Season 08 Episode 34: Ship of Death

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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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

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 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 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, 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, 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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

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 McLain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The

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