Taskinen was born in 1976. He had an unusual command of pharmacology, described in the Finnish coverage as a walking drug encyclopaedia, and used two opioid painkillers, Dolcontin, a morphine preparation, and Abalgin, both of which are dangerous in large doses and considerably more so with alcohol.
In August 1996, in the Rantaperkio district of Tampere, a twenty-year-old student died of a Dolcontin overdose. In February 1997, in a flat in the same district, a thirty-year-old man who had studied medicine died after drinking with him; a strong overdose of Abalgin was found in his blood, and he had made a will in Taskinen's favour shortly before. Taskinen had obtained the Abalgin by going to a second doctor after the first had written the prescription non-renewable, and had got it at more than twice the original strength; both doctors had warned him it was lethal with alcohol.
In 2005 his spouse died. Markku Franssila was twenty-five years his senior, and they had registered their partnership three months before the death. Franssila was wealthy, and the inheritance was the motive the courts accepted.
He was arrested in January 2006. The convictions are two, not three: the district court treated the 1996 death as aggravated negligent homicide, and the court of appeal dismissed that charge altogether. For the 1997 death he was convicted of manslaughter, and for Franssila's death of murder, and sentenced to life.
The appeal court's reasoning on Franssila is the legally interesting part. It accepted that Franssila knew he was taking substances that could kill him, but found he was too intoxicated to stop, and that Taskinen, who knew exactly what the combination would do, was guilty notwithstanding the victim's own participation. President Tarja Halonen rejected his petition for clemency in 2007. He has denied the murder throughout.
Then the case turns strange. In prison he changed his name to Anton von Schrowe and took a law degree, graduating Master of Laws from the University of Turku in 2020, and said he intended to apply for a licence to practise. His master's thesis was on the criminal responsibility of a person who supplies a narcotic for the consequences the user brings on themselves. Which is, precisely, the doctrine his own conviction turned on.
The Helsinki Court of Appeal granted his application for conditional release in April 2022 and he was released at the end of July 2023, having served about seventeen and a half years. Finnish life sentences are reviewable after twelve.
The entry that stood here gave three victims and said his release position was unrecorded. Both were wrong: two convictions, and he has been at liberty since 2023.