Michael Maria Penttilä

Michael Maria Penttilä (born Jukka Torsten Lindholm, born July 1965) is a Finnish serial killer.

According to Finnish crime magazine Alibi, she is the only Finn that fits FBI's description of a serial killer.

In November 1981, Penttilä, then known as Jukka Lindholm, kidnapped a 15-year-old girl and forced her into a basement, where she beat her, choked her with scarves and threatened to rape her.

She wore black leather gloves during the attack.

The girl managed to escape.

Lindholm was sentenced to fines and a suspended sentence, but other thefts and attacks led to a prison sentence in 1984.

She was released in 1985.

Lindholm killed her mother, 48-year-old barmaid Laina Lahja Orvokki Lindholm in their apartment in Oulu on 26 August 1985.

Both Lindholm and her mother's male friend were suspected of the murder, but it went unsolved until Lindholm later confessed.

The next murder Lindholm committed was on 26 July 1986.

She met two 12-year-old girls downtown and persuaded them to "come to her apartment so she could lend them a few marks for alcohol".

Within her residence in Oulu, she locked one of the girls in the bathroom.

The other girl, Titta Marjaana Kotaniemi, was knocked down on the floor and was choked to death.

After some time, Lindholm released the other girl from the bathroom and sexually assaulted her.

The girl escaped her grasp and ran from the apartment to the stairway, while Lindholm fled to the nearby forest where the police soon caught her.

She was drunk, measuring 1.75 on the BAC scale.

In connection with the murder of Kotaniemi, Lindholm confessed to the police that she was mistreated by her mother.

According to her statement, she had worn the blue leather gloves and the red-colored scarf of her mother before doing so.

She was angered by the fact that her mother had not been able to release her from the youth facility and that she had been dating a new man, preferring to live with him rather than her father.

Later, in the Oulu court, she recanted her confession and claimed she had been using multiple psychoactive drugs at once.

The Oulu District Court issued its judgment on 17 March 1987.

The court ruled that Lindholm had been guilty of two charges of manslaughter as well as other crimes, condemning her to 9 years and 7 months imprisonment.

However, the Rovaniemi Appellate Court held the case that Laina Lindholm's death was not intentional and instead an assault or negligent homicide, and reduced the sentence to 7 years imprisonment.

Lindholm was granted parole in May 1992.

On 31 May 1993, she choked a 42-year-old woman with a cloth belt in her Kempele apartment.

Lindholm at first objected sharply to the act, claiming that somebody had set her up.

On 23 June 1993, she escaped from the Oulu County Police Station with a man.

The Oulu District Court considered Lindholm to be completely sane and sentenced her to 9.5 years imprisonment on 13 December 1993.

Following the judgment of the District Court, Lindholm contacted the investigators.

She admitted to having killed the woman, but it was an accident.

According to her, she had proposed explicit sex and explained that she was playing around the neck before realizing that the woman had died due to choking.

Lindholm had wandered off to her mother's grave after the murder, staying there for a few hours.

The Appellate Court subsequently changed the sentence to 10.5 years, sending Lindholm to a special institution.

According to psychiatric reports, Lindholm admired the primordial, violent manhood of her teenage years – despite starting to wear dresses and women's underwear while in prison.

The head of the Hämeenlinna Center forbade this, and Lindholm subsequently complained to the Parliament's ombudsman.

Lindholm was released on parole in November 2008.

Before her release, she was subjected to treatment, which concluded that she was not yet ready for civilian life.

In prison, she married Hannele Pentholm, who was sentenced to life imprisonment for her husband's murder.

They were married for a couple of years.

Since then, she renamed himself to Michael Maria Pentholm, who invited a woman to her house in May 2009.