Moscow ? A former grocery clerk who imagined himself as “almost God” while murdering 48 people during a methodical hunt to produce one body for every space on a chessboard was sentenced Monday to life in a hard labor colony.

A Moscow court handed down Russia’s harshest possible sentence for Alexander Pichushkin, 33, who mostly preyed on residents of his poor Moscow neighborhood.

Pichushkin stood in a reinforced glass cage, his hands cuffed behind his back, while the judge read the sentence in a room packed with victims’ relatives. Asked whether he understood the sentence, he replied: “I’m not deaf.”

Pichushkin, who had been unrepentant and defiant during the trial, looked subdued and depressed. Some of the victims’ relatives wiped away tears as they listened.