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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  Then there was the Swiss account, which had only recently been brought to the attention of the Swedish tax authorities, via a so-called voluntary disclosure, the kind of thing wealthy people do when they need to repatriate money for private reasons, or when they can sense the Tax Agency or the Economic Crime Authority breathing down their necks, now that Switzerland had started cooperating in the hunt for tax refugees. But there was no information about withdrawals from the rich alpine nation either.

  Therese Tang and her volunteers had been told that the missing person’s Chrysler had been found parked in the Funkabo area, just a third of a mile to the east of them, outside the apartment he maintained as an extra home for when he was in the city. The police had searched the car several times without finding anything. It contained keys to some of Göran’s properties, an old hotel bill from a road trip, a handful of parking receipts, and various other sundries that tend to accumulate in cars. No suicide note, no clues.

  Finding Göran’s car there was hardly mysterious per se. He had owned his apartment in the area for twenty-five years, a studio of 410 square feet on the second floor, with a living room with French doors, a kitchen, a walk-in closet, and a bathroom. But it was strictly an overnight apartment, as he was registered as residing in Norra Förlösa, ten miles further north, where he owned farmland, wooded land, and houses.

  Although he had last been seen alive out in the countryside, the car had been found here, so it was natural for Missing People to focus on Funkabo first.

  “We had printed out some maps and divided up the area,” Therese said, “but it wasn’t remotely as well planned as it should have been. For example, we didn’t know how long it would take to do a search, that you can only clear about two-thirds of a mile per hour. But a few of us organizers had prepared as well as we could, and lots of people came, so we just had to roll with it.”

  On a noticeboard in the schoolyard, there was a picture of Göran holding a dog in his arms and looking to the right.

  Kenneth Hallberg, one of the volunteers, had brought his dog Akke with him. In an interview with Swedish Radio, he said, “Akke’s a trained tracking dog. He usually turns up interesting things in the woods. I never considered not lending a hand here today. After all, we were heading out for a walk anyway.”

  Eva-Lotta Johansson, who lived in the area, told the local paper Barometern, “I saw on Facebook that there was going to be a search, and I felt good about being able to come and help out. It’s also exciting to see how they organize one of these searches.”

  It could almost have been mistaken for a large family outing on this crisp November Saturday, albeit an outing with hi-vis vests and a grave undertone.

  At around eleven that morning, the group of about seventy volunteers was ready to set out. Therese blinked a few times and collected herself. She took a deep breath, got everyone’s attention, and then started sending the volunteers out in smaller patrols.

  The Funkabo neighborhood, estimated to be about eighty acres, has just over 2,700 registered residents. It consists of a handful of clusters of detached houses, but mostly blocks of apartments. The majority of the buildings are from the fifties, when the residential co-operative association Riksbyggen invested across the country, a decade or so before the construction explosion of Sweden’s so-called Million Program, where a million apartments with affordable rents were constructed across the land.

  In Funkabo, you will find three-story buildings of yellow brick, plenty of parking, and leafy bicycle paths meandering between the buildings. There is a pizzeria at one end, a bicycle shop, and a school with a soccer field. Every small Swedish town has its own version of a neighborhood like this one.

  A belt of trees, between 100 and 150 yards wide, flanks one side of the area. Distance and topography were important factors for the volunteers. Göran’s body could be more or less concealed right there, among the trees. At the very least, there might be a clue there to help explain what had happened to him.

  This was a busy area, with people coming through all the time, so any tracks going to or from a car, bike, or house would likely have been erased by now. Tracking dogs would therefore be of little use. If the missing man had lain dead somewhere among the houses, he would have been found by now. That much was certain. What remained was to look for belongings, such as phones, wallets, papers, or glasses, provided they had not been destroyed by the elements already. The volunteers began their search in the heart of Funkabo and moved out from there within a radius of about a mile and a quarter, paying special attention to bodies of water and wooded areas.

  Over the past few months, there would have been countless joggers, young people sneaking a cigarette, and for that matter, even hardened criminals lingering among the trees. But maybe not everywhere. People have been found dead in the strangest places in terrain like this. Like Marina Johansson, in that stand of spruce trees, barely visible. And even if someone had spotted the body of the missing person, they might not have realized what they were looking at, or they might have been too afraid to report it. The body could still be there.

  At least Therese and her colleagues must believe as much. They had not yet been informed of the covert police work that had been taking place behind the scenes. Two weeks earlier, Göran’s apartment in Funkabo had been cordoned off for a full crime-scene investigation. Forensic search dogs had been brought in to sniff around just two days before the search. And that same morning, the police had been given a warrant to search Göran’s permanent home in Norra Förlösa and to open his safe-deposit box. They had also been granted permission to tap the phones of the missing person’s daughter Sara and her boyfriend, Martin. But Therese and her volunteers didn’t know any of these details.

  Notwithstanding the police’s recommendations regarding search areas, Therese had already been planning to widen the search to include a path between Norra Förlösa and the nearby neighborhood of Lindsdal in Kalmar. In order to have time to cover it, though, they would need a lot more than the seventy-two volunteers who had joined them that day.

  They had been sent equipment from Missing People in Gothenburg the day before—vests, writing boards, and flashlights. Even Therese’s mother was there helping out, dividing people into groups and registering them. Therese then instructed each group on how to conduct a search and what to do if they found anything.

  “Everyone should line up, arm’s length apart. The person in the middle keeps an eye on things and is responsible for everyone walking in a straight line. The people at the end mark the path taken to make sure the areas overlap and nothing is missed.”

  Therese had been given strict orders by the police that her volunteers must not pick up anything they come across. They were just to mark it on the ground and on a map.

  The volunteers spread out across the area and the search went off without a hitch, aside from when Kenneth Hallberg’s dog Akke caught the scent of some animal, probably a hare, and dragged his owner off the path and into the woods. Kenneth landed headfirst in the rocky undergrowth and had to be patched up by his fellow volunteers.

  The groups even had time to move beyond the immediate Funkabo area. They searched the wooded neighborhood of Tallhagen, at the foot of the Öland Bridge, which leads over to Sweden’s second-largest island, Öland. They also searched farther out along the paths to Svinö Island, a recreational area by the Kalmar Sound with designated camping sites, jogging trails, and picnic tables. Despite the peaceful setting, the mood remained somber throughout. At the back of everyone’s mind, of course, was the possibility of finding a corpse.

  “You can’t just look down at the ground when you’re doing a grid search,” Therese had told the volunteers before they set out. “You have to look everywhere: up and to the sides. For all you know, the person hanged themselves from a tree.”

  It is not unusual for suicidal people to take to the woods. They want to be by themselves, away from people, alone with their decision. That was perhaps particularly likely in this case, be
cause a forest owner/worker would feel safe and at home among the trees. But if that were the case, shouldn’t he have opted to stay near his home—in the area around Norra Förlösa? Therese couldn’t shake the suspicion that they were wasting their time in Kalmar. Sure enough, the combing of the woods did not turn up any dead bodies that day.

  Therese was mildly disappointed there had been no time to search the path leading north toward Norra Förlösa. She summed up the day to the journalists: “We have found a few cell phones here and there, but otherwise there have been no relevant discoveries. The turnout was great, and everything went smoothly. If we had had another fifty people, we would have been able to cover the whole area. But we did the most crucial parts.”

  All in all, Missing People volunteers that day found fourteen cell phones, which indicated that they had been thorough. Locating dark electronic gadgets in the undergrowth, fallen leaves, grass, and shrubbery is challenging.

  “One of the groups also found a large trunk full of clothes in the woods,” Therese reported. “It contained a lot of ladies’ lingerie and also a man’s shoe. It was not considered relevant to Göran’s disappearance, but it certainly was odd.”

  At the on-ramp to the Öland Bridge, another group found bone fragments, leading to much excitement among the volunteers, but the bones turned out to belong to a deer.

  Göran Lundblad did not appear, dead or alive.

  The Östran newspaper wrote:

  Now Missing People will consider whether to continue the search in locations not yet checked. They may also choose to conduct searches in Stigtomta outside Nyköping [180 miles north], where Göran Lundblad owns two farms with several tenants.

  He is said to have visited Stigtomta during the days before his disappearance.

  It was a successful first search operation for Missing People Kalmar, Therese felt, despite everything. The organization was up and running, people seemed eager to get involved, the police accepted the assistance, and the seventy-odd volunteers did an admirable job during the search.

  As she drove the fifty miles back to her home in Oskarshamn, she finally started to relax. She was exhausted, yet there was so much left to learn, so much to sort out. But as of that night, Therese had absolutely no idea what role she would come to play in the nineteen-months-long drama that had only just begun to unfold.

  5

  GOLD RUSH

  In the middle of the nineteenth century, countless gold rushes flared up along the west coast of the American continent and continued until well into the next century. Gold fever drew tens of thousands of people from all over the world to places like Yreka, Shasta, and Coloma in California; Dawson City in Canada’s Yukon territory; and Fairbanks and Nome, Alaska.

  In Nome, where the Snake River empties into the sea, one of the world’s most accessible gold deposits was discovered in September 1898. Lined up at the water’s edge, the prospectors panned nuggets right out of the stream.

  According to family legend, it was here, in what would one day become America’s biggest state, the Lundbladian fortune was begun. One of the many adventurers traveling to Alaska in the first few years of the twentieth century was named Knut Lundblad. He hailed from Balebo in Kalmar County and intended to make a future for himself. Not by following the stream of migrants from Sweden looking to put down roots in the US or Canada, but by saving up a tidy nest egg to bring back home.

  For a competent man in possession of good health and his own shovel, pickax, and pan, the chances of making money in the wilderness were good. That is, with a bit of luck—and if the gunpowder in his rifle stayed dry.

  Knut Lundblad didn’t make his fortune all at once; it took him several trips to the US to scrape together the capital he needed to invest in forest and land in Sweden. But when he stepped off the trans-Atlantic steamer for the last time in his home country, he had enough money to buy his first property, Rogsta Farm in Stigtomta, around sixty miles southwest of Stockholm.

  Knut would tell countless stories of bear hunting in the forests of Alaska and the trials and tribulations of gold miners and adventurers. A bear pelt and several other mementos from his journeys held pride of place in the main house at Rogsta. He was the talk of the town. It was said about him that he cast his own gold ingots and hid them.

  The new seat of the Lundblad family, Stigtomta, in southern Södermanland, is home to just under two thousand people today. Ancient burial mounds and stone-lined fire pits prove that people have resided here since the Bronze Age. It is a landscape with a long history going back to before the Swedish nations were united under one king and the name “Sweden” had ever been uttered.

  The Lundblad farm was located outside Stigtomta proper, with Hallbo Lake and Yngaren Lake to its west and southwest. From Rogsta’s first-floor balcony, during the first few decades of the twentieth century, Knut had a view across the water, glimpsing Stigtomta to the south, no more than a couple of miles away but hidden behind trees, and the road to Vrena, Bettna, and Katrineholm to the north.

  Knut’s son, Gustav Adolf Oscar Lundblad, who went by the name of Jösse, would be pivotal to the family’s continuing wealth. He was born in 1922 as one of four children to Knut and his wife, Signe. Having trained as an engineer, Jösse became an inventor and entrepreneur.

  He was known among his kin as a restless soul, tough in business, if not outright greedy. His own mother called him a “devil” in business and warned the rest of the family not to cross him.

  When he was around twenty, Gustav founded the company Patenta. It was the 1940s, and the Second World War had just come to an end. He had settled down in Segeltorp, a southwestern suburb of Stockholm, and married Maj, a woman with accounting skills who had studied at the Stockholm School of Economics. Among his inventions were a bathroom mirror that could be pulled in and out like an accordion, and a thermostat. But his most eccentric and successful product was dubbed the Dollar Pipe, a kind of tobacco pipe.

  It may seem odd to grant a patent on a habit as ancient as smoking. Prehistoric remains of tobacco smoking have been found in a pipe in the US. Christopher Columbus was the one who brought the tobacco plant back to Europe, where the use quickly spread. Clay pipes, corncob pipes, meerschaum pipes, and every imaginable type of smoking implement has, thus, been used in Sweden for hundreds of years. But Gustav Lundblad had found a new way to utilize modern materials. Patent number 212646 at the Swedish Patent and Registration Office registers a “device adjoining bowl to shank in tobacco pipe as well as process for the manufacture of bowl with said device, and the tool used therefor.”

  The patent owner, G. A. Lundblad in Segeltorp, had solved an inherent problem of the world’s most popular pipe material, briar. Briar is cut from the root burl of the tree heath plant, Erica arborea, which is naturally fire resistant. It is also a hard and compact wood, which makes carving an effective and efficient bowl difficult.

  Tar and tobacco residue tend to gather in the bend of the pipe. Anyone who has ever used a pipe cleaner knows how gluey the tar becomes. In addition, finding sufficiently large pieces of briar to make a pipe bowl is not entirely straightforward. The quality of the large pieces varies widely.

  Gustav Lundblad wanted to manufacture only the bowl itself out of briar, then attach it to a plastic shank and stem. That way, the smoke would still be generated in the wooden chamber and thus retain the flavor smokers want. But the construction as a whole would be cheaper to manufacture, if nothing else because smaller pieces of dense wood are in more plentiful supply.

  He was also granted a patent for the machine used to manufacture his pipes, so he set up his own workshop. The patent is valid in the Nordic countries as well as in the US. When added to the income from his other ventures, Gustav Lundblad’s modernized tobacco pipe made him enough money to allow him to invest in a number of properties in Stockholm, around Rogsta, and down in Kalmar County, in the home region of his father, Knut.

  The Dollar Pipe is still being produced in a couple of versions today; the mate
rials come from Italy and the Baltic countries. Four manufacturing sessions per year are required to meet demand from the distributor, tobacco giant Swedish Match. Dollar Pipe is a modest cash cow, bringing in no more than a few hundred thousand kronor a year. The pipes are sold for about one hundred kronor (twelve dollars) to Swedish Match, who offer them to the end consumer for somewhere between two and three times that amount.

  The Lundblad family owned land in Norra Förlösa as early as the 1950s—the decade of the great modernization. The Second World War was over, and a new Europe was being built. In the years after the war, neutral Sweden experienced an unprecedented rise in the quality of life, largely thanks to industries that, having escaped wartime destruction, were running full speed to supply the reconstruction of the rest of Europe.

  At that time, Göran Lundblad was still a little boy; he turned nine years old just before Christmas 1958. During these years, a feud flared up between neighbors in Norra Förlösa, one that would fester and eventually change forever the course of both his life and those of his loved ones.

  Beyond a bend in the road in Norra Förlösa, among groves and fields, approximately thirty feet above sea level, you will find Skyttelund Farm. The surrounding land doesn’t look like much. Three to five acres of forest, about five acres of farmland—a blanket of soil over densely packed loam.

  But this is farm country, land-owning country, going back generations. Every piece of land counts. And this particular piece is at the heart of a dispute that has affected several generations.

  When the Swedish National Land Survey surveyed the Förlösa area in the 1950s, a small section was missed, a parcel of land sandwiched between the Lundblads’ property and that of their neighbors, the Törnblads. The parcel was not deeded and therefore didn’t formally belong to either neighbor. Both laid claim to the land, which was the size of about three or four football fields. “Poorer than average,” the Land Survey’s archives note about the quality of the soil.