He came in the morning, after the relatives had gone to work, and introduced himself as the doctor from the local polyclinic. He took the pensioner's blood pressure, said an injection was needed, and gave one. The drug put the patient out. Then he searched the apartment and took money, valuables, icons and small household things, and slipped the rings and earrings off the patient before he left. For the first two years nobody died. People woke up and found the doctor and their belongings gone. Many were ashamed to report it, believing they were losing their minds, since what doctor would rob them; some did go to the police, where officers were in no hurry to take their statements.
The man was Maxim Vladimirovich Petrov, a medical worker on the 5th substation of the St. Petersburg ambulance service. Earlier accounts describe him as a qualified pediatrician; the Russian press of 2025 calls him a feldsher, a paramedic. He was born in Leningrad, in November 1965 according to reports marking his sixtieth birthday (other sources give 1966), grew up on Vasilyevsky Island in an ordinary family, and was remembered by colleagues and the families of his young patients as attentive and kind. He was said to dislike violence in films. The press called him Doctor Death and Doctor Killer.
The robberies began in August 1997, and there were forty-six or forty-seven of them. The victims were not chosen at random. Every one was on a list of patients who had been through the chest X-ray screening program, which he had taken from a polyclinic. Investigators worked the case for a long time before they understood the principle. The police declined to release a composite sketch, expecting an early arrest.
The first killings came on February 2, 1999, during what was about his thirtieth robbery. The patient was already unconscious when the patient's daughter came home unexpectedly and found him going through the apartment. He struck her with a screwdriver and strangled her father. After that his method changed. He began injecting mixtures of several lethal drugs, a combination messy enough, Russian accounts say, not to look like the work of a medical man, and he set fire to the apartments 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 rubles, or for food taken from the victim's refrigerator. What he took he sold at the market, and much of it was still in his own apartment when he was arrested on January 17, 2000. He is said to have regarded his scheme as close to flawless and his arrest as bad luck.
He withdrew his admissions and told the court he had been made to incriminate himself. The case rested on the property of dead pensioners found in his home and on the evidence of witnesses, among them people who had survived an injection. On November 21, 2003 he was convicted of eleven murders committed for robbery, four attempted murders, and dozens of robberies, and sentenced to life imprisonment. A psychiatric examination found him legally sane. Some Russian sources put the dead at twelve rather than eleven.
He served his sentence at IK-2, the special-regime colony in Solikamsk known as the White Swan. In March 2025 the Telegram channel SHOT reported that, having spent twenty-five years in custody, he wanted to apply for parole and return to St. Petersburg. Russian law allows a prisoner serving life to petition after twenty-five years if he has a positive record and no serious violations in the previous four. The human rights advocate Eva Merkacheva said that a court would weigh the serial nature of his crimes and what she described as his mental problems. Soon afterward the regional prison service told RIA Novosti that reports of his imminent release were untrue. No court decision on any application has been reported.