On the final day of 1966, the people of Jersey were shocked to learn about the discovery of the battered body of a young woman in a field in St Clement. The gruesome find, reported on the front page of the JEP on Saturday December 31st, quickly progressed into a murder enquiry, with the victim identified as Tuula Höök, a 20-year-old from Finland who worked as an au pair and waitress during two spells in Jersey during 1965 and 1966.
The case baffled police detectives assigned to the case, and the mystery has persisted during several cold-case reviews, attaining the status of Jersey’s most notorious unsolved crime.
In summer 2023, Tuula’s story came to the attention of Mark Bridgeman, the author of a number of true-crime books, who became fascinated by the case, and resolved to seek support from both Tuula’s family and States of Jersey Police in turning it into a book. After extensive research, including multiple trips to Jersey and several JEP articles, some of which led to Islanders stepping forward with information, his work – Tuula, A True Crime Tragedy – is set for publication.
The first extract explores how Tuula’s short life came to a mysterious and violent end. What inspired her to travel to Jersey, what secrets lay hidden on the island awaiting her, and who was this young girl from Helsinki?
Exciting new decade dawned for glamorous young Finn
“Her absence is like the sky – it is spread over everything.” – C. S. Lewis
Once in a generation, someone is born with the ability to light up the lives of all those around them. A person who is truly a force of nature in this world, someone lucky enough to possess grace, intelligence, warmth, beauty, talent and generosity in equal measure. Yet still able to carry those considerable attributes, not with arrogance, selfishness, and self-importance, but with style, kindness and a sense of purpose. I am reliably informed, by everyone who was privileged to have met her, that Tuula was such a person. As a teenager, the young Tuula modelled herself on Audrey Hepburn. Had her young life not been cut so tragically short, she may well have followed in Audrey’s footsteps.
In researching this book, a friend of Tuula’s from the mid-1960s told me that:
“She was glamorous and tall. People always looked when she walked into a room. Although not naturally forward, she was gregarious, friendly, and thoughtful. Her English was good, spoken without an accent. Yet, even with all her obvious attributes, there was still more to her than met the eye.”
Without any conscious effort on her part, Tuula, like the gravitational pull of a celestial body, both attracted all those around her while simultaneously brightening their lives.
Tuula Sinikka Höök was a postwar child, born on Tuesday, 12 March 1946, in the respectable and attractive Helsinki suburb of Kruununhaka. As all good parents do, Tuula was protected from the realities of the world into which she had been born. While Europe swept aside the rubble of the recently ended war, Finland emerged from its own complicated conflict.
Nevertheless, Tuula’s home life was a happy one. Never far from the water, Tuula could watch the ships and small boats as they plied their trade around the coastline of the city. Commodities were in short supply in the years following the Second World War, so Tuula and her sisters relied on their own creativity and imagination. Tuula developed a love for drawing and art, no doubt inspired by her colourful surroundings, and soon became an accomplished illustrator and artist.
By the early 1960s, she developed an interest in fashion, music, film and photography. Travel too became a possibility as an exciting new decade dawned for Tuula – Germany, France, England and Jersey would soon become more than mere possibilities. The 1960s had arrived. Yet, almost inevitably, dark shadows encroached on the sunlight. In Finland, the tragic quadruple murder at Lake Bodom cast a veil over the country. Meanwhile, in Jersey a decade of secrets, sex crime and murder was about to begin…
The events of the 1960s have cast a dark, lengthy shadow over Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands. This sinister spectre is entirely at odds with the island’s reputation as the sunniest and warmest place in the United Kingdom, not to mention one of its most welcoming. In fact, it might be said that islanders bear two sets of scars. The scars of the German occupation are visible for all to see (and were still fresh in the 1960s). The wounds from the events detailed in this book are far less obvious to the outsider. But, nonetheless, they remain. To shed light on the circumstances that led to the murder of a young overseas summer worker in Jersey in 1966 may help to heal some of those hidden wounds and finally bring her killer to account – a man who has evaded justice for more than half a century.
The quiet parish of St Clement, Jersey, sits two miles or so to the east of the capital, St Helier, and is the smallest [by area] of the 12 parishes that make up this compact island. Although urban development has now sprawled eastwards from St Helier, leaving little green land between the capital and St Clement, the site of Tuula’s murder remains remarkably peaceful and unchanged.
Around 10.30 am on that New Year’s Eve morning, a 19-year-old man by the name of Robert Le Quesne looked upward at the sky through the window of his home, Slate House, in St Clement, and noticed that the heavy rain and fog of the previous night had finally abated. He decided to take a drive along a narrow lane, Rue Laurens, to the local shop and, on the way, check if Andre Jeget, one of the French farmworkers employed by his family, had begun cutting the hedgerows that fringed the fields along that particular stretch of road. His decision would lead to a startling discovery, setting in motion a long running police investigation, which would soon be dubbed ‘The Au Pair Murder’.
Le Quesne drove from the Grande Route de St Clement (the A5) onto the quieter Rue Laurens. He headed northwards alongside the parish church and up the gently sloping lane towards Grouville Mill. The lane was bordered on both sides by hedgerows and occasional trees, which framed farmers’ fields, and the road surface was still wet from the previous day’s heavy rain. Either side of the lane, the entrances to the fields were thick with dark mud. Approximately 400 yards along Rue Laurens, Le Quesne glanced to his left into one of his family’s potato fields and observed that his French farmhand had not yet started to cut back the vegetation along the field’s perimeter, although work on other hedges elsewhere had already begun. Then, in the inclined entrance to the field, something on the ground caught Le Quesne’s eye. The access gap into the field, which was opposite a low stone wall and a corrugated tin shack, was sodden with mud caused by the overnight downpour. There, on the rutted and inclined entrance into the field, approximately six yards from the lane, was what appeared to be a body dressed in dark clothing. Le Quesne jumped out of his car and, to his horror, realised his instinct had been correct. Had the body not been dressed in women’s clothing, it may have been impossible to identify the victim as either male or female, such was the extensive trauma that had been inflicted on the face and head.
In fact, had Robert Le Quesne not made a special point of examining the hedgerows on either side of Rue Laurens as he drove along that morning, he may not have noticed the body at all, lying as it did on the dark, muddy ground. It is almost certain that any motorist driving along that narrow lane during the heavy rainfall and fog of the previous night would have missed the body. The killer clearly did not feel the need to hide or camouflage his victim’s body. In fact, any person hellbent on the destruction of another human being could not have wished for a more helpful combination of circumstances to assist in concealing the perfect murder.
Tuula, A True Crime Tragedy will be published by Tippermuir Books on 21 May. An interview with author Mark Bridgeman is available via Bailiwick Podcasts.
