Virpi Butt: The Finnish TV Gladiator Who Became a Murderer

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In the early 1990s, Virpi Butt was on Finnish television in Lycra, knocking contestants off podiums as a Gladiator called Timantti, the Finnish word for diamond. Ten years later she was in a Tampere courtroom, on trial over two men who'd been killed, cut up and left in bins around the city. One of those men has never been found. And more than two decades on, with Butt herself dead, Finnish police still haven't been able to rule her out of a third case: the disappearance of a 16 year old girl.

Quick Answers

Who was Virpi Butt? A Finnish bodybuilder, born on 9 August 1972, who appeared on the TV show Gladiaattorit as Timantti and was later jailed for life for murder.
What was she convicted of? The murder of 26 year old Arto Malinen in Pirkkala at Midsummer 2003, along with desecrating his body.
Did she commit two murders? Not in the eyes of the courts. Her partner Janne Hyvönen was convicted of murdering Kari Pekka Anttonen in 2002. Butt helped dispose of the body.
How long did she serve? About fifteen and a half years. She was released on parole on 31 December 2018.
How did Virpi Butt die? She died abroad on 22 November 2021, aged 49. The cause has been established but is confidential. Police don't suspect a crime.
Was she linked to anything else? She's the only known suspect in the 1999 disappearance of Raisa Räisänen. It's never been proven and she was never charged.

From Gladiaattorit's Timantti to the bars of Tampere

Gladiaattorit was Finland's take on American Gladiators and it ran in 1993 and 1994. Butt joined for the second series. A fan-run database of the show lists her at 171cm and 72kg, the youngest of the Finnish female Gladiators at 21, and particularly good at Duel and Powerball thanks to her build. She shared the arena with Tony Halme, who performed as Viikinki and became the show's biggest name.

She's not the only killer with a telly credit. Rodney Alcala turned up on The Dating Game in the middle of a murder spree. Butt's case runs the other way round: the TV fame came first and the violence followed nearly a decade later.

By the early 2000s she was living in Tampere with a small child. She later told the court she'd been into bodybuilding and had used hormones, and the crime magazine Alibi described her as a mixed substance user. One Finnish outlet reports she had a reputation for pinning men against walls in bars and hitting them when drunk, though that's a single-source claim and worth treating as such.

The killing of Kari Pekka Anttonen, May 2002

Kari Pekka Anttonen was a 29 year old programmer, originally from Mikkeli and living in Tampere. English-language write-ups tend to call him Butt's ex-husband or ex-boyfriend. Alibi's contemporary report on the case, which is the most detailed account from the time, says the two had known each other since at least 1994 and were seeing each other when he died.

On 29 May 2002, Anttonen went out drinking in Tampere with Butt and her friend Janne Hyvönen. He got very drunk and the three of them went back to Butt's flat on Näsilinnankatu. In the early hours, Hyvönen stabbed him repeatedly in the back and then cut his throat. Butt's young child was in the flat at the time.

Butt and Hyvönen cleaned up together and moved the body into the bathroom. Over the next few days Hyvönen dismembered it and the parts went into bins around the city. The court heard that Hyvönen had been jealous of Anttonen's relationship with Butt, but nobody ever found a motive that made any rational sense.

Then there's the cannibalism. Hyvönen told the court he'd roasted parts of Anttonen's legs and eaten them, and that he'd boiled the head. It's worth being clear that this rests on his own testimony, because there were no remains left to test it against. If true, it puts him alongside Issei Sagawa, the cannibal who walked free, although Hyvönen didn't get anything like the same soft landing.

The head in the plastic bag

The detail that sticks with most people is what Butt reportedly did next. Hyvönen told the court that she carried Anttonen's head into a Tampere bar called Hevosenkenkä in a plastic bag and told people exactly what was in it. His memory of the reaction, translated from the Finnish: "Nobody looked in there, though. A few ran out the door."

Whatever the regulars made of it, nothing came of it. Anttonen stayed a missing person for more than a year.

Midsummer 2003: the murder of Arto Malinen

Midsummer, or juhannus, is Finland's biggest summer holiday, and in June 2003 Butt spent it drinking. Arto Malinen was 26, had a job and had lived in Pirkkala, just outside Tampere, for about three years. He met Butt the evening before he died, while she was out getting alcohol, and the drinking carried on from there.

A small group ended up at his flat on Kreetankuja: Malinen, Butt, a woman named in reports as Maria and a young man known as Junnu, who'd come along hoping to buy drugs. There weren't any. The mood turned, Junnu and Malinen scuffled, and Butt went for Malinen with a kitchen knife.

She stabbed him more than ten times in the back. MTV Uutiset, summarising the verdict years later, puts the total at 13 wounds. Malinen crawled towards the shower, Butt followed, and she cut his throat. Then she phoned Hyvönen, who came over and helped her take the body apart. Money was taken from the flat, along with a knife Malinen had kept from his officer training.

Getting rid of a body in a flat is the same grim logistics problem that eventually undid Dennis Nilsen in London. Butt and Hyvönen went with the method they'd used before, and Malinen's remains were spread between bins in Tampere and neighbouring Nokia.

The phone call police nearly ignored

This time there were witnesses, and one of them talked. Alibi reported that the first call to police about a killing in Pirkkala wasn't taken especially seriously. Then a woman rang the emergency centre and said she'd been in the flat when a man was murdered and dismembered.

Jari Kinnunen, the detective who led the investigation, told MTV Uutiset years later that she gave so much specific detail it couldn't be "some hoax call". Officers went to Pirkkala and Butt and Hyvönen were arrested soon afterwards. The flat gave up blood and DNA evidence, and both suspects described what they'd done.

It was only then that police worked out what had happened to the programmer who'd vanished from Tampere a year earlier. From July 2003 they searched the Koukkujärvi landfill in Nokia for Anttonen's remains and found nothing. He's never been recovered. His only memorial is a plaque at Kalevankangas cemetery in Tampere.

The trial: who was actually convicted of what

The case went to Tampere District Court, with two other men facing lesser charges. Reporters noted that Butt and Hyvönen seemed indifferent and were even seen laughing. Hyvönen said he'd worked like a machine during the dismemberment. Butt denied there'd been any cruelty and insisted Malinen's death was quick. Lead prosecutor Jouko Nurminen said he'd never come across a killing this horrific in his long career.

Both were sent for psychiatric examination and both were found fully responsible for their actions. In the summer of 2004, both got life.

Here's the bit that most English-language coverage gets wrong. Butt is routinely described as a double murderer or a convicted serial killer. She wasn't. The courts convicted her of murdering Malinen and of two counts of violating the sanctity of the grave, the Finnish offence that covers desecrating a body. One count was for each victim. Hyvönen was convicted of murdering Anttonen and of the same desecration offence over Malinen. Each was found to have helped the other dismember and hide a victim, but each had one murder conviction.

They both appealed, arguing the killings were manslaughter. On 29 April 2005, the Turku Court of Appeal upheld both life sentences and rejected Butt's claim of diminished responsibility. The two other men had their sentences trimmed: one to three months suspended for moving Anttonen's remains, the other to 30 days suspended for failing to report a serious crime.

True crime has plenty of pairs who were worse together than apart, from the Lonely Hearts Killers onwards. Butt and Hyvönen fit the pattern uncomfortably well.

Released despite a 'high risk' warning

A life sentence in Finland doesn't usually mean life. Lifers can apply to the Helsinki Court of Appeal for parole, and in August 2017 the court approved Butt's release, setting the date for the end of 2018.

It wasn't a popular call. The Criminal Sanctions Agency opposed it, and a forensic psychiatric assessment rated her risk of committing another violent crime as high. The court pointed to the length of time she'd served, a year spent in an open prison, her work and study inside and her commitment to staying sober.

Before she got out, she changed her name to Lucrezia Francesca Pandora Butt. She walked free on New Year's Eve 2018 and moved to a small town in the Pirkanmaa region, where local press reported her new neighbours were frightened. No new convictions were recorded against her in Finland. Hyvönen followed on 1 March 2019, after 15 years and nine months inside.

A death abroad that went unreported for a year

Butt married after her release and took her spouse's surname. The marriage didn't last: her spouse filed for divorce in June 2021, but it hadn't been finalised when she died.

By then she'd left Finland. MTV Uutiset's information is that she spent her final period in Africa, apparently in Ghana. She died on 22 November 2021, aged 49. Nobody in Finland reported it until Ilta-Sanomat broke the story on 8 November 2022, almost a full year later. Detective superintendent Pasi Nieminen would only say: "The information about the death came from abroad."

In February 2023, police confirmed the cause of death had been established but said it would stay confidential because no crime was suspected.

The Raisa Räisänen question

Days after Butt's death became public, a much older case came back into the headlines. Raisa Räisänen was 16 when she vanished from central Tampere on Saturday 16 October 1999. She'd got into the Casablanca nightclub on Hämeenkatu using a friend's ID, rang her boyfriend at 10.18pm and left the club at 10.50pm. She didn't travel home with her friends and she's never been seen since. No body has been found. The case started out as a suspected manslaughter and was reclassified as murder once the 20 year time limit on manslaughter ran out, which keeps it open indefinitely.

Raisa Räisänen disappeared in Tampere on October 16, 1999. These photos of Räisänen were shared with the public during the search.

Yle reported in November 2022 that Butt is the only known suspect. In 2006, a street musician told police that he'd run into Butt and Hyvönen in central Tampere back in 1999 or 2000, and that Butt had shown him what looked like a human head in her backpack. He said he was 95 per cent sure it was a girl's.

It took until 2019, just after her release, for that to turn into action. The National Bureau of Investigation went to Pirkanmaa District Court for permission to monitor Butt's phone, which by then was a Bulgarian number, and backed the application with seven tips and witness statements. Several witnesses described a girl matching Raisa's description walking through the city centre with a shorter woman in her thirties or forties, with sightings placed at the Hämeensilta bridge, Koskipuisto park, Tuomiokirkonkatu and Lapintie. One of them said he recognised Butt from the gym and from Gladiaattorit.

None of it produced a body. In the summer of 2021, coast guard divers searched part of Hervantajärvi lake in Tampere after a dog walker came forward about something seen near the lake road early on the morning after Raisa vanished. They found nothing. And investigators never got to put any of this to Butt herself. MTV Uutiset reports that police hadn't managed to reach her for questioning before she died.

Lead investigator Jussi Luoto put it carefully, saying one person "has not been ruled out". That's a long way from proof. The National Bureau of Investigation questioned Hyvönen as a suspect in September 2022 and, in former investigation chief Paavo Tuominen's words, "He denied that they had anything to do with the murder." Hyvönen is no longer considered a suspect.

Yle's own analysis concluded that police simply don't have enough evidence either for or against Butt. By January 2025 the case was no longer being actively investigated. Like the Beaumont children in Australia, it's a disappearance where the passing decades have produced theories and not much else. Butt was never charged, and she can't answer the suspicion now.

What happened to Janne Hyvönen

Hyvönen's freedom went badly from the start. In September 2019, six months after his release, he was caught drink-driving. The district court gave him a suspended sentence, the prosecutor appealed because of his record, and the appeal court sent him back to prison.

In late May 2025 he was killed at his terraced home in Lavia, part of Pori, at the age of 50. He was hit with a car, beaten with an iron pipe and a stool and then set on fire in his bathroom with flammable liquid while still alive. The word "rotta", Finnish for rat, had been cut into his back. A neighbour found him.

On 7 January 2026, Satakunta District Court jailed Jaakko Bremer for life. Bremer, born in 1982, admitted aggravated assault but denied killing him, and said he'd appeal. MTV Uutiset reported the court found the attack had torture-like features. A neighbour got a five month suspended sentence for harbouring an offender. The motive was never fully pinned down, though a debt was suggested, and the two men had history: a week later Bremer was fined for fraud over a 24,900 euro motorcycle that he and Hyvönen had obtained using someone else's online banking details.

So both of the people at the centre of the Tampere dismemberment murders are now dead, and a lot went with them. A 2024 Finnish audio series, Timantista tappajaksi (From Diamond to Killer), admits there are still plenty of open questions about Butt. Where Kari Pekka Anttonen's remains ended up is one. What happened to Raisa Räisänen may be another.