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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  In the gun cabinet, he also discovered an illegal firearm, a timeworn automatic pistol, Fabrique Nationale model 1900. The weapon was at least a hundred years old; the model had been discontinued around the turn of the last century. A reasonable explanation for this weapon would be that the pistol was an heirloom, purchased before World War I, when a license was not required to own a firearm in Sweden.

  After a forensic examination on October 24, 2012, a ballistics technician concluded that the gun was in poor condition and likely not functioning. The pistol had not been used as a murder weapon, at least not in modern times.

  After Blomgren’s initial interview with Sara and Martin in September 2012, the Kalmar police pursued the most obvious leads. Their checks reinforced the impression that something was amiss.

  Göran’s fuel credit card had not been used. His accounts with Swedbank, SEB, and Handelsbanken remained untouched as of October 19, which was particularly ominous, because there had always been, up until he disappeared, a lot of activity on his business accounts—regular payments, withdrawals, and purchasing of money orders. His standing automatic transfers such as, for example, some smaller sums into his children’s savings accounts, continued unabated.

  There remained the possibility that Göran had left of his own accord. Granted, he did normally drive everywhere, but he could, hypothetically speaking, have left his car in the free-parking zones in Funkabo, where Sara and Martin had found it, and continued on by some other means.

  But the taxi companies had no record of him. The main train operator stated that they had not had a Göran Lundblad travel from Kalmar at any point during 2012. The Øresund trains to Denmark couldn’t find his name either. A call to the local airport yielded no results. No Göran Lundblad on Kalmar Flyg’s flights, or SAS’s, as far as they could confirm. These were not ironclad conclusions, of course—you do not need to give your full name to travel by train, coach, or maybe another car. But the police checked everything that could be checked while they waited for any sign of life.

  Among the measures taken, another detective with the Kalmar police, Jan Bergqvist, noted this:

  Ongoing contact with Göran’s two daughters, Sara Lundblad and Maria Lundblad, as well as Maria’s mother, Irina. No information has come to light beyond what is documented in the interview records.

  Maria and Irina confirmed in interviews what Sara had already told the police: that when Göran had been missing for a day or two, Sara tried to call her sister, Maria, who was in Stockholm and unreachable. Instead, Sara got hold of her stepmother.

  “The first thing Sara said was, ‘Dad and I had a fight, and now he’s disappeared.’ I don’t remember the exact words, but something along those lines,” Irina said in her interview. “Sara very rarely cries, but this time she cried a lot. So much that she couldn’t speak. She was gasping and sobbing.”

  Irina had tried to calm her down by reminding her that Göran was liable to do as he pleased and had been known to keep himself distanced at times. He might be up checking on his properties in Södermanland, for example. That he was not answering his phone was hardly remarkable for Göran either.

  “Wait and see,” Irina advised her stepdaughter.

  There were more phone calls between the two during the next few days; Sara was consistently distraught. She told Irina, among other things, that she had found his car near Vasallgatan, that she had been up to check the apartment but it smelled fusty, and it was clear no one had been there in a long time.

  “I tried to console Sara and come up with reasons why Göran was missing,” Irina said. “We speculated that he might have gone somewhere to get away from all the nagging. But he’s not the kind to just take off. We lived together for seven years, and in that time, he never went anywhere. But I wanted to comfort Sara and help her.”

  The outcome of the conversations between the three of them—Sara, Maria, and Irina—was an agreement to wait and see. But when Maria’s eighteenth birthday passed without any communication from him, Sara finally contacted the police.

  When the results of the investigations into the disappearance of Göran Lundblad were collated that autumn, the police had little to build on. A series of circumstantial facts, gathered through formal interviews as well as more informal conversations, all of which had generated a slowly growing stack of documentation at the police station:

  A missing man who rarely left his home region, who hadn’t touched his accounts and hadn’t contacted anyone he knows. The pattern adhered closely to a voluntary disappearance, and he had plenty of money to help him get by, but that he would simply leave everything he had lived for since birth seemed unlikely.

  A daughter who delayed reporting him missing for many days, long enough to cover plenty of tracks if she were indeed culpable. Granted, she had discussed the matter with her closest relatives and been advised to wait and see. But it was still an unusually long delay. In addition, her behavior was not in line with what is normally expected from the relative of a missing person. She seemed convinced her father would not be coming back.

  A feud, for lack of a better word, between the missing man and his daughter’s boyfriend. And a fight about influence—about money—between the missing man and his daughter.

  Another call to the police in October, this time from the youngest daughter, Maria, the half sister, who suspected that something was amiss.

  In a crime novel, this would have been enough to secure the convictions of both Martin Törnblad and Sara Lundblad. But the police live in the real world. A Swedish court would make short shrift of a prosecutor who came in with this kind of concoction, seeking murder convictions. Such prosecutors could in fact themselves be charged with a crime—prosecutorial misconduct.

  A central tenet of jurisprudence is corpus delicti, which, directly translated from the Latin, means “the body of the crime.”

  The essence of it is simple: no body, no murder. Many jurisdictions hold as a legal rule that a defendant’s out-of-court confession is not enough evidence to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Nor can a defendant be convicted on the testimony of an accomplice alone. In other words: there has to be tangible proof that a crime has been committed for anyone to be arrested, tried, and sentenced.

  If the police have the body, it should be possible to determine whether death occurred naturally or not. But although this sounds self-evident, it is rarely so when it comes to the law. Let’s say a body is found with a crushed skull. A collapsed cranium, protruding bone fragments, dead as a doornail. Was the person hit with a rock? Or did he or she fall headfirst from a tree, a ladder, a passing airplane?

  With the body at hand, it is also possible to assess whether various kinds of crimes can indeed be proven. To be convicted of murder, a perpetrator must have killed with premeditation and with the intent to cause death.

  Was the victim stabbed with a knife or was he shot? How many bullets? Where? In the head, leg, arm? At what distance?

  Such assessments provide the basis for the work done by police and prosecutors during a criminal investigation and provide a foundation for the court’s assessment of guilt, as well as appropriate sentencing. But when there is no body, everything is pure theory. Without a body to examine, one must resort to hypothetical reasoning.

  To convict someone of murder without a body being recovered requires staunch documentation, such as a video recording of the crime. In December 2015, two Gothenburg locals, Hassan Al-Mandlawi and Al-Amin Sultan, were sentenced to life in prison. A video from 2013 showed them being involved in slitting the throats of two captive men in Syria, so the two were convicted of murder and terrorist crimes on circumstantial evidence alone.

  There was no physical evidence at all from the scene of the crime presented in court. Nor had the murder victims been positively identified when the trial started. The prosecutor relied heavily on three videos portraying the murders to identify the two defendants. The videos were found on a USB stick belonging to Al-Amin Sultan when he was indicted
in another case.

  The two men claimed they had not even been at the scene, but the technical evaluation of the films was accepted in full. And the men were convicted, even though they were not directly involved in the subsequent slow severing of the victims’ heads from their bodies. Aiding and abetting the gruesome murders was enough for them to get life imprisonment in their home country.

  Another way to convict someone of murder without having a body is by acquiring a voice recording in which the suspect explains clearly how they did it and describes other circumstances that can be verified at the scene. Bullet holes in a wall from a certain angle, for example, or where to find the stains from the victim’s blood or other bodily fluids in certain places—in the crack between floorboards, under a rug, or perhaps behind wallpaper.

  When a body doesn’t turn up, a prosecutor must settle for trying the suspect on lesser crimes. In lieu of murder or manslaughter charges, they might focus on proving less serious offenses, such as kidnapping, aggravated assault, or the relatively new criminal offense of severely aggravated assault. In Sweden, kidnapping is punishable by up to lifetime imprisonment.

  In the disappearance of Göran Lundblad, at this stage, the case would be a convoluted construction to haul through a court, or, rather, many courts, because an appeal would be all but inevitable. And the appeal, too, would require some form of corpus delicti. Blood spatter, DNA, broken furniture, or other traces of an attack, or, alternatively, overwhelming evidence of some kind of abduction.

  Thus, they were back to where they’d started. The body was missing. There were no videos, no recorded confessions, and there was no evidence of foul play.

  Something needed to happen or the case would be dead.

  4

  VOLUNTEERS

  November 17 was an overcast day, and the Östra Funkabo schoolyard in Kalmar was teeming with volunteers. Dressed in brightly colored yellow and orange high-visibility vests, they were all chatting with each other, some quietly, some more loudly, as if they were about to embark on a school field trip. Some people knew each other already, but others were new to the group and had only come out for this particular search.

  In order to join the search, participants were required to be eighteen years old and were preferably to dress in appropriate outdoor clothing and carry something warm to drink. All volunteers had first met in the school building, where they had been briefed, divided into groups, and given maps, vests, and specific instructions:

  Walk a yard apart, focus only on your task, ignore other groups.

  If you find something that looks interesting, back up twenty to thirty yards and call one of the organizers over.

  Finally, more than two months after he had been reported missing, the first large-scale search for millionaire Göran Lundblad was about to begin.

  The volunteers had come at the call of Missing People Sweden, a group made up of volunteers who organize grid searches across the countryside in cases of missing people. Those who had appeared today on this gray Saturday afternoon were eager to lend a hand, make themselves feel good, perhaps even get their picture in the paper.

  The organization had, during its brief existence, already attracted enormous attention. When Missing People Sweden was founded on the west coast in January 2012, some laughed at the determined men and women in hi-vis vests grid-searching the remote terrain. But the laughs were cut short when the remains of thirty-one-year-old Marina Johansson from Stenungsund were found that same spring. She had, by that point, been missing for two years, feared murdered. But without a body, it had not been possible to have her boyfriend convicted of murder, manslaughter, or even kidnapping, despite a pool of blood in her bed, despite bullet holes in the bedroom wall. No body, no provable crime.

  When her remains were discovered by volunteers in the Svartedalen area in April 2012, the body was wrapped in, among other things, a mattress and a white tarpaulin. Following the find, the boyfriend was finally sentenced to sixteen years in prison, and Missing People Sweden was given a medal by the regional police authority.

  The discovery was, however, in all honesty, something of a fluke—one of the volunteers was answering the call of nature by a stand of spruce trees when he spotted something white among the branches. On the other hand, if an organized search had not brought people out into the woods that day, the police would have had very little to work with and a murderer would likely have gone unpunished.

  That case became Missing People’s breakthrough among the general public as well. After the well-publicized incident, hundreds of people joined the organization’s Facebook group. Requests for help and searches started trickling in from every corner of the country, and interested people from other counties got in touch to start their own local branches.

  Therese Tang, thirty, a mother of three from Oskarshamn, stood in the middle of it all, taking in the scene around her. At five foot eight, she did not stand out in the crowd, but she seemed to be the focal point, the hub around which everything else moved. Her long blonde hair was tucked away under a warm woolen cap, and she wore a padded jacket, hi-vis vest, and winter gloves. The oversize glasses on her nose were a memento from her time modeling for an eyeglasses company. Her ice-blue eyes surveyed her surroundings.

  She was the boss, the COO of the new local branch of Missing People that had just been opened in Kalmar. She had put out the call for volunteers a few days ago and was quite pleased with the turnout. But with so many people under her command, she was feeling the pressure. Therese was standing, lips pursed, gathering all her mental energy. It would, she knew, take a lot of focus to make this work.

  But in the schoolyard that day, it irked her that the initial search was not being done around Göran’s home in Norra Förlösa. She would have preferred to get a better feeling for who he was, his surroundings, relatives, friends, environment.

  “Before we started the search, we contacted his relatives, which is routine procedure,” Therese said. “Another member of the management team, Tomas Karlsson, contacted the daughter, Sara, initially. I know Tomas thought she was a bit odd. She simply confirmed that her dad was missing but wanted us to talk to her sister Maria instead, the one who had contacted us. He read it as Sara being a bit upset. It was the first time any of us had spoken to a relative, so we didn’t really know what it was supposed to be like.”

  Therese had also spoken to the police, of course, and asked them whether they had gotten any kind of strange vibe during their ongoing investigation. They had told Therese that they had checked with the airlines and things like that, to see if perhaps the missing man had traveled somewhere, but they had gotten no indication that he had left the country. She was puzzled and determined to find out more.

  In early November, the police had also published the missing man’s name and picture in the media, which had generated quite a few responses. Tenants from Göran’s properties outside Nyköping, among others, had gotten in touch with the police, as did neighbors and acquaintances in various places. They had all manner of things to report, but still no one had seen Göran. The police had no concrete leads.

  One theory that the police had aired in the media early on was that Göran might have left the country and somehow run into trouble or become ill. But the focus nevertheless remained on his home region, Kalmar County.

  Several local media outlets were present in the schoolyard that morning, and a handful of articles had already been written about the search in advance. The police were on site as well, to monitor every step the members of the search teams would take. The temperature was just over forty degrees Fahrenheit, and a mild southerly wind was sweeping up from inland. The volunteers wore hats and gloves to protect against the cold.

  They had all been informed that they were looking for the sixty-two-year-old farmer and forest owner, Göran Lundblad. He was not tall, around five foot six; he weighed around 175 pounds and was thus fairly thickset, but muscular, the way a person would be after a long life of working in the fields and fore
st.

  Göran kept his fine, once-blond, now-gray hair combed back. He wore glasses to correct his myopia and was quite wealthy, which at this point had been made known through the media. At the time of his disappearance, he was good for about fifty million kronor (six million dollars), a sum sufficient to pay out an average Swedish salary every month for more than one hundred fifty years. More than enough to make a person financially independent. Cashed out, it would make a fifty-foot-high stack of thousand-krona notes.

  Göran was not in perfect health, having been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, the adult-onset variety, several years earlier. He also suffered from glaucoma and had been taking blood thinners for a few years, out of concern over his heart. There was, at his age and with his health concerns, certainly some risk of him having fallen or even died during a walk through a wooded area near Kalmar.

  Around seven to eight thousand people disappear every year in Sweden. The majority are found, either when they run out of money or when they sober up—physically or psychologically—or for other, more or less rational, reasons. Of that number, only a tiny minority are found dead.

  The Göran Lundblad case was not looking optimistic. He had been missing for two and a half months. No signs of life. Hadn’t answered his phone, or in fact used it at all. It had not been possible to ping its location. He had not crossed any national borders, as far as the police could tell, and he had not yet even touched his well-stocked bank accounts.

  The inactivity in his bank accounts was not in itself a confirmation of either life or death. Göran Lundblad was a man who preferred to use cash. He had several safe-deposit boxes in Sweden where he might have stashed wads of cash, but as far as anyone could tell, he had not visited any of them.