Dec. 2, 2025
Finland: Matti Haapoja and the Great Famine Murders
Episode 10 of 15 | Series 36: Serial Killers in History
Finland's first documented serial killer terrorized two continents across three decades. This episode traces Matti Haapoja's brutal journey from famine-ravaged Finland to Siberian exile and back—a life defined by escape, violence, and ultimately, one final act of defiance.
Victim Humanization
Heikki Impponen was forty-two years old when he walked along that frozen road in December 1867. A farmer with a wife named Kaisa and three children waiting at home, he had known young Matti since childhood—their fathers had worked neighboring fields, they had been boys together in the harsh Finnish countryside. He carried what little money he had, perhaps hoping to buy food during Finland's devastating Great Famine. Maria Jemina Salo was in her early twenties, trying to survive in Helsinki's rougher districts, wearing a silver necklace her mother had given her. Guard Juho Rosted had worked at Kakola Prison for eleven years, with a pregnant wife expecting their fourth child—a daughter who would never know her father.
Why This Case Matters
Matti Haapoja's crimes fundamentally reshaped Finland's approach to criminal justice and prison security. His four successful escapes from Kakola Prison exposed critical weaknesses in the nation's penal system, earning the facility the mocking nickname "Pakola"—the escape prison. His case prompted a complete overhaul of prison architecture and security protocols throughout Finland. The investigation techniques developed to track him helped establish the framework for modern Finnish police procedures, while the case demonstrated how the Great Famine of 1866-1868, which killed 270,000 Finns, created conditions where desperate violence flourished.
Content Warning
This episode contains descriptions of violent murders and suicide. Listener discretion advised.
Key Case Details
Haapoja's criminal career spanned three decades across two continents, leaving eight confirmed victims dead and exposing the limitations of 19th-century criminal justice systems across Finland and Siberia.
• Timeline: First murder December 6, 1867, during Finland's Great Famine; sentenced to Siberian exile in 1880; returned to Finland September 1890; final escape attempt October 10, 1894; death by suicide January 8, 1895
• Investigation: Haapoja's escapes revealed major security flaws in Finnish prisons; his capture after Maria Salo's murder came when his notorious reputation led to his recognition in Porvoo just days after the crime
• Resolution: Sentenced to death in 1891 (automatically commuted to life imprisonment as Finland had abolished capital punishment in 1826); died by his own hand while awaiting trial for murdering Guard Juho Rosted
• Historical Context: The puukkojunkkari (knife-fighter) culture of Southern Ostrobothnia shaped Haapoja's violent identity; his skeleton was displayed in the Finnish Museum of Crime for 99 years before burial in 1995
Historical Context & Sources
This episode draws on records from the National Museum of Finland, the National Biography of Finland, and the BiographySampo database. Prison museum collections preserve the tools of Haapoja's escapes—rope, wooden slats, and a floorboard with a drilled hole. Contemporary newspaper accounts from the 1890s, which sensationally compared his crimes to Jack the Ripper's London murders, provide crucial details about his final trial and death. The Circuit Court records of Hausjärvi from 1891 document his arrogant confession and the commutation of his death sentence.
Resources & Further Reading
For listeners interested in exploring this case and era further, these historically significant sources provide additional context:
• The National Museum of Finland maintains archival materials on 19th-century Finnish criminal justice and the puukkojunkkari phenomenon
• The Finnish National Biography database (Biografiakeskus) contains verified biographical details on Haapoja and his contemporaries
• Academic research on the Great Famine of 1866-1868 illuminates the devastating conditions that shaped Haapoja's early crimes
Call-to-Action
Next week on Foul Play: Francisco Guerrero Pérez terrorized Mexico City for decades, targeting women the newspapers refused to mourn. Subscribe now to follow Season 36: Serial Killers in History to its conclusion.
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WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_00]: January 8th, 1895.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Turkey Provincial Prison, Southwest Finland.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Guard Henrik Lund, walked the morning rounds.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Cell 47 was always the one he checked last, the one he dreaded.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The prisoner inside, Madhihapuja, was different from the others.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Lunt had seen men break in, a coolest prison stone corridors, watch them weep, watch them beg, watch them go mad, behind the granite walls, they'd carved with their own hands.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Bahupuja never broke.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He escaped, instead.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Four times, four times they dragged him back.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Lund turned his key in the lock.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The heavy door swung open.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The body hung from a beam, a wool and string torn from prison socks, twisted tight around the wood.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The man was cold, he had been dead for hours, some time in the night, while lung slept in his quarters, while the other guards played cards in the break room.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Matt Apugia had escaped, worn final time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was 49 years old, he'd spend more than half his life behind these walls, walls he'd escape for separate times, walls that had held him during the two trials for murder, walls that represented everything he'd fought against since his childhood.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the guards cut him down.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd known this was possible.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Just three months earlier, on October 10th, 1894, Apuja had tried to escape one last time.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When God rojo-yosted confronted him in the prison yard, Apuja stabbed him to death with a homemade knife.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then he turned the blade on himself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: seven times in his own abdomen, trying to die rather than face recapture.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the prison doctor had saved him, stitched him up, locked him back in the cell to await trial.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Three months of waiting, three months knowing the death sentence was likely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Three months to plan, one final act of defiance.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The string from his socks was strong enough
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[SPEAKER_00]: This was how Maddie Hupuji chose to leave this world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not executed by the state, not broken by the system, on his own terms.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Finland's first documented serial killer, a man convicted of three murders, suspected of many more, possibly as many as 25 victims across two continents.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A man who'd escaped prison so many times they nicknamed the place, Polkola.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They escaped prison.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A man who'd survived Siberian exile and became a legend and finished criminal folklore.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But before the legend, before the excapes, before the bodies piled up and finished for us, in Siberian snow, there was a boy born into violence, in a famine ravaged land.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hello friend, welcome to foul play.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Mati Habuja was born in 1845 in the rural village of Isakura, located in Western Finland.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Growing up in a poor farming family during a time of great hardship of Finnish history, his early years were mocked by struggle and deprivation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His parents were tenant farmers, working land owned by others, and Yann Mati was expected to contribute to the family survival from an early age.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Life in 19th century, rural Finland was harsh and education was a luxury many couldn't afford.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Hapoja received minimal schooling, instead spending his days working in the fields and forests.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Those who knew him as a young man would later recall his unusual strength and quiet demeanor, traits that would serve him while in future criminal endeavors.
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[SPEAKER_01]: By his early 20s, Hapoja had already gained a reputation as a trouble maker,
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[SPEAKER_01]: The turning point came in 1867 during Finland's devastating break famine.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As hunger and desperation gripped the nation, Hapoja committed his first known murder.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His victim, Hakee, in open and a travelling merchant who had the misfortune of crossing paths with the then 22 year old Hapoja.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The murder was brutal in its simplicity.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The body was discovered days later, but her poge had already fled the area.
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[SPEAKER_01]: This first killing revealed a pattern that would become familiar in his later crimes.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The careful selection of vulnerable victims and the robbery had his victims after death.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Local authorities initially struggled to identify the killer, but her poge has loose tongue while drinking eventually led to his arrest.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was sentenced to prison for manslaughter, but this were proved to be just the beginning
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[SPEAKER_01]: The relative ease of his first murder, combined with the primitive state of law enforcement in rural Finland, seemed to embolden him.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What started as an opportunist killing, would evolve into a calculated pattern of violence that would terrorise Finland for years to come.
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[SPEAKER_01]: As a poge as criminal confidence grew, so did the frequency and brutality of his attacks.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Between 1869 and 1880, he embarked on what would become one of Finland's most notorious murder sprees.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His victims were primarily travellers' merchants and those who worked in isolation.
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[SPEAKER_01]: People who carried money, who's disappearance might not be immediately noticed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Winter 1867, Finland was dying.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The great famine had begun two years earlier in 1865, when spring never really came.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Frost killed the crops, summer stayed cold, harvest failed, then failed again, and again, by 1867 a third of Finland's population was starving.
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[SPEAKER_00]: not hungry, starving, bodies in the road and villages.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Parents watching their children die because there was no food anywhere.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In this landscape of death, survival became its own kind of morality.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A man named Hakey Opponent left his farm in a neighboring village.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He was 42 years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A farmer, like most men in rural Finland, married 18 years to a woman named Kaisa.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They had three children.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He'd known the Hapuja family for years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He and young Maddie had grown up in the same harsh landscape.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Share the same desperate winters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Their fathers had worked neighboring fields.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd been boys together.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Imponent was carrying what little money he had, maybe to buy food in the next town.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe to barter for grain.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What we know is that Maddie Hupujan saw him walking alone on that frozen road, and made a choice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What Hakey and Poonin couldn't know was that the boy he'd known, the quiet one, from the Hablewafarm, had learned different lessons about survival than most, had learned that violence was simpler than patience, that taking was easier than working, that in a world where everyone was dying anyway, killing one man to live another week made a terrible kind of sense.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His body was found three days later and a shallow grave in the forest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He had been stabbed to death.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His money was gone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His coat was gone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His boots were gone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everything that might keep someone alive for another week and that frozen hell gone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A pooja was arrested.
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[SPEAKER_00]: During questioning, he showed no particular emotion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The man was dead.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A poochah had his money, his coat, his boots.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That was the transaction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That was survival.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Finland had a particular term for men like Apuja during this period.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Puko Yonkari, it literally translates to knife trap or knife vagrant, a wandering criminal who carried a knife and prayed on travelers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: These weren't romantic Robinhood figures.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were desperate violent men, who survived by taking what others had.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the context of the great famine, when survival itself was the only law that mattered, Pukoyonkari represented the complete breakdown of social order.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They robbed travelers on forest paths.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They killed for food, for money, for warm clothing,
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were products of a society that had collapsed into pure desperation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A Pooja fit this pattern perfectly, not because he was uniquely evil, because he'd learned early that violence was how you survived.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The famines starvation, the poverty, the desperation, all of it taught the same lesson, take what you need, or die.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the trial was brief.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A Pooja was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But Finland in 1867 didn't have the infrastructure for long-term imprisonment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The solution was simple and brutal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Exile to Siberia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In August 1871, Maddie Apugia was shipped east, with other finished criminals.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They traveled by train to St. Petersburg, then by convoy, deeper into Russian territory.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Weeks of travel, months, sometimes, until they reach the work camps in Siberia, where
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[SPEAKER_00]: Most men didn't survive a decade in Siberian exile.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The cold, the labor, the disease, the brutality of camp commanders, who viewed finished criminals as less than human.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Maddie approached us survived more than 10 years, and in those frozen wastes far from home, he continued to kill.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Throughout his criminal career, Hapoja became as famous for his prison escapes as he was for his murders.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His first notable escape came in 1880, when he was being held in the Turkey Provincial Prison, using nothing more than a spoon and inexhaustible patience.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He spent weeks scraping away at the mortar between the stones of his cell wall, eventually creating a whole large enough to squeeze through.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The most spectacular of his escapes occurred in 1885 from the supposedly escape proof Helsinki prison.
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[SPEAKER_01]: After months of careful observation, Apogen noticed a brief window in the guard's patrol pattern.
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[SPEAKER_01]: During the evening meal service, he managed to slip away from his cell block and make his way to the prison workshop.
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[SPEAKER_01]: There he used his experience as a labourer to fashion a crude rope from stolen materials,
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[SPEAKER_01]: In the dead of night, he scaled the prisons out of wool and disappeared into the city.
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[SPEAKER_01]: The subsequent manhunt was one of the largest and finished history at that time.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Police and military units combed the countryside, while wanted posters with a poge as likeness were distributed throughout the region.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Yet, despite the extensive search efforts, he managed to evade capture for nearly six months, likely by exploiting his network of criminal contacts and his intimate knowledge of Finland's remote areas.
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[SPEAKER_01]: During his time on the run, Hapoja added to his notoriety by continuing his criminal activities.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He committed several robberies and was suspected of at least two more murders, though these were never proven.
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[SPEAKER_01]: It's a ability to remain free despite being a Finland's most wanted man, only enhanced his reputation and struck fear into the hearts of rural community.
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[SPEAKER_01]: What made her poge as escapes particularly remarkable was his understanding of prison systems and human behaviour.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He was spent months studying guard rotations, learning the daily routines of the prison, and identifying weak points in security.
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[SPEAKER_01]: His patience was legendary.
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[SPEAKER_01]: He would often wait for precisely the right moment before attempting an escape, sometimes planning for months or even years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: While Papuja was escaping finished prisons, in the 1880s and 1890s, investigators began looking at his time in Siberia more carefully.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Between 1871 and 1882, five men had died under suspicious circumstances in the work camps where Hupuja was stationed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: All five deaths had been investigated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: None had resulted in charges.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In Siberian exile camps, murder investigations were perfunctory at best.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One less prisoner meant one less mouth to feed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Ivan Gregorvitch Petrov, a fellow exiled, who survived two brutal Siberian winters, before Hupuja ended his third, found beaten to death in the forest, near their work camp in 1882, carrying a month's wages that disappeared with his life.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hupuja was questioned but not charged.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Mikhail Steffanoff, illiterranean carpenter, exiled for theft, killed in a knife-fight outside the barracks in 1884.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Witnesses called it self-defense.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The local commandant accepted that explanation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Steffanoff's money went missing, so did his tools.
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[SPEAKER_00]: While the implements he'd managed to keep through his years of exile,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Alexander Volkov, an ethnic Russian convicted of dissertion from the Imperial Army, died from head trauma in 1877.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The official report said he fell during a logging accident.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Multiple prisoners told investigators that Hepuja had been arguing with him the night before.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Volkov's possessions were never recovered.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Dmitry Sokolov found frozen to death two miles from camp in January, 1879.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He had been stripped naked, a pooja was seen wearing Sokolov's fur-lined coat the next day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He claimed he traded for it, no one could prove otherwise.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Nikolai Andreyov killed an barracks brawl in 1881, multiple witnesses
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[SPEAKER_00]: Chaos and violence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When the guards sorted through the aftermath, and Dreyof was dead from stab wounds, Apujah had blood on his clothes, so did seven other men.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Kamadot arrested no one.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Five deaths, five investigations that went nowhere.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Five men who died in a place where life was already cheap.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Finish authorities reviewing these cases decades later, noted the obvious pattern.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Each victim had possessions worth stealing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Each death occurred in circumstances where Hupuja had opportunity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Each investigation was cursory designed to close the case quickly, rather than pursue justice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Siberian exile system wasn't designed for justice.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was designed to remove criminals from society and work them until they died.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Whether they died from cold, disease, labor, or murder by fellow prisoners, it didn't particularly matter.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were already dead to their families.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Already dead to their homeland.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not because he was clever, because he understood violence better than most, because he'd learned in childhood that taking what you needed was survival, because he adapted to Siberia the way he adapted to Finland's great famine, by being willing to do what others couldn't.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When he returned to Finland in September 1890, he was 45 years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He'd spend more than a decade in one of the harshest environments on Earth.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He'd survived conditions that killed most men within five years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And based on the evidence reviewed by Finnish investigators, he killed at least five men during those years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The number could have been higher.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Records from Siberian work camps were incomplete.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Deaths went unrecorded.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Bodies buried and unmarked graves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Prisoners who disappeared during transport or worked details.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the vast frozen emptiness of Siberia, murder was easy and investigation was rare.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Or we know for certain, Apujel left Finland as a convicted murderer in 1871.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He returned in 1882 as an experienced killer who'd learned that in desperate places, violence worked.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A month after his return, Maria Gemina Salo was dead.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Maria Jimina Salo was a prostitute, working in Helsinki's rougher districts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The record suggests she was in her early twenties, young, probably from the country side originally, like so many women who ended up working in the city with no other options.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She met Hapoja in October 1890, where exactly the records don't specify.
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[SPEAKER_00]: a tavern maybe, a street corner, somewhere their paths crossed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the way such paths did, in cities where poverty and desperation overlapped,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Her body was found the next morning in a rented room, multiple stab wounds to the chest and neck.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Her jewelry was missing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A distinctive silver necklace her mother had given her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The only thing of value she owned.
20:08.740 --> 20:15.287
[SPEAKER_00]: When police searched Hapu just room, they found the necklace, under his bed, in a canvas bag.
20:16.516 --> 20:21.221
[SPEAKER_00]: distinctive silver work, her mother identified it immediately.
20:21.261 --> 20:25.526
[SPEAKER_00]: At trial, Apuja claimed he found the necklace.
20:26.727 --> 20:28.930
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he said he'd bought it from another man.
20:30.411 --> 20:32.574
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he couldn't remember where he'd gotten it from.
20:32.594 --> 20:36.278
[SPEAKER_00]: His story changed every time he spoke.
20:37.700 --> 20:42.625
[SPEAKER_00]: The evidence was overwhelming.
20:43.853 --> 20:46.658
[SPEAKER_00]: life imprisonment at Kukula Prison.
20:47.940 --> 20:51.185
[SPEAKER_00]: The stone fortress that would hold him for the next 12 years.
20:52.047 --> 20:54.090
[SPEAKER_00]: The walls he would escape for times.
20:55.112 --> 21:02.925
[SPEAKER_00]: The place where, on October 10, 1894, he would take his final
21:04.913 --> 21:07.598
[SPEAKER_00]: Guard Yaho roasted was 38 years old.
21:08.499 --> 21:10.443
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd worked at Kula for 11 years.
21:11.545 --> 21:20.340
[SPEAKER_00]: His wife also was pregnant with their fourth child, a daughter who would be born three months later and never knew her father.
21:21.637 --> 21:27.123
[SPEAKER_00]: That day in the prison yard, Roasted approached Apugia during a work detail.
21:28.485 --> 21:32.610
[SPEAKER_00]: Apugia had fashioned a knife from scrap metal over several weeks.
21:33.531 --> 21:34.993
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd hidden it and is clothing.
21:36.174 --> 21:39.338
[SPEAKER_00]: He died within minutes on the prison yard stones.
21:41.600 --> 21:43.042
[SPEAKER_00]: Other guards rushed to the scene.
21:44.003 --> 21:49.770
[SPEAKER_00]: Apugia turned the knife on himself.
21:51.016 --> 21:57.226
[SPEAKER_00]: trying to die rather than face trial again, trying to escape one final time through death.
21:58.468 --> 22:07.742
[SPEAKER_00]: The prison doctor saved him, stitched his wounds, locked him in the most secure cell to await trial for murder.
22:08.313 --> 22:09.555
[SPEAKER_00]: He never made it to trial.
22:11.078 --> 22:17.531
[SPEAKER_00]: Three months later, on July 9th, 1895, guards found him hanging in his cell.
22:18.573 --> 22:21.619
[SPEAKER_00]: A string torn from his socks, cold.
22:22.621 --> 22:24.465
[SPEAKER_00]: He chosen his own end.
22:28.225 --> 22:36.176
[SPEAKER_01]: Beyond the brutal killings, Hapoja's legacy would be defined by how his crimes exposed critical weakness is in Finland's criminal justice system.
22:37.218 --> 22:52.039
[SPEAKER_01]: His repeated escapes had revealed serious security flaws in the nation's prisons, while the length of his criminal career highlighted the challenges law enforcement faced in tracking and apprehending dangerous criminals across Finland's vast rural expanses.
22:52.019 --> 22:57.539
[SPEAKER_01]: The impact of Haboja's crimes and escapes resonated far beyond his death in 1895.
22:57.700 --> 23:04.003
[SPEAKER_01]: Fundamentally reshaping Finland's approach, decriminal justice and prison security.
23:04.996 --> 23:14.813
[SPEAKER_01]: In notoriously ability to escape even the most secure facilities at the time, prompted a complete overhaul of prison architecture and security protocols throughout the country.
23:15.755 --> 23:23.849
[SPEAKER_01]: Prison walls were reinforced, guard patrols were standardised, and new systems were put in place to monitor high risk inmates more effectively.
23:24.610 --> 23:30.480
[SPEAKER_01]: The case also marked a turning point in how finished society,
23:30.460 --> 23:36.870
[SPEAKER_01]: Before Hopoja, most films viewed serious crime as something that happened primarily in cities or foreign lands.
23:37.431 --> 23:42.158
[SPEAKER_01]: Is a ability to terrorise rural communities shattered this illusion of rural safety.
23:42.739 --> 23:47.647
[SPEAKER_01]: Leading to the establishment of more organised law enforcement networks in Finland's countryside.
23:48.669 --> 23:55.860
[SPEAKER_01]: Local police forces began coordinating their efforts more effectively, and a more systematic approach to criminal investigation emerged.
23:57.848 --> 24:06.139
[SPEAKER_01]: In modern Finland, approaches cases still studied by law enforcement and criminology students as a pivotal moment in the nation's criminal justice history.
24:07.300 --> 24:13.488
[SPEAKER_01]: The security measures implemented in response to his escapes from the foundation of modern Finnish prison security.
24:14.129 --> 24:20.818
[SPEAKER_01]: While the investigative techniques developed to track him, help to establish the framework for contemporary police procedures.
24:20.798 --> 24:28.811
[SPEAKER_01]: Matti Hupujer's reign of terror in late 19th century Finland stands as one of the most notorious chapters in the nation's criminal history.
24:29.853 --> 24:41.372
[SPEAKER_01]: His confirmed murders, likely numbering more than ten, combined with his dramatic prison escapes, created a legacy that would influence Finnish society and its justice system for generations to come.
24:41.352 --> 24:52.353
[SPEAKER_01]: The case of Matihapuja serves as a grim reminder of how its single individual's actions can reshape an entire nation's approach to law enforcement and criminal justice.
24:53.335 --> 25:04.356
[SPEAKER_01]: His brutal crimes expose critical weaknesses in Finland's rural policing and prison security, leading to reforms that would modernise the country's entire criminal justice system.
25:04.336 --> 25:21.703
[SPEAKER_01]: While his name may have faded from international memory, his impact on finish society remains evident in the enhanced security measures, improved investigative, but techniques and coordinated law enforcement efforts that emerged in response to his crimes.
25:21.683 --> 25:32.577
[SPEAKER_01]: As we reflect on this dark chapter of Finnish history, perhaps the most important lesson from her poo just case is how it ultimately strengthened rather than weakened Finnish society.
25:33.758 --> 25:39.906
[SPEAKER_01]: Through the horror of his crimes, Finland found the reserve to build a more effective, more humane justice system.
25:40.827 --> 25:48.957
[SPEAKER_01]: One that would become a model for progressive criminal rehabilitation, while maintaining the security measures necessary to protect its citizens.
25:51.940 --> 25:54.647
[SPEAKER_00]: but her poo just story didn't end with his death.
25:55.669 --> 26:00.301
[SPEAKER_00]: His skeleton was displayed in the finished museum of crime for nearly a century.
26:01.203 --> 26:09.544
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind glass, a teaching tool they said, a curiosity, criminology student studied his bones.
26:09.524 --> 26:13.970
[SPEAKER_00]: School children on field trips stared at the skull of Finland's first serial killer.
26:15.111 --> 26:16.613
[SPEAKER_00]: Tourists took photographs.
26:17.734 --> 26:21.880
[SPEAKER_00]: For 90 years, Maddie Hupuja remained on display.
26:22.741 --> 26:26.125
[SPEAKER_00]: The man who'd spent his life escaping was finally captured.
26:26.686 --> 26:32.393
[SPEAKER_00]: For ever, reduced to an exhibit, a warning, a spectacle.
26:32.373 --> 26:42.406
[SPEAKER_00]: Until 1995, when someone finally asked, should we be doing this, should we display a human being a trophy?
26:43.948 --> 26:52.879
[SPEAKER_00]: Even one who'd killed at least eight people, even him, 100 years after his death, they took him down.
26:54.884 --> 27:07.123
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1995, his remains were finally buried in the Elistaro, no ceremony, no marker, just earth and stone and silence.
27:07.143 --> 27:14.434
[SPEAKER_00]: The man who'd spent his life breaking out of prisons was finally later rest behind walls he couldn't escape.
27:15.596 --> 27:21.685
[SPEAKER_00]: No stone this time, just dirt, six feet deep, permanent.
27:24.618 --> 27:39.910
[SPEAKER_00]: Three confirmed murders, five suspected victims in Siberia, poorly documented and unproven, four prison escapes, two murder trials, one final act of defiance,
27:41.577 --> 27:56.228
[SPEAKER_00]: Haking Imponent 42 years old, father of three, childhood friend, killed during the great famine in 1867 for his coat and boots, the things that might keep someone alive for another week.
27:57.558 --> 28:08.489
[SPEAKER_00]: Ivan Gregorovich Petrov, who survived two Siberian winters before Hupovic ended his third in 1882, beaten to death for a month's wages.
28:09.711 --> 28:22.384
[SPEAKER_00]: Mikhail Stefanov, with the waning carpenter killed in 1884, his quality tools stolen, the implements that represented his livelihood, his skill, his identity.
28:23.782 --> 28:29.510
[SPEAKER_00]: Alexander Volkov, Russian deserter, died from head trauma in 1877.
28:30.271 --> 28:33.155
[SPEAKER_00]: The official reports had accident.
28:34.076 --> 28:35.578
[SPEAKER_00]: The evidence said murder.
28:37.060 --> 28:41.687
[SPEAKER_00]: Demetri Salkalov, found frozen and naked in January 1879.
28:42.067 --> 28:46.313
[SPEAKER_00]: A pooch of war has feraligned coat the next day.
28:47.643 --> 28:51.753
[SPEAKER_00]: Nicolai and Dreiv, killed in a barrack's brawl in 1881.
28:52.174 --> 28:56.886
[SPEAKER_00]: One more death in a place where death was commonplace.
28:58.390 --> 28:59.914
[SPEAKER_00]: Maria Gemina Salo.
29:00.991 --> 29:05.798
[SPEAKER_00]: in her early 20s, trying to survive and help sink his rough or district.
29:07.039 --> 29:12.948
[SPEAKER_00]: Stap to death in July 1882, for a silver necklace her mother had given her.
29:14.450 --> 29:19.997
[SPEAKER_00]: Guard Yohou rusted, 38 years old, 11-year veteran of Kakola Prison.
29:21.219 --> 29:30.492
[SPEAKER_00]: Father of three, with a fourth child coming, murdered on the prison yard stones,
29:31.687 --> 29:33.269
[SPEAKER_00]: his daughter never knew him.
29:35.793 --> 29:53.340
[SPEAKER_00]: Eight named victims, each with their own lives, their own families, their own futures stolen by a man who learned in childhood that violence was survival, and spent 50 years proving he'd learned that lesson too well.
29:55.345 --> 30:12.928
[SPEAKER_00]: Maddie Apugia escaped Stonewalls four times, survived two murder trials, outlasted a decade in Siberia, killed eight people across two continents, but he never escaped who he was, never escaped what his father's axe rages had taught him.
30:14.210 --> 30:19.176
[SPEAKER_00]: Never escaped the childhood where violence was the only language anyone spoke.
30:19.156 --> 30:26.230
[SPEAKER_00]: The stone walls of Coca-Cola prison, the walls it escaped for times, finally held him.
30:27.292 --> 30:31.701
[SPEAKER_00]: Not because the walls got stronger, but because there was nowhere left to run.
30:32.703 --> 30:37.232
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the end, even the strongest string is strong enough.
30:40.334 --> 30:47.044
[SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, remember, the most dangerous patterns aren't always the ones that make headlines.
30:48.066 --> 30:59.644
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes, they're the quiet accumulation of violence that society refuses to see, until someone finally escapes in the only way left to them.
31:01.327 --> 31:03.490
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening, friend.
31:11.738 --> 31:15.927
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
00:03.102 --> 00:05.485
[SPEAKER_00]: January 8th, 1895.
00:06.907 --> 00:10.212
[SPEAKER_00]: Turkey Provincial Prison, Southwest Finland.
00:11.814 --> 00:15.138
[SPEAKER_00]: Guard Henrik Lund, walked the morning rounds.
00:16.741 --> 00:21.988
[SPEAKER_00]: Cell 47 was always the one he checked last, the one he dreaded.
00:23.270 --> 00:27.996
[SPEAKER_00]: The prisoner inside, Madhihapuja, was different from the others.
00:28.955 --> 00:43.396
[SPEAKER_00]: Lunt had seen men break in, a coolest prison stone corridors, watch them weep, watch them beg, watch them go mad, behind the granite walls, they'd carved with their own hands.
00:44.878 --> 00:46.761
[SPEAKER_00]: Bahupuja never broke.
00:48.074 --> 00:49.618
[SPEAKER_00]: He escaped, instead.
00:50.981 --> 00:54.810
[SPEAKER_00]: Four times, four times they dragged him back.
00:55.953 --> 00:58.118
[SPEAKER_00]: Lund turned his key in the lock.
00:59.241 --> 01:01.105
[SPEAKER_00]: The heavy door swung open.
01:02.384 --> 01:10.675
[SPEAKER_00]: The body hung from a beam, a wool and string torn from prison socks, twisted tight around the wood.
01:11.837 --> 01:23.192
[SPEAKER_00]: The man was cold, he had been dead for hours, some time in the night, while lung slept in his quarters, while the other guards played cards in the break room.
01:24.534 --> 01:28.459
[SPEAKER_00]: Matt Apugia had escaped, worn final time.
01:30.515 --> 01:48.000
[SPEAKER_00]: He was 49 years old, he'd spend more than half his life behind these walls, walls he'd escape for separate times, walls that had held him during the two trials for murder, walls that represented everything he'd fought against since his childhood.
01:48.807 --> 01:50.209
[SPEAKER_00]: the guards cut him down.
01:51.651 --> 01:53.054
[SPEAKER_00]: They'd known this was possible.
01:53.995 --> 02:01.727
[SPEAKER_00]: Just three months earlier, on October 10th, 1894, Apuja had tried to escape one last time.
02:03.169 --> 02:10.341
[SPEAKER_00]: When God rojo-yosted confronted him in the prison yard, Apuja stabbed him to death with a homemade knife.
02:11.522 --> 02:14.427
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he turned the blade on himself.
02:14.407 --> 02:20.055
[SPEAKER_00]: seven times in his own abdomen, trying to die rather than face recapture.
02:21.757 --> 02:28.687
[SPEAKER_00]: But the prison doctor had saved him, stitched him up, locked him back in the cell to await trial.
02:29.929 --> 02:34.436
[SPEAKER_00]: Three months of waiting, three months knowing the death sentence was likely.
02:35.597 --> 02:39.022
[SPEAKER_00]: Three months to plan, one final act of defiance.
02:40.284 --> 02:43.148
[SPEAKER_00]: The string from his socks was strong enough
02:45.271 --> 02:48.376
[SPEAKER_00]: This was how Maddie Hupuji chose to leave this world.
02:49.878 --> 02:55.666
[SPEAKER_00]: Not executed by the state, not broken by the system, on his own terms.
02:57.089 --> 03:09.507
[SPEAKER_00]: Finland's first documented serial killer, a man convicted of three murders, suspected of many more, possibly as many as 25 victims across two continents.
03:10.735 --> 03:16.244
[SPEAKER_00]: A man who'd escaped prison so many times they nicknamed the place, Polkola.
03:17.426 --> 03:18.648
[SPEAKER_00]: They escaped prison.
03:20.070 --> 03:26.601
[SPEAKER_00]: A man who'd survived Siberian exile and became a legend and finished criminal folklore.
03:28.184 --> 03:40.670
[SPEAKER_00]: But before the legend, before the excapes, before the bodies piled up and finished for us, in Siberian snow, there was a boy born into violence, in a famine ravaged land.
03:43.376 --> 03:46.362
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello friend, welcome to foul play.
03:49.666 --> 03:57.939
[SPEAKER_01]: Mati Habuja was born in 1845 in the rural village of Isakura, located in Western Finland.
03:58.981 --> 04:06.713
[SPEAKER_01]: Growing up in a poor farming family during a time of great hardship of Finnish history, his early years were mocked by struggle and deprivation.
04:07.714 --> 04:15.707
[SPEAKER_01]: His parents were tenant farmers, working land owned by others, and Yann Mati was expected to contribute to the family survival from an early age.
04:17.020 --> 04:22.265
[SPEAKER_01]: Life in 19th century, rural Finland was harsh and education was a luxury many couldn't afford.
04:23.166 --> 04:28.171
[SPEAKER_01]: Hapoja received minimal schooling, instead spending his days working in the fields and forests.
04:29.052 --> 04:36.600
[SPEAKER_01]: Those who knew him as a young man would later recall his unusual strength and quiet demeanor, traits that would serve him while in future criminal endeavors.
04:37.661 --> 04:45.829
[SPEAKER_01]: By his early 20s, Hapoja had already gained a reputation as a trouble maker,
04:45.809 --> 04:50.598
[SPEAKER_01]: The turning point came in 1867 during Finland's devastating break famine.
04:51.720 --> 04:55.908
[SPEAKER_01]: As hunger and desperation gripped the nation, Hapoja committed his first known murder.
04:56.869 --> 05:04.343
[SPEAKER_01]: His victim, Hakee, in open and a travelling merchant who had the misfortune of crossing paths with the then 22 year old Hapoja.
05:05.445 --> 05:07.429
[SPEAKER_01]: The murder was brutal in its simplicity.
05:07.409 --> 05:12.353
[SPEAKER_01]: The body was discovered days later, but her poge had already fled the area.
05:13.134 --> 05:17.138
[SPEAKER_01]: This first killing revealed a pattern that would become familiar in his later crimes.
05:17.818 --> 05:22.423
[SPEAKER_01]: The careful selection of vulnerable victims and the robbery had his victims after death.
05:23.483 --> 05:30.890
[SPEAKER_01]: Local authorities initially struggled to identify the killer, but her poge has loose tongue while drinking eventually led to his arrest.
05:31.591 --> 05:37.416
[SPEAKER_01]: He was sentenced to prison for manslaughter, but this were proved to be just the beginning
05:37.396 --> 05:45.331
[SPEAKER_01]: The relative ease of his first murder, combined with the primitive state of law enforcement in rural Finland, seemed to embolden him.
05:46.413 --> 05:53.807
[SPEAKER_01]: What started as an opportunist killing, would evolve into a calculated pattern of violence that would terrorise Finland for years to come.
05:55.230 --> 06:00.720
[SPEAKER_01]: As a poge as criminal confidence grew, so did the frequency and brutality of his attacks.
06:00.700 --> 06:07.772
[SPEAKER_01]: Between 1869 and 1880, he embarked on what would become one of Finland's most notorious murder sprees.
06:08.994 --> 06:13.060
[SPEAKER_01]: His victims were primarily travellers' merchants and those who worked in isolation.
06:13.621 --> 06:17.848
[SPEAKER_01]: People who carried money, who's disappearance might not be immediately noticed.
06:21.203 --> 06:25.148
[SPEAKER_00]: Winter 1867, Finland was dying.
06:26.289 --> 06:33.338
[SPEAKER_00]: The great famine had begun two years earlier in 1865, when spring never really came.
06:34.260 --> 06:47.937
[SPEAKER_00]: Frost killed the crops, summer stayed cold, harvest failed, then failed again, and again, by 1867 a third of Finland's population was starving.
06:47.917 --> 06:53.469
[SPEAKER_00]: not hungry, starving, bodies in the road and villages.
06:54.471 --> 06:59.262
[SPEAKER_00]: Parents watching their children die because there was no food anywhere.
07:00.645 --> 07:05.115
[SPEAKER_00]: In this landscape of death, survival became its own kind of morality.
07:06.293 --> 07:10.444
[SPEAKER_00]: A man named Hakey Opponent left his farm in a neighboring village.
07:11.246 --> 07:12.469
[SPEAKER_00]: He was 42 years old.
07:13.913 --> 07:20.449
[SPEAKER_00]: A farmer, like most men in rural Finland, married 18 years to a woman named Kaisa.
07:21.191 --> 07:22.294
[SPEAKER_00]: They had three children.
07:23.607 --> 07:25.691
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd known the Hapuja family for years.
07:26.632 --> 07:29.738
[SPEAKER_00]: He and young Maddie had grown up in the same harsh landscape.
07:30.579 --> 07:32.162
[SPEAKER_00]: Share the same desperate winters.
07:33.344 --> 07:35.268
[SPEAKER_00]: Their fathers had worked neighboring fields.
07:36.190 --> 07:37.251
[SPEAKER_00]: They'd been boys together.
07:38.694 --> 07:43.442
[SPEAKER_00]: Imponent was carrying what little money he had, maybe to buy food in the next town.
07:44.765 --> 07:46.027
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe to barter for grain.
07:46.708 --> 07:48.231
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know.
07:48.211 --> 07:54.357
[SPEAKER_00]: What we know is that Maddie Hupujan saw him walking alone on that frozen road, and made a choice.
07:56.328 --> 08:23.297
[SPEAKER_00]: What Hakey and Poonin couldn't know was that the boy he'd known, the quiet one, from the Hablewafarm, had learned different lessons about survival than most, had learned that violence was simpler than patience, that taking was easier than working, that in a world where everyone was dying anyway, killing one man to live another week made a terrible kind of sense.
08:23.277 --> 08:27.823
[SPEAKER_00]: His body was found three days later and a shallow grave in the forest.
08:28.784 --> 08:30.045
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been stabbed to death.
08:30.085 --> 08:32.028
[SPEAKER_00]: His money was gone.
08:32.969 --> 08:33.970
[SPEAKER_00]: His coat was gone.
08:35.092 --> 08:36.613
[SPEAKER_00]: His boots were gone.
08:38.135 --> 08:43.322
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything that might keep someone alive for another week and that frozen hell gone.
08:44.884 --> 08:46.045
[SPEAKER_00]: A pooja was arrested.
08:47.307 --> 08:50.413
[SPEAKER_00]: During questioning, he showed no particular emotion.
08:51.555 --> 08:52.397
[SPEAKER_00]: The man was dead.
08:53.438 --> 08:56.224
[SPEAKER_00]: A poochah had his money, his coat, his boots.
08:57.266 --> 08:58.548
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the transaction.
08:58.568 --> 09:00.692
[SPEAKER_00]: That was survival.
09:02.984 --> 09:07.292
[SPEAKER_00]: Finland had a particular term for men like Apuja during this period.
09:08.654 --> 09:20.335
[SPEAKER_00]: Puko Yonkari, it literally translates to knife trap or knife vagrant, a wandering criminal who carried a knife and prayed on travelers.
09:20.315 --> 09:23.459
[SPEAKER_00]: These weren't romantic Robinhood figures.
09:24.199 --> 09:28.424
[SPEAKER_00]: They were desperate violent men, who survived by taking what others had.
09:29.586 --> 09:39.697
[SPEAKER_00]: In the context of the great famine, when survival itself was the only law that mattered, Pukoyonkari represented the complete breakdown of social order.
09:40.899 --> 09:43.221
[SPEAKER_00]: They robbed travelers on forest paths.
09:44.102 --> 09:48.027
[SPEAKER_00]: They killed for food, for money, for warm clothing,
09:49.222 --> 09:53.668
[SPEAKER_00]: They were products of a society that had collapsed into pure desperation.
09:54.909 --> 10:04.182
[SPEAKER_00]: A Pooja fit this pattern perfectly, not because he was uniquely evil, because he'd learned early that violence was how you survived.
10:05.764 --> 10:15.837
[SPEAKER_00]: The famines starvation, the poverty, the desperation, all of it taught the same lesson, take what you need, or die.
10:17.622 --> 10:19.806
[SPEAKER_00]: the trial was brief.
10:19.826 --> 10:23.172
[SPEAKER_00]: A Pooja was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
10:24.595 --> 10:30.586
[SPEAKER_00]: But Finland in 1867 didn't have the infrastructure for long-term imprisonment.
10:32.109 --> 10:33.872
[SPEAKER_00]: The solution was simple and brutal.
10:34.914 --> 10:36.677
[SPEAKER_00]: Exile to Siberia.
10:38.125 --> 10:44.551
[SPEAKER_00]: In August 1871, Maddie Apugia was shipped east, with other finished criminals.
10:45.813 --> 10:52.039
[SPEAKER_00]: They traveled by train to St. Petersburg, then by convoy, deeper into Russian territory.
10:53.420 --> 11:04.892
[SPEAKER_00]: Weeks of travel, months, sometimes, until they reach the work camps in Siberia, where
11:06.374 --> 11:10.041
[SPEAKER_00]: Most men didn't survive a decade in Siberian exile.
11:11.123 --> 11:19.819
[SPEAKER_00]: The cold, the labor, the disease, the brutality of camp commanders, who viewed finished criminals as less than human.
11:21.141 --> 11:29.817
[SPEAKER_00]: Maddie approached us survived more than 10 years, and in those frozen wastes far from home, he continued to kill.
11:33.256 --> 11:38.545
[SPEAKER_01]: Throughout his criminal career, Hapoja became as famous for his prison escapes as he was for his murders.
11:39.386 --> 11:49.303
[SPEAKER_01]: His first notable escape came in 1880, when he was being held in the Turkey Provincial Prison, using nothing more than a spoon and inexhaustible patience.
11:49.884 --> 11:58.538
[SPEAKER_01]: He spent weeks scraping away at the mortar between the stones of his cell wall, eventually creating a whole large enough to squeeze through.
11:58.518 --> 12:05.365
[SPEAKER_01]: The most spectacular of his escapes occurred in 1885 from the supposedly escape proof Helsinki prison.
12:06.225 --> 12:11.550
[SPEAKER_01]: After months of careful observation, Apogen noticed a brief window in the guard's patrol pattern.
12:12.531 --> 12:18.597
[SPEAKER_01]: During the evening meal service, he managed to slip away from his cell block and make his way to the prison workshop.
12:19.458 --> 12:24.863
[SPEAKER_01]: There he used his experience as a labourer to fashion a crude rope from stolen materials,
12:24.843 --> 12:30.636
[SPEAKER_01]: In the dead of night, he scaled the prisons out of wool and disappeared into the city.
12:31.859 --> 12:35.487
[SPEAKER_01]: The subsequent manhunt was one of the largest and finished history at that time.
12:36.329 --> 12:43.425
[SPEAKER_01]: Police and military units combed the countryside, while wanted posters with a poge as likeness were distributed throughout the region.
12:44.435 --> 12:56.070
[SPEAKER_01]: Yet, despite the extensive search efforts, he managed to evade capture for nearly six months, likely by exploiting his network of criminal contacts and his intimate knowledge of Finland's remote areas.
12:57.391 --> 13:02.898
[SPEAKER_01]: During his time on the run, Hapoja added to his notoriety by continuing his criminal activities.
13:03.840 --> 13:09.767
[SPEAKER_01]: He committed several robberies and was suspected of at least two more murders, though these were never proven.
13:10.760 --> 13:19.875
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a ability to remain free despite being a Finland's most wanted man, only enhanced his reputation and struck fear into the hearts of rural community.
13:21.087 --> 13:27.077
[SPEAKER_01]: What made her poge as escapes particularly remarkable was his understanding of prison systems and human behaviour.
13:28.159 --> 13:35.672
[SPEAKER_01]: He was spent months studying guard rotations, learning the daily routines of the prison, and identifying weak points in security.
13:36.574 --> 13:37.996
[SPEAKER_01]: His patience was legendary.
13:38.657 --> 13:45.930
[SPEAKER_01]: He would often wait for precisely the right moment before attempting an escape, sometimes planning for months or even years.
13:49.150 --> 13:58.300
[SPEAKER_00]: While Papuja was escaping finished prisons, in the 1880s and 1890s, investigators began looking at his time in Siberia more carefully.
13:59.562 --> 14:09.030
[SPEAKER_00]: Between 1871 and 1882, five men had died under suspicious circumstances in the work camps where Hupuja was stationed.
14:10.212 --> 14:12.454
[SPEAKER_00]: All five deaths had been investigated.
14:12.474 --> 14:15.096
[SPEAKER_00]: None had resulted in charges.
14:16.437 --> 14:21.662
[SPEAKER_00]: In Siberian exile camps, murder investigations were perfunctory at best.
14:23.043 --> 14:28.708
[SPEAKER_00]: One less prisoner meant one less mouth to feed.
14:30.089 --> 14:49.889
[SPEAKER_00]: Ivan Gregorvitch Petrov, a fellow exiled, who survived two brutal Siberian winters, before Hupuja ended his third, found beaten to death in the forest, near their work camp in 1882, carrying a month's wages that disappeared with his life.
14:51.211 --> 14:58.358
[SPEAKER_00]: Hupuja was questioned but not charged.
14:59.840 --> 15:07.610
[SPEAKER_00]: Mikhail Steffanoff, illiterranean carpenter, exiled for theft, killed in a knife-fight outside the barracks in 1884.
15:09.233 --> 15:11.976
[SPEAKER_00]: Witnesses called it self-defense.
15:11.996 --> 15:14.560
[SPEAKER_00]: The local commandant accepted that explanation.
15:15.761 --> 15:19.086
[SPEAKER_00]: Steffanoff's money went missing, so did his tools.
15:20.187 --> 15:24.413
[SPEAKER_00]: While the implements he'd managed to keep through his years of exile,
15:25.675 --> 15:34.048
[SPEAKER_00]: Alexander Volkov, an ethnic Russian convicted of dissertion from the Imperial Army, died from head trauma in 1877.
15:34.328 --> 15:39.937
[SPEAKER_00]: The official report said he fell during a logging accident.
15:41.299 --> 15:46.667
[SPEAKER_00]: Multiple prisoners told investigators that Hepuja had been arguing with him the night before.
15:47.989 --> 15:50.333
[SPEAKER_00]: Volkov's possessions were never recovered.
15:52.000 --> 15:57.889
[SPEAKER_00]: Dmitry Sokolov found frozen to death two miles from camp in January, 1879.
15:57.909 --> 16:05.662
[SPEAKER_00]: He had been stripped naked, a pooja was seen wearing Sokolov's fur-lined coat the next day.
16:05.702 --> 16:10.670
[SPEAKER_00]: He claimed he traded for it, no one could prove otherwise.
16:11.952 --> 16:18.582
[SPEAKER_00]: Nikolai Andreyov killed an barracks brawl in 1881, multiple witnesses
16:18.562 --> 16:20.666
[SPEAKER_00]: Chaos and violence.
16:21.588 --> 16:31.869
[SPEAKER_00]: When the guards sorted through the aftermath, and Dreyof was dead from stab wounds, Apujah had blood on his clothes, so did seven other men.
16:31.929 --> 16:35.136
[SPEAKER_00]: The Kamadot arrested no one.
16:37.394 --> 16:40.658
[SPEAKER_00]: Five deaths, five investigations that went nowhere.
16:41.519 --> 16:45.204
[SPEAKER_00]: Five men who died in a place where life was already cheap.
16:46.325 --> 16:51.471
[SPEAKER_00]: Finish authorities reviewing these cases decades later, noted the obvious pattern.
16:52.252 --> 16:54.315
[SPEAKER_00]: Each victim had possessions worth stealing.
16:55.116 --> 16:59.301
[SPEAKER_00]: Each death occurred in circumstances where Hupuja had opportunity.
16:59.281 --> 17:07.570
[SPEAKER_00]: Each investigation was cursory designed to close the case quickly, rather than pursue justice.
17:08.883 --> 17:12.167
[SPEAKER_00]: The Siberian exile system wasn't designed for justice.
17:13.128 --> 17:18.013
[SPEAKER_00]: It was designed to remove criminals from society and work them until they died.
17:19.314 --> 17:27.083
[SPEAKER_00]: Whether they died from cold, disease, labor, or murder by fellow prisoners, it didn't particularly matter.
17:28.164 --> 17:30.046
[SPEAKER_00]: They were already dead to their families.
17:31.328 --> 17:38.215
[SPEAKER_00]: Already dead to their homeland.
17:38.195 --> 17:59.443
[SPEAKER_00]: Not because he was clever, because he understood violence better than most, because he'd learned in childhood that taking what you needed was survival, because he adapted to Siberia the way he adapted to Finland's great famine, by being willing to do what others couldn't.
18:01.516 --> 18:07.284
[SPEAKER_00]: When he returned to Finland in September 1890, he was 45 years old.
18:08.326 --> 18:12.452
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd spend more than a decade in one of the harshest environments on Earth.
18:13.694 --> 18:17.960
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd survived conditions that killed most men within five years.
18:19.442 --> 18:26.292
[SPEAKER_00]: And based on the evidence reviewed by Finnish investigators, he killed at least five men during those years.
18:27.554 --> 18:28.976
[SPEAKER_00]: The number could have been higher.
18:29.016 --> 18:32.862
[SPEAKER_00]: Records from Siberian work camps were incomplete.
18:33.864 --> 18:35.066
[SPEAKER_00]: Deaths went unrecorded.
18:36.087 --> 18:37.910
[SPEAKER_00]: Bodies buried and unmarked graves.
18:38.852 --> 18:42.898
[SPEAKER_00]: Prisoners who disappeared during transport or worked details.
18:43.960 --> 18:51.351
[SPEAKER_00]: In the vast frozen emptiness of Siberia, murder was easy and investigation was rare.
18:51.331 --> 18:56.660
[SPEAKER_00]: Or we know for certain, Apujel left Finland as a convicted murderer in 1871.
18:56.760 --> 19:06.536
[SPEAKER_00]: He returned in 1882 as an experienced killer who'd learned that in desperate places, violence worked.
19:07.978 --> 19:12.546
[SPEAKER_00]: A month after his return, Maria Gemina Salo was dead.
19:14.281 --> 19:19.547
[SPEAKER_00]: Maria Jimina Salo was a prostitute, working in Helsinki's rougher districts.
19:20.768 --> 19:30.980
[SPEAKER_00]: The record suggests she was in her early twenties, young, probably from the country side originally, like so many women who ended up working in the city with no other options.
19:32.241 --> 19:39.529
[SPEAKER_00]: She met Hapoja in October 1890, where exactly the records don't specify.
19:39.509 --> 19:44.201
[SPEAKER_00]: a tavern maybe, a street corner, somewhere their paths crossed.
19:45.263 --> 19:50.937
[SPEAKER_00]: In the way such paths did, in cities where poverty and desperation overlapped,
19:52.081 --> 19:59.549
[SPEAKER_00]: Her body was found the next morning in a rented room, multiple stab wounds to the chest and neck.
19:59.569 --> 20:00.791
[SPEAKER_00]: Her jewelry was missing.
20:01.772 --> 20:04.415
[SPEAKER_00]: A distinctive silver necklace her mother had given her.
20:05.316 --> 20:07.358
[SPEAKER_00]: The only thing of value she owned.
20:08.740 --> 20:15.287
[SPEAKER_00]: When police searched Hapu just room, they found the necklace, under his bed, in a canvas bag.
20:16.516 --> 20:21.221
[SPEAKER_00]: distinctive silver work, her mother identified it immediately.
20:21.261 --> 20:25.526
[SPEAKER_00]: At trial, Apuja claimed he found the necklace.
20:26.727 --> 20:28.930
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he said he'd bought it from another man.
20:30.411 --> 20:32.574
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he couldn't remember where he'd gotten it from.
20:32.594 --> 20:36.278
[SPEAKER_00]: His story changed every time he spoke.
20:37.700 --> 20:42.625
[SPEAKER_00]: The evidence was overwhelming.
20:43.853 --> 20:46.658
[SPEAKER_00]: life imprisonment at Kukula Prison.
20:47.940 --> 20:51.185
[SPEAKER_00]: The stone fortress that would hold him for the next 12 years.
20:52.047 --> 20:54.090
[SPEAKER_00]: The walls he would escape for times.
20:55.112 --> 21:02.925
[SPEAKER_00]: The place where, on October 10, 1894, he would take his final
21:04.913 --> 21:07.598
[SPEAKER_00]: Guard Yaho roasted was 38 years old.
21:08.499 --> 21:10.443
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd worked at Kula for 11 years.
21:11.545 --> 21:20.340
[SPEAKER_00]: His wife also was pregnant with their fourth child, a daughter who would be born three months later and never knew her father.
21:21.637 --> 21:27.123
[SPEAKER_00]: That day in the prison yard, Roasted approached Apugia during a work detail.
21:28.485 --> 21:32.610
[SPEAKER_00]: Apugia had fashioned a knife from scrap metal over several weeks.
21:33.531 --> 21:34.993
[SPEAKER_00]: He'd hidden it and is clothing.
21:36.174 --> 21:39.338
[SPEAKER_00]: He died within minutes on the prison yard stones.
21:41.600 --> 21:43.042
[SPEAKER_00]: Other guards rushed to the scene.
21:44.003 --> 21:49.770
[SPEAKER_00]: Apugia turned the knife on himself.
21:51.016 --> 21:57.226
[SPEAKER_00]: trying to die rather than face trial again, trying to escape one final time through death.
21:58.468 --> 22:07.742
[SPEAKER_00]: The prison doctor saved him, stitched his wounds, locked him in the most secure cell to await trial for murder.
22:08.313 --> 22:09.555
[SPEAKER_00]: He never made it to trial.
22:11.078 --> 22:17.531
[SPEAKER_00]: Three months later, on July 9th, 1895, guards found him hanging in his cell.
22:18.573 --> 22:21.619
[SPEAKER_00]: A string torn from his socks, cold.
22:22.621 --> 22:24.465
[SPEAKER_00]: He chosen his own end.
22:28.225 --> 22:36.176
[SPEAKER_01]: Beyond the brutal killings, Hapoja's legacy would be defined by how his crimes exposed critical weakness is in Finland's criminal justice system.
22:37.218 --> 22:52.039
[SPEAKER_01]: His repeated escapes had revealed serious security flaws in the nation's prisons, while the length of his criminal career highlighted the challenges law enforcement faced in tracking and apprehending dangerous criminals across Finland's vast rural expanses.
22:52.019 --> 22:57.539
[SPEAKER_01]: The impact of Haboja's crimes and escapes resonated far beyond his death in 1895.
22:57.700 --> 23:04.003
[SPEAKER_01]: Fundamentally reshaping Finland's approach, decriminal justice and prison security.
23:04.996 --> 23:14.813
[SPEAKER_01]: In notoriously ability to escape even the most secure facilities at the time, prompted a complete overhaul of prison architecture and security protocols throughout the country.
23:15.755 --> 23:23.849
[SPEAKER_01]: Prison walls were reinforced, guard patrols were standardised, and new systems were put in place to monitor high risk inmates more effectively.
23:24.610 --> 23:30.480
[SPEAKER_01]: The case also marked a turning point in how finished society,
23:30.460 --> 23:36.870
[SPEAKER_01]: Before Hopoja, most films viewed serious crime as something that happened primarily in cities or foreign lands.
23:37.431 --> 23:42.158
[SPEAKER_01]: Is a ability to terrorise rural communities shattered this illusion of rural safety.
23:42.739 --> 23:47.647
[SPEAKER_01]: Leading to the establishment of more organised law enforcement networks in Finland's countryside.
23:48.669 --> 23:55.860
[SPEAKER_01]: Local police forces began coordinating their efforts more effectively, and a more systematic approach to criminal investigation emerged.
23:57.848 --> 24:06.139
[SPEAKER_01]: In modern Finland, approaches cases still studied by law enforcement and criminology students as a pivotal moment in the nation's criminal justice history.
24:07.300 --> 24:13.488
[SPEAKER_01]: The security measures implemented in response to his escapes from the foundation of modern Finnish prison security.
24:14.129 --> 24:20.818
[SPEAKER_01]: While the investigative techniques developed to track him, help to establish the framework for contemporary police procedures.
24:20.798 --> 24:28.811
[SPEAKER_01]: Matti Hupujer's reign of terror in late 19th century Finland stands as one of the most notorious chapters in the nation's criminal history.
24:29.853 --> 24:41.372
[SPEAKER_01]: His confirmed murders, likely numbering more than ten, combined with his dramatic prison escapes, created a legacy that would influence Finnish society and its justice system for generations to come.
24:41.352 --> 24:52.353
[SPEAKER_01]: The case of Matihapuja serves as a grim reminder of how its single individual's actions can reshape an entire nation's approach to law enforcement and criminal justice.
24:53.335 --> 25:04.356
[SPEAKER_01]: His brutal crimes expose critical weaknesses in Finland's rural policing and prison security, leading to reforms that would modernise the country's entire criminal justice system.
25:04.336 --> 25:21.703
[SPEAKER_01]: While his name may have faded from international memory, his impact on finish society remains evident in the enhanced security measures, improved investigative, but techniques and coordinated law enforcement efforts that emerged in response to his crimes.
25:21.683 --> 25:32.577
[SPEAKER_01]: As we reflect on this dark chapter of Finnish history, perhaps the most important lesson from her poo just case is how it ultimately strengthened rather than weakened Finnish society.
25:33.758 --> 25:39.906
[SPEAKER_01]: Through the horror of his crimes, Finland found the reserve to build a more effective, more humane justice system.
25:40.827 --> 25:48.957
[SPEAKER_01]: One that would become a model for progressive criminal rehabilitation, while maintaining the security measures necessary to protect its citizens.
25:51.940 --> 25:54.647
[SPEAKER_00]: but her poo just story didn't end with his death.
25:55.669 --> 26:00.301
[SPEAKER_00]: His skeleton was displayed in the finished museum of crime for nearly a century.
26:01.203 --> 26:09.544
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind glass, a teaching tool they said, a curiosity, criminology student studied his bones.
26:09.524 --> 26:13.970
[SPEAKER_00]: School children on field trips stared at the skull of Finland's first serial killer.
26:15.111 --> 26:16.613
[SPEAKER_00]: Tourists took photographs.
26:17.734 --> 26:21.880
[SPEAKER_00]: For 90 years, Maddie Hupuja remained on display.
26:22.741 --> 26:26.125
[SPEAKER_00]: The man who'd spent his life escaping was finally captured.
26:26.686 --> 26:32.393
[SPEAKER_00]: For ever, reduced to an exhibit, a warning, a spectacle.
26:32.373 --> 26:42.406
[SPEAKER_00]: Until 1995, when someone finally asked, should we be doing this, should we display a human being a trophy?
26:43.948 --> 26:52.879
[SPEAKER_00]: Even one who'd killed at least eight people, even him, 100 years after his death, they took him down.
26:54.884 --> 27:07.123
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1995, his remains were finally buried in the Elistaro, no ceremony, no marker, just earth and stone and silence.
27:07.143 --> 27:14.434
[SPEAKER_00]: The man who'd spent his life breaking out of prisons was finally later rest behind walls he couldn't escape.
27:15.596 --> 27:21.685
[SPEAKER_00]: No stone this time, just dirt, six feet deep, permanent.
27:24.618 --> 27:39.910
[SPEAKER_00]: Three confirmed murders, five suspected victims in Siberia, poorly documented and unproven, four prison escapes, two murder trials, one final act of defiance,
27:41.577 --> 27:56.228
[SPEAKER_00]: Haking Imponent 42 years old, father of three, childhood friend, killed during the great famine in 1867 for his coat and boots, the things that might keep someone alive for another week.
27:57.558 --> 28:08.489
[SPEAKER_00]: Ivan Gregorovich Petrov, who survived two Siberian winters before Hupovic ended his third in 1882, beaten to death for a month's wages.
28:09.711 --> 28:22.384
[SPEAKER_00]: Mikhail Stefanov, with the waning carpenter killed in 1884, his quality tools stolen, the implements that represented his livelihood, his skill, his identity.
28:23.782 --> 28:29.510
[SPEAKER_00]: Alexander Volkov, Russian deserter, died from head trauma in 1877.
28:30.271 --> 28:33.155
[SPEAKER_00]: The official reports had accident.
28:34.076 --> 28:35.578
[SPEAKER_00]: The evidence said murder.
28:37.060 --> 28:41.687
[SPEAKER_00]: Demetri Salkalov, found frozen and naked in January 1879.
28:42.067 --> 28:46.313
[SPEAKER_00]: A pooch of war has feraligned coat the next day.
28:47.643 --> 28:51.753
[SPEAKER_00]: Nicolai and Dreiv, killed in a barrack's brawl in 1881.
28:52.174 --> 28:56.886
[SPEAKER_00]: One more death in a place where death was commonplace.
28:58.390 --> 28:59.914
[SPEAKER_00]: Maria Gemina Salo.
29:00.991 --> 29:05.798
[SPEAKER_00]: in her early 20s, trying to survive and help sink his rough or district.
29:07.039 --> 29:12.948
[SPEAKER_00]: Stap to death in July 1882, for a silver necklace her mother had given her.
29:14.450 --> 29:19.997
[SPEAKER_00]: Guard Yohou rusted, 38 years old, 11-year veteran of Kakola Prison.
29:21.219 --> 29:30.492
[SPEAKER_00]: Father of three, with a fourth child coming, murdered on the prison yard stones,
29:31.687 --> 29:33.269
[SPEAKER_00]: his daughter never knew him.
29:35.793 --> 29:53.340
[SPEAKER_00]: Eight named victims, each with their own lives, their own families, their own futures stolen by a man who learned in childhood that violence was survival, and spent 50 years proving he'd learned that lesson too well.
29:55.345 --> 30:12.928
[SPEAKER_00]: Maddie Apugia escaped Stonewalls four times, survived two murder trials, outlasted a decade in Siberia, killed eight people across two continents, but he never escaped who he was, never escaped what his father's axe rages had taught him.
30:14.210 --> 30:19.176
[SPEAKER_00]: Never escaped the childhood where violence was the only language anyone spoke.
30:19.156 --> 30:26.230
[SPEAKER_00]: The stone walls of Coca-Cola prison, the walls it escaped for times, finally held him.
30:27.292 --> 30:31.701
[SPEAKER_00]: Not because the walls got stronger, but because there was nowhere left to run.
30:32.703 --> 30:37.232
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the end, even the strongest string is strong enough.
30:40.334 --> 30:47.044
[SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, remember, the most dangerous patterns aren't always the ones that make headlines.
30:48.066 --> 30:59.644
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes, they're the quiet accumulation of violence that society refuses to see, until someone finally escapes in the only way left to them.
31:01.327 --> 31:03.490
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening, friend.
31:11.738 --> 31:15.927
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you.
