It was Sunday, May 17th, 1953, and seventeen-year-old Kyllikki Saari had been attending a prayer meeting in the town of Isojoki, Finland, not far from her home. After the meeting was over, Kyllikki got on her bicycle and pedaled off down the road. She was seen by a man on a maintenance crew less than a mile away from her house, but shortly after this sighting, she mysteriously vanished.
Kyllikki was actually not reported missing by her parents for a couple of days, because they assumed she was staying with a friend who had attended the prayer meeting with her. It was only on Tuesday, after the young woman’s place of employment phoned the house asking why she had not shown up to work, that her disappearance was reported to police.
Several months passed with no sign of the girl, and clues seemed very thin on the ground. A few witnesses told police they had seen two men in a cream-colored car around the area at the time of the girl’s disappearance, and one witness even claimed that the car had had a bicycle wheel sticking out of the trunk. Despite a thorough search of the area where Kyllikki was last seen, however, nothing of note turned up.
Then, in mid-summer, Kyllikki’s bicycle was found partially submerged in a marsh quite a distance from the road where she was last seen. The bicycle still appeared to be in good condition, leading police to believe that it had not been in the marsh for the entire time since Kyllikki had vanished. The air had been let out of the tires, and investigators speculated that the killer had recently returned to the scene of the crime and tried to sink the bike in the mud.
A few months later, in early October, searchers discovered a man’s sock, as well as Kyllikki’s scarf, which was wrapped around one of her shoes. The scarf appeared to have teeth marks embedded in it, suggesting that it had been used to gag the young woman. Again, it was theorized that this evidence had been dumped recently, as it hadn’t been discovered on any of the previous searches of the area.
On the day following the finding of the scarf, investigators came across a stick pointing out of the ground, which turned out to mark the final resting place of Kyllikki Saari. Her body was partially decomposed, and had probably been buried only recently, suggesting that the killer had been keeping her body elsewhere. Since the corpse was so degraded, forensic examination could not determine whether she had been sexually assaulted, though her body was found naked from the waist down. She had been killed by several blows to the head and face with a blunt instrument.
Very quickly, three main suspects became the focus of the intense police inquiry. The first of these was parish priest Kauko Kanervo, who had something of a reputation for pursuing young women and who had exchanged several letters with Kyllikki, though these letters were strictly of a religious nature. Though Kanervo had been in the general area of Kyllikki’s disappearance that night, several witnesses placed him too far away from Isojoki to have traveled there and back in the short time that his movements were unaccounted for.
Another promising suspect was thirty-eight-year-old Vihtori Lehmusviita, a laborer who lived and worked very near to the spot where Kyllikki had vanished. Lehmusviita had a history of mental illness and sexual violence. Though his sister claimed he was with her on the night of the murder, Lehmusviita himself made a few statements to police that sounded as though they might be a partial confession, though he later retracted them, claiming he‘d been misunderstood. Because of the suspect’s questionable mental state, it was uncertain how much of what he said was accurate, and there was never enough evidence to formally charge him with the crime.
Perhaps the most likely culprit, though, was the unfortunately named Hans Assmann, a German and an alleged KGB spy. Not only was he left-handed, as the killer was, but he also owned a car that looked very similar to one that witnesses had reported seeing in the area on the night of the disappearance.
Further, Assmann’s wife told police that on that particular night, her husband had come home with a dented car, wet shoes, and missing one of his socks. She also claimed that he and his chauffeur had left the house again shortly after getting home, taking a shovel along with them.
In later years, Assmann even confessed to killing Kyllikki, though he claimed that his driver had accidentally run her over with the car, and that he and the driver had then staged the murder to prevent police from finding out that he was in the area. It should be noted as well that Hans Assmann would also be a potential suspect in Finland’s infamous Lake Bodom murders, which would occur six years later.
Despite these promising leads and the copious media coverage, no one was ever charged with the murder of Kyllikki Saari, and her death remains one of Finland’s best-known cold cases.
Crime Immemorial 