Pirjo's Murders of Multiple Women

Pirjo’s murders of multiple women come into focus as both a personal reckoning and a written confession: she recognizes that jealousy and misunderstanding have consumed her, while the document attributed to her sets out a trail of killings reaching back to Alberte on Bornholm.

Recognition and Responsibility

As the possibility that Atu had killed no one takes hold, Pirjo confronts what that would mean for her own actions. She thinks she had lived a lie and reacted to a lie, allowing others to pay for it. In that moment she counts three women she has killed and Shirley, whom she nearly killed. Jealousy and misunderstandings, she realizes, have consumed her. Her sudden roar marks the force of the reckoning, though she does not know whether it came from her.

What the Confession Claims

A later written confession, read aloud by Carl, gives a more specific account. It claims that Pirjo killed two officers in a solar power control room and killed Wanda Phinn, whose body was buried at Gynge Alvar, about eight hundred meters from where the path ends and then a hundred meters to the right. The document also claims that she pushed a German woman named Iben in front of a car at the ferry terminal in Karlskrona and drowned Claudia, who was found in Poland. The confession says Pirjo could not then remember their surnames.

Alberte and the Interrupted Record

The confession traces the beginning back to Alberte on Bornholm, where Atu was then called Frank. It breaks off after that unfinished reference: the text descends into repeated letters and spaces, and Carl identifies the key where the typist’s finger must have fallen—the n key, directly above the space bar. The abrupt end leaves the account of Alberte’s case incomplete even as it connects Pirjo’s confession to the older events surrounding her.