The Lake Bodom murders is one of the most famous unsolved cases in Finnish. At Lake Bodom on June 5, 1960, 15-year-olds Maila Irmeli Björklund and Anja Tuulikki Mäki and 18-year-old Seppo Antero Boisman were killed by stabbing and blunt-force trauma to their heads, while sleeping inside a tent. The fourth teenager, then 18 years old, Nils Gustafsson, was found outside of the tent with broken facial bones and stab wounds. Despite extensive investigations, the perpetrator was never identified, and various theories on the killer's identity have been presented over the years.
Sometime between 4:00am and 6:00am during the early morning hours of Sunday, June 5, 1960, Mäki, Björklund and Boisman were all stabbed and bludgeoned to death by an unknown assailant. Gustafsson, the only survivor of the massacre had fractured facial bones which appeared to confirm his story. He stated afterwards that he had seen a glimpse of an attacker clothed in black and bright red coming for them.
At about 6:00 a.m., a group of boys birdwatching some distance away had reportedly seen the tent collapsed and a blond man walking away from the site. The bodies of the victims were discovered at about 11:00am by carpenter Esko Oiva Johansson. He alerted the police, who arrived on the scene at noon.
The killer had attacked the occupants from outside the tent with a knife and an unidentified blunt instrument (possibly a rock) through the sides of the tent. The murder weapons have never been located to this day. The killer had taken several items from the victims which puzzled the detectives, including the keys to the victims' motorcycles, which themselves had been left behind. Gustafsson's shoes were partially hidden approximately 500 meters from the murder site. The police did not cordon off the site nor record the details of the scene and almost immediately allowed a crowd of police officers and other people to trample around and disturb the evidence. The mistake was further exacerbated by calling in soldiers to assist with the search around the lake for the missing items, several of which were never found.
Björklund, Gustafsson's girlfriend, was found undressed from the waist down and was lying on top of the tent, and had suffered the most injuries out of all of the victims. She was stabbed multiple times after her death, whilst the other two teenagers were slain with less brutality. Gustafsson was also found lying on the top of the tent.
There have been numerous suspects over the course of the investigation of the Lake Bodom murders, but the following are the most notable:
Valdemar Gyllström:
Many local people suspected Karl Valdemar Gyllström, a kiosk keeper from Oittaa known to have been hostile towards campers. Police found no hard evidence to link him to the murders. They were skeptical of the supposed confessions he was said to have made because they considered him disturbed. He drowned in Lake Bodom in 1969, most likely by suicide. The people in the town knew Gyllström was violent, cut down tents, threw rocks at people who came to his street, and some have later said that it was Gyllström they saw coming back from the murder scene but were too afraid to call the police about him. The police never did any DNA tests from Gyllström and it is now too late, but a book released in 2006 brings up the theory in detail. The book also claims that the police almost immediately ignored much more evidence that was previously unknown to the public because of language barriers, among other things.
Hans Assmann:
Most public suspicion focused on Hans Assmann, who lived several kilometers from the shore of Lake Bodom. A series of books spread a theory of Assmann committing the Bodom killings. It was not taken seriously by the police, as Assmann had an alibi for the night of the Bodom murders. On the morning of June 6th 1960, however, he had shown up at a hospital in Helsinki with bloody clothes.
In late March 2004, almost 44 years after the event, Gustafsson (who was not considered a suspect to the public) was arrested. In early 2005, the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation declared the case was solved based on new forensic analysis. According to the prosecution's interpretation of the bloodstains, Gustafsson had been drunk and excluded from the tent when he attacked the other boy, getting his jaw broken in a fight which escalated into him committing three murders.
The trial started on August 4, 2005. Gustafsson's defense lawyer argued that the murders were the work of one or more outsiders and that Gustafsson would have been incapable of killing three people given the extent of his injuries. It had always been known that the shoes worn by the killer and hidden by him 500 yards away from the tent belonged to Gustafsson, who was found barefoot on top of the tent. Modern DNA analysis was significant for the prosecution as it showed that the three murdered victims' blood was on Gustafsson's shoes, but Gustafsson's was completely absent.
The prosecution said it followed from the lack of Gustafsson's blood on the shoes, that his injuries had occurred at a different time to the attack on the murdered victims, and that the only explanation of this was that Gustafsson had committed the murders, then faked the theft of items by hiding them, further injured himself and then went back to the tent where (now barefoot) he pretended to be unconscious. The prosecution attempted to boost their case by alleging an identification by two birdwatchers of Gustafsson as the tall blond man at the scene on the crime, an assertion that he had been overheard making an incriminating remark, and also that a decade after the event he had boasted to a woman about his guilt.
On October 7, 2005, Gustafsson was acquitted of all charges.The court explained the verdict as due to the prosecution evidence being inconclusive, failure to show Gustafsson had a motive appropriate to a crime of such extreme seriousness, and certainty about the facts now being impossible given the time that had elapsed. The State of Finland paid him €44,900 for the mental suffering caused by the long remand time, but he was refused permission to sue Finnish newspapers for defamation.
No one has been questioned or arrested in connection with the case since.
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