this point and they would certainly get their hands on this note and that would absolutely implicate him and so he didn't really know what to do but by the time they were strolling into the forest alexander had decided he was going to kill her anyways and many people believe he did this specifically to get caught not to protect the public from himself but because he wanted fame he wanted recognition for what he had done this theory stems from the fact that starting with his 41st victim nikolai zakrachenko alexander began leaving his victims bodies out in the open he stopped putting them into that well and he wouldn't just leave them out in the open he would prop them up in strange poses against trees and he would jam glass bottles into the holes in the backs of their heads indicating he wanted the police to find them that way he could get all the credit he believed he deserved when the police did finally arrest alexander they searched his apartment and they found this notebook and in this notebook was a picture of a chessboard now a chessboard has 64 squares on it and in alexander's notebook this chessboard had 62 of the 64 squares filled in and alexander would explain to police that that was his scorecard he had 62 victims it would turn out two of those people had actually survived the pregnant woman and the 13 year old boy but still there were 60 murders accounted for in this notebook alexander would be fully cooperative with police and would tell them every detail he could possibly remember about every single killing including what conversations were like with the person he killed right before he killed them he would also often reenact what he did to the person and how he felt afterwards it was very clear that alexander was reveling in the attention he was getting from law enforcement and it was very clear that he loved talking about killing ultimately the police were only able to gather enough evidence to charge alexander with 49 murders not 60 and when alexander heard this he was totally disappointed and he asked the judge if he could get credit for the other 11 murders to maintain his 60 victim mark the judge said no during his trial alexander was deemed to be such a threat he was kept inside of a glass cage the entire time and during the proceedings he showed no remorse and in fact seemed kind of happy like he was enjoying the spectacle of his trial he was ultimately given the harshest penalty under russian law at the time which was life in prison without parole and the first 15 years of his life sentence would be in complete and total solitary confinement so virtually no human interaction kept inside of a cell 24 hours a day with nothing in his cell all day long alexander is still alive today and he is still in solitary confinement so that's going to do it guys if you got something out of today's episode and you haven't done this already please offer to help build the like buttons new dresser they got from ikea and as soon as you open it up take all the screws out 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Channel: MrBallen

Views: 6,163,311

Keywords: strange, dark, mysterious, true, story, scary, scary story, horror story, disturbing, narration, narrator, storyteller, storytime, storytelling, unsolved mystery, solved mystery, true crime, russia, russian, Moscow, poor, ghetto, rundown, neighborhood, urban, suburbs, forest, bitsevski park, bitsa park, scary forest, serial, bitsevski park maniac, maniac, psycho, Russian man, criminal, true story, crime, chess, chessboard, hammer, well, sewer, trapped, claustrophobia, psychopath, evil, Khrushchyovka, poverty, corrupt, wow

Id: 8NaHaRS0_DA

Length: 34min 3sec (2043 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 12 2022