In the very early summer of 1960, a heinous triple murder at a camp site would sear itself into the cultural framework of Finland, and eventually become one of the most infamous unsolved homicides in the Western world.
It was a Saturday in early June, in a town called Vantaa, not far from Finland’s capital city of Helsinki, and a group of four young people decided to go on a summer camping trip. Eighteen-year-old boys Nils Wilhelm Gustafsson and Seppo Antero Boisman, accompanied by their fifteen-year-old girlfriends Anja Tuulikki Mäki and Maila Irmeli Björklund, hopped on their motorcycles and headed up to the shores of Lake Bodom, near the town of Espoo.
As night fell, they erected their tent and presumably went about doing whatever teenagers are prone to do when out camping. But evidently, the fun only lasted until sometime around four in the morning, at which point things took a turn for the macabre.
At six a.m. on Sunday, a pair of boys who had been out bird watching noticed that the campers’ tent had collapsed, and spotted a blond man walking away from the scene. They didn’t think a great deal of it, and in fact it would be several more hours before the aftermath of the crime would be discovered. At approximately eleven in the morning, a man named Risto Sirén was passing by the camp site. What he saw there prompted him to immediately contact police, who arrived an hour later.
Seppo, Anja, and Maila were all dead, having been stabbed multiple times and bludgeoned in the head with what appeared to be a pipe or a rock. Whoever had attacked the teenagers had cut the guy ropes of the tent—allowing it to fall on the campers presumably sleeping within—before battering the victims through the canvas. The bodies of Seppo and Anja were found inside the tent, while Maila and Nils were found on top of it. Maila, in fact, had sustained the worst of the injuries inflicted on the victims, and had been furiously stabbed several times after her death. She was also discovered naked from the waist up.
Nils Gustafsson had likewise been struck with a blunt object on the back of the skull. He had also had his forehead slashed with a knife and his jaw broken, but he managed to survive his injuries. Unfortunately, he could remember nothing of the circumstances surrounding the attack, only saying that he had seen a black, shadowed figure with red eyes looming over him in the darkness. He was taken to a nearby Red Cross center for treatment and would eventually make a full recovery. He claimed that memories of that night refused to surface, though under hypnosis shortly after the attack, he stated that he had been able to get out of the tent during the onslaught, and that the perpetrator had subsequently kicked him in the jaw.
Perhaps because of the rarity of this type of crime in Finland, police were not as stringent as they might have been in investigating the murders, and seemingly saw no reason to immediately seal the crime scene, even going so far as to actively encourage the public to aid in the investigation. Due to this rather unwise decision, evidence was most likely contaminated, as police, soldiers, and amateur sleuths combed the area, making the solution to the mystery become ever more elusive as the crime scene became more overrun.
A handful of clues did emerge despite the less-than-ideal police work, however. Investigators were able to determine that the sets of motorcycle keys belonging to the two male victims had been stolen, though the vehicles themselves remained at the site. The keys were never found. No murder weapon of any kind was ever found either, though oddly, police did recover a pair of shoes belonging to Nils Gustafsson, partially hidden in some bushes a little over five-hundred yards away from the bodies. The shoes were covered in blood, though in 1960, it was impossible to determine who the blood belonged to. The unconscious Nils Gustafsson, notably, had been found barefoot at the scene.
The ensuing inquiry dredged up a few possible suspects. One of these was a man named Pentti Soininen, who apparently lived nearby and had a history of violent criminal behavior. While in prison on an unrelated charge, he allegedly confessed to a fellow inmate that he had committed the Lake Bodom murders. Police, however, were skeptical of his involvement, as he was known to have mental health issues. He committed suicide by hanging nine years after the crime.
Another possibility was Hans Assman, an individual who had also been suspected in the unsolved murder of seventeen-year-old Kyllikki Saari back in 1953. According to witnesses, Assman had arrived at a hospital in Helsinki on the morning of the Lake Bodom murders, and was behaving very strangely. His clothing was allegedly splattered with blood, and he gave a false name to hospital staff. The clothing that Assman was wearing, in addition, was said to be similar to the description given to police by the two bird-watching boys, of the clothing of the blond man they had seen leaving the camp site at six a.m.
Assman claimed that he had once been a member of the SS and a guard at Auschwitz, but that he was later captured by the Soviets and recruited as a KGB spy. Whether this story was true or not, it doesn’t appear that investigators took him completely seriously as a suspect in the Lake Bodom killings, since it was almost certain that he had been in Germany on the day of the crime. However, a few researchers have suggested that Assman’s purported KGB ties allowed him to get away with as many as five murders, including those at Lake Bodom, and that of Kyllikki Saari.
At the time of the Lake Bodom incident, however, probably the most scrutinized suspect was Karl Valdemar Gyllström, the proprietor of a kiosk in nearby Oittaa. Several acquaintances alleged that he had a particular hatred for campers, and may have engaged in confrontations with them in the past. Not only that, but his neighbors claimed that he had gotten drunk one evening and confessed to them that he had killed the Lake Bodom victims and had hidden the evidence down a well on his property, which he later had filled in.
On the strength of these leads, police conducted a thorough search of Gyllström’s land and looked into his supposed confessions, but could find no solid evidence linking him to the slayings. Gyllström also later committed suicide, interestingly by drowning himself in Lake Bodom. Many years afterward, his wife apparently claimed that even though she had told police that her husband was home on the night the campers were killed, she had actually lied to cover for him, and later came to believe wholeheartedly that Gyllström was indeed the murderer.
There the case stagnated until 2004, when new DNA evidence emerged that prompted investigators to reopen the case. Startlingly, the finger of blame was pointed at the surviving member of the camping party, Nils Gustafsson, who was then in his early sixties and had lived a completely normal life during the intervening four decades, raising a family and working as a bus driver.
A modern analysis of blood evidence at the scene had uncovered the fact that the blood on Nils’ shoes found near the site had come from the three other victims, but not from Nils himself, which led authorities to hypothesize that Nils had been wearing the shoes when he murdered his three friends, after which he removed them and stowed them in the bushes before inflicting injuries upon himself in order to shift guilt onto an outside perpetrator.
Investigators also found it suspicious that Maila Irmeli Björklund, Nils’ girlfriend at the time, had suffered the most violence at the hands of the killer, leading police to believe that drunken jealousy on Nils’ part had spurred a fistfight with Seppo Boisman which had eventually escalated to a murderous rampage.
Nils Gustafsson was placed on trial for the triple murders in August of 2005. The prosecution’s case hinged on the DNA evidence as well as the “overkill” nature of Maila’s murder. A police officer also claimed that Nils had confessed to the killings shortly after his arrest, though this particular piece of testimony was dismissed by the judge as not credible. Likewise, a woman who claimed to have been at a neighboring campsite, and had witnessed Nils’ drunken aggression around the time of the murders, was disregarded, as no corroborating evidence could be found that backed up her statements.
The defense countered that it was extremely unlikely that Nils Gustafsson had inflicted his grievous wounds upon himself, particularly the serious injury to the back of his head, which would have been difficult for him to administer.
In October of 2005, Nils was acquitted of all charges, and awarded nearly sixty-thousand dollars in compensation for mental suffering due to the unusually long remand time.
The Lake Bodom murders, therefore, still stand as officially unsolved, and remain among Finland’s best-known crimes. Such is their cultural impact, in fact, that in 1993, an extreme metal band hailing from the town of Espoo named themselves Children of Bodom, in reference to the notorious lake, and the band have even recorded several songs about the murders over the course of their long career. In 2016, additionally, a Finnish slasher film titled Lake Bodom was released, based upon the iconic killings.
Crime Immemorial 