Tobias Sylvester
A 41-year-old teacher named Ilkay Sivasli hired a hitman Tanju Dogan, 48, to help end her life but he ended up falling in love with her and desperately tried to persuade her not to go through with it.
Her continual pleas led him to finally pull the trigger after he realized how desperately unhappy she was.
Sivaslı was found dead in her home in Istanbul’s Kartal district and media outlets had initially reported that the suspected murderer Tanju was her ex-boyfriend who killed her after an argument over money.
However, after the capture of Tanju in the southern city of Adana, where he fled after the incident, along with the discovery of text and audio messages in his possession changed the course of the investigation.
It turned out that Sivaslı was depressed after she broke up with her married boyfriend and found Tanju online while searching for a hit man to kill her as she wasn’t able to commit suicide.
She paid TL 6,000 to her would-be killer, but Tanju fell in love with the teacher and couldn’t bring himself to kill her, at least for a month.
He also recorded every conversation he had with the woman on the phone and in person and some recordings Sivaslı can be heard telling him, “I am fed up with waiting. When will you kill me?”
While in another recorded conversation, she is heard telling Tanju not to kill her while she is in the company of her friends.
Tanju finally brought himself to kill Sivaslı and tried to choke her to death at first but failed. He then fired a shot at the woman, ultimately killing her and fled the scene.
Speaking of the killing, Tanju said:
“I tried to strangle her but her face went red and she was gasping. When I saw her like that, I couldn’t go through with it and I fled.
“But she called me again. She had bought a gun. She was constantly talking about death. She was in overdrive about wanting to die, and when I went there she gave me the gun and said ‘Kill me, finish the job’.
“She asked me to shoot her in the heart. I was unable to resist her pleas any longer, so I laid her gently on the bed with her head under a pillow, and I shot her.”
He said that shockingly she had not died and instead had been badly wounded, and had been conscious for an hour before she finally fainted, at which point he had fled the house after calling an ambulance.
When he was finally arrested, he said he had thought she had been saved and did not realize she had died.
Her body was found by medics at her home in Istanbul on April 21 who were answering the emergency call. A court date for a trial is yet to be scheduled.
