In autumn 1931, police stumbled upon a gruesome stash of severed body parts near Helsinki, Finland. After swiftly discounting the work of a serial killer, detectives focussed on the possibility that the body parts were mutilated as part of black magic or Masonic rituals. It was over a year before the perpetrators were brought to trial and the Finnish Freemasons were exonerated.
Severed Body Parts Found in Well at Tattarisuo near Helsinki
It was in a well, in the Tattarisuo area of Helsinki in September 1931, according to The Times newspaper of October that year, that Finnish police discovered a head and some hands and feet that had been severed from nine cadavers. After deciding that necromancy was most likely involved, a series of exhumations were carried out at the nearby pauper cemetery at Malmi and some 30 bodies were found to have pieces missing.
Suspicion initially fell upon a man called Saarenheimo who was caretaker of the town’s mortuary. Police found a Swedish black bible and papers in English relating to necromancy and black magic practices at his lodgings. His role as mortuary caretaker meant he had the opportunity to remove body parts before the remains were buried. His neighbours also gave information about mysterious meetings he had held at night in the mortuary during the previous couple of years.
Finnish Freemasons Suspected of Using Snatched Limbs for Rituals
However, some of the severed limbs and body parts came from corpses that had been dealt with at mortuaries at which Saarenheimo was not caretake,r so the police looked elsewhere. The finger of suspicion then fell, according to the Freemasonry Today magazine edition of Spring 2001, on medical students needing such items for their studies.
When the students were swiftly discounted, it was members of the fledgling Finnish Freemason organisation itself that became prime suspects. The reason being that non-masons suspected that body parts were used in rituals and practices so secret, no-one outside the Brethren were allowed to know what they were.
Finland Body Snatchers Baltic Islands Immigrants Says The Times
But, announced The Times newspaper of August 13 1932, after a raid on a cemetery a year later in late summer 1932, three unemployed workers confessed to having mutilated human bodies at the Malmi Cemetery in order to use the severed body parts for occult purposes and implicated two other women in the crime.
A really interesting article in Folklore Magazine of March 1, 1934 by Ernst Harms, [available at JSTOR by subscription only,] explained how the people who had been tried and convicted of the crime were immigrants to Helsinki from the Baltic Islands in the Gulf of Riga where it was well known (at the time allegedly) that certain communities believed strongly in using body parts of the dead for necromantic purposes.
The confession of these immigrants meant that the Brethren of the Finnish Freemason society were finally off the hook and the families of the deceased who had been violated were able to put their loved ones' bodies to rest once more.
Other sources:
The Times Digital Archive available by subscription only.
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