The Dark Heart: A True Story of Greed, Murder, and an Unlikely Investigator

by Joakim Palmkvist

  The police officer asked Maria if she believed her older sister Sara was directly involved in Göran’s disappearance.

  “I think she might do him harm to get at the money, but there is no way for me to know for sure,” Maria replied. “Sara is capable of hatred toward anyone going against her. She has an aggressive personality. Her boyfriend, Martin, is more withdrawn; he’s hard to read.”

  Maria had no new evidence to give, but she wanted to alert police to her suspicions to make sure nothing was left to chance.

  At 5:02 p.m., Daniel Augustsson ended the recording. The interview had lasted just under half an hour. It would prove to have a decisive impact on a six-week-old investigation in Kalmar that had recently ground to a halt.

  3

  GONE MISSING

  Justice is a slow-grinding machine. The cogs and wheels of that same machinery had been clicking for over a month when Maria made her frustrated call to the local police in late October.

  Six weeks earlier, on September 10, 2012, Detective Jonas Blomgren from the Kalmar police had knocked on the door of Göran’s home, Ställe Farm in Norra Förlösa. Had he brought his police dog Ido into the house that day, things might have gone differently. But for Detective Blomgren, this was merely a routine visit. A young woman had called the police, saying her father had been missing for several days. In such cases, the police prepare a basic initial report and begin the standard investigatory process.

  When Detective Blomgren stepped into Göran’s house to meet with the missing man’s daughter Sara, Ido stayed in his crate in the car. The detective shook hands with both Sara and her boyfriend, Martin, who was with her in the house that day. The couple did not live in the house; they resided together on the next farm over, which belonged to Martin’s family. They hardly needed to explain this because it was obvious from the state of the house that the young couple didn’t live there. Ställe Farm was dirty and neglected, lacking “a woman’s touch,” as the detective put it.

  Once they had taken a seat in the living room, Sara told Blomgren that her father had been missing for several days. He had gotten into his car, a gray Chrysler, driven into Kalmar, left the car there, then disappeared entirely.

  “The conversation was subdued and calm,” Blomgren later recalled. “Sara seemed sad to me because her manner was reserved, and it was hard to get her to talk. She cried a little, I think, at the beginning of the conversation.”

  Sara provided most of the background information, but her boyfriend was helpful as well, answering as many questions as he could. But Blomgren did most of the talking, asking all the standard questions, as per procedure.

  Police work always relies on historical knowledge based on information from previous cases; it operates from a baseline of circumstances and behavior it considers “normal.” Consequently, anything that deviates from “normal” arouses suspicion and ought to be scrutinized. Call it what you will—cynicism, prejudice. But the police tend to call it experience.

  Having the ability to quickly read people in an interview situation is one thing—not everyone has a talent for it—but police officers are trained both before being put into service and while on the job to identify contradictions in information and to recognize unusual behaviors and narratives.

  Detective Blomgren had at this point been an officer of the law for over a decade and had thus seen most of what a uniformed officer in the Kalmar area was ever likely to see. He had been a dog handler for a few years at this point. The Swedish police have relatively few such specialists, only about four hundred in total, spread across the whole country. For that reason, they are often dispatched to provide support in other regions, to help to track suspects from the scene of a crime, for example, or to search for missing people.

  During his career, Blomgren had worked on a lot of missing-person cases. In his experience, the family members were often very helpful, coming up with creative suggestions and useful information to aid the police in their investigation. But Blomgren noted quickly that Sara and Martin were not behaving at all as he would have expected. He felt he had to drag information out of the couple.

  They told him about the fight between Sara and Göran, after which she said she left the house and did not return for a day or two. At that point, she told the detective, Göran and his Chrysler were gone. She later discovered the car outside her father’s apartment in Kalmar when she and Martin went looking for him.

  After that basic story had been told, Blomgren hit a wall. Sara and Martin’s answers dwindled down to mostly yes or no responses for the remainder of the interview.

  “I asked what they thought might have happened,” Blomgren said. “We talked about Göran’s habits and how he normally behaves. I had to be very proactive to get anywhere. It was hard to coax even basic information out of them. Given that very little came out unprompted, I got the feeling there was more to the situation than they let on.”

  The couple told Blomgren that Göran appeared to have taken his passport and briefcase, and that he had been traveling earlier in the summer and could have gone off again without telling anyone. Göran, he was told, mostly kept to himself and tended to withdraw in times of conflict, though not usually this abruptly. Sara told the detective of her suspicion that Göran’s disappearance might have been his way of punishing his daughter. By making himself unreachable, he might be forcing her to get by on her own and perhaps to realize that she actually did need him.

  At least that was what she had thought for the first few days, Sara said. But then she became increasingly worried and finally contacted her stepmother, Göran’s ex-wife, Irina, who lived in Norrköping, for advice. Irina felt Sara could hold off on doing anything for a bit longer, that Göran would probably turn up. She suggested that Sara look around the neighborhood, or perhaps try the hotels in Kalmar. Göran had enough money to spend a few nights in a hotel. For that matter, he could also afford to get on a plane to anywhere in the world.

  After that phone call, Sara began to search in earnest. She had come across the Chrysler in the Funkabo neighborhood, near Göran’s apartment. He knew the area well enough to know which streets he could park on for free long-term, so she took this as a sign that he had really left.

  During the course of her search, Sara also attempted to contact her father on his cell phone, though not particularly actively, as records would eventually show.

  When September 6, the day of Sara’s younger sister’s, Maria’s, eighteenth birthday, came and went without a word from Göran, Sara’s concern intensified, she said. It was an occasion Göran would never have missed, no matter how angry or offended he might have felt. The realization that something must have happened finally sank in, Sara said, and it was at this point that she finally called the police.

  The conversation lasted for approximately forty minutes. Detective Blomgren took copious notes, then asked permission to search the premises.

  “In many cases, oddly enough, missing people have turned up in their own houses,” he told them. “The reporting party has been unable to find them because they have hidden themselves away.”

  There could have been a medical emergency: Göran could have had a heart attack, fallen off his bed, then accidentally rolled underneath it. Perhaps he had gotten himself trapped somewhere on the property. Not the most likely of theories—and if either one were true, Sara and her boyfriend ought to have found him by now. But stranger things have happened, and police work is, to no small extent, all about ruling out possible explanations. Besides, a search of someone’s home always helps give a more precise impression of the person in question.

  On the ground floor of Ställe Farm, Blomgren found a hallway, a kitchen, and a study, in addition to the living room where their conversation had been taking place. At the other end of the hallway was a larger room, crammed with unused things, furniture, rolled-up carpets, and plastic bags full of recycling. It didn’t seem inhabited. Blomgren poked his head in but didn’t enter.

  On the second floo
r, there were two bedrooms and an attic storage room that measured approximately 320 square feet. One of the bedrooms had been Sara’s before she moved out, and it looked as though Göran might have been using the other. Neither Sara nor Martin gave a clear indication, and in fact, they told him very little about the house or who lived where.

  Blomgren continued his search, methodically going through each of the rooms, closets, and storage areas, all to no avail. In his search of the garage, he discovered an expensive Mercedes under a protective cover. He also checked the basement, where there was a laundry room, as well as a room with several pieces of unusual-looking manufacturing equipment, which turned out to be woodworking machines for the family’s pipe company.

  The outcome of his search: absolutely nothing. The house seemed abandoned.

  “There was nowhere a person could hide that I didn’t check,” the detective reported.

  Blomgren continued the search elsewhere on the property, both in the large hall that housed the farm machines, where Göran’s Chrysler had been parked since Sara and Martin drove it back from Kalmar, and in the older wooden building that served as a combined barn and stable. Sara kept her two horses in the southern end of the building at night. He took a look in there but was careful not to touch anything or move any straw around.

  Ido was also eventually taken out of the car to help with the search, so she ran a lap around the house to try to locate a trail—this too is routine in missing-person cases. If Ido had picked up the scent of anything, the matter could have progressed to a so-called hasty search—further sniffing along roads, sidewalks, or other natural trails in the area.

  But it was a hopeless task, given the amount of time that had passed since Göran had disappeared. Of course, his scent, and that of many other people, may have lingered, but what would that prove? Once Ido had finished her lap, Blomgren was certain that no interesting tracks led away from the house or its immediate vicinity.

  He continued his search in the apartment Göran owned nearby, but once again found nothing. Blomgren prepared his report on the work done on this first day of the investigation:

  When I concluded my work that evening, it was with a feeling that a number of circumstances had not been brought to my attention.

  There was, however, nothing to justify taking further legal action.

  The police report on Göran Lundblad’s disappearance was assigned the code 9011, for missing person. This is an administrative description that does not actually amount to a crime.

  Over a month later, at the end of October, a forwarder machine rumbled through the Norra Förlösa forest. Göran may have been missing, but the forest had no regard for such things. The trees won’t wait.

  The well-used, rather battered machine wheeled over the uneven undergrowth, full of rocks and tree stumps, with a young woman at the controls. A corridor of green, with neatly ordered trees waiting to be cut, stretched toward the hills and fields beyond, and a crisp autumn sun sparkled overhead.

  With Göran missing, Sara now had to do the required forestry work by herself. At around eleven that morning, Detective Blomgren returned to the property, driving down one of the little forest roads until he found her.

  Shortly after the interview with Sara and Martin at Ställe Farm in September, Blomgren had, coincidentally, been transferred to the violent-crime unit, a routine transfer to enhance his career skills development. The change would turn out to be rather timely.

  The Göran Lundblad case, which Blomgren himself had entered into the system back in September, had since ended up on the desk of a middle manager at violent crime; Blomgren quickly asked to be assigned to the case. He had been there from the start, and since then had been unable to shake the feeling that something wasn’t adding up.

  As one of the investigators on the case, Blomgren was now free to spend as much time as he liked on it, as long as the rest of his caseload didn’t suffer. This was standard procedure for stalled missing-person investigations at the time; they were simply added to a list and dealt with if and when time permitted.

  When Sara spotted the detective, she turned off the forestry machine and climbed out to greet him.

  “Nothing’s happened since you were here before. We haven’t heard anything,” Sara said. “I can’t understand why Dad isn’t getting in touch. Even if he is still angry, surely the worst of it should have blown over by now.”

  No, she told him, no one in her family knew anything either—not her sister nor her stepmother, Irina—and none of Göran’s tenants outside Nyköping or anyone else who would normally interact with him had heard a word from him.

  In the interview record, Blomgren noted the following:

  When asked about Göran’s access to funds, Sara replied that he normally keeps quite a bit of money at home. The sum has, however, never exceeded 60,000 kronor [7,000 American dollars].

  On occasion there have been euros, but Sara also said that whatever money Göran might have had at home must surely run out eventually if he is traveling.

  There is no money left in his home.

  On the other hand, there was money abroad: millions of kronor in a Swiss bank account, as far as Sara knew. There was enough to build a whole new life if need be, she told him. She promised Blomgren that she would contact the Swiss bank in question to inquire about any recent activity.

  The two continued to chat a bit longer about the fact that Göran would not be above tax evasion—having done some business under the table—though Sara was quick to point out that Göran had never had any criminal dealings to her knowledge. She had never heard about any contacts of that kind, and her dad had no enemies as far as she knew.

  They also talked about how strange it was that Göran—whose entire life revolved around his properties, forest, and land—would leave everything unattended. Even if he were out to punish his daughter, he would surely have been in touch to check on the business, his bread and butter.

  During their conversation, Blomgren invited speculation about where Göran might be, and whether he was alive or not. What did she think had happened? And if something terrible had indeed befallen him, what would the course of events have been? And how would the perpetrator have gotten rid of the body?

  Sara was clearly unprepared for the direct accusation he leveled at her next:

  “It wouldn’t be hard to make someone vanish, with a machine like that,” Blomgren said, nodding toward the log loader with its giant extendable boom and claw, a machine capable of moving whole tree trunks.

  Then he waited to see what would happen. The statement, not entirely appropriate, was not entered into the official report of their interaction that day.

  “I wanted to see her reaction, so I said it outside of the interview situation,” Blomgren explained later. “And I wanted to make it clear that the police have to ask tough questions to find out what happened to Göran.”

  Sara had no noticeable reaction, there and then. But the thinly veiled accusation clearly unsettled her. And it festered. If anyone knew whether it were possible to bury a body with a loader or tree harvester, it would certainly be her. That machine was designed to cut down trees, not to dig. You wouldn’t use this machine. In order to dig a hole the size of a human body, you would need a front-end loader or excavator. Nevertheless, she felt a finger had been pointed at her and soon told others: “The police think I’ve buried Dad with an excavator.”

  It was a rather incredible accusation to throw at a grieving daughter, potentially enough to have Blomgren investigated by internal affairs. But Sara didn’t choose that path, and her lack of reaction only served to fan Blomgren’s suspicions.

  Shortly thereafter, she did, however, call him, feeling upset.

  “She was like a child who had been scolded and told me I couldn’t say things like that to her, that she didn’t like it,” Blomgren said.

  It sounded as though she had told someone else about the detective’s statement and been informed how she should have reacted in the mom
ent. Or perhaps she had mulled it over on her own, pondering what it meant for a police officer to point his finger at her in that way.

  “I explained that I appreciated it was unpleasant, and that I knew it was important to treat relatives with respect,” Blomgren said. “But we also want to solve this case. Asking unpleasant questions is part of my job.”

  After the thirty-minute conversation with Sara in the woods, Blomgren also spoke to Martin, who confirmed something he hadn’t mentioned in the first interview: that Göran didn’t like him. But Martin claimed that he had come to feel more accepted as time had passed. In fact, though he admitted he didn’t exactly know Göran as a friend, he insisted that they had a good relationship nowadays.

  But of all the people the police interviewed after Göran’s disappearance, Martin was the only one to say such a thing. Instead, each and every one of the relatives, tenant farmers, neighbors, property tenants, and people who had worked for Göran stated that Martin was detested, a thorn in Göran’s side. And that Göran never missed an opportunity to point that out.

  According to the interview records, although Martin was not being formally charged with a crime, Blomgren put the screws to him anyway, pushing and prodding to judge his involvement with the case.

  “I’m not the kind of person who could hurt someone. I’m too much of a coward and would rather avoid a fight,” Martin replied.

  Throughout the twenty-minute interview he maintained that the disappearance was inexplicable, and he promised to get in touch if he thought of anything else.

  Detective Blomgren also seized firearms from Ställe Farm during the month of October. Göran had a license for three weapons: two shotguns and a small-bore rifle—a parlor gun. During this visit, Blomgren had a chance to enter the room he had only given a cursory glance to during his first visit: the cluttered room behind the kitchen, which housed the gun cabinet.

  It was the size of a standard bedroom, about 160 square feet, and jam-packed with things. Aside from a couple of piles of clothes, there were also several black garbage bags of recycling—bottles and cans—which occupied most of the floor. Blomgren had not brought his dog this time, though a police dog might not have been able to pick out any relevant scents among all that junk anyway. The detective didn’t spend a lot of time contemplating the mess. After all, it was the household of an older man who lived alone. Blomgren had seen worse.