Twenty-three-year-old Eila Karjalainen was a nursing student, a native of Finland who was spending her vacation backpacking around the UK. On August 7th, 1983, which was a Sunday, she was seen alive in London, but after that point, her movements were unclear, and it’s believed she may have been hitchhiking. She was actually due to return to Finland on August 14th, and when she failed to appear, her worried family contacted police, who launched a missing persons investigation.
Months later, on November 25th, her decomposed body was found in Barnham Woods in Woodstock, Oxfordshire. She had been strangled or asphyxiated to death, though the state of the remains made it impossible to tell whether she had been sexually assaulted as well. Her backpack was eventually recovered about five miles away from her body, alongside the A40 near Oxford.
Fingerprints from an individual believed to be the killer were lifted from some of Eila’s belongings, but so far have matched no one in the national database. Interestingly, Eila had been in the habit of writing down the names of people she met on her trip in her diary; this diary was found, but the relevant pages had been torn out.
One suspect whose name has been tentatively linked with the case is taxi driver Christopher Halliwell, who was convicted of murdering twenty-two-year-old Sian O’Callaghan in Oxfordshire in 2011, and was later convicted of killing twenty-year-old Becky Godden-Edwards, who had gone missing in 2007.
Investigators suspect that Halliwell may have been responsible for several other murders and disappearances, including those of Trevaline Evans in 1990, Julie Finley in 1994, and Sally Ann John in 1995. Though he would have been only eighteen years old at the time of Eila Karjalainen’s murder, researchers are keeping him in mind, and authorities are still hoping to eventually get a match to the fingerprints found at the scene in order to solve the case once and for all.
Crime Immemorial 