On 1st of December 2006 at 2:43 am public-safety answering point got a call from Anneli Orvokki Auer (b. 19th of March 1965) who started the call by shouting “here is someone, a killer, come quickly!”. Auer told that a strange man had came inside the house and started to stab her husband, 51 year old Jukka S. Lahti (b. 1955). Auer also told that she had been wounded as well. Auer and Lahti had four children who were 2, 4, 7 and 9 years old at the time of the murder. At least two of the eldest children woke up during the happening. The emergency call lasted for 4 minutes, from where Auer was absent for 59 minutes. The first officers arrived at their house about 3 minutes after the call. They found bloody Lahti who was laying on the bedroom floor. Soon after paramedics arrived who pronounced Lahti dead.
The murder according to Auer
Lahti came home from a work trip around 11 pm and Auer and he went to bed at 12 am. At 2:40 am they woke up to ruckus, when a strange man broke the bedroom window. According to Auer the window breaking took about one minute. The room was dark when the man jumped in through the window and attacked Lahti. Lahti grabbed two firewood with what he tried to protect himself.
When Auer tried to help Lahti, the stranger dressed in a black hoodie and possibly a balaclava, stroke her in the chest with a knife. Auer told the stranger was about 180 cm tall. She also told that she understood the stranger was a murderer so she fled. Auer opened the front door and shouted the children to leave the house, but they did not hear her. After this she called the emergency number with a landline located in the kitchen.
The eldest child had woken up because of the noises. Auer asked her to come to the phone to wait in the line while she goes to help Lahti. When she arrived back to the bedroom, the stranger attacked her twice which forced her to fled the room again. When Auer came back to the phone she had been absent for 59 seconds. When the eldest child looked to the bedroom she saw a stranger dressed in dark clothing exiting the window, and noticed her bloody father laying on the floor.
The murder according to the prosecutor
When Lahti came back home from the work trip around 11 pm, an argument broke between Auer and Lahti. According to the prosecutor their values and morals differed a lot and they had been considering a divorce. The argument escalated and they started to throw objects and using firewood and knives as weapons. With a knife Lahti hit Auer on her side. When Auer got the knife for herself she stroke Lahti who lost his consciousness. Auer thought she had killed him.
Auer started to stage the scene so that it seemed like the murder was done by an outsider. According to the prosecutor Auer for example broke the bedroom window and made bloody footprints with shoes belonging to Lahti. Auer called the public-safety answering point, but while she was on the phone Lahti regained his consciousness and started to shout. Auer asked the eldest child to come to the phone while she went back to the bedroom to strike Lahti twice on the head. Lahti died immediately. Alternative theory according to prosecutors is that Lahti died before Auer even made the call, and the noises heard in the background came from a record Auer had made earlier.
When Auer came back to the phone, the eldest child looked at the bedroom and thought she saw an outsider fleeing. According to the prosecutor Auer hid the murder weapon and the clothes she had been wearing during the murder so well, that the police officers haven’t been able to find them.
The first officers arrived at the scene 9 minutes after the call started. Lahti was laying lifelessly on the floor that had blood and shards of glass on it. Beside him they found a bloody Fiskars -knife and a bloody firewood. The killing however was done with a heavy, blunt object that has never been found.
At the bloody bed in the room was another firewood, and from there the officers found DNA belonging to Lahti and some other unknown person. Officers also found a black glove from the bed. On the floor and outside on the terrace was bloody footprints and on the window frame bloody prints made with the glove. According to Matti Mäkinen, the crime scene investigator, the window most definitely was broken from the outside. Years after, the police in Pori claimed that the window was broken from the inside. The shards of glass were inside as well as outside on the terrace.
The investigators were able to find many brown synthetic fibers from the crime scene, but they were unable to find out from where they came from. The fibers were also found from the window frame, from the terrace and from Lahti. From the red shirt Auer was wearing they did not find any.
Police dogs arrived at the scene about 1 hour 30 minutes after the murder to search for odour trace of the murderer. From the grounds it was impossible to find any because many officers had been going in and out to the house. The dog found a trace from the neighbours yard but the investigators were unable to tell who had been walking there. The dog also didn’t find any connection between Auer and the alleged knife that had been used in the murder.
At first the investigators thought the attack was a personal vengeance because of Lahti’s work. Lahti worked as a manager in a copper factory in Luvata, who recently had fired 400 employees. The murder itself and the way the murderer acted, pointed to a carefully planned attack. The police profiled the murderer being psychopathic. Before the murder Lahti had told that he had gotten threats, but he did not individualize them at all.
Inspector Juha Joutsenlahti asked help from the public in finding a red Volvo passenger car. It had been seen moving around the neighbourhood during the night of the murder, and a week before that. The police also told that noises made by an outsider were in the emergency call recording and that they had the DNA of the killer (the one they found from the bed). The police carried out the largest DNA sample gathering in Finland. They took over 700 samples from people, but did not have a break through in the case. It wasn’t until 2013 when it was revealed that the unknown DNA police had, belonged to their own investigator.
The police arrested many suspects, but the arrests did not lead anywhere. In July 2007 actor Kai Tanner was arrested for some reason. He remained in custody for 7 days, until Joutsenlahti ordered him to be released immediately. Tanner applied for compensation from the government and was paid 11 000 euros.
Auer as a suspect 2009-2010
In the summer of 2008 Auer was considered to be the main suspect. The police used undercover tacticts, listened to phones and also listened the home of Auer. The undercover inspections started in April 2009 when Auer met Seppo Mäkelä. He met Auer’s children and visited her in her home. The undercover investigation lasted for months and the reason behind this was to find clues about Auer’s personality and the night of the murder. It wasn’t until the trial when Auer got to know that Mäkelä was actually an undercover police officer. She demanded to get all the information they had gathered from her. The National Bureau of Investigation (Finnish: Keskusrikospoliisi, KRP) denied her demand, because according to them the undercover investigation didn’t reveal any clues supporting the possibility that Auer was the perpetrator. In the end Auer managed to get all the information.
Auer was arrested on 28th of September 2009 for the murder of Lahti. Two days later Kuusiranta announced that Auer had confessed to the murder. Later Auer denied the confession, because according to her the confession was only a speculation of everything that could’ve happened, if she was the perpetrator.
Auer herself was confused how the police even could suspect her, because during the murder she was on the phone, so she would’ve needed to stage the noises Lahti made during the call. The most essential proof was the recording of the emergency call. The police couldn’t find any noises belonging to a stranger from it. The KRP’s sound investigator Tuija Niemi said that on the recording can be heard a two syllable word Auer said: (u)-o-l-e (Finnish: kuole = die).
The children of Auer and Lahti had been taken in custody, and Auer’s brother had been their foster parent. He contacted the police in 2011 because according to him the two eldest children had told more things about the night of the murder and other things. He had recorded the things they had told. The children had told that Auer had been practicing Satan worshipping rituals, where dozens of animals had been killed. The second eldest child had told that Auer had been practicing the murdering of Lahti and that she had built a wooden shield that would’ve protected her clothes from blood splatter.
The second eldest child also told hearing everything of the murder to their room through a door. They had heard for example how a knife was picked up from a table and the pressing of the buttons of a record player. According to the child the murder was done before the emergency call and the noises heard during the call came from the record player. The sound investigator of KRP also agreed that the murder had been done before the call. In 2012 FBI investigated the recording and tried to find if it included manipulated parts, for example pre-recorded portions. FBI however didn’t find anything. They also told that they are unable to tell the amount of footsteps or the amount of people present in the house from the recording. The eldest child denied the accusations of the second eldest child and claimed that the perpetrator was outsider.
The trial started on 14th of July 2010 where Auer was accused on murdering Lahti. According to the prosecutors there were no outsiders present during the murder, and that Auer did kill Lahti at the end of an argument and after that staged the crime scene. The district court sentenced Auer to life in prison for the murder on 12th of November 2010. Before the sentence there was a mental evaluation done to Auer that stated that Auer was sane during the murder.
Auer complained about the sentence to court of appeals in Vaasa and on 1st of July 2011 the court of appeals dismissed the murder charge. They explained that Auer’s innocence was defended by the things she herself and the eldest child told about the outsider, the bloody footprints and the brown fibers found from the crime scene. Additionally the police were unable to find the other murder weapon. The court saw that it was impossible that Auer could’ve had time between the emergency call and the arrival of the first officers to stage the whole murder scene.
The case went to court again on 20th of August 2013. According to the prosecutor additional investigation had revealed clearance on the motive and things before the murder. At the beginning of the trial the prosecutor dropped the claims that the murder would’ve included Satan worship.
On 12th of December 2012 the district court of Satakunta region sentenced Auer once again to life in prison for the murder of Lahti. Majority of the judges saw that it was impossible that there was a outsider as the perpetrator. According to the court the murder wasn’t planned, but it was exceptionally cruel and crude.
Auer once again complained to the court of appeals and on 19th of February 2015 the court of appeals dismissed the murder charge. They once again saw that the evidence pointing to the outsider and the lack of evidence can’t make innocent people suffer when serious crimes are investigated. The court of appeals didn’t think the things the youngest children had told were believable. Despite the dropping of the murder charge, Auer remained in custody, because there had been new accusations.
In September 2011 Auer and her new boyfriend were arrested because they were suspected sexual offenders. On 29th of June 2012 the district court of Turku sentenced Auer to 7 years in prison for two aggravated rape and three accounts of child sexual exploitation. Auer’s ex-boyfriend Jens Rurik Kukka (b. 1963) was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The previously mentioned crimes happened between 2007 to 2009.
Auer and Kukka complained to the court of appeals of Turku and on 27th of June 2013 the court of appeals saw that Auer was also guilty of three aggravated assaults and the sentence was raised with 6 months, making the sentence 7 years and 6 months. Kukka’s 10 year sentence did not change. Auer and Kukka complained to European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), but they did not investigate the complaints.
The prosecutors have critiziced the investigation, because according to them it was done poorly. The court of appeals in Vaasa also critiziced the investigation because the house wasn’t investigated properly.
In August 2012 Auer made an investigation request. According to her she was considered as the main suspect since the year 2009 and because of this investigation ruled out things that could’ve pointed to the direction that she was innocent. In December 2013 prosecutor Tapio Mäkinen concluded that a investigation will not be made since there is no reason to suspect that crime has happened in the police work.
In September 2016 Auer published a book called Memoirs of the murder widow (Murhalesken muistelmat). In the book she tells about her life before the murder and also goes through her and her children’s life through the investigation. The book is the first written document where Auer herself tells everything from her own point of view.
Honestly, I have to say that it is really sad how this case surrounds Auer herself more than the victim, Lahti. Of course people are very interested about her since she is very controversial person, but we should not forget that a man lost his life. Finns are also divided, there are people who believe she absolutely did it, but also people who think it was someone else. However I think it’s safe to say that the majority of Finns believe Auer definitely is a murderer. This murder remains officially unsolved.
