Crimes in criminal investigation

How the child's quiet question turned into the woman's commanding cry...

Tampering with emergency call recording

In the original Ulvila murder emergency call recording, at point 2.03, a quiet question was heard from nine-year-old Amanda on the phone, "Who's there?" This has been confirmed by Mika Sihvonen, Senior Assistant at Hypermedia Laboratory of the University of Tampere, who examined the recording in January 2008, and Vesa Aaltonen, Detective Inspector, who reviewed the recording with him.

In the emergency call recording that is part of the official preliminary investigation and trial materials of the murder, Amanda's question is not heard, but instead Auer yells "die". No one had heard this Auer's yell until Detective Sergeant Tapio Santaoja, in August 2009, called on Tuija Niemi, sound analyst of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Forensic Laboratory, to investigate that passage in question. According to Santaoja, it contained Auer's message, "die hell."

What happened to the emergency call recording? Where did the child's question disappear to and where did the woman's cruel exclamation come from? The answer is creepy, but simple. The police edited the recording. No one has been able to offer any other explanation.

Fake recordings

During the murder trials, it emerged that there were two different versions of the emergency call, both of which were claimed to be copies of the original. The FBI had been sent a lower-quality version for examination. The matter was embarrassing. For this reason, the police conducted further investigation and, according to documents, restored the original call twice from the backup recording of the emergency response centre in 2012 and asked sound analyst Niemi to compare these restored sound files with the recording provided in 2006 by the emergency response centre. And, strangely enough, the restored recordings were different from each other, but in exactly the same way as the previous ones. Although it was suspected that the differences were due to the procedures performed during the restoring process, the matter was not clarified with those who made the restores, but rather with the system importer. Why? Well, the matter could not be asked of the people who made the returns, because no returns had been made. This has been confirmed by Miia Tukia, lawyer of the emergency response centre, Taito Vainio, director of the emergency response centre and Marko Savolainen, Chief Superintendent of the National Police Board.

An investigation request 1225/R/397/25

Based on the information presented in the book, a reader has made a request for an investigation into the crimes suspected of being committed by the police. The request for an investigation is awaiting preliminary investigation at the Prosecutor General's Office on the desk of Tapio Mäkinen State Prosecutor and Head of the Police Crime Unit. Personally, I do not believe in the effectiveness of police legality supervision, but miracles can always happen.

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UPDATE

The crimes have expired – at least almost

State Prosecutor Tapio Mäkinen decided not to investigate the falsifications of the emergency call recording of Ulvila's murder because the right to prosecute in the case has expired.

The emergency call recording was forged at some point before the conclusion of the preliminary investigation, so more than 15 years have passed since the crime. The police tried to cover up their crime with new forgeries in early 2012 by fabricating new recordings that were claimed to be copies of the original recording recovered from the emergency center's security tape, which they were not. More than 13 years have passed since this crime. This forged evidence was used in the Ulvila murder trial until the very end. The trial officially ended in December 2015 when the Supreme Court rejected the prosecutors' application for leave to appeal. In these respects, 10 years have soon passed since the crimes. The right to prosecute in that respect will therefore expire soon.

However, the crimes are not permanently time barred. The murder is still unsolved and does not expire as a crime. The emergency call recording is evidence in the murder case, and the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) is currently investigating the possibilities of utilizing this fake recording in the investigation. If charges are ever brought for the murder and the recording is used as evidence, the police/prosecutor may then be guilty of a crime.

The case seems unusual, but it is not unique. The police have previously edited recordings to make them more suitable for their purposes. This was also done in the Keijo Smolander case, when an officer from the forensic laboratory "mixed the recordings for the courtroom". Journalists Matts Dumell and Juhani Tamminen have written a comprehensive article about the Smolander case in Alibi 1/2013.