On Sunday, February 21, 1999, with a few degrees of frost and snow falling in Helsinki, Sanna Sillanpää had booked a lane at the Helsinki Shooting Club on Albertinkatu. Five men were there with her. She had rented a 9mm Beretta 92FS pistol. When the other shooters put their guns down on the table, she turned and opened fire on them. Three men died: the club's twenty-three-year-old supervisor, a twenty-five-year-old car mechanic and a thirty-seven-year-old driver. A fourth was wounded and left with lifelong injuries. The fifth was not hurt.
She walked out, took a city bus to Helsinki-Vantaa airport and bought a ticket to London. Police identified her from the club's booking records and arrested her at the departure gate about four hours after the shooting. She had dropped the pistol into a trash bin in the terminal, where a cleaner later found it.
Sanna Riitta Liisa Sillanpää was born on April 15, 1968. She held a master's degree in computer science and worked in information technology, most recently for Fujitsu Finland, and lived in Espoo. She had no criminal record. Finnish reporting describes a woman who loved animals and who, some years before the shooting, had begun to withdraw from other people; her parents had tried to get her psychiatric help.
At her trial in the Helsinki district court she barely spoke. Asked whether she had shot people, she answered only "I have not." A psychiatric examination ordered on June 2, 1999 diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia and found that she had been in a severe psychotic state at the time. The prosecutor, Maarit Loimukoski, asked for a prison sentence, but on October 11, 1999 the court found her not criminally responsible for three manslaughters and two attempted manslaughters and ordered her into involuntary psychiatric care. The prosecution appealed, arguing that her attempt to leave the country showed planning; the Court of Appeal upheld the ruling. She was committed to Niuvanniemi, the state psychiatric hospital at Kuopio.
No motive was ever established. The case set off a wide public debate in Finland about mental health services and the control of firearms at shooting ranges. It was a single act, not a series of killings.