Austin

The rumors spread around basically for decades, but most of it came from just noisy neighbors and onlookers, people who wanted to gossip.

The police at no point considered Niels anything but a victim.

After all, you know, he had survived with very severe injuries and he also did not have any motive.

Still, some people found it suspicious that he was less injured than everyone else, despite being found next to the most brutally slain member of their group.

Not to mention the inherent emotional connection between him and Myla, who was more aggressively targeted than the other two victims.

But really, despite the rumor mills, Niels went on to recover and he lived a fairly normal life for over 40 years.

And then all of a sudden, in 2004, Finnish police reopened the investigation into the Lake Bodum murders, citing new evidence.

Blood samples and DNA taken from Niels' shoes, if you remember that had been found about 500 meters from the crime scene, had blood from the victims on them.

Not only did the police find blood from all the victims on Niels' shoes, they claimed they had proof that the killer had worn Niels' shoes during and after the murder.

No other blood was found on the shoes.

Police believed that whoever was wearing the shoes would have been the killer.

so this is what this was their new piece of evidence essentially and niels was brought in by police for questioning but he maintained the same story he had told them interviewers and everyone he knew for the last 44 years he did not know who attacked them and he could not remember the events of that night

Remember, he was bashed in the skull like this guy had a potential brain damage.

So gash in his cheek where you could see his teeth.

Yeah.

I mean, he was brutalized as well.

Right.

So when local media learned of the development in the case, the news really just spread like

I mean, this was a huge story and it's still to this day kind of Finland's most notorious cold case.

And people were thinking that this was finally solved and the man responsible was the only surviving victim.