Hyvinkää is a Finnish commuter town near Helsinki whose Swedish name is Hyvinge. In the book’s account, the town’s most consequential connection to Black Metal is the 1998 murder of a young enthusiast by people from his own circle. The case unfolded in an apartment on Torikatu Street and came to public notice after the victim’s remains were found in several locations around town.

Setting and Local Context

Hyvinkää is described as one of the smaller towns clustered around a larger city, close enough to the capital for an easy train commute. Its Swedish name, Hyvinge, reflects the stronger Swedish influence in southern Finland. The case narrative locates its central events in a shabby apartment building on Torikatu Street, in a section locals sarcastically called “Luotikuja,” or “bullet alley.” The area was known to police as a source of frequent domestic-disturbance calls.

The 1998 Case

The account traces the events to November 21, 1998, when five black-clad youths visited a mobile Christian teahouse. After an argument with the Christians, they returned to the apartment in Hyvinkää where two of them lived. There, they listened to Black Metal records and drank heavily. The book notes that the group commonly drank kilju, a homemade fermented beverage.

The victim was the fifth member of the group. According to the prosecutor’s account as presented in the book, the group turned against him and subjected him to escalating abuse before killing him. The narrative emphasizes that details available to the public were limited and that the prosecutor’s application for a summons represented one side of an ongoing case. After the killing, the perpetrators concealed the victim’s remains in rubbish containers and dumps around the area.

Discovery and Aftermath

On November 24, a severely mutilated human leg was found at a garbage dump in Hyvinkää. Further discoveries in other inappropriate locations eventually enabled the victim to be identified as a young Black Metal enthusiast. Police arrested four of his closest friends, some of whom had lived with him, and charged them with murder.

The book identifies 23-year-old Jarno Elg as the person widely regarded as the group’s leader, describing his influence over his 17-year-old girlfriend and two male friends, aged 20 and 16. The victim had played in the Black Metal band Utuk Xul. At the time the book was written, the proceedings remained unresolved, with appeals pending and a forty-year secrecy order restricting access to the case materials. Hyvinkää thus appears not merely as the place where the crime occurred, but as the setting through which a largely closed and fragmentary case entered wider public view.