Stories
The Kansan Lehti newspaper (2 November 1915) reported on the murder under the headline “Murder and arson in Toholampi” as follows: “At midnight between last Friday and Saturday, people noticed that crofter Iisakki Oikemus’ house was on fire. Once the people reached the house, they saw the crofter lying on the floor of the burning kitchen. His married daughter was lying unconscious in her bed. The building burned down completely, but by using water one managed to see from the dead bodies that a cruel murder had been committed. Old Iisakki had been hit with an axe and his head had been crushed badly. The same applies to the daughter. Four sheep had also been killed in the cattle house. The daughter’s husband Oskari Lehtinen was immediately the prime suspect (…).”
Over the course of time, this tragedy has been coloured by various storytellers, including the blacksmith Leander Nisula (1888–1975). On 3 October 2018, Tapio Isoniemi presented his own interpretation and story, summarised as follows:
Oskari Lehtinen, known as a decent man, had a pregnant wife and was suspicious about who the father was. The suspicion made Oskari kill his wife and father-in-law as well as destroy everything on the farm. After that, he fled to the backwoods, which he knew well. While running away, he encountered a barking dog in the yard of a house and shot it with his pistol. The people in the house threw themselves on the floor for protection because bullets also came their way.
The villagers began to look for the murderer and arsonist. Oskari was finally found among the remains of a forest cabin. He had apparently lit it on fire and shot himself thereafter. For some reason, the body had not burned and so it was brought by horse to the village. The frozen body was defrosted at the doctor’s house before putting it into a coffin. However, a fire started in the house during the procedure. A boy slightly under ten years of age happened to be near the house and saw the doctor carry out the body from the burning building. The boy was deeply frightened and did not dare to go out alone for a long time after the incident. The pistol had been salvaged earlier and ended up with the blacksmith Leander Nisula. On the funeral day, Nisula went to the graveyard and threw the pistol into the grave, shouting: “Take along your tool as well!”
More than thirty years later, a gravedigger’s shovel hit the pistol, which someone put into a hole in the stone wall of the churchyard. When he was little, Tapio Isoniemi caught sight of the pistol in the stone wall but did not dare to take it. In 2005, the pistol ended up in the Häkkilä museum collection.
