Alexander Elistratov

On March 26, 2008, the Moscow City Court sentenced Alexander Elistratov to life imprisonment, with the verdict upheld by the Supreme Court of Russia. He is currently imprisoned at the Polar Owl Colony, from where he tried to unsuccessfully escape on June 3, 2011.

Alexander Ivanovich Elistratov (Russian: Александр Иванович Елистратов; born 1954), known as The Bloody Taxi Driver (Russian: Кровавый таксист, was a Russian robber and serial killer who killed six of his passengers in Moscow between 2005 and 2007, in addition to non-fatally robbing three others. He was convicted of the killings and sentenced to life imprisonment, which he is serving at the Polar Owl Colony.

Elistratov was born in Ulyanovsk in 1954, but moved to the Kazakh SSR at an early age. In 1990, he returned to Russia, settling in Moscow's Federal Avenue with his wife, who gave birth to two sons. The couple later divorced, with the woman claiming that Alexander never paid for anything, but they still decided to live together as a family. Elistratov was described very positively by his acquaintances, especially by his blind neighbor Alesya, who claimed that he would drive her for free around the city and even buy her family salmon, despite being a man of modest means. Unbeknownst to them, Elistratov had four criminal convictions: two for illegal possession of weaponry, and one each for theft and robbery, but due to negligence of the authorities, he was presented as a first-time offender during his trials for the third and fourth convictions, for which he was given a 4-year suspended sentence in 2004.