July 11, 2025 • 30 mins
Early on the morning of July 28th, 1987, a rescue helicopter was dispatched to the passenger ferry MS Viking Sally, out on the Baltic Sea.
When the medic stepped onto deck, he realized immediately that this emergency was very much out of the ordinary...
Written by Diane Hope and produced by Richard MacLean Smith
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, it's Richard mccleinsmith here with a quick update before
we dive into today's episode. Unexplained is very excited to
be a part of Crime Wave at Sea this November,
joining forces with some of the eeriest voices in the
world of true crime and the paranormal four Nights in
the Caribbean, with amazing podcasts like Last Podcast on the Left,
(00:20):
Scared to Death and many more live shows, meet and greets,
creepy Stories under the Stars and you can be there too,
but don't wait. Rooms are nearly sold out. Head to
Crimewavetsea dot com forward slash Unexplained to grab your fan
coat and lock in your cabin. We'd love to see
you on board. Early in the morning of July twenty eighth,
(00:54):
nineteen eighty seven, a rescue helicopter flew fast and low
over the Baltic Sea. At this latitude of almost sixty
degrees north, the sun had already risen and there was
excellent visibility as the pilot and flight crew searched the
rippled sea below for their target. Shortly before five a m.
(01:14):
They saw it, passenger ferry m S Viking Sally, heading
steadily towards the port of Toriku, on the southwest coast
of Finland. The pilot steered expertly toward the ship's small
helicopter deck, located directly behind one of the Viking Sally's funnels.
It would have been a tricky landing site in bad weather,
(01:36):
but the sea was calm and the ship barely rocked.
The flight mechanic opened the side door and guided the
pilot down over his helmet headset. In the back seat,
twenty seven year old nurse Hiki Masculine was readying himself
to respond to whatever the situation presented. Roused from sleep
(01:57):
barely an hour earlier. Neither he nor the flight crew
had been given any details of the emergency medical transport mission.
Typically such distress calls from ferries sailing this route were
for an elderly patient who suffered a heart attack or
an intoxicated passenger who'd fallen down the stairs. But as
(02:17):
Masculine stepped onto the deck, he realized immediately that this
emergency was very much out of the ordinary. You're listening
to unexplained and I'm Richard McLean Smith. Thomas Schmidt can't
(02:40):
remember what prompted him and his friend Klaus Schlk to
go interrailing to Finland, a form of travel whereby one
train ticket grants you unlimited rail travel across thirty three
countries in Europe. Schmidt and Schlker, who had both just
turned twenty, had met at a local football club in Stuttgart,
(03:00):
where they'd become friends. Both were studying to beat mechanics.
Joining them on the trip was Bettina Taxis, who had
met Shelker in a night club the previous year and
the pair had quickly become an item. The trio planned
to use inter rail passes to tour the Nordic countries,
traveling by train from what was then still West Germany
(03:22):
to Sweden's capital city of Stockholm. Next, they were traveled
by ferry up the Baltic Sea to Torku in Finland,
where they planned to attend the music festival Ruis Rock.
After that, they would continue north to finish lapland then
head to Bergen in Norway, before taking a boat south
(03:42):
along the coast to Oslo, the nation's capital. The trio
arrived in Stockholm and boarded the ferry shortly before ten
p m. On July twenty seventh. The Viking Sally provided
a daily service between Sweden, Finland and Orland, a chain
of islands at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia.
(04:04):
With a crew of around two hundred, it could take
up to four hundred vehicles and two thousand passengers. It
was only seven years old and came equipped with three restaurants,
several bars, a movie theater and a swimming pool. It
must have seemed luxurious to the three twenty somethings who
had everything to look forward to as they leant on
(04:25):
the rail to watch the late summer sunset as the
ship sailed off into the freezing waters of the Baltic Sea.
Finding their way to the bar, Thomas sat quietly drinking
as Klaus and Bettina, the more sociable of the group,
got chatting with several of their fellow passengers. Among them
(04:46):
was a young British man named Patrick Haley, who was
on his way to visit his Finnish girlfriend, and a
man named Tawno, who the couple described to Thomas as
a German speaking fun Finn, a car parts dealer returning
from a business trip to Germany. Around one a m
on July twenty eighth, Klaus and Bettina pulled their sleeping
(05:10):
bags from their back packs and told Thomas that they
were off to get some sleep. With limited funds for
their trip, the youngsters hadn't booked cabins, opting to sleep
on deck to save money. The pair told Thomas that
they'd found a sheltered spot out on deck nine at
the rear of the ship, next to the helicopter pat
(05:31):
where a plexiglass barrier would provide shelter from the wind.
It was a quiet location with the added benefit of
being dimly lit since the nearest deck lamp was broken.
Not wanting to intrude on the young couple's privacy, Thomas
opted to bed down indoors on one of the lower
decks and agreed to look after every one's back packs,
(05:53):
which were left with him. Exactly what happened next remains
unclear to this day. Also on board the Viking Sally
that night was a boisterous group of Danish boy Scouts
heading to an International Nordic Scout camp in Salvo, southwest Finland.
(06:18):
According to passengers, some of the scouts had been causing trouble.
A small group perhaps three or so, had been noisily
roaming the ship or night, causing havoc. One of them,
eighteen year old Thomas Nielsen, later told police that around
three forty five a m. While mooching about the helicopter deck,
(06:39):
he saw two people, a man and a woman, who
at first appeared to be heavily intoxicated and struggling to
stand up. He claimed that when he moved closer to
get a better look, he realized that the pair were
not drunk, but bleeding profusely from head wounds, apparently in
a panic. He then went to get help. Shortly after
(07:03):
three forty five, the attack was reported to ship's crew,
and the OnCore nurse, along with the security operative, hurried
to the scene, soon to be joined by the Viking
Sally's captain. Recognizing the seriousness of the injuries, the captain
requested immediate medical assistance from the mainland. This was the
(07:24):
situation that nurse Hike Masculine stepped into as he alighted
from the rescue helicopter in the cold morning air. A
small group of people were clustered around two prone figures
on the adjacent deck. When he got there, the unmistakable
metallic smell of fresh blood filled the air. It covered
(07:46):
so much of the deck area that masculine had to
be careful not to slip in it. As he approached
the two limph forms, he was shocked by the severity
of their injuries. With the help of the ship's crew,
the blood drenched patients were quickly loaded onto stretchers and
into the helicopter. As they lifted off from the ship,
(08:08):
Maskalin made a quick assessment. Just one glance told him
that the injuries were life threatening. The damage to the
back of the young man's head was especially bad. Maskelin
did what he could, staunching the patients bleeding with the towels.
At some point, Klaus's heart stopped, while Bettina passed in
(08:31):
and out of consciousness. She tried to say something in German,
but the nurse couldn't make out the words clearly enough
to understand her. The patients were received by the Torkou
University Hospital at five forty eight. Klaus Schelker was pronounced
dead on arrival. Bettina Taxis was still alive and placed
(08:54):
in intensive care in a critical condition. Meanwhile, back on
board the boat, the police investigation was getting underway. At
six thirty am, three police tactical investigators and one crime
scene technician alighted onto the Viking Sally's helipad. One thing
(09:14):
that was clear was that the injuries sustained by the
young couple were in no way accidental. They had resulted
from heavy blows in what the chief investigator would later
describe as an especially ferocious attack. Perhaps most shockingly to
several police officers, the assault was eerily reminiscent of a
(09:36):
previous incident the year before on the exact same ship.
On July ninth, nineteen eighty six, just over a year
before the German trio's ill fated voyage, during a passage
(09:59):
in the opposite direction from Torku to Stockholm, the Viking
Sally had been the scene of a violent murder. It
wasn't until the ship docked that the body of forty
four year old business men Anti Eliyala was found in
his cabin. It later emerged that a fellow passenger named
Ray Yohama, said to be an associate of the murdered man,
(10:22):
entered Eliyala's cabin and attempted to steal some money. When
Eliyala told the intruder that he was going to report
the theft to the police, the thirty three year old
Hammer stabbed him five times in the throat with a
dinner knife, then strangled him to death with a strip
of fabric torn from the cabin's bed sheet. It was
(10:45):
an open and shut case. Ammar was captured, tried, found
guilty of murder, and given a life sentence. It seemed
a strange coincidence, indeed, that a violent attack would happen
on the same ship, almost a year to the day
since the previous murder, when the Viking Sally docked in
(11:06):
Torkou at ten past eight on that July twenty eighth
morning in nineteen eighty seven. Unless the perpetrator of the
attack on the two young Germans had jumped overboard, they
had to still be on the ship. In theory, all
the police had to do was surround the vessel and
find the culprit. And so, as the Viking Sally arrived
(11:29):
in Torkou harbor, the police were ready and waiting in
the docking area. They planned to video record every passenger
as they disembarked, asking a brief series of questions and
taking down names and contact information, but with around fourteen
hundred passengers on board that day, they soon realized that
(11:51):
this would take far too long. Making a compromise, they
excluded the passengers least likely to be the assailant, families
with children and the elderly, and targeted others for close attention,
including the dead victim's friend, Thomas, and the young British
man who the German couple had spent time with in
(12:11):
the bar the previous evening. At first, Thomas Schmidt appeared
to be in shock. He said he'd heard a helicopter
during the night, but thought nothing of it so went
back to sleep. The police questioned him for some time
before he demanded to know what had happened. It was
only then that he was told of the terrible events
(12:34):
that had befallen his traveling companions. In the end, Thomas,
who appeared genuinely distraught to hear the news, was deemed
to be telling the truth. He'd slept all night in
a public space, and there were witnesses that he was
in another part of the ship at the time of
the murder. Attention then turned to Patrick Hailey, the young
(12:57):
british Man who'd spoken with the couple in the When
the ship docked, police found him in his sleeping back
covered in blood. Hailey insisted it was the result of
a nosebleed. The man was interviewed repeatedly until forensic tests
eventually appeared to confirm that the blood in his clothing
(13:19):
probably was his own, and he too was released. None
of the twenty initial suspects who were interviewed by police
in detail gave any reason to suspect them. The police
had only two things to go on. A violent assault
(13:42):
and murder seemed to have been committed with no conceivable motive,
an extremely exceptional occurrence in Finland, and whoever the perpetrator
was had just walked off the Viking Sally. The police
soon ruled out robbery or a sexual attack as the motive.
The only viable explanation they felt was that the crime
(14:05):
had been sparked by a seemingly insignificant reason and likely
carried out by someone who was mentally ill or possessed
of a severe personality disorder. In today's high tech world,
the investigators would have had more evidence to work with,
but at the time, forensic DNA testing was in its infancy,
(14:28):
and it had only been used for the first time
in a criminal case in the UK the previous year. However,
it had proved crucial exonerating an innocent suspect and resulting
in the conviction of the Trooe perpetrator in a case
known as the Enderb murders. The outcome of the Viking
Sally investigation might have been very different if DNA testing
(14:51):
had been widely available to the Finnish police, but at
the time, the most the Finns could expect from their
blood sample analysis were determining the blood group and whether
the sample was human or another animal. On board CCTV
footage was mostly unavailable too. The ship only had surveillance
(15:12):
cameras on the car deck and in the engine room,
and at that time there was no requirement for Swedish
ships to keep comprehensive passenger lists. Victim testimony didn't help either.
When Bettina Taxes eventually regained consciousness and Finish investigators finally
managed to question her, it was months after the incident
(15:35):
and Bettina couldn't remember anything about the attack. Nevertheless, investigators
did what they could, even sailing on the Viking Sally
between Turku and Stockholm several times hoping to find clues,
but all to no avail. The only real evidence the
police were left to work with was the footage they
(15:57):
had shot of the disembarking passengers poring over it for
endless hours. Investigators identified several potential suspects and released footage
of them to the public. One man was especially elusive.
He'd been spotted moving around near the fifth deck cafeteria
(16:17):
in the early hours on the morning of the attack.
Aged around thirty five foot five inches tall, with dark hair,
it was reported that he spoke English and wore a
distinctive beanie hat. He was never traced. And then there
was the Danish boy scout Thomas Nielsen, who appeared to
(16:38):
have been the first person to find the injured couple.
It was late October nineteen eighty seven when the police
questioned Thomas Nielson again. Nielsen had only recently been in
trouble with the police in Denmark on suspicion of theft.
(17:01):
The Finnish police believed he was looking for something to
steal on the night of the murder. This second time,
when asked to described the morning he'd found the couple,
Nielsen told a slightly different story. Rather than spotting the
couple immediately, he said now that he'd gone to the
helicopter deck two or three times before he spotted them,
(17:24):
and it was only when he followed members of the
crew as they rushed to the helicopter deck that he
saw they were injured. The police also questioned the Danish
scout leader, who said at the time that Thomas had
woken him on the Viking Sally in the early hours
of the morning covered in blood, which he'd said was
from helping the victims of the attack. The scout master
(17:47):
had asked the ship's staff to wash the boy's bloody clothes,
and shortly before they arrived in Torku, items were returned
clean and dry, and the man thought nothing more of it.
A magazine reporter who interviewed Nielsen around a month after
the attack also noticed something strange. The young man seemed
(18:09):
to have remarkable recall of the details of the pair's injuries,
despite the traumatic nature of the events, the time of
night and the area being dimly lit. The eighteen year
old described how the couple's faces had not been hit, kicked,
or slashed with a knife, but rather were like slush,
(18:31):
as if they'd been hit with something like a hammer.
But who would suspect a fresh faced boy scout of
such a brutal attack. During the investigation, around one thousand
people were interviewed in nine different countries and several hundred
forensic samples were sent for analysis, but with no eyewitness
(18:52):
to the incident, no useful CCTV footage, and no apparent motive,
after four years, the investigation was discontinued. Traditions about bad
luck attaching itself to ships have been around for centuries,
and often date back to ancient times. In the past,
(19:14):
many ships had a cat on board to help control rodents.
If the ship's cat fell overboard, it was believed that
this would summon a terrible storm. Even if the ship
survived the storm, it would be cursed with nine years
of bad luck. Whistling on board a ship has long
been frowned upon. Doing this is said to literally whistle
(19:37):
up the wind, causing a strong gale to appear. Perhaps
the most well known of all maritime superstitions is that
it's bad luck to renamership, a tradition so ingrained in
seafaring culture. It's even mentioned in the classic novel Treasure Island,
when pirate captain long John Silver chooses to keep the
(20:00):
name of a captured ship to avoid any potentially negative consequences.
According to legend, When every ship is christened, its name
goes into a ledger of the deep, maintained by the
god Neptune, who views it as devious to use a
new name. To this day, many mariners still insist that
(20:31):
if you must change a ship's name, you should perform
a purging and renaming ritual to demonstrate to the sea
gods that you have no hidden agenda. There are numerous
cautionary tales of ships being renamed without this ritual, then
meeting a tragic end. On the evening of September twenty seventh,
(20:53):
nineteen ninety four, the cruise ship the MS Estonia, powered
westwards across the Baltic ringing through twenty foot high waves
into sixty mile per hour headwinds carrying sheets of icy rain.
The vessel had left its home port of Talent bound
for Stockholm, fifteen minutes behind the scheduled seven pm departure,
(21:15):
and the crew were pushing it at maximum speed to
make up time. As the Estonia pitched through the heavy seas,
most passengers were sleeping when around one am, a gigantic, deep,
metallic sound reverberated throughout the entire ship. A crew member
(21:36):
later said that he saw one of the loading bay doors,
taking in water. The high waves had crashed the bow
doors to separate from the ship, allowing water to flood
into the vehicle deck. Panic ensued as the Estonia began
listing heavily to its starboard side. Less than forty minutes later,
(21:57):
the boat capsized and sank. Of the nine hundred and
eighty nine passengers and crew on board, eight hundred and
fifty two died, most of them trapped inside the sinking ship.
Many escaped the ship, only to freeze to death in
the Baltic's icy waters. Only one hundred and thirty seven
(22:19):
people survived in what became one of the most deadly
European peace time disasters at sea, second only to the
sinking of the Titanic. But Ms Estonia hadn't always been
called that. It was, in fact none other than the
Viking Sally, which had been sold and repurchased in the
(22:40):
nineteen nineties. In twenty sixteen, twelve years after the former
Viking Sally had sunk to her watery grave, and almost
thirty years since the mysterious assault on the Young German Cup,
the police received information that prompted them to reopen what
(23:04):
had been a very cold case. Initially, Torku police refused
to reveal any details about the new evidence. Finally, in
September twenty twenty they announced that they had solved the case,
and in December that year, a district prosecutor filed homicide
charges against a fifty two year old Danish man. It
(23:27):
was none other than the former boy scout Thomas Nielsen,
the very person who'd claimed to have discovered the victims.
The police received a tip from a Danish jail where
Nielsen had spent half of his life for various crimes
and had confided to a fellow inmate that he'd gotten
away with the crime on the Viking Sally. They also
(23:50):
discovered that in twenty fifteen, the man began to threaten
his ex wife, sending her numerous text messages in which
he said he committed the shipboard attack. Doroku police sent
two officers to question him, who changed his name by
then to Hermann Himmler. Danish police warned the Fins that
(24:11):
it would be a wasted trip, but to everyone's surprise,
Himmler more or less confessed to committing the crime. Himler's
trial started in May twenty twenty one, with the statutory
limit of twenty years on cases of manslaughter, the charges
had been changed to murder and attempted murder, which have
(24:32):
no expiration date in Finland. Prosecutors pointed to the accused's
apparent knowledge that the murder had been committed with a
welding hammer, and that he had told several people that
he had killed and gotten away with murder. There was
only one problem, or three to be precise. There was
(24:52):
no lawyer present when Himmler made his confession, which he
later retracted, the murder weapon had never been found, and
a key witness, the defendant's former wife, refused to give
evidence at the trial, defense attorneys insisted that their client
now denied all the charges. In the end, the court
(25:21):
sided with Hermann Himmler since there was insufficient proof that
he was truly responsible, and in June twenty twenty one
he was acquitted of all charges. Today, the ill fated
ship lies deep beneath the cold, dark waters of the
Baltic twenty two nautical miles from the Finnish island of Utah.
(25:44):
The precise reason for its sinking is also a somewhat
murky and contentious story, perhaps one for another episode, but
yet another grim warning to the perils of offending the
god Neptune by renaming a ship as for knowing who
it was exactly that assaulted Bettina Taxis and killed Klaus
(26:07):
Shekel as they slept on deck that harrowing night in
July nineteen eighty seven that remains to this day Unexplained.
This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by
(26:28):
Richard mclin Smith. Diane is an audio producer and sound
recordeded in her own right. You can find out more
about her work at Dianehope dot com and on Instagram
at in the sound Field. Thank you as ever for listening.
Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard
(26:48):
McLain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music,
are also produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The
book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You
can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get
(27:09):
your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with
any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on
the show. Perhaps you have an explanation or a story
of your own you'd like to share. You can find
out more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reach us
online through X and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod and
Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast a
(30:01):
assass
Hello, it's Richard mccleinsmith here with a quick update before
we dive into today's episode. Unexplained is very excited to
be a part of Crime Wave at Sea this November,
joining forces with some of the eeriest voices in the
world of true crime and the paranormal four Nights in
the Caribbean, with amazing podcasts like Last Podcast on the Left,
(00:20):
Scared to Death and many more live shows, meet and greets,
creepy Stories under the Stars and you can be there too,
but don't wait. Rooms are nearly sold out. Head to
Crimewavetsea dot com forward slash Unexplained to grab your fan
coat and lock in your cabin. We'd love to see
you on board. Early in the morning of July twenty eighth,
(00:54):
nineteen eighty seven, a rescue helicopter flew fast and low
over the Baltic Sea. At this latitude of almost sixty
degrees north, the sun had already risen and there was
excellent visibility as the pilot and flight crew searched the
rippled sea below for their target. Shortly before five a m.
(01:14):
They saw it, passenger ferry m S Viking Sally, heading
steadily towards the port of Toriku, on the southwest coast
of Finland. The pilot steered expertly toward the ship's small
helicopter deck, located directly behind one of the Viking Sally's funnels.
It would have been a tricky landing site in bad weather,
(01:36):
but the sea was calm and the ship barely rocked.
The flight mechanic opened the side door and guided the
pilot down over his helmet headset. In the back seat,
twenty seven year old nurse Hiki Masculine was readying himself
to respond to whatever the situation presented. Roused from sleep
(01:57):
barely an hour earlier. Neither he nor the flight crew
had been given any details of the emergency medical transport mission.
Typically such distress calls from ferries sailing this route were
for an elderly patient who suffered a heart attack or
an intoxicated passenger who'd fallen down the stairs. But as
(02:17):
Masculine stepped onto the deck, he realized immediately that this
emergency was very much out of the ordinary. You're listening
to unexplained and I'm Richard McLean Smith. Thomas Schmidt can't
(02:40):
remember what prompted him and his friend Klaus Schlk to
go interrailing to Finland, a form of travel whereby one
train ticket grants you unlimited rail travel across thirty three
countries in Europe. Schmidt and Schlker, who had both just
turned twenty, had met at a local football club in Stuttgart,
(03:00):
where they'd become friends. Both were studying to beat mechanics.
Joining them on the trip was Bettina Taxis, who had
met Shelker in a night club the previous year and
the pair had quickly become an item. The trio planned
to use inter rail passes to tour the Nordic countries,
traveling by train from what was then still West Germany
(03:22):
to Sweden's capital city of Stockholm. Next, they were traveled
by ferry up the Baltic Sea to Torku in Finland,
where they planned to attend the music festival Ruis Rock.
After that, they would continue north to finish lapland then
head to Bergen in Norway, before taking a boat south
(03:42):
along the coast to Oslo, the nation's capital. The trio
arrived in Stockholm and boarded the ferry shortly before ten
p m. On July twenty seventh. The Viking Sally provided
a daily service between Sweden, Finland and Orland, a chain
of islands at the entrance to the Gulf of Bothnia.
(04:04):
With a crew of around two hundred, it could take
up to four hundred vehicles and two thousand passengers. It
was only seven years old and came equipped with three restaurants,
several bars, a movie theater and a swimming pool. It
must have seemed luxurious to the three twenty somethings who
had everything to look forward to as they leant on
(04:25):
the rail to watch the late summer sunset as the
ship sailed off into the freezing waters of the Baltic Sea.
Finding their way to the bar, Thomas sat quietly drinking
as Klaus and Bettina, the more sociable of the group,
got chatting with several of their fellow passengers. Among them
(04:46):
was a young British man named Patrick Haley, who was
on his way to visit his Finnish girlfriend, and a
man named Tawno, who the couple described to Thomas as
a German speaking fun Finn, a car parts dealer returning
from a business trip to Germany. Around one a m
on July twenty eighth, Klaus and Bettina pulled their sleeping
(05:10):
bags from their back packs and told Thomas that they
were off to get some sleep. With limited funds for
their trip, the youngsters hadn't booked cabins, opting to sleep
on deck to save money. The pair told Thomas that
they'd found a sheltered spot out on deck nine at
the rear of the ship, next to the helicopter pat
(05:31):
where a plexiglass barrier would provide shelter from the wind.
It was a quiet location with the added benefit of
being dimly lit since the nearest deck lamp was broken.
Not wanting to intrude on the young couple's privacy, Thomas
opted to bed down indoors on one of the lower
decks and agreed to look after every one's back packs,
(05:53):
which were left with him. Exactly what happened next remains
unclear to this day. Also on board the Viking Sally
that night was a boisterous group of Danish boy Scouts
heading to an International Nordic Scout camp in Salvo, southwest Finland.
(06:18):
According to passengers, some of the scouts had been causing trouble.
A small group perhaps three or so, had been noisily
roaming the ship or night, causing havoc. One of them,
eighteen year old Thomas Nielsen, later told police that around
three forty five a m. While mooching about the helicopter deck,
(06:39):
he saw two people, a man and a woman, who
at first appeared to be heavily intoxicated and struggling to
stand up. He claimed that when he moved closer to
get a better look, he realized that the pair were
not drunk, but bleeding profusely from head wounds, apparently in
a panic. He then went to get help. Shortly after
(07:03):
three forty five, the attack was reported to ship's crew,
and the OnCore nurse, along with the security operative, hurried
to the scene, soon to be joined by the Viking
Sally's captain. Recognizing the seriousness of the injuries, the captain
requested immediate medical assistance from the mainland. This was the
(07:24):
situation that nurse Hike Masculine stepped into as he alighted
from the rescue helicopter in the cold morning air. A
small group of people were clustered around two prone figures
on the adjacent deck. When he got there, the unmistakable
metallic smell of fresh blood filled the air. It covered
(07:46):
so much of the deck area that masculine had to
be careful not to slip in it. As he approached
the two limph forms, he was shocked by the severity
of their injuries. With the help of the ship's crew,
the blood drenched patients were quickly loaded onto stretchers and
into the helicopter. As they lifted off from the ship,
(08:08):
Maskalin made a quick assessment. Just one glance told him
that the injuries were life threatening. The damage to the
back of the young man's head was especially bad. Maskelin
did what he could, staunching the patients bleeding with the towels.
At some point, Klaus's heart stopped, while Bettina passed in
(08:31):
and out of consciousness. She tried to say something in German,
but the nurse couldn't make out the words clearly enough
to understand her. The patients were received by the Torkou
University Hospital at five forty eight. Klaus Schelker was pronounced
dead on arrival. Bettina Taxis was still alive and placed
(08:54):
in intensive care in a critical condition. Meanwhile, back on
board the boat, the police investigation was getting underway. At
six thirty am, three police tactical investigators and one crime
scene technician alighted onto the Viking Sally's helipad. One thing
(09:14):
that was clear was that the injuries sustained by the
young couple were in no way accidental. They had resulted
from heavy blows in what the chief investigator would later
describe as an especially ferocious attack. Perhaps most shockingly to
several police officers, the assault was eerily reminiscent of a
(09:36):
previous incident the year before on the exact same ship.
On July ninth, nineteen eighty six, just over a year
before the German trio's ill fated voyage, during a passage
(09:59):
in the opposite direction from Torku to Stockholm, the Viking
Sally had been the scene of a violent murder. It
wasn't until the ship docked that the body of forty
four year old business men Anti Eliyala was found in
his cabin. It later emerged that a fellow passenger named
Ray Yohama, said to be an associate of the murdered man,
(10:22):
entered Eliyala's cabin and attempted to steal some money. When
Eliyala told the intruder that he was going to report
the theft to the police, the thirty three year old
Hammer stabbed him five times in the throat with a
dinner knife, then strangled him to death with a strip
of fabric torn from the cabin's bed sheet. It was
(10:45):
an open and shut case. Ammar was captured, tried, found
guilty of murder, and given a life sentence. It seemed
a strange coincidence, indeed, that a violent attack would happen
on the same ship, almost a year to the day
since the previous murder, when the Viking Sally docked in
(11:06):
Torkou at ten past eight on that July twenty eighth
morning in nineteen eighty seven. Unless the perpetrator of the
attack on the two young Germans had jumped overboard, they
had to still be on the ship. In theory, all
the police had to do was surround the vessel and
find the culprit. And so, as the Viking Sally arrived
(11:29):
in Torkou harbor, the police were ready and waiting in
the docking area. They planned to video record every passenger
as they disembarked, asking a brief series of questions and
taking down names and contact information, but with around fourteen
hundred passengers on board that day, they soon realized that
(11:51):
this would take far too long. Making a compromise, they
excluded the passengers least likely to be the assailant, families
with children and the elderly, and targeted others for close attention,
including the dead victim's friend, Thomas, and the young British
man who the German couple had spent time with in
(12:11):
the bar the previous evening. At first, Thomas Schmidt appeared
to be in shock. He said he'd heard a helicopter
during the night, but thought nothing of it so went
back to sleep. The police questioned him for some time
before he demanded to know what had happened. It was
only then that he was told of the terrible events
(12:34):
that had befallen his traveling companions. In the end, Thomas,
who appeared genuinely distraught to hear the news, was deemed
to be telling the truth. He'd slept all night in
a public space, and there were witnesses that he was
in another part of the ship at the time of
the murder. Attention then turned to Patrick Hailey, the young
(12:57):
british Man who'd spoken with the couple in the When
the ship docked, police found him in his sleeping back
covered in blood. Hailey insisted it was the result of
a nosebleed. The man was interviewed repeatedly until forensic tests
eventually appeared to confirm that the blood in his clothing
(13:19):
probably was his own, and he too was released. None
of the twenty initial suspects who were interviewed by police
in detail gave any reason to suspect them. The police
had only two things to go on. A violent assault
(13:42):
and murder seemed to have been committed with no conceivable motive,
an extremely exceptional occurrence in Finland, and whoever the perpetrator
was had just walked off the Viking Sally. The police
soon ruled out robbery or a sexual attack as the motive.
The only viable explanation they felt was that the crime
(14:05):
had been sparked by a seemingly insignificant reason and likely
carried out by someone who was mentally ill or possessed
of a severe personality disorder. In today's high tech world,
the investigators would have had more evidence to work with,
but at the time, forensic DNA testing was in its infancy,
(14:28):
and it had only been used for the first time
in a criminal case in the UK the previous year. However,
it had proved crucial exonerating an innocent suspect and resulting
in the conviction of the Trooe perpetrator in a case
known as the Enderb murders. The outcome of the Viking
Sally investigation might have been very different if DNA testing
(14:51):
had been widely available to the Finnish police, but at
the time, the most the Finns could expect from their
blood sample analysis were determining the blood group and whether
the sample was human or another animal. On board CCTV
footage was mostly unavailable too. The ship only had surveillance
(15:12):
cameras on the car deck and in the engine room,
and at that time there was no requirement for Swedish
ships to keep comprehensive passenger lists. Victim testimony didn't help either.
When Bettina Taxes eventually regained consciousness and Finish investigators finally
managed to question her, it was months after the incident
(15:35):
and Bettina couldn't remember anything about the attack. Nevertheless, investigators
did what they could, even sailing on the Viking Sally
between Turku and Stockholm several times hoping to find clues,
but all to no avail. The only real evidence the
police were left to work with was the footage they
(15:57):
had shot of the disembarking passengers poring over it for
endless hours. Investigators identified several potential suspects and released footage
of them to the public. One man was especially elusive.
He'd been spotted moving around near the fifth deck cafeteria
(16:17):
in the early hours on the morning of the attack.
Aged around thirty five foot five inches tall, with dark hair,
it was reported that he spoke English and wore a
distinctive beanie hat. He was never traced. And then there
was the Danish boy scout Thomas Nielsen, who appeared to
(16:38):
have been the first person to find the injured couple.
It was late October nineteen eighty seven when the police
questioned Thomas Nielson again. Nielsen had only recently been in
trouble with the police in Denmark on suspicion of theft.
(17:01):
The Finnish police believed he was looking for something to
steal on the night of the murder. This second time,
when asked to described the morning he'd found the couple,
Nielsen told a slightly different story. Rather than spotting the
couple immediately, he said now that he'd gone to the
helicopter deck two or three times before he spotted them,
(17:24):
and it was only when he followed members of the
crew as they rushed to the helicopter deck that he
saw they were injured. The police also questioned the Danish
scout leader, who said at the time that Thomas had
woken him on the Viking Sally in the early hours
of the morning covered in blood, which he'd said was
from helping the victims of the attack. The scout master
(17:47):
had asked the ship's staff to wash the boy's bloody clothes,
and shortly before they arrived in Torku, items were returned
clean and dry, and the man thought nothing more of it.
A magazine reporter who interviewed Nielsen around a month after
the attack also noticed something strange. The young man seemed
(18:09):
to have remarkable recall of the details of the pair's injuries,
despite the traumatic nature of the events, the time of
night and the area being dimly lit. The eighteen year
old described how the couple's faces had not been hit, kicked,
or slashed with a knife, but rather were like slush,
(18:31):
as if they'd been hit with something like a hammer.
But who would suspect a fresh faced boy scout of
such a brutal attack. During the investigation, around one thousand
people were interviewed in nine different countries and several hundred
forensic samples were sent for analysis, but with no eyewitness
(18:52):
to the incident, no useful CCTV footage, and no apparent motive,
after four years, the investigation was discontinued. Traditions about bad
luck attaching itself to ships have been around for centuries,
and often date back to ancient times. In the past,
(19:14):
many ships had a cat on board to help control rodents.
If the ship's cat fell overboard, it was believed that
this would summon a terrible storm. Even if the ship
survived the storm, it would be cursed with nine years
of bad luck. Whistling on board a ship has long
been frowned upon. Doing this is said to literally whistle
(19:37):
up the wind, causing a strong gale to appear. Perhaps
the most well known of all maritime superstitions is that
it's bad luck to renamership, a tradition so ingrained in
seafaring culture. It's even mentioned in the classic novel Treasure Island,
when pirate captain long John Silver chooses to keep the
(20:00):
name of a captured ship to avoid any potentially negative consequences.
According to legend, When every ship is christened, its name
goes into a ledger of the deep, maintained by the
god Neptune, who views it as devious to use a
new name. To this day, many mariners still insist that
(20:31):
if you must change a ship's name, you should perform
a purging and renaming ritual to demonstrate to the sea
gods that you have no hidden agenda. There are numerous
cautionary tales of ships being renamed without this ritual, then
meeting a tragic end. On the evening of September twenty seventh,
(20:53):
nineteen ninety four, the cruise ship the MS Estonia, powered
westwards across the Baltic ringing through twenty foot high waves
into sixty mile per hour headwinds carrying sheets of icy rain.
The vessel had left its home port of Talent bound
for Stockholm, fifteen minutes behind the scheduled seven pm departure,
(21:15):
and the crew were pushing it at maximum speed to
make up time. As the Estonia pitched through the heavy seas,
most passengers were sleeping when around one am, a gigantic, deep,
metallic sound reverberated throughout the entire ship. A crew member
(21:36):
later said that he saw one of the loading bay doors,
taking in water. The high waves had crashed the bow
doors to separate from the ship, allowing water to flood
into the vehicle deck. Panic ensued as the Estonia began
listing heavily to its starboard side. Less than forty minutes later,
(21:57):
the boat capsized and sank. Of the nine hundred and
eighty nine passengers and crew on board, eight hundred and
fifty two died, most of them trapped inside the sinking ship.
Many escaped the ship, only to freeze to death in
the Baltic's icy waters. Only one hundred and thirty seven
(22:19):
people survived in what became one of the most deadly
European peace time disasters at sea, second only to the
sinking of the Titanic. But Ms Estonia hadn't always been
called that. It was, in fact none other than the
Viking Sally, which had been sold and repurchased in the
(22:40):
nineteen nineties. In twenty sixteen, twelve years after the former
Viking Sally had sunk to her watery grave, and almost
thirty years since the mysterious assault on the Young German Cup,
the police received information that prompted them to reopen what
(23:04):
had been a very cold case. Initially, Torku police refused
to reveal any details about the new evidence. Finally, in
September twenty twenty they announced that they had solved the case,
and in December that year, a district prosecutor filed homicide
charges against a fifty two year old Danish man. It
(23:27):
was none other than the former boy scout Thomas Nielsen,
the very person who'd claimed to have discovered the victims.
The police received a tip from a Danish jail where
Nielsen had spent half of his life for various crimes
and had confided to a fellow inmate that he'd gotten
away with the crime on the Viking Sally. They also
(23:50):
discovered that in twenty fifteen, the man began to threaten
his ex wife, sending her numerous text messages in which
he said he committed the shipboard attack. Doroku police sent
two officers to question him, who changed his name by
then to Hermann Himmler. Danish police warned the Fins that
(24:11):
it would be a wasted trip, but to everyone's surprise,
Himmler more or less confessed to committing the crime. Himler's
trial started in May twenty twenty one, with the statutory
limit of twenty years on cases of manslaughter, the charges
had been changed to murder and attempted murder, which have
(24:32):
no expiration date in Finland. Prosecutors pointed to the accused's
apparent knowledge that the murder had been committed with a
welding hammer, and that he had told several people that
he had killed and gotten away with murder. There was
only one problem, or three to be precise. There was
(24:52):
no lawyer present when Himmler made his confession, which he
later retracted, the murder weapon had never been found, and
a key witness, the defendant's former wife, refused to give
evidence at the trial, defense attorneys insisted that their client
now denied all the charges. In the end, the court
(25:21):
sided with Hermann Himmler since there was insufficient proof that
he was truly responsible, and in June twenty twenty one
he was acquitted of all charges. Today, the ill fated
ship lies deep beneath the cold, dark waters of the
Baltic twenty two nautical miles from the Finnish island of Utah.
(25:44):
The precise reason for its sinking is also a somewhat
murky and contentious story, perhaps one for another episode, but
yet another grim warning to the perils of offending the
god Neptune by renaming a ship as for knowing who
it was exactly that assaulted Bettina Taxis and killed Klaus
(26:07):
Shekel as they slept on deck that harrowing night in
July nineteen eighty seven that remains to this day Unexplained.
This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by
(26:28):
Richard mclin Smith. Diane is an audio producer and sound
recordeded in her own right. You can find out more
about her work at Dianehope dot com and on Instagram
at in the sound Field. Thank you as ever for listening.
Unexplained as an Avy Club Productions podcast created by Richard
(26:48):
McLain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music,
are also produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The
book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You
can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores.
Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get
(27:09):
your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with
any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on
the show. Perhaps you have an explanation or a story
of your own you'd like to share. You can find
out more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reach us
online through X and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod and
Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast a
(30:01):
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