The Tulilahti Murders

Two friends from Jyväskylä

Eine Nyyssönen and Riitta Pakkanen were young women from Jyväskylä in Central Finland. Nyyssönen, 21, was training as a nurse, while Pakkanen worked in an office. Reports differ slightly on Pakkanen's age: Yle gave it as 22, while a later MTV Uutiset retrospective put it at 23. In July 1959 the two set out together on a summer cycling holiday through eastern Finland, heading in the direction of the Koli hills.

According to MTV Uutiset, they left on 18 July and intended to be home by 3 August, because Pakkanen was due back at work. They never returned.

Disappearance at the Tulilahti campsite

The last confirmed sighting of the pair was on 27 July 1959 at the Tulilahti camping area in Heinävesi, on the shore of Lake Kermajärvi. Investigators later concluded that both women were killed during the night of 27 to 28 July.

After relatives raised the alarm, early searching concentrated on the Varkaus area because of sightings that later proved mistaken. On 21 August the effort shifted to Tulilahti itself, where around 300 police officers and conscripts combed the terrain. On the first morning of that search, a soldier found a concealed grave in boggy ground some 200 metres or more from the campsite, and the bodies of both women were recovered. Their bicycles were later found in Lake Kermajärvi in September, and some of their belongings surfaced along the road between Varkaus and Heinävesi roughly a year afterwards.

A moped rider and a long manhunt

Witness accounts quickly shaped the inquiry. Police appealed for information about a blue moped, possibly of the Solifer make, ridden by a suntanned man thought to be between 30 and 40. Two local young men said a moped rider had bothered the women at the campsite on the evening of 27 July. Author Mikko Pennanen has noted that several local men were detained early on and then released within days.

In November 1959 police arrested Runar Holmström in Munsala, Ostrobothnia, initially over a string of burglaries in the Vaasa area. He had owned a blue moped that summer and carried a knife that police linked to marks found at the burial site. Holmström at first said he had been in Heinävesi, then withdrew that statement, and he consistently denied any part in the killings.

A case that never reached a verdict

According to MTV Uutiset, proceedings against Holmström were held in Heinävesi in the second half of 1960, but the murder charge was dropped for lack of evidence and he was kept in custody pending a psychiatric examination. Yle has likewise reported that he was never convicted of the Heinävesi crime. He died in Vaasa prison in 1961; MTV Uutiset reports that he took his own life. No court ever found him guilty of the murders. He is therefore legally innocent of them.

Doubts about his involvement were substantial. No eyewitness, fingerprint or bloodstain tied him to the scene. MTV Uutiset reports that the presiding judge and the prosecutor later said they did not believe he was the killer. Pennanen likewise regards the evidence against him as weak, pointing out that his criminal record involved property offences only.

Status today

The murders remain officially unsolved. Finland's National Bureau of Investigation (KRP) has kept the original files and continued to receive tips for decades, often after media coverage of old cases; in 2009 Yle reported that four had arrived that summer alone. A KRP chief inspector later told MTV Uutiset that such cases stay open while a living perpetrator could still plausibly be held to account.

The most recent substantive commentary came in October 2024, when Pennanen, author of the book Tulilahden murhamysteeri, told the forensic site ForenSeek that he believed the case could no longer be solved. In his view the perpetrator is presumably dead, police are not actively investigating, and no surviving evidence is known that modern methods could test. He considers a local person who knew the area the more likely culprit. Writer Teemu Keskisarja has also examined the case in a book that draws on police and National Archives records.

Why Tulilahti still matters in Finland

Pennanen describes Tulilahti as the first killing of campers in a tent of its kind in Finland, and it was followed less than a year later by the Lake Bodom murders of 1960. Pennanen counts it, with Bodom and the 1953 killing of Kyllikki Saari, among Finland's three most famous unsolved cases.

It is also a cautionary example for Finnish policing. Police later acknowledged errors, the scene examination fell short of modern standards, and the inquiry leaned heavily on unreliable eyewitness sightings. The pursuit of a single suspect, never convicted and later doubted by the judge and prosecutor themselves, shows how circumstantial evidence can narrow an inquiry. Keskisarja's work places the killings within a longer history of violence against women in Finland, a framing that keeps the names of Eine Nyyssönen and Riitta Pakkanen at the centre of the story.