Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Lights out, everybody.
What's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Lights Out. I'm your host, Josh. And I'm your host, Austin. And I'm the producer, Daniel. Today we're going to be taking a look at a very, very sinister case. One that's unsolved as well. And has been unsolved for a lot of years at this point. All the way over in Finland. This is the Lake Boda murders.
This case has kind of been on my radar for a long time. And I've always just kind of forgotten to put it on the schedule for the show. Because it's such an absolutely insane case. Very brutal, very violent. And yeah, I'm glad we're glad we're finally getting around to covering it. So, yeah, let's let's just go ahead and get into things here. And let's go back to the very beginning of June 1960.
As I mentioned, Lake Bodum is over in Finland. It's just outside of Helsinki, actually. The area is fairly rural, but a short drive from the nation's capital, where many could come to fish, cross-country ski, camp, hike, you know, just enjoy the great outdoors. On Saturday, June 4th, 1960, four teenagers found themselves seeking something fun to do for the weekend.
Forgive me if I mispronounce any of these names. Give it my best shot. We have 15-year-old Myla Irmeli Bjorklund, her boyfriend, 18-year-old Niels Wilhelm Gustafsson, along with 15-year-old Anya Tuliki Maki, and her boyfriend, 18-year-old Seppo Antero Boisman. And the girls, they knew each other from vocational school, and the boys worked as apprentices at a foundry.
And they decided to make the trip out to the stunning shores of Lake Bodum and ride around on mopeds. The teens were very familiar with the lake. The four came from nearby Espoo and had made the short journey out to Lake Bodum many times over the years. So it was no surprise that the teens set up their camp along the south side of the lake, a popular spot for local youth to spend their evenings.
By nightfall, they had built their tent and organized their supplies, ready to enjoy a calm evening in the cool quiet of an early Finnish summer. They all went swimming, and the boys did a bit of drinking, and they appeared drunk to Myla. They stayed up until around 2 a.m. fishing.
Late that night, they went to sleep in their tent, and by morning, one of them would be critically injured and the other three would be dead. Though the following investigation would leave many questions unanswered, the general belief is that sometime between 4 and 6 a.m. on June 6, an unknown assailant entered the camping area with the sleeping teens.
By morning, the campsite was an absolute nightmare. Using what appeared to be a knife and a blunt object, the teens were brutally stabbed, slashed, and beaten to death. The violence of the attack collapsed the fabric tent into a tangled mess of canvas, blood, and bodies. Their skulls had been fractured from blunt force trauma, and knife wounds covered their arms.
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Chapter 2: What happened during the Lake Bodum murders in 1960?
It's believed that he also suffered a potential brain injury. The police described the boy's injuries as so severe that he was incapable of talking immediately upon discovery. So if they wanted to ask him any questions, he wasn't really able to respond.
But later, when he could speak, Niels would tell investigators that he remembered nothing from the attack but the image of a terrifying man dressed in black with glowing red eyes approaching their tent. He then cut through the tent and then attacked them all.
After Niels was removed from the scene, police got a better look at the other victims, and inside the tent were the bodies of Anya and Seppo, and both had suffered stabbing and bludgeoning wounds to the majority of their body. And on top of the tent, where Niels had been found, was the body of the survivor's 15-year-old girlfriend, Myla.
Myla had also been stabbed and beaten, but it was apparent her attack was far more severe than the others, usually signifying that she was the target. Myla was found naked from the waist down with dozens more stab wounds, many inflicted after she was already deceased.
In fact, the forensic specialists described the body as being hacked at post-mortem, a treatment none of the other victims had received. So, you know, this particularly heinous attack on Myla was noted by the investigators, and they wondered if she was the target. In the wake of the discovery of the teen's bodies, the police had basically ruined the crime scene.
They didn't put up any crime tape, and random campers, searchers, and search dogs just trampled through this crime scene, ruining basically any chance of finding the culprit's footprints. And during their search, police also realized that several of the victim's personal belongings were missing. Some of these items included their wallets, Myla's clothing, Neal's shoes, and Seppo's leather jacket.
Most confusingly, the attacker had stolen the keys to the victim's mopeds, but both vehicles were left behind. I believe those keys were never even recovered, too. Neal's shoes were actually later found about 500 meters from the campsite, pretty far away, vaguely hidden along the lakeside, but the rest of the campers' items were never seen again.
Additionally, the police were unable to immediately locate the murder weapons, including the knife or whatever the blade was used in the murder, or the blunt object, which they believed may have been a large rock. What was odd near the tent was a pillowcase rolled up and held with an elastic band.
They found traces of blood and semen on it, but testing could not confirm who these fluids belonged to. This time frame of the murder was determined based on the eyewitness sighting of a group of boys who had actually been across the lake birdwatching that morning. At around 6 a.m. in the morning, some other boys spotted the 14's tent collapse and a mysterious man with long blonde hair.
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Chapter 3: Who were the victims of the Lake Bodum murders?
Through eyewitness accounts, the police believe the man was about 5'8", and he was somewhere in his 20s. After the bodies were removed from the scene, investigators were able to crudely reconstruct the tent and confirm that the murderer did not enter the tent to attack the teens.
Instead, the assailant actually slashed the tent ties and stabbed and bludgeoned the victims through the fabric wall of the tent. When the bodies were later inspected in the morgue, Seppo Boisman had suffered stab wounds on the neck and it was determined he most likely died of blood inhalation. And Myla Bjorklund had defensive wounds on her arms and had been stabbed about 15 times.
Many of these wounds were inflicted after she had already died.
Police eventually gathered a group of suspects. 4,000 people would be interviewed in total. Police created a list of 88 suspects, but it was narrowed down to only a few. These included Pali Kusta Luoma, Penty Soyninen, Carl Waldmeier Giestrom, Hans Assmann, and later Niels Wilhelm Gustafsson, which was, again, the attack's only survivor.
Luoma was a man who looked similar to the description given by the eyewitnesses. He had also approached a carpenter who lived in the forest near where the murders took place on 10am the day after the murders. He was seen with bloodstains on his chest. He was an escapee from a labor facility and actually wanted by police. He was incarcerated for robbery but did not have a history of violence.
When he was later caught, he gave a credible alibi, and the bloodstains were most likely a result of a wound he had gotten during the escape. At the time of the murders, Pentti Soyninen was nowhere on the police's radar. However, in the late 1960s, years after the murders, Soyninen confessed to a fellow prison inmate that he had committed the heinous crime.
It turned out that Soyninen had lived in a care home near the lakes at the time of the crime, and by the late 1960s, he was known in the area to be an unstable and violent man. However, there was one detail the police couldn't overlook. Soininen was 14 at the time of the crime, so it's pretty young.
Investigators also discovered that he had a history of mental illness, including a psychosis diagnosis later in life, but he also believed he was simply too young at the time to have committed the crime, let alone managed to escape and dispose of so many pieces of evidence without being discovered.
Soninen later took his own life on the 9th anniversary of the teens' murders, which is kind of eerie and weird. But one of the detectives' other prime suspects also came to their attention after an apparent confession. This was Karl Valdemir Giestrom, who had a nickname of Kioskman, and he was never initially on the police's radar.
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Chapter 4: What were the details of the crime scene discovered at Lake Bodum?
Days after the attack, Nils Gustafsson was re-interviewed by police, and at first he continued to claim he had really no memory of the night. Remember, he had a lot of brain damage. I mean, he was bludgeoned and his face was cut open. Later, he claimed that he was attacked first and that's how he saw the man with the red eyes, but he was unable to remember the exact attack and what was going on.
After some inconsistent retellings, the police took a questionable approach, especially to today's standards. They actually called in a hypnotist to try and get a description of this culprit from Niels. So one of the doctors in charge of Neil's care at the time, it was a man named Yorma Apollo. And he would go on to write three separate bestselling books describing his involvement in the case.
Uh, that also goes to show just how much interest the public had in this case and how long it went unsolved. This guy wrote three different books about it. Um, But this is what Niels described during this hypnotism. And Niels described the man, the attacker, as a stern-looking man with long, slicked-back blonde hair, large and protruding eyes, deep forehead wrinkles, thick lips, and a large nose.
So this description was used to make multiple composite sketches of the attacker, which are still available today. and this was all done under hypnotism and notably these sketches of the man seemed to match the description given by the bird watching boys on the day of the murder um
Which a part of me is a bit iffy on because it's like, wouldn't Niels have heard how the birdwatching boys had described the man and maybe played into his hypnotism? So additionally, these images had an eerie resemblance to another man on the list of potential suspects. And this was the man named Hans Hassmann.
Hans was allegedly a KGB spy and a former member of the Nazi party who had been on the investigation's radar early on due to some suspicious behavior that took place at the time of the crime. And that's allegedly a KGB spy.
Yeah, it's never been confirmed, right? Because on June 6th, 1960, just hours after the murders took place, Hans arrived at the Helsinki Surgical Hospital, only 22 kilometers from the site of the murder. The man was reportedly delirious, speaking incoherently and seemingly unsure of where he was or why he was there.
Hans' clothes were covered in red stains, his fingernails were blackened with dirt and grime, and his overall appearance was alarmingly disheveled. It was reported that Hans, despite his apparent lack of awareness, pretended to be unconscious at one point as a way to trick the doctors into seeing him before attending to other patients in the emergency waiting room.
However, it didn't work, and the realization that he wasn't going to get away with it caused Hans to become hostile and cruel toward the staff, after which he was asked to leave. The hospital informed police of the interaction, including the information that Hans' clothes were soiled with what appeared to be blood.
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Chapter 5: What were the initial police investigations and findings?
A shaved head. Yeah, you stick out like a sore thumb after that. Very, very bizarre. Hans had also been a known domestic abuser and was also a suspect in a previous horrific Finnish murder. I'm going to do my best to pronounce their name correctly, but I'm sure I'll probably get it wrong. This was the unsolved murder of 17-year-old Kiliki Sari in 1953.
Three and a half hours northwest of Lake Bodum, the young woman had been riding her bike home from a devotional service in the late evening when she went missing. Two months after her disappearance, Sari's bike was found in a bog near the area from which she disappeared. Three months after that, her body was found in the same bog and a strange grave covered with stumps.
Hans had been a prime suspect in this murder after his wife reported that he and his driver had been in the area of Isoyoki at the time Sari had went missing. At the time, police were unable to prove Hans' connection to the crime, but the stain it left on him didn't ease anyone's minds when it came to the murders of the teens in Lake Bodum. Kind of reminded everybody of that prior murder.
In 1997, Hans called a journalist while he was on his deathbed and he told him, that, quote, he wouldn't admit nor deny things, which wasn't really a definitive answer, and, like, who knows? I mean, that's just such a bizarre thing.
Yeah, because why wouldn't you just say, like, no? If you're dying, just say if you did it or not. Yeah, or yes. Yeah, it's weird.
But it was also later revealed that his alibi at the apartment was reportedly fraudulent. He had cut a deal with the landlord and hostess that saw him that morning. Very sketchy. And this is now a second alibi that's been reported as just a lie. Everybody's lying about their involvement and where they were. Yeah.
When these murders took place, one of the doctors at the hospital where Hans had arrived on the day of the murders alleged that Hans truly was a KGB spy, which is why he wasn't worried about getting caught. The doctor claimed that Hans had immunity and the Finnish authorities denied this. So again, this just could be complete speculation rumor going around that they thought Hans was a KGB spy.
Right. Um, Yeah. I don't know that he would act the way that he did and say the things that he did if he was or was not. I don't know. I feel like if you made a bigger deal of it, if you were truly a spy, that'd be almost worse than just like not saying anything and disappearing.
Right. Yeah. And not to say that this discredits everything, but I always feel like, especially like this kind of time period, if you ever want to get into like, whoa, something deeper is going
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Chapter 6: Who were the main suspects in the Lake Bodum case?
Doesn't, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But the trial ended up lasting six weeks, during which Niels' defense attorney continued to argue that the evidence showed it was impossible for the man to have committed the crime, and that the motive created by the police was purely speculative. Kind of seems that way.
The defense argued that Niels had been injured so severely before the murders, so much so that he suffered severe head trauma, cerebral fluid was leaking out of his nose, and his facial bones were broken. Therefore, it wouldn't have been possible for him to attack the other three victims all at the same time. Because you attack one, the other one's going to wake up.
And then the other one's going to wake up as well. So now you have three people. One person's going to overpower three others. It seems very unlikely, especially if you're all similar age groups. Like if you're a teenager with other teens, maybe a grown man could do that quickly. But it almost seems like somebody... Who would have had experience doing something like this?
Who would have known how to quickly do this? Yeah. Not somebody who's drunk and was like, ah, and just got into a rage. Right. Possible, I guess, but I don't know.
This dude has brain fluid leaking from his nose. I mean, unless we're buying the theory that he had already done it afterwards, possibly, but I don't really buy it.
Also, his wounds matched the other victims, down to the weapons used as well as the angle, meaning they were all most likely carried out by the same person. They also pointed out that his blood was found inside the tent, meaning that the fight that the prosecution mentioned actually happened inside of the tent, or that Niels had been attacked with the others.
Plus, the bloodstains on Niels did not match the blood spatter on his shoes. As for the shoes being found 500 meters from the campsite, why wouldn't he have disposed of the shoes the same way he would have disposed of the still missing items from the camp? Right. Which is a really good point. If he did, why wouldn't he just stuff it with rocks and sink them, you know?
And he really had time to get rid of all that other evidence?
Yeah.
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