Background
Between October 2000 and January 2001, five people were found dead in different districts of Istanbul. Because the bodies had been left inside cardboard boxes, the press called the person behind the killings the 'Box Killer'. The absence of an obvious common link among the victims made it harder to connect the cases.
The five incidents took place over about three and a half months. The first was on 9 October 2000 and the fifth and last on 17 January 2001. The discovery of boxes in different places, such as empty land and construction sites, drew great public attention in the city.
The investigation
The turning point of the investigation was a mobile phone that belonged to one of the victims and had gone missing. Police followed the phone's signal, established that the device was being used in Bursa, and caught the suspect there on 26 January 2001. The file is cited as an early example of technical tracking playing a decisive role in a murder investigation.
According to press reports, the suspect admitted the events in his police statement but withdrew it during the trial. Questions about his mental state were also raised in court, but there was no definitive medical finding that changed the conviction.
The trial
Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty and later asked for life imprisonment instead. In June 2004 the court sentenced the defendant to five aggravated life terms. The conviction rests on the court's finding that the killings were his.
Public sources contain no information on any release or on how the sentence has been served.
The prosecution's shift from seeking the death penalty to seeking life imprisonment reflects the change in Turkey's legal order after the death penalty was abolished for peacetime offences in 2002. Aggravated life imprisonment became the most severe sentence after that change.
Legacy
The Box Killer case is among the best-known serial-murder files in Turkey. What stands out in the file is that an investigation with few leads for a long time reached a result within days once a missing mobile phone was traced. The difficulty of finding links between the victims also keeps the case a topic of discussion among forensic and criminology circles.
This text is written with respect for those who lost their lives. Victims are not named, out of consideration for their relatives' privacy. The account relies only on information from the press and court decisions.