The trial of a Danish man accused of murder and attempted murder on board the Viking Sally cruise ship in the summer of 1987 began at the District Court of Southwest Finland in Turku on Monday.
Twenty-year-old Klaus Schelkle died in the attack while his 22-year-old girlfriend, Bettina Taxis, sustained serious injuries. The ship was travelling from Stockholm in Sweden to the Finnish port city of Turku, and was almost certainly in Finnish waters at the time of the attack.
German students Schelkle and Taxis were travelling around the Nordic region on a budget, and chose not to pay for an overnight cabin on the ship. Instead they went to sleep on the open-air 9th deck at the rear of the ship, in an area that was dimly lit due to a broken lamp.
A group of three Swedish boy scouts discovered the victims at approximately 3:45am.
Prosecutor demands life imprisonment
The defendant has denied the charges, and did not attempt to hide his face from photographers inside the courtroom on Monday. He was 18 years old at the time of the attack, on 28 July 1987, and he was on his way to Finland to participate in a Mormon scout camp.
Special Prosecutor Heidi Röblom is demanding the suspect receive a sentence of life imprisonment as he attacked the couple with a slag hammer while they were sleeping and therefore defenceless, making the crime especially cruel and heinous.
The prosecutor also told the court that the man had admitted his guilt in text messages sent to his ex-wife, and that he is alleged to have spoken about the murders to several other individuals.
At the outset of the trial, the judge declared that interviews with the suspect carried out by Finnish and Danish police officers during 2016 were not admissible as evidence since the defendant did not have a lawyer present at the sessions. Due to the serious nature of the suspected crimes, and the fact that the interviews were conducted partly in Danish and partly in English, the defendant should have been accompanied by legal counsel, the judge said.
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Yle understands that the accused man made a comment during one of these sessions which could be interpreted as referring to his guilt.
Police initially interviewed the defendant as a witness, and in October 1987 he was questioned as a possible suspect.
The case has attracted international media attention, with journalists from both Germany and Denmark in attendance, and the trial will be conducted in Swedish.
The Viking Sally later became MS Estonia, which sank off the island of Utö in the Turku archipelago in 1994, with the loss of 852 lives.
If the defendant is convicted of the charges, the case will have the longest offence-to-conviction lead time in Finnish judicial history, with a gap of nearly 34 years. Currently the longest lead time is 21 years, in the case of the murder in Espoo of Raija Muukkonen, also killed in 1987, for which the perpetrator received a sentence of life in prison in 2009.
