Myrkky-Tiina

Myrkky-Tiina ("Poison Tiina"), real name Tiina Matero née Väisänen (born 1873 in Puolanka, Kainuu) was a woman who moved to Hyrynsalmi to be the wife of Aapeli Matero. She lived in Kytömäki village in Hyrynsalmi for many decades and murdered multiple people during this time.

Tiina's story
When Tiina arrived as a new wife to the house of Kyrö, she ended up in a fight with her mother-in-law, who spit into Tiina's cauldron of water and the enraged Tiina vowed that she would never do so again. Quickly, Tiina became remorseful, cried and apologized, asking her mother-in-law for a coffee in order to make peace again. Her mother-in-law drank the coffee and died due to the fox poison Tiina had put into the cup. This is Tiina's earliest known murder. She killed her husband in 1920. Tiina often got into fits of rage, jumping and cursing around, threatening anyone she didn't like with death. She didn't kill healthy people, but waited for them to get sick first as the deaths of sick and old people were more difficult to be spot as murders. She might have given her victim a bit of poison first to weaken them, and deal the lethal dose later.

Once, she tried to kill the mistress of another house with the same coffee trick. The lady was able to crawl out of the room but the act could not be proven as a murder attempt as Tiina had quickly destroyed the evidence by washing the coffee pot, and the mistress had another illness that could've caused her to collapse.

In 1923, she got the life sentence in house of correction. She had already tried to hang herself while captured, before the sentence had been decided. She defended herself in court with brutality and wisdom. The day after her sentencing, she killed herself by eating sodium hydroxide in the prison washroom. She is believed to have killed at least nine people over the decades.

Tiina's horrible story lives on in the tales told by the locals to this day.

Tiina's grandmother
According to Kaisa Anttonen, a folk healer from Hyrynsalmi, Tiina's grandmother had also been a terrible person, a witch who always caused nothing but harm for people. The story, told by Esko Kinnunen from Kytömäki village, tells that when that witch had died, demons came to get her, and she yelled at them that she would not be afraid. In mental and physical anguish, she dug out her eye from the eyesocket with her finger and threw it at the creatures shouting: "That's for the devil!"