Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Wednesday Weird: Lake Bodom Murders

All right. Since we're counting down the days until ASSASSIN'S HEART releases, from now until then, all the Wednesday Weirds will be in some way related to AH.

Which mean, time for some weird, creepy or unsolved murders!

Today we're starting with the Lake Bodom Murders.

Lake Bodom is in Espoo, Finland and on June 4th, 1960 a group of 4 teenagers decided to spend the night on its banks camping in a tent together.

That was the end of their fun.

While they slept, someone with a knife crept into their tent and violently stabbed the teens. Only one of them survived the attack, 18-year old Nils Gustafsson. Which, you think would be great (objectively) because at least there would be an eye witness to help the police catch the murderer.



Except Nils's face had been bludgeoned so bad that he couldn't really remember anything.

Unfortunately, the case went cold.

Until twelve years later, on the anniversary of the murders, when a man committed suicide. In his note, he confessed to the killings. In fact, the man used to work in a lakeside kiosk selling drinks, and had quarreled with the teens more than once. Hey, motive!

Case solved, right?

Nope.

The man had an alibi during the night of the murders. He'd been at home with his wife.

Around the same time, a doctor revealed that he had treated a man at his hospital shortly after the attack. The man, Hans Assman, was a German immigrant and lived near Lake Bodom. He arrived at the hospital wearing red stained clothes and discombobulated. But somehow, the police never thought to question him.

When the doctor did some research on his own, he discovered that Assman was former KGB and possibly a violent, ex-nazi.

But Assman also had an alibi for the night.

In 2004, another suspect entered the scene. Survivor Nils Gustafsson himself.

A new witness had come forward and said that Nils had been drunk and aggressive right before the murders, Also, with new forensics technology, including blood spatter analysis, there was some evidence that showed that perhaps Nils had murdered his friends in a drunken rage, and had received the facial injuries in the fight.

But, over a year later, Nils was cleared of all charges, too.

And that's where the case stands today. Two of the suspects dead and Nils cleared.

Thoughts or theories?

3 comments:

Alex J. Cavanaugh said...

I don't think you could write a story like that with so many false starts.

Rena said...

They were hushed up. An operative in the area was working on something and the Teens saw her do something. To keep them quiet, she murdered all of them except the one to throw off suspicion--Nils. To muddy the waters because he wasn't the brightest crayon, she blackmailed the others into confessing or planting suspicious evidence on. To this day, we still don't know what the operative did.

or, you know, aliens... OH! Swamp gas?

Matthew MacNish said...

Crazy! One of the alibi witnesses must be lying. I think it's ASSMAN!

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