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The Lake Bodom Murders
Who Killed Finnish Teenagers Seppo Boisman, Maili Björklund and Tuulikki Mäki?
The White Night
In June, in the southern part of Finland, the sun dips just below the horizon and the ‘white night’ falls. White nights are beautiful and magical. They can make it hard to sleep. They can also be eery: the light has a strange, greyish quality which is different from dusk or dawn instead, it's like someone dialed down the brightness for a few hours. During these ‘not-quite-nights’ the world falls silent.
On one such Finnish white night, June 4 — June 5, 1960, a violent triple murder would occur which has never been solved.
Camping at Lake Bodom
Lake Bodom is a large tranquil lake surrounded by small villages and stands of birch and pine trees, 20 km (12 miles) west of the Finnish capital Helsinki and just north of the city of Espoo.
On Saturday 4 June 1960, four teenagers from the city of Vantaa two boys — Seppo Boisman, 18, and his best friend Nils Gustafsson, 18 — and two girls — Maili Björklund, 15, and her friend Tuulikki Mäki, 15 — arrived together at the south shore of Lake Bodom with their tent for a night of camping.
They had ridden the roughly 30 km (18 miles) west to the camping spot on the boys’ motorcycles, which they parked leaning up against two trees next to where they had chosen to pitch their light-coloured tent.
Probably, the four were celebrating the end of the school year and perhaps Maili’s 16th Birthday, which would be on June 6. The boys would soon be off to do their Army service, but for now, the summer stretched ahead.
Image created by the author on Canva. Image sources: 1, 2, 3. A little note here. It took quite a bit of internet digging to find these photos of the four campers. The usual ones used are very poor quality. This photo of Nils was taken soon after the events at Lake Bodom (see below).
Blond-haired Seppo, though baby-faced, was the eldest of the four: he had turned 18 that January and was working as an apprentice electrician. He had previously visited Lake Bodom by bicycle.
Seppo’s best friend, blue-eyed Nils, had a shock of thick brown hair. He had turned 18 less than a month before the camping trip. Nils was popular, well-dressed, and always wore his leather…
