A Finnish court has increased the prison sentence of a man who killed his girlfriend and continued to live with her body for several weeks before it was discovered.
The Rovaniemi Court of Appeal has extended the prison sentence of a man from Ylivieska, who was convicted of murdering his partner, to ten years and four months. This decision follows the initial sentencing by the Oulu District Court, which last April sentenced him to almost ten years in prison. Jurisdictional decisions revealed that the man, born in 1985, killed his girlfriend between the 24th and 25th of May 2022, but failed to report the incident and continued cohabiting with her remains, which were only found by her relatives during midsummer week.
The accused, Jeremia Jesse Andreas Tenkula, appeared at the Court of Appeal, where he maintained his innocence regarding the murder, claiming that someone else must have killed the woman. He argued that he had not disclosed her death to anyone because he wanted to identify the true murderer himself. Additionally, in previous court proceedings, he asserted that he had not lived with her body for extended periods but only for a few individual days, attempting to deter authority questions about his accountability in the case.
Tenkula was previously convicted for murder and for violating the peace of the grave. However, the court of appeal ultimately dismissed one of the charges. This case highlights issues surrounding domestic violence and how such acts are processed within the Finnish legal system, raising concerns about the detection of crimes occurring within intimate relationships, where the victim is often left voiceless until authorities become aware of the situation.
