“There have been whispers about the “river pusher” serial killer for years in Turku – now the chilling urban legend is seen on the theatre stage.
Horror is rarely brought to theatrical stages. In November, plays based on real crimes premiered in Turku and Kemi. How does popular true crime turn into theatre?
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Maybe you’ve sat in a café in Turku for an evening and when you were leaving, you heard someone say “please avoid the riverside on the way home”. In the city, there have been whispers for years about an urban legend of a serial killer called a “river pusher” (jokituuppari in Finnish). A figure of mythical proportions in pub conversations has reportedly been pushing young men into the water at the dead of the night.
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Over the years, sneakers have been found in the Aura River. A wallet at a gas station, far away from the place of disappearance. Some of the incidents have been clarified. Alcohol and dumb bravado have played a part, but some of the men may have disappeared forever.
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The urban legend did not leave Jussi Marttila, who worked as a private detective, alone, so he wrote a crime novel about the river pusher called “Veden varaan”, “Into the Water”, in 2020. Now its play version is performed at Turku City Theatre, dramatised by Sami Keski-Vähälä and directed by Mikko Kouki.
Kouki, who settled in Turku in 1991, remembers hearing about the river pusher soon after moving to the city. Sometimes, while walking along the river, he has also seen search parties fishing the missing with a hook. The thought of a figure pushing people into a river terrifies and at the same time tickles the imagination.
“Usually, in cities with a river flowing in the middle of them, myths like these arise. Maybe there is someone here in Turku, pushing people into the Aura River”, Kouki says.”
“Jussi Marttila, who worked as a private investigator until 2014, investigated what was known about the drowning incidents in the Aura River and wrote a report about them. He said in an interview with the Seura magazine in 2020 that the urban legend of the drowner lived its strongest season from 2006 to 2010. At that time, several young men disappeared from Turku within a relatively short period of time.
The story started to be told again in 2017, when 25-year-old Juuso disappeared on a bar trip. Eventually, the police found his body with the Finnish Defence Forces’ side-scan sonar at a depth of six metres.
“The incidents raised a lot of questions and concerns about what led to the death of these people,” Marttila told to Seura magazine.
In their investigations, the police have not found any indication of the existence of a serial killer, but Sami Keski-Vähälä points out in the play’s script that this does not mean that there cannot be one.
“As long as there is no fact, we have a myth.””
[https://yle.fi/a/74-20061111](https://yle.fi/a/74-20061111)
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