The Tulilathi Campsite murders | Finland
Army conscript Mauno Kiviaho pushed through the dense undergrowth of the Finnish forest, sweat beading on his forehead despite the cool late-summer air. It was August 21st, 1959, and he was part of a massive search effort – over 300 volunteers combing the wilderness around Tulilahti. They'd been told to look for anything unusual.
When Kiviaho spotted a stick jutting from the marshy earth, he stopped. His stomach tightened. He called out to the others. As the search team gathered around, they began removing the thick logs and large pieces of peat that covered the ground. The smell hit them first. Then they saw what lay beneath.
Buried in a shallow grave, hidden under carefully arranged branches and earth, were two young women. Eine Nyyssönen and Riitta Pakkanen had been missing for nearly a month. Their families had been desperately hoping for their safe return. Now, 200 meters from where they'd last been seen alive, that hope died.
This is the story of the Tulilahti campsite murder – a case that would grip Finland with fear in the summer of 1959 and remains unsolved to this day.
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In the spring of 1959, best friends Riitta Pakkanen and Eine Nyyssönen began planning a cycling holiday through Eastern Finland. Riitta was 23 years old with blonde hair and blue eyes. She worked as an office assistant in Jyväskylä, a city in Central Finland. Eine was 21, dark-haired with green eyes, studying to become a nurse. The two young women had been friends for years and shared a love of adventure.
They spent months preparing for their trip. They trained by taking long bike rides together, building up their stamina for the journey ahead. They sewed special bags to attach to their bicycles to carry their belongings. They saved their money and studied maps of the route they would take. They each bought a matching straw panama hat – Eine’s light blue, Riitta’s light pink – to protect them from the summer sun.
The plan was to cycle through some of Finland’s most beautiful landscapes, visiting the famous Koli National Park in North Karelia, and returning home through the town of Varkaus. They would camp along the way, taking in the natural beauty of the lakes and forests. The entire trip would take about two weeks, with an expected return date of July 30th.
Riitta borrowed her brother Veikko’s black Altissa box camera so they could document their adventure. She promised to take good care of it and to bring back photographs of all the places they would see.
On Saturday, July 18th, 1959, Eine and Riitta set off from Jyväskylä on their blue bicycles, their panama hats perched on their heads, their handmade bags packed with camping gear and summer clothes. It was a glorious day. The sun was shining, and the two friends were filled with excitement about the journey ahead.
For over a week, everything went exactly as planned. Postcards arrived home regularly. From Koli, they wrote “Ihanaa!”—“Wonderful!” They were having the time of their lives. The weather was perfect, the scenery breathtaking. In the photographs Riitta took, the two friends smiled brightly, their faces full of joy and freedom.
By July 25th, they had reached Koli National Park. They spent time taking in the spectacular views from the hilltops, looking out over the endless expanse of lakes and forests that stretched to the horizon. It was everything they had hoped for.
From Koli, they made their way to Polvijärvi, arriving on the evening of July 26th. They checked into a local guesthouse for the night. The owner would later remember them clearly: two cheerful young women, full of life and laughter. That evening, Eine and Riitta went to a local dance hall. It was a typical summer evening activity for young people of the area, and the girls enjoyed themselves before returning to their lodgings around midnight.
The next morning, July 27th, they prepared to continue their journey. One of the bicycle saddles needed repair, so they stopped at a local workshop. Väinö Sirviö, the man who fixed their bikes, struck up a friendly conversation with them. He asked if they had found any pen pals during their travels in Karelia – a common question in those days. The young women smiled and politely said no, they weren’t looking for correspondence. They paid for the repair, thanked him, and cycled away.
They were heading toward Heinävesi, where they planned to spend the night at the Tulilahti campsite. It was around 7:30pm when they were seen riding down the road toward the camping area. The Tulilahti site sat on the shores of Lake Kermajärvi, surrounded by dense birch forest. It was remote and beautiful: exactly the kind of place they had been seeking throughout their trip.
The campsite was unguarded and nearly deserted. Just a clearing near the water where travelers could pitch their tents. Eine and Riitta found a good spot, set up their tent, and settled in for the evening. The sun wouldn’t fully set for hours yet… This far north, summer nights stayed bright until nearly midnight.
Around 8pm, two local boys arrived by boat. Heikki Pelkonen and Keijo Ruuskanen were forestry trainees, both around 18 years old. They had noticed the two visitors and, in the friendly way of small-town Finland, decided to introduce themselves. They spent some time chatting with Eine and Riitta, and showed them how to make decorative boxes from folded birch bark – a traditional Finnish craft. It was a pleasant, innocent encounter. Around 10pm, the boys said their goodbyes and motored away across the lake.
Eine and Riitta were left alone as the evening deepened. Or so they thought.
What the two friends didn’t know was that they had been watched. Multiple witnesses would later report seeing a man on a blue moped circling the area throughout the day. He had been spotted following the two cyclists earlier, keeping his distance but never approaching. Now, as the long summer twilight began to fade, he was there again. Watching. Waiting.
That was the last time anyone saw Eine Nyyssönen and Riitta Pakkanen alive.
When the sun rose on July 28th, the Tulilahti campsite was empty. The tent was gone. There was no sign of the two young women or their bicycles. It was as if the forest had devoured them.
Back in Jyväskylä, the families waited. At first, they weren’t worried. The girls were adventurous and might have decided to extend their trip or take a different route. But July 30th came and went – the day they had promised to return home. Still no word. No postcards. No phone calls.
On August 3rd, Riitta didn’t show up for work. Her employer called her family and the worry turned to fear. Riitta was responsible and reliable. She would never simply fail to appear without letting anyone know. Something was wrong.
The families contacted police and filed a missing persons report. The initial investigation focused on Varkaus, since that was the last place Eine had mentioned in her postcard home. Search parties combed the area but found nothing.
Radio broadcasts went out across Finland describing the two missing women. Eine Nyyssönen, 21 years old, dark-haired, green eyes, approximately 162 centimeters tall. Riitta Pakkanen, 23 years old, blonde, blue eyes, also around 162 centimeters. Both last seen riding blue bicycles and wearing panama hats.
The broadcasts worked. Witnesses began coming forward, retracing the girls’ route. Someone remembered seeing them at Polvijärvi. The bicycle repairman came forward. The boys who had visited their campsite contacted police. It became clear that Tulilahti was the last place anyone had seen them.
In mid-August, the search moved to Heinävesi. The National Bureau of Investigation took over, coordinating a massive effort. Volunteers poured into the area. Police officers, army conscripts, local residents—everyone wanted to help find the two missing women.
On August 21st, three and a half weeks after the disappearance, Mauno Kiviaho made the discovery that everyone had been dreading. The sharpened stick. The disturbed earth. The carefully concealed grave.
When the bodies were uncovered, investigators saw immediately that this was murder. Both women had been killed violently. Riitta had suffered severe head injuries consistent with blows from a heavy object. Eine had sustained fatal injuries caused by a bladed weapon. Investigators concluded two different weapons had been used. At least one of the women was found unclothed, though medical examiners later confirmed there had been no sexual assault.
The killer had worked hard to hide what he had done. The grave was three meters long and approximately 25 centimeters deep – he had tried to dig deeper but had hit a fallen branch. He had covered the bodies with thick logs and pieces of peat. The sharpened spruce sapling had been carefully carved and placed upright on the grave. A marker. Or perhaps a warning.
As investigators searched the surrounding area, they found more evidence of the killer’s methodical approach. The tent was discovered hidden in one location. The sleeping bags in another. Various items of clothing were scattered in different spots throughout the forest. The killer had taken his time, concealing evidence piece by piece.
On September 4th, police divers made another grim discovery. Both blue bicycles were found submerged in a deep section of the lake. They had been deliberately sunk in a place where discovery would be difficult, further suggesting familiarity with the area.
Some items were never recovered. But what investigators had found told them something important about the killer. This was not a crime of opportunity committed by a stranger passing through. The level of planning, the knowledge of the terrain, the careful concealment of evidence… This suggested someone who knew Tulilahti well.
Police were under enormous pressure to find the killer. Two young women, on a simple cycling holiday, had been brutally murdered. The nation was horrified and frightened. If this could happen to Eine and Riitta, it could happen to anyone.
On August 29th, 1959, thousands of people gathered in Jyväskylä for the funeral. Eine was carried by her fellow nursing students, still in their uniforms. Riitta was carried by her close relatives. The sight of two white coffins, two young lives ended so violently, devastated everyone who witnessed it.
The investigation focused on finding the man with the blue moped. Multiple witnesses had described him. Police needed to identify him and bring him in for questioning.
The case drew comparisons to other unsolved murders. Six years earlier, in May 1953, 17-year-old Kyllikki Saari had vanished while cycling home from a prayer meeting. Her body had been found five months later, buried in a similar manner: hidden beneath branches and peat in a forest clearing. That killer had never been caught. The similarities were impossible to ignore.
In early November 1959, police made arrests. Several local men were brought in for questioning. But on November 6th, police traveled hundreds of kilometers away to Munsala, a Swedish-speaking town in Ostrobothnia, and arrested 36-year-old Erik Runar Holmström.
Holmström was a petty criminal with a record of thefts in the Vaasa area. He had already been in custody for aggravated burglaries when police connected him to the Tulilahti murders. The connection came from an unexpected source: his own brother, Arne.
Arne Holmström had mentioned to acquaintances that (quote/unquote) “the Heinävesi thing might have been Runar’s doing.” He claimed he had seen his brother riding through Eastern Finland that summer on a blue moped. When Police Inspector Axel Skogman heard about these statements, he began investigating Runar Holmström as a suspect.
During questioning, Holmström admitted to owning a blue Solifer moped that summer. Police searched his home and found a Mora knife – a common Finnish working knife. The blade appeared to match the cutting marks on the sharpened spruce sapling that had been found marking the grave.
Police also found a loaded gun in Holmström’s possession with the safety off. When confronted during his arrest, he refused to touch it. His behavior struck investigators as suspicious.
When officers took Holmström to the Tulilahti crime scene, he became visibly nervous. He appeared to know details about the location that hadn’t been released to the public. During one interrogation session, he made statements investigators interpreted as admissions. He acknowledged being the man on the moped and admitted to watching the girls. He said he had seen the two local boys trying to hug and kiss them that evening. But he insisted he had continued on to Varkaus around midnight and had nothing to do with the murders.
Later, Holmström retracted these statements, claiming police had misunderstood him. But investigators believed they had their man. The moped, the knife, his presence in the area, his suspicious behavior… It all seemed to fit.
The trial began on June 8th, 1960. The timing was significant – it started just days after another shocking crime. On the night of June 4th to 5th, 1960, three teenagers had been brutally murdered while camping at Lake Bodom, west of Helsinki. The similarities between the Bodom murders and the Tulilahti case were striking. Both involved young people camping. Both featured attacks with a knife and a blunt object. Both showed methodical concealment of evidence. Finland was gripped by fear.
The trial was held in the assembly hall of Hasumäki Elementary School in Heinävesi. It became a spectacle. Holmström was brought into the courtroom in heavy shackles, his feet bound in thick chains. He was one of the last defendants in Finland to be displayed this way. Photographs of the shackled man appeared in newspapers across the country.
The prosecution presented their case. Holmström had owned a blue moped. He had been in the area. He possessed a knife that could have made the cuts on the grave marker. He had admitted watching the girls. He knew details about the crime scene. To the public, it seemed like an open-and-shut case.
But the defense attorneys began to dismantle the prosecution’s arguments one by one.
First, there was the matter of the knife marks. The carved sapling showed clear evidence of being cut by a right-handed person. Runar Holmström was left-handed.
Second, there was the physical difficulty of what the prosecution was suggesting. Holmström stood only 164 centimeters tall, roughly the same height as both victims. Eine and Riitta were young, healthy, active women. Could Holmström have overpowered both of them, killed them using two different weapons, then carried their bodies 200 meters through difficult terrain to bury them in a bog?
The timeline was equally problematic. To commit these murders, Holmström would have had to stalk and kill both women, dig a grave in marshy ground, bury their bodies, retrieve a shovel from a farm several hundred meters away – where an aggressive watchdog reportedly remained silent – hide the tent and sleeping bags in various locations, transport the bicycles to the lake and sink them, and conceal remaining items throughout the area. All of this would have had to happen in just a few hours on a bright summer night when darkness barely fell.
Most damaging to the prosecution’s case was this: Holmström was a Swedish-speaker from Ostrobothnia and unfamiliar with the Heinävesi area. Yet the killer appeared to have detailed knowledge of Tulilahti, its forest paths, its terrain, and places suitable for hiding evidence. Reconstruction tests suggested the acts could be completed in the estimated timeframe only if the person already knew the area well.
In about a year after the murders, while Holmström had been in custody for over a year, new evidence emerged. Women’s underwear and two hats belonging to the victims were found along the road between Varkaus and Heinävesi. The items were in unusually good condition, showing little sign of prolonged exposure to the elements.
If these items had been placed there by the killer, it suggested that the person responsible was still free, still moving the victims’ belongings, while Holmström remained in custody.
The trial continued throughout 1960 and into 1961. Even the prosecutor, Viljo Laaksonen, and the presiding judge later admitted privately that they did not believe Holmström was guilty. But he remained the only substantial suspect investigators had.
The murder charges were ultimately dropped due to insufficient evidence. Holmström remained in custody awaiting a psychiatric evaluation. The months in jail, the public vilification, and the trial that had branded him a monster in the eyes of the nation became too much to bear.
On May 8th, 1961, Runar Holmström hanged himself in his cell at Vaasa Provincial Prison, using a rope made from bedsheets. He was 37 years old. He left no confession, no final statement, no explanation. If he had any secrets about what happened at Tulilahti, they died with him.
But many who later studied the case came to believe Holmström was innocent, a convenient scapegoat, a petty criminal with a moped and a knife who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There was another suspect whose name would surface repeatedly in later discussions of the case.
Hans Assmann was a German-born man living in Finland who later became the subject of extensive speculation. Some writers and researchers alleged that he had wartime connections and possible intelligence ties. He had previously been questioned in connection with other unsolved crimes, including the 1953 murder of Kyllikki Saari and the Lake Bodom murders.
Witnesses later reported seeing men speaking German near the region shortly before the Tulilahti murders. Assmann was known to spend time in the Heinävesi area and to be familiar with the surroundings. These claims, however, were never conclusively proven, and Assmann was never formally charged in connection with the Tulilahti case.
Police, having focused their investigation on Holmström, did not pursue these alternative leads with the same intensity.
The case remains officially unsolved. The Central Criminal Police still receives occasional tips, especially when media attention renews public interest. More than 60 years have passed. If the killer was alive today, he would be well over 100 years old.
Eine Nyyssönen and Riitta Pakkanen were two young women with bright futures. Instead, their journey ended in a marshy grave just 200 meters from where they had pitched their tent on a warm July evening.
Their killer was never brought to justice. Their families never got answers.
And the question that haunted investigators in 1959 haunts us still:
Who murdered Eine Nyyssönen and Riitta Pakkanen at Tulilahti?
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