Foul Play: A Historical True Crime Podcast · Shane L. Waters, Wendy Cee, Gemma Hoskins

Finland: Matti Haapoja's Famine Murders

December 2, 2025·31 min·2 clips

Finland's first documented serial killer—a man who'd survived Siberian exile and become a legend in Finnish criminal folklore.

Hapuja comes in at the end, with the locked cell and the body hanging from the beam. The episode then walks backward, not to soften the ending but to make sense of it. He spent more than half his life inside prison walls. Four times, he escaped. Each return made the next attempt feel more likely. The biggest escape came in 1887 from Helsinki Prison, which was supposed to be escape-proof. He watched the guards' routines. He waited for the evening meal service. Then he slipped out of his cell block and into the prison workshop. There he used his experience as a laborer and stolen materials to make a crude rope. In the night, he climbed the outer wall and vanished into the city. The manhunt that followed was one of the largest Finland had seen. Police and military units searched the countryside. Wanted posters spread across the region. He stayed free for nearly six months, and during that time he kept committing robberies and was suspected of at least two more murders. The episode then turns to his years in Siberian exile. Between 1871 and 1882, five men died under suspicious circumstances in the camps where he was sent. The deaths were investigated, but no charges followed. That part lands hard because the system barely counted the losses. The episode closes by pulling the violence back to childhood, to a home where brutality was survival and the pattern was already there.

As heard by us

A grim prison-break story where violence, exile, and confinement keep folding back on each other.

The episode presents Finland's Matt Hapuja as a prison-break figure whose violence, confinement, and escape are rendered through hard, concrete detail.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a prison-break saga that ends in a locked cell.

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