Within heavy metal, fans of Children of Bodom will be familiar with this case, for the rest of you who may not have heard of it, there is a frustrating lack of information online these days (unless you can speak Finnish, and I don’t trust google translator). The wikipedia entry gives a fairly good overview of the case:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_bodom_murders
But there are an awful lot of coincidences and unresolved questions that make it quite fascinating, as with most cold cases. There were a string of unsolved murders in Finland in the 50’s and 60’s, most famous of which was the murder of a young girl called Kyllikki Saari which some of you may have heard of.
Finland itself is a very haunting place, I have been camping round one of their lakes in the summer where it doesn’t get dark at night time (due to the latitude) – you would think a forest with no dark is not a very scary place but there’s something very unsettling about how quiet it goes once the animals go to sleep, not to mention how isolated one can feel so far from any people. It all adds up to the same kind of atmosphere found in cases like Robert Hanson or Ivan Milat; there’s something particularly horrible about the way these killers can operate in the wilderness unhindered by society.