Police source says Nils Gustafsson confessed to Bodom killings

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According to a member of the National Bureau of Investigation, Finland's central criminal police arm, Nils Gustafsson - the man charged with the triple murder at a lakeside campsite in 1960 - actually confessed to the crimes after he had been arrested in the spring of 2004.
      Taking the stand this morning in the Espoo District Court, NBI investigator Markku Tuominen reported that Gustafsson had been in a nervous state after he was taken into custody, and that he had thrown himself onto a bed, saying "What's done is done, that's fifteen years". Tuominen understood at the time that Gustafsson was referring specfically to his complicity in the Bodom Lake murders.
     
Tuominen's statement follows hard on the heels of an article in the somewhat sensationalist crime magazine Alibi, which carried an interview with a 40-year-old nurse who claimed to have met Gustafsson more than 20 years ago, and that the defendant had admitted his guilt to her.
      Gustafsson's defence counsel have stated that the woman's claims do not hold up, but she writes in the magazine that Gustafsson seemed almost proud of having got away with it, and that he found it laughable that nobody had suspected him.
     
The trial in Espoo District Court began in early August. Nils Gustafsson, now in his early sixties, is charged on three counts of murder. The prosecution is calling for a life sentence against Gustafsson, who was 18 years old at the time of the alleged slayings.
      The prosecution claims Gustafsson used knives and blunt instruments to kill the other three campers - two young women and one man. He was the only survivor in what has become one of the great mysteries of recent Finnish criminal history.
      Gustafsson and his defence team maintain that the killings in June 1960 were the work of an outside assailant, and that although he survived, he had sustained a number of puncture wounds and lacerations himself.
      The case continues.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Surprise witness testifies at Bodom murder trial (24.8.2005)
  Gustafsson testifies at trial on Friday (22.8.2005)

Helsingin Sanomat