HS Home 6.4.2004 - Age cannot wither murder, nor dispel its curious charm

By Ritva Liisa Snellman

In the black and white photos of that Whitsun weekend in June 1960, people sit on the grass under the birch trees as if they were out for a picnic. The older men are in their shirtsleeves, wearing cloth caps, and the women have donned summer frocks and nylons.

Younger men and youths are fashionably bare-headed, and some have managed to persuade their parents to fork out for a pair of tight drainpipe jeans.

Little boys run hither and thither in shorts, carrying whittled sticks. The cars, many of them big American models, have rounded rear ends and large protruding fins.

Finland looks charmingly innocent. Even the police officers are wearing peaked caps and their summer dress uniforms.

But something is missing from the idyllic scene. There are no wicker picnic baskets in sight, for a start. The grim looks betray the fact that something serious has happened.

A policeman sits, hand on chin, looking reflective, perched on the front fender of a large Renault "Black Maria" van. This is no day out in the country after all.

On Sunday morning, the bodies of three slain youths had been discovered on the shores of Lake Bodom. Two girls and a boy, they had been stabbed and bludgeoned to death, apparently as they slept in their tent. A fourth camper had survived, though not without serious injury.

The Finnish people had woken up that Sunday morning to read the papers, in which the most interesting item of news was of course the unveiling of the new equestrian statue of Marshal Gustaf Mannerheim. A large crowd of Helsinki locals had gathered in front of the city's main post office for the unveiling ceremony.

Sunday was a bright summer's day, and for the first time in a good while there was an extra day off work in prospect, with the Whit Monday holiday to come.

The news of the Bodom Lake killings came through from the radio. In those days there were precious few television receivers - only around 70,000 TV-licences had been issued in the entire country. The idea of breathless live newscasts from the scene was still a long way off in the future.

So there was nothing for it but to go and see for oneself. Espoo and Helsinki residents made the trek on foot, on bicycles, on mopeds, or in the family car.

Just seven years had passed since the shocking - and unresolved - murder of Kyllikki Saari. This new killing far outshone even the earlier case in all its blind senselessness: three young people stabbed in their sleep, a warm summer night, no idea of a possible perpetrator. It was like the black mirror-image of a summer wedding - a complete nightmare.

The violent and apparently random death of a young person evokes more interest than the slaying of a middle-aged man in the course of a bungled robbery, since it accentuates the poles of good and evil, the victim's innocence and the killer's omnipotence.

Now, 44 years later, the events at Bodom are once again the topic of discussions, but this time in virtual form, via the Net.

We have learnt of late to take candles and flowers to the scenes of murder or tragedy, but curiosity and a thirst for the frisson of horror are more easily satisfied these days by going to an online chatroom or discussion group.

Unsolved murders always attract a crowd of amateur sleuths. For example on the web-pages of one group of Bodom Murders freaks there is a collection of scraps of information about the killings: press cuttings, interviews, theories about possible perpetrators, photos, and maps of the location that have been scanned from the local phone book.

The bulk of the site users are so young that even their parents would have a hard time remembering what happened on Whit Sunday over 40 years ago.

On Friday evening at 18.17 the front page of the site is updated with a dramatic ARREST! in red capital letters.

The tone expressed in the flood of messages in the guest-book that follows this announcement is "shocked and stunned", excited, and in places somewhat puffed up and self-important.

"Excellent", writes a correspondent whose forum monicker tells us only that he (or she) was born in 1984. "It's public pressure that has brought this about."

Another regular user delights in the number of hits recorded. "It looks like a great day for this site. So f**king many new users."

When the inquisitive of the 1960s had to get on their bikes and ride to Espoo to see the exact location of the killing ground, now the site of the tent can be inspected with one smart click of the mouse.

Of course, there will be no pictures of the clickers left for posterity like the 44-year-old image of the crime-scene searchers and the simply curious shown above.

Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 4.4.2004