Murder night and initial investigation
The victim's wife, Anneli Auer (born 1965), called the emergency number at 2:43 AM on December 1, 2006. According to Auer, a masked assailant had attacked her husband in the family home. Lahti had been stabbed multiple times and hit in the head with a blunt object, and Auer was also wounded. The police detained or arrested several people, among them an actor whom Auer had identified as the assailant, but who was later cleared. One theory by the police was that the murder had been a revenge, because Lahti had been working as an HR director in a company that had laid off many people. In the spring of 2008 the police conducted hundreds of DNA tests among the company's employees.Auer arrested
In August 2008, the case received a new chief investigator, and the police started to focus on the phone call that Auer had made to the emergency services. According to the police, the tape had no evidence of an outside killer. The tape had also been analyzed by theSecond set of trials
In October 2012, the Supreme Court of Finland decided to send the case back to Satakunta District Court, because of the new evidence the prosecutors presented after Auer's appeal. In the summer of 2013 it was reported that the DNA sample that was taken from the crime scene had in fact been contaminated and the unknown male DNA belonged to a crime laboratory examiner. In December 2013, the Satakunta District Court again convicted Auer in a 2–1 ruling, and sentenced her to life imprisonment. Auer appealed against her second conviction to Vaasa Court of Appeal. The appeal hearings began in September 2014 and ended in October. In February 2015, the Vaasa Court of Appeal overturned her conviction for the second time. The verdict was 2–1, with one of the judges ruling to uphold the District Court's verdict. According to the verdict, it had not been proven that Auer had staged the crime scene, and the presence of an outside perpetrator could not be ruled out based on the evidence. The court did not accept the prosecution's claim that the phone call to the emergency services contained parts that Auer had pre-recorded. The judge who voted to convict Auer was of the opinion that she was the killer and had staged the crime scene. The prosecutors appealed to the Supreme Court and provided the court with new evidence. An analysis done on behalf of the prosecution claimed to prove that the phone call had been pre-recorded by Auer. By pre-recording the sounds of the killing before the phone call, Auer would have had more time to stage the crime scene. The analysis also concluded that Auer had yelled "Die" (kuole) instead of "Don't die" (älä kuole), as she claimed. The defense team rebutted the claim with their own expert statement, which stated that the tape had no evidence of tampering, and that an outside person can be heard on it. In December 2015, the Supreme Court dismissed the appeal and upheld the Court of Appeal verdict which had found Auer not guilty of the murder of her husband. Auer had spent more than 600 days in prison for the murder, and in 2016 she was awarded a compensation of about 500,000 euros. At 800 euros per day it was the highest compensation given to a falsely imprisoned person in Finland. In 2016 over 50 police officers were charged for trying to access Auer's information in the police database. Most of them received a fine.See also
*References
External links
*{{cite web , url= http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/13667-anneli-auer-cleared-of-murder-charges-after-six-years.html, title= Anneli Auer cleared of murder charges after six years, last1= , first1= , last2= , first2= , date= 21 December 2015, website= Helsinki Times, publisher= , access-date= , quote= 2000s murders in Finland 2006 crimes in Finland 2006 murders in Europe Unsolved murders in Finland