Kaspars Petrovs was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Riga Regional Court on May 12, 2005. The court convicted him of 13 murders, together with attempted murders, theft and robbery. Almost all of the people he killed were elderly women living in Riga, and he killed them in the course of robberies between 2000 and early 2003. He had confessed to many more. The indictment put before the court in February 2005 listed 38 murders and eight attempted murders, but prosecutors could not prove most of them, and the court's judgment covered 13. The Baltic Times called him the most prolific serial killer in Latvian history. Latvian papers called him a "21st-century Kaupēns" and likened him to Andrei Chikatilo.
At the time of the killings he was in his early or mid twenties and had no home. He had already been convicted once, in the port city of Liepāja, for robbing elderly people, and had been given a suspended sentence. He has said throughout that he meant to rob, not to kill. "I wanted only to rob them, not to kill them," he told the court, according to The Baltic Times.
Petrovs grew up in Grobiņa, a small town in the Liepāja district of western Latvia. His year of birth is given as 1978 in Latvian reports from 2015 and 2026. A 2005 profile by the Liepāja newspaper Kurzemes Vārds, published by TVNET, gave 1976, though the same article described him as 27 years old in April 2005.
He came from a large family. His lawyer, Antons Drēbnieks, told Neatkarīgā in 2007 that his parents were medical workers and that he was one of nine children. A 2026 Jauns.lv account describes him as one of ten. The Kurzemes Vārds profile said only that he had many brothers and sisters and that his parents were educated professionals well known in Grobiņa. Every account describes the family as close, educated and caring.
He did not fit in. Former classmates and teachers told Kurzemes Vārds that he had been a quiet, tidy boy who read a great deal and was bright, and one teacher said he could have become a well-educated young man with a future. In the last years of primary school he began to skip classes, and his marks fell. He was given a lowered conduct mark for hooliganism in the eighth grade and was kept back a year, and in 1993 the school council voted to expel him. A teacher at an after-school club recalled that in quarrels with other boys he could turn very violent. Jauns.lv reports that as a teenager he began smoking and drinking and ran away from home several times.
After leaving his family in Grobiņa, Petrovs moved to Liepāja. According to Kurzemes Vārds, he lived in social housing and with girlfriends in different parts of the city, and at times he slept in attics.
His first crimes were in Liepāja. In 1996, the newspaper reported, he robbed elderly residents there, taking only a few lats each time, and broke into a flat, taking a radio and a telephone. Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze later summarized his early record as the robbery of three elderly men and a break-in. Kurzemes Vārds reported that one of the people he attacked in this period was a woman of 90, who later wrote to the court that the attack had done her lasting psychological harm and asked not to have to appear.
The case was decided in the Liepāja court on April 9, 1997. Judge Vineta Vaiteika sentenced him to three years' imprisonment, suspended, a term Kurzemes Vārds described as under the legal minimum for the offenses. The court gave weight to his confession, his remorse and the fact that he had a child to support. A forensic psychiatric and psychological examination found him sane and aware of what he was doing. Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze reported that an investigator at the time judged him unlikely to offend again.
Accounts of this first conviction differ. The Baltic Times wrote in 2005 that he had a theft conviction from 1998. Jauns.lv wrote in 2026 that at 18 he received a suspended three-year sentence for theft. The Kurzemes Vārds account, written while he was on trial in Riga and based on interviews in Liepāja, gives the April 1997 date and the court that decided it.
A Liepāja police officer told Kurzemes Vārds that Petrovs spoke well and knew how to win people's trust.
Petrovs moved to Riga. RUS TVNET reported in 2017 that he went there from Liepāja in 2001 after a quarrel with his parents, and that he had no fixed address; for a time he stayed in other people's summer cottages and then lived with a local woman, telling her each morning that he was going to work. The Baltic Times reported at his sentencing that he had been living on the streets of Riga for the three years before his arrest.
Between 2000 and early 2003 he robbed and strangled elderly people in Riga. In Riga, Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze reported in 2015, he attacked only elderly women. Prosecutors told the court in 2005 that every one of the killings was committed for the sake of robbery.
The amounts he took were small. RUS TVNET reported that he took between a few dozen and a few hundred lats from each victim, and that one woman, aged 89, lost little more than some tinned fish and vegetables. Prosecutors put the total losses across the case at more than 18,000 lats. The Baltic Times gave the same figure and converted it to about 26,000 euros. RUS TVNET in 2017 gave a total of more than 25,000 lats.
His lawyer later told Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze that he sold what he stole for cash in Riga, and that Petrovs seemed to have a nose for where money was kept, though sometimes there was none to find. Drēbnieks put the motive in one word: greed.
Because the women were old, many of the deaths were at first taken for natural ones, Jauns.lv reported. LETA reported in February 2005 that relatives did not suspect a crime until after his arrest and the news coverage that followed, when they went to the police, and investigators then established that the women had been killed. Two exhumations were ordered for forensic examination.
In 2002 Riga criminal police began to see a pattern. Several elderly people had died by strangulation, and the cases looked alike, Kurzemes Vārds and Jauns.lv reported. According to LETA, police first suspected one man of the deaths of five women in Riga: two in November and December 2002 and three in late January 2003. Kurzemes Vārds reported that he was arrested as a suspect in three killings, and that investigators then linked him to many more.
He was detained on February 3, 2003. Neatkarīgā reported in 2007 that police had picked him up for a petty robbery, and Jauns.lv wrote in 2026 that he was detained in Riga for theft. Under questioning he began to confess to killings.
His own explanation for confessing, as reported by Neatkarīgā in 2007, was that he could not sleep: the dead women came to him in his dreams. He later told his lawyer that they still did.
The confessions grew over the months that followed. LETA reported that the indictment at first cited 30 murders and that he then confessed to more; by November 2004, prosecutors knew of 38 murders that he had admitted. Kurzemes Vārds wrote that under questioning he confessed to killing 38 elderly women, and that the prosecutor believed the real number was higher.
The case reached the Riga Regional Court as six separate criminal cases, sent to the court in 2004 and joined into one. The final indictment listed 53 criminal episodes: 38 murders, eight attempted murders and several robberies and thefts. According to Jauns.lv, the oldest of the 38 women named in the indictment was 91 and the youngest was 66. He faced life imprisonment, or 10 to 20 years in prison.
Forensic psychiatric and psychological examinations during the investigation found him sane and aware that he was committing crimes, LETA reported.
The indictment was read in the Riga Regional Court on February 9, 2005. The largest courtroom was full, LETA reported, mostly with relatives, friends and neighbors of the victims, and with journalists, among them reporters from Russian media. Later accounts in Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze and Jauns.lv said journalists came from Russia, France, Poland and Lithuania to follow the case.
Petrovs admitted his guilt. LETA reported on the first day that his testimony matched the evidence in the case file, and that he said he had not wanted any of the crimes to end in a death.
Kurzemes Vārds, writing in April 2005 while the trial was under way, quoted a Riga investigator who said that without a life sentence Petrovs would probably return to crime.
At the end of the trial he spoke about his family. "I understood that I would not be able to earn as much as my family demanded from me," he said, according to The Baltic Times. "Therefore I turned to crime." He told the court that he had not enjoyed what he did and found it disgusting, but that he had been carried away and could not stop. He said he regretted the killings, that he wished the women were still alive, and that he could not undo what he had done with words. He asked the victims' families to forgive him.
On May 12, 2005, the Riga Regional Court sentenced Petrovs to life imprisonment. He was convicted of 13 murders, eight attempted murders, theft and robbery, The Baltic Times reported in its follow-up on May 18. The paper's first report on the day of the verdict had described the conviction as covering all 38 murders in the indictment; its later report and the Latvian press give 13. Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze, writing in 2015, described the sentence as life for 13 proven murders, and Jauns.lv in 2026 described the indictment as naming 38 victims.
The gap between the two figures came from the evidence. The Baltic Times reported that a lack of forensic evidence limited the murder convictions to 13. Neatkarīgā wrote in 2007 that the court recognized fewer than half of the killings he had confessed to because of errors by police and medical examiners, and that 23 deaths were left with no one held responsible for them and no one looking.
The number of people Petrovs killed is not settled. The court's judgment covers 13 murders. He admitted 38 during the investigation, and those 38 went into the indictment. His lawyer, Antons Drēbnieks, told Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze in 2015 that, according to investigators, the true number might be about 100. None of these higher figures has been tested in court.
The 2007 Neatkarīgā report also carried a claim pointing the other way. A prisoner who had shared a cell with Petrovs during the trial wrote to the president of Latvia to say that a cellmate may have taken the blame for murders he did not commit. The newspaper did not make clear whom the letter meant.
Several details differ between accounts. His year of birth appears as both 1976 and 1978. His first conviction is dated 1997 by Kurzemes Vārds and 1998 by The Baltic Times, and is described as robbery by one paper and as theft by others. The total stolen is put at more than 18,000 lats by prosecutors and at more than 25,000 lats by RUS TVNET.
Petrovs began his sentence at Riga Central Prison and was later held in Jelgava, according to Jauns.lv. By 2007 he was in the prison at Daugavpils known as "Baltais gulbis", the White Swan, Neatkarīgā reported, and in April 2015 Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze reported that he had spent nearly ten years in a life-sentence cell at Daugavpils. RUS TVNET reported in 2017 that he was serving his sentence at Daugavpils. Jauns.lv, in February 2026, described him as held at the Daugavgrīva prison, "Baltais gulbis".
His lawyer told RUS TVNET in 2017 that Petrovs behaved well in prison. The Prison Administration told Neatkarīgā in 2007 that he listened to advice. Drēbnieks was less hopeful, saying he doubted Petrovs would change, because Latvian prisons were closer to camps than to places of correction.
He wrote to his lawyer often. Neatkarīgā described long, carefully written letters in a near-calligraphic hand, full of philosophical remarks such as "Today is today." Asked in 2007 whether there was anything more he wanted to tell, he answered, "Not right now." In 2015 Drēbnieks said he still received letters and visited Petrovs about once a year, and that he had hopes for him. Petrovs had said, according to the lawyer, that he would not kill again.
Jauns.lv reported in February 2026 that late in 2025 Petrovs wrote a letter apologizing to his victims, their relatives and his own family, saying he had never wanted to kill anyone, and that he still saw the women in his dreams.
In 2007 Neatkarīgā reported that Petrovs had sold the rights to his life story to the Russian broadcaster RTR, whose producers paid 1,000 lats to make a documentary about him. RUS TVNET reported the same payment in 2017. Drēbnieks said he had advised Petrovs to save the money in case he was ever released.
Drēbnieks was also writing a book about him. Petrovs gave his lawyer exclusive rights to study his life and to publish the results, with photographs and under his real name, Neatkarīgā reported in 2007; the lawyer was still at work on it in 2015.
Latvia has no death penalty. Neatkarīgā Rīta Avīze noted in 2015 that the country had carried out its last executions in January 1996 and had ratified Protocol 13 in January 2012, and that the Petrovs case had prompted some emotional calls to bring capital punishment back.
The rules on release from a life sentence have been reported differently over the years. In 2007 the Prison Administration told Neatkarīgā that, like every life prisoner, he could apply for early release after 21 years, and that he could ask the president for clemency after 16 years. The head of the Presidential Pardon Service, Rita Aksenoka, told the paper that the first clemency request from a life prisoner might come in 2013, and the paper wrote that Petrovs would be able to apply to the president in 2023. Jauns.lv, citing the Criminal Law, wrote in 2026 that a life prisoner may apply for conditional release after 25 years, and that Petrovs could in theory apply from 2028.
1976 or 1978: born; grows up in Grobiņa, Liepāja district.
1993: expelled from school by vote of the school council.
1996: robberies of elderly people and a break-in in Liepāja.
April 9, 1997: Liepāja court gives him a suspended three-year sentence.
2000 to early 2003: robberies and killings of elderly women in Riga.
2002: Riga criminal police link several strangling deaths of elderly people.
November and December 2002, late January 2003: five deaths for which he is first suspected.
February 3, 2003: detained in Riga; begins to confess.
November 2004: prosecutors know of 38 admitted murders.
2004: six cases sent to the Riga Regional Court and joined into one.
February 9, 2005: indictment read; 53 episodes, including 38 murders and eight attempted murders.
May 12, 2005: convicted of 13 murders, with attempted murders, theft and robbery; sentenced to life imprisonment.
2007: held at Daugavpils; RTR pays 1,000 lats for a documentary.
April 2015: reported in a life-sentence cell at Daugavpils for nearly ten years.
Late 2025: writes a letter of apology to victims' families, as reported in February 2026.
February 2026: reported held at Daugavgrīva prison.