Four Teenagers Went Camping. Only One Survived. The Lake Bodom Murders.

At about six o'clock in the morning on Sunday, June 5, 1960, a group of boys out birdwatching on the shore of Lake Bodom, in southern Finland, looked across the water and reportedly saw something strange.

A tent collapsing. And a blond man walking away from it.

Five hours later, a carpenter walking by found what was inside that tent.

Three teenagers were dead. A fourth was alive, badly injured.

More than sixty years later, nobody has ever been convicted of the Lake Bodom murders. And the strangest turn in the case came in 2004, when police arrested the only survivor.

Four teenagers

Lake Bodom is a long, narrow lake in Espoo, a city just west of Helsinki, the capital of Finland. In 1960, the area around it was quiet, wooded and rural.

On Saturday, June 4, 1960, four teenagers decided to go camping on the shore.

Maila Björklund, fifteen.

Anja Mäki, fifteen.

Seppo Boisman, eighteen.

And an eighteen-year-old boy who was Maila's boyfriend. He is the one who survived. We are not naming him here, for a reason that will become clear.

They rode out on motorcycles and pitched a tent near the water, not far from an old estate called Oittaa Manor.

It was early summer in Finland. The nights are short and the sky barely gets dark.

Between four and six

Sometime between about four and six in the morning on June 5, someone attacked them.

The attacker did not open the tent. He struck from the outside, through the tent walls, while the teenagers were inside.

The weapons were a knife, and a blunt object that investigators thought may have been a rock. Neither weapon was ever found.

Maila Björklund, Anja Mäki and Seppo Boisman were killed. Maila was attacked with the most violence. We are not going to describe that in detail.

Her boyfriend survived, with a broken jaw, other broken bones in his face, and stab wounds.

He later said he had glimpsed the attacker, a figure dressed in black, coming toward the group. He described it as having "bright red eyes."

The discovery

At about six in the morning, the birdwatching boys reportedly saw the tent collapse and the blond man walking away. That sighting has never been confirmed.

At about eleven in the morning, a carpenter named Esko Johansson came across the scene and called the police.

The police arrived at about noon.

The survivor was found outside the tent. In the later trial, he was described as lying barefoot on top of the collapsed tent.

What was taken

The killer took things with him.

He took the keys to the teenagers' motorcycles. But he left the motorcycles themselves behind.

He also took clothing. Some of it was later found, partly hidden, about five hundred meters from the tent. Among it were the survivor's shoes.

Several items, including the weapons, were never found at all.

Nobody has ever explained why someone would take the keys and not the bikes.

Think about what that means. A robber would take the motorcycles. A panicked stranger would just run. Taking the keys, and some of the clothes, and then hiding part of them in the woods, looks like someone making choices. But what those choices were meant to do, nobody knows.

A ruined crime scene

What happened next is the part of the case that investigators still regret.

The police did not cordon off the scene. They did not properly document it. Officers, and other people, walked all over the area, trampling whatever evidence there might have been.

Soldiers were brought in to search the shoreline. Some items were never recovered.

In hindsight, this is seen as one of the biggest failures of the case. Whatever the scene could have told investigators in 1960, much of it was lost in the first few hours.

Decades of suspects

For decades, the case stayed open, and the suspects piled up. We are not naming any of them, because none was ever charged.

Many locals suspected a man who ran a small kiosk near the lake. He was said to be hostile to campers and violent. He reportedly made confessions. Police found no hard evidence and doubted those confessions. He drowned in the lake in 1969, most likely by suicide.

A German-born man living in Finland was promoted in popular books as the killer. Police dismissed him, because he had an alibi.

And in the 1960s, a violent prison inmate claimed he had done it. He would have been about fourteen at the time of the murders, and many people doubt a boy that age could have overpowered four older teenagers.

None of these leads went anywhere.

The arrest

In late March 2004, forty-four years after the murders, Finnish police made an arrest.

It was the survivor.

By early 2005, Finland's National Bureau of Investigation said the case was solved, based on new forensic analysis.

Prosecutors laid out their theory. They said he had been drunk, had been shut out of the tent, had gotten into a fight in which his jaw was broken, and then had killed the other three. They said he then hid items, injured himself further, and came back barefoot to pretend he had been knocked unconscious.

Their key evidence was DNA. Modern testing found the victims' blood on his shoes, the ones found five hundred meters away, but none of his own blood. Prosecutors also pointed to an identification by birdwatchers, a remark they said was incriminating, and a claim that he had boasted about his guilt to a woman about ten years after the murders.

The verdict

The trial began on August 4, 2005.

The defense argued that outsiders had committed the murders. They said that, with a broken jaw and his other injuries, it made no sense that he could have killed three people.

On October 7, 2005, the court acquitted him of all charges.

The court said the evidence was inconclusive. It said the prosecution had not shown a motive that fit a crime this serious. And it said that after so many years, certainty was impossible.

The state of Finland later paid him forty-four thousand nine hundred euros for the mental suffering caused by his long detention before trial.

He was found not guilty. That is why we have not used his name.

The legend

Lake Bodom became the most famous unsolved crime in Finland.

It inspired a 2016 Finnish horror film called Lake Bodom. A well-known Finnish heavy metal band, Children of Bodom, named itself after the lake. Podcasts around the world have covered it.

But under the legend are three teenagers who went camping on a summer night and never came home. Maila Björklund. Anja Mäki. Seppo Boisman.

What we still don't know

More than sixty years later, we still do not know who attacked the tent at Lake Bodom.

We do not know who the blond man was, if he was real. We do not know why the killer took the motorcycle keys and left the motorcycles. We do not know where the weapons went.

What we know is this. Three teenagers were killed through the walls of their tent. One survived. The scene was ruined within hours. And the only person ever put on trial for it was the survivor, and the court found him not guilty.

Who do you think was at Lake Bodom that morning? And do you think a better crime scene in 1960 would have solved it?