The maniac lumbers through a silent forest. he is a sallow-faced man with a stout physique and a deep, low voice. he's with a friend, a woman, and they are enveloped by birch trees rising fifty, sixty feet into a pale gray sky.

They are talking about something important. What is love? Is love for real, or is it a ruse, a make-believe ambrosia? The woman doesn’t know that the Maniac has had this conversation before. He is practiced. When he talks, he has an almost preternatural concentration. He wants to be understood, and he likes to say he never lies. In court he will declare: I always say exactly what I think.

She had no idea he would be so serious. The Maniac, after all, is a clerk at the grocery store where they both work. He approached her maybe a half hour ago, started chatting, making jokes. He offered her a cigarette. She cupped it while he lit the match, then laughed at something he said. He suggested a walk in the park. She didn’t know him all that well, but well enough, and she wanted another cigarette. She accepted.

Now they’re walking over branches, wrappers, cigarette butts; past bottles, a stuffed animal, a used condom. He’s talking about intimacy, of all things. (During the trial he’ll have this to say about intimacy: “The closer a person is to you and the better you know them, the more pleasurable it is to kill them.”) They can hear trails of moving laughter somewhere far away, other people carousing, but here, in this particular swath of woods, there are only trees and shadows. They can no longer see the road. He says something—later he will try to remember exactly what it was he said—and then he smirks. He sees something flash across her face, like many disparate pieces of information coalescing into an anticipation of…what? She knows, of course, about the disappearances. Everyone does. By this point—spring 2006—something like fifty people have vanished into the woods. There are bodies, cops, sketches of suspects. She knows about the park, the Maniac, the faceless animal no one has seen or is even sure is one man or two or many. He is part of the daily chatter coursing through the apartment blocks that ring the park. They talk about him on TV every night.

But the grocery clerk?

The grocery clerk. Now she seems certain that this man with sturdy hands and thick wrists, this co-worker, is the Maniac. Suddenly she looks very, very tired. She throws her arms around a tree trunk and falls to the ground sobbing, squeezing her eyes shut tight. The Maniac is startled. How could she have known?

There are pieces of bark pressed against her cheek, a scratch on her neck. She begins talking to herself. In court he won’t be able to recall what she was saying, or trying to say, but he’ll remember the penultimate moment with absolute clarity. As the woman, Larissa Kulagina, clings to the tree, he can’t help it, but he smirks again, and when she says, “Are you going to kill me?” he has no choice but to reply: “Yes.”

In the months following his July 2006 arrest, Alexander Yurievich Pichushkin, now 35, achieved his only goal: Around the world, he was hailed as a monster. All the big news organizations—CNN, The New York Times, the BBC—aired or published long stories about the deadliest man in Russia. Criminologists, psychologists, and serial-killer aficionados weighed in online with theories and speculation. Pichushkin had transcended Pichushkin. He was now the Maniac.