Maxim Vladimirovich Petrov was born in Leningrad in 1966; some sources give 1965. He grew up on Vasilyevsky Island in an ordinary family, qualified as a paediatrician in 1989, and worked on an ambulance substation in the city, not, as this entry previously said, as a district physician doing polyclinic rounds. Colleagues and the families of his child patients described him as attentive and kind. He was reported to dislike violence in films.
The robberies began in August 1997 and there were forty-six or forty-seven of them. He would arrive at a pensioner's flat unannounced, usually in the morning, once the relatives had gone to work, and introduce himself as the doctor from the local polyclinic. He took the patient's blood pressure, said an injection was needed, and gave one. The drug put them out. He then searched the flat, took money, valuables, icons and small household things, and left. He took rings and earrings off the people themselves. For the first two years nobody died. They woke up, and found the doctor and their belongings gone. Russian reporting called him Doctor Killer.
How he chose them is the fact this entry was missing altogether. Every victim was on a list of patients who had been through the chest X-ray screening programme, which he had taken from a polyclinic. Investigators spent a long time on the case before they understood the principle, and until they did the attacks looked random. The police also declined to release a composite sketch, expecting an early arrest.
The first killings were on February 2, 1999, during what was about his thirtieth robbery. The patient was already unconscious from the injection when the daughter came home and found him going through the flat. He struck her with a screwdriver and strangled the patient. After that the method changed. He began injecting mixtures of several lethal narcotic drugs, and Russian accounts are explicit about the reason: a deliberately messy combination would not look like the work of a medical man. He also began setting fire to the flats to destroy what he had left behind. In November 1999 two women were killed in a single episode.
The amounts were trivial. Some of the killings were for fifty roubles, or for food taken out of the victim's refrigerator. What he took was sold at the market, and much of it was still in his own flat when he was arrested on January 17, 2000.
He was not convicted until November 21, 2003. He withdrew his admissions and told the court he had been made to incriminate himself. The case against him was the property of dead pensioners found in his flat and the evidence of witnesses, including people who had survived an injection. He was convicted of eleven murders, four attempted murders and dozens of robberies, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He has been serving it since 2004. Some Russian sources give the figure as twelve patients killed rather than eleven; the count in this roster has been rewritten to separate the two, and the figure of nineteen it previously carried has no support anywhere.
He is said to have regarded his own scheme as close to flawless and his arrest as bad luck.
In March 2025 Russian outlets reported that Petrov, having served twenty-five years, was in a position to apply for parole and wished to return to St Petersburg. Russian law permits a prisoner serving life to petition after twenty-five years, and two men convicted of serial killings have been released that way. Nothing further has been reported about the application.