Here we are again, me and my summer car, on the parking lot of a very small ski centre. I had found instructions to the site of a well documented murder mystery.
Finding it involved some difficulties. The area was nowadays an outdoor recreation area, which involved snow scooter and probably skiing tracks as well.
But according to my instructions, this was the place.
Back in 1959 there was a camping site here. And in 1959 two young ladies camped here.
They were from Jyväskylä in Central Finland, but they spent the summer biking around Eastern Finland. In late July they sent a postcard promising to be back home before August. When one of them didn’t return to work, a missing person report was filed.
Large searches were conducted in Northern Karelia, where they were last seen but in late August a swamp grave was found near this location. A bit later their belongings were found hidden all around the place and their bikes were found in the deepest part of the bay.
A petty thief from Western Finland was arrested. He had been moving around the area that summer, and it was widely believed, that he had followed the girls. He was taken to court, but committed suicide before the main trial and it was never determined, if he was guilty or not.
While the main culprit was imprisoned, the police found ladies’ underwear and two hats hidden a long way from the murder scene. The clothes hadn’t lost any color, so it was determined, that they hadn’t been there for very long.
A reconstruction of the crime was conducted, and it was determined, that the culprit managed to kill the victims and hide their bodies in the persumed time. But in order to do that, they had to know the location really well.
The shovel used to bury the bodies had been stolen at a nearby farm. The farm house’s dog was known to be aggressive towards strangers, but it had stayed silent all night.
So the murders remain a mystery and a part of Finnish folk lore.