(Reuters) - A man accused of murdering 49 people has told a court his grisly toll should include another 11 victims - and that when he first strangled a man it felt like falling in love.
Alexander PichushkinRussian supermarket worker Alexander Pichushkin has been branded the "chessboard killer" because he hoped to cover all 64 squares of a chessboard with coins, each one representing a life he had taken.
Speaking from a cage in a Moscow courtroom, the 33-year-old told the court he started killing at the age of 18 with the murder of a classmate.
"A first killing is like your first love. You never forget it," he said.
He said he had suggested to his classmate that they kill someone, but when his friend refused, "I sent him to heaven". He then smirked at the jury.
"The closer a person is to you, and the better you know them, the more pleasurable it is to kill them," he said.
"In all the cases I killed for only one reason. I killed in order to live, because when you kill, you want to live."
Often aggressive in court, Pichushkin gesticulated to show the jury how he strangled his victims and the marks his victims had left on his hands as they struggled.
Prosecutors have charged Pichushkin with 49 murders and three attempted murders, but he asked the court to take into account another 11 murders.
"I thought it would not be fair to forget about the other 11 people," he told the court.
Prosecutors say he lured most of his victims to secluded parts of Moscow's Bitsevsky Park, where he plied them with vodka and then smashed their skulls with a hammer.
Other victims were strangled, drowned in a sewage pit or thrown off balconies.
He said police interviewed him at the time of his first murder, but let him go due to a lack of evidence.
"You should not credit the police with catching me. I gave myself up," he told the court.
If convicted, Pichushkin could be Russia's most prolific serial killer.
Andrei Chikatilo , the " Rostov Ripper", was convicted in 1992 and executed in 1994 for raping, butchering and in some cases eating as many as 52 people.
However, he is still well short of the total amassed by the UK's worst serial killer.
Harold Shipman killed between 215 and 260 people over a 23-year period while working as a doctor in Yorkshire. He was found hanged in his prison cell in 2004.