People have always found ways to stay hidden when they want to do something they know is wrong. These days a lot of that hiding happens online.
The dark web is basically a hidden part of the internet. People need a special browser called Tor to get there. Tor makes it really hard for anyone to track where they are or what they're looking at by bouncing their connection through different computers around the world.
Most people who use it just want privacy. But some use it for illegal stuff.
One of the things that make dark web so notorious, is the murder-for-hire some people sell as a service. People can and do hire someone to kill another person in real life. On the dark web, though, it’s almost impossible to know for sure if the person will actually do it. Buyer pay with Bitcoin or some other digital money to someone they never meet. A lot of the websites that claim to offer hitmen are just scams.
But not this one that happened in Viiala.
When people who claimed to have hired someone on the web were eventually scammed, with the seller taking the money to then vanish, or make up excuses, what happened in Finland became the country's first proven murder for hire arranged on the dark web.
In began in the late 2019, when a 19-year-old man from Jyväskylä named Mika Markus Aleksi Hytönen put up an ad on a Tor forum. He said he would kill someone for Bitcoin.
A 20-year-old from Rauma named Aatu Viljami Halonen answered him.
The two had never met in person. They talked through an encrypted app called Wickr Me.
Halonen wanted his own father dead. His father was a 44-year-old businessman who lived in the Viiala part of Tampere and had a fair amount of money. Halonen gave Hytönen the address, photos of his father, the name and job of the father's girlfriend, and the detail that the apartment door did not have his father's name on it.
He also told him a time when the girlfriend would be out of town.
They agreed on a price of about €10,000 that would come from the inheritance after the father was gone.
Hytönen later said Halonen pushed him to do it soon because the father was planning to marry his girlfriend, which would make the money situation more complicated.
The court also heard that Halonen had been angry at his father for a long time, going back to when he was a kid. Hytönen had already told his girlfriend that he had thought about killing someone.
The murder happened.
On the night of January 27, 2020, Hytönen took a bus from Jyväskylä, and arrived in to Tamperein the early morning of the 28th. He then walked from the bus station to the apartment on Vasaratie.
In his bag, was a folding knife, zip ties, and other things.
He put on a bathrobe and Crocs so he would look like someone who lived nearby.
Based on the information Halonen had given him, it didn't take long before Hytönen arrived to the front door of the family.
He knocked on the door and said he was a neighbor who had forgotten his keys. The father let him in.
Once he was inside he asked to use a phone, pretended to make a call.
When the father was looking away, Hytönen attacked the older man with the folding knife, plunging the blade to his body, stabbing him more than 40 times.
The worst cuts were to the neck. Those cuts hit the main blood vessels there.
At one point the father got free and ran outside, but due to the the injuries, he collapsed in the snow.
Hytönen dragged him back inside. Neighbors later said they heard a scream and saw what was happening.
The father died from losing too much blood.
Hytönen tried to clean some of the blood inside the apartment and covered some of the blood outside with snow. Then he left. He only took about €250 from the father’s wallet.
The rest of the money was never paid.
While Hytönen stayed anonymous online, he was still a real person with a real-life identity, which meant physical evidence from the crime scene could identify him.
In this case, he left behind a plastic bag that still had the price sticker from a banana he bought the night before at a store in Jyväskylä.
Police used that sticker and the store's security cameras to track him down. They later found the bathrobe and Crocs in a grit box near the building and a bloody knife in the woods nearby.
DNA from the apartment matched Hytönen.
Police also found a lot of messages and photos that tied Halonen to the plan.
There were pictures of Halonen's driver's license and a power bill that Hytönen had asked for so he could be sure who he was dealing with.
There was also a photo of Halonen holding a spoon that he sent as proof.
Records showed Halonen's phone was active for a long time the night before the killing.
As for Halonen, he tried to wipe the evidence on his part by resetting his phone. But since facts are clear, and after Hytönen admitted to the crime, Halonen was also arrested.
In March 2021 both of them were given life in prison.
While Hytönen was found guilty of murder, Halonen was found guilty of ordering the murder, which Finnish law treats the same as doing it himself.
Mental health checks showed both of them knew what they were doing.
Halonen said the whole time that he had nothing to do with it and that someone had set him up. He appealed, but a higher court kept the life sentence in 2022.
The case stands out in Finland because the whole plan was made online through the dark web instead of through people who already knew each other.
It shows that while most of the hitman ads on the dark web are just scams that take people's money, every once in a while, two strangers really do connect and someone ends up dead.
