Carl Gustaf Christer Pettersson (23 April 1947 – 29 September 2004) was a Swedish criminal who was a suspect in the 1986 assassination of Olof Palme, the Prime Minister of Sweden. In 1989 he was convicted of the murder in district court but acquitted on appeal the following year.
Pettersson was born on 23 April 1947, to Roland Pettersson (1916–1977) and Inga Maria Hansson (1918–1973) and grew up in a middle-class family in Solna outside of Stockholm and later moved to the suburb of Sollentuna. In his youth, he attended a theatrical school (Calle Flygares teaterskola), where he was considered to be promising by at least one of his teachers. However, Pettersson suffered a head injury from which he would never fully recover. Petterson then began a period of substance abuse, which would eventually force him to drop out of school.
In 1970, he stabbed a man to death in central Stockholm, during a street brawl in what the Swedish press dubbed the "bayonet murder". The killing took place just around the corner from what would later be the site of the Palme assassination. Pettersson was sentenced to closed psychiatric care for manslaughter for the killing. After less than two years he was released and continued a life of petty crime, which financed his alcohol and drug abuse.

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