Reported by Timo Haukioja, 4 June 1999
Two Murder Cases, the Finnish Way
Yesterday's evening papers contained stories on two murder cases which are currently in
court in Helsinki, Finland. They have both received a fair amount of media coverage. What
makes a comparison between them interesting is the fact that in one (let's call it case
A), the accused is a man and the victim is a woman. In the other (case B), the accused is
a woman, and
the victims (note the plural) are men.
I'd like to give my short impressions on how the media has covered these cases. I'd also like to emphasize that these are just that, impressions - the murder in case A took place last summer or last fall, and case B in late winter this year, and as much as I'd like to, I don't have the time to go through newspaper archives and the like to get the raw data. If our university had a Men's Studies program (it has a fairly large and relatively well-funded Women's Studies program) and I were part of it, I could do that as part of my day job, but alas, that is not the case.
I'm also not claiming that these cases would be identical and would not warrant different treatment. Just to give you the background, in case A, the woman was allegedly killed by her ex-fiancee, who was desperately depressed after she had left him. It seems like in this case, the question whether he actually did it will be determined in court (i.e. he didn't get caught red-handed and there are no eyewitnesses). What is known is that he had tried to hire a friend of his to do the killing; the friend is on trial for accessory to murder.
In case B, a woman killed three men and wounded two others (at least one of whom was permanently disabled by a serious head wound) at a shooting range. All these men were complete strangers to her. Her defense attorney denies that she did any of that, but the two wounded men have identified her and her fingerprints are all over the murder weapon, so there should really be no doubt as to whether she is guilty or not. It is anticipated that the trial will mainly focus on determining if she is criminally insane.
When reading the newspaper reports yesterday, one thing struck me: I can name both of these women. They are pretty close to household names. What I can not do is name *any* of the men involved. Case A was very quickly named after the murder victim. The reports on this case concentrated on the victim, gave her life history, etc. Friends and relatives were interviewed, and her future plans - now permanently put on hold - were revealed. The murderer's motivation was simply dismissed as that of a jealous man who wants to own his ex- fiancee, even after a break-up. I don't remember reading anything about his childhood, upbringing, or the like. Nobody was set out to find traumatic events from his past.
Case B was the reverse. Most of the interest in the media was directed toward the murderer. The men were only mentioned in passing. Some of them (I can't recall how many) had families and children, but they apparently were not interesting enough to interview in depth. Instead, all the papers were hell bent on finding out what could make a woman snap like that. It was soon found that she had had mental problems before. A few years ago, she had had a period with apparently paranoid delusions; according to her, her employee tapped her phone and read her e-mail, her colleagues were selling information about her, and she suspected that a colleague had raped her while she was unconscious. Interestingly enough, the media bit on the last item on that list, while dismissing the first three as delusions; however, the first three are fairly well documented (i.e. quite a few people knew she thought she was being spied on), but the rape story was only known by her sister. No physical evidence exists, of course, but this did not stop some to posit the "suspected rape" as the source of all her problems.
Just to show how deep the media was willing to dig to find out the motivation behind the murders, consider this: when this murderer had been caught at the Helsinki airport (with a one-way ticket to London in her hand), she had had a few bullets in her pocket, which she explained as "memorabilia from her deceased husband from the US, who was a FBI agent". She had never been married, but true enough, the papers found an American guy she had dated a couple of times while an exchange student in the US. There had been no contact between these two after the exchange student year (which must have been about 12 years ago). This the papers thought was important enough to report; all I've seen about the background of her victims was names, ages, and occupations, plus some small bits about their family relations.
Let me emphasize again that these are not anything like research results, but rather
just impressions -- based on my admittedly fallible memory -- about how the cases were
reported. I didn't read all of the stuff that was written about these in any paper, and I
only follow a couple of papers, so you could say the selection was random. I may have
missed something important; but unless there is really something MAJOR that somehow got by
me, the trend is clear. If a man kills a woman, it's a result of another violent male in
action. No excuses for him; instead, we get to read about the life the woman tragically
lost and the future she missed. However, when the roles are reversed (and the number of
victims multiplied!), we do not
get to hear of all the hopes of these men that will never come true, and we only hear
small bits about the tragedies their deaths caused to their families. (You could almost
argue that this reflects a view according to which male life is of little value in itself,
but it may gain some in connection with a family - is that paranoid?) Instead, we get a
detailed account of the murderer's life, which, although she was well-educated, fairly
wealthy and from a good family, somehow contains tragic problems that eventually led this
poor woman to snap - with a definite overture of "maybe it's some guy's fault after
all".
I'd really like to look into this deeper. Maybe I'll do that on my vacation.
- Timo
Comment : Who edits newspapers, and what is their agenda ?