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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  “He would often stop by for a coffee or dinner with me and my partner,” said Daniel Erixon, one of Göran’s tenants in the 2000s. “But we were never invited to his place. That’s just how he was.”

  Rodney described Göran as having been very strictly raised. “His father, Gustav, ruled that home. Göran wasn’t allowed to pick his own friends, and I assume it was the same with girlfriends. His parents probably had the final say,” said Rodney. “I was surprised when he got himself a girlfriend from abroad. But he must have had his parents’ blessing.”

  Rodney agreed with the general impression of Göran as withdrawn, a person who wouldn’t talk about his affairs until they were concluded, and a man who had become very lonely in the time before his disappearance.

  “He seemed to be troubled that he didn’t have a woman in his life,” Rodney lamented. “He never said anything specific, but it was clear he didn’t want to live alone.”

  Göran was caring toward his family, even when he didn’t need to be. When Irina’s oldest daughter completed her degree in Linköping, he helped her out by buying an apartment in Norrköping and subletting it to her, despite the fact that she wasn’t his biological daughter and not really his responsibility. His own children were also given allowances, as well as monthly contributions to their savings accounts.

  Maria had a special bond with her father while living with him at Ställe Farm to finish comprehensive school. They had a shared affliction—insomnia.

  “He had terrible sleeping habits. I’m sure it was related to stress,” Maria said. “I had trouble sleeping, too, and used to go down to the ground floor when I couldn’t sleep to see if he was up as well. If he was in bed, I would sit in the kitchen and talk to him. If the TV was on, I would join him in the living room and we would chat in there.”

  They would sit there for a few hours in the middle of the night, the teenage girl and her dad, both with too much on their minds—adulthood, school, work, the forest, the family. Chatting about everything and nothing, watching TV.

  “Sometimes he fell asleep on the couch,” Maria said.

  Even after she moved back to Norrköping for high school, they spoke on the phone several times a week, the calls sometimes lasting for hours.

  As the details about multimillionaire Göran Lundblad collected, the picture that emerged was one of a lonely person who was too busy to enjoy his life. When he disappeared in late summer 2012, his domineering father, Gustav, had not been in the ground for even five years. After his father’s passing, Göran, by then almost sixty years old, was finally allowed to make his own decisions for the first time, and to do whatever he wished with his entire fortune and all the family assets.

  In some ways, he was the epitome of the dutiful baby boomer, even though he was born at the early part of that generation: the mind-set was that you had to work hard and save your pennies. He was, after all, only one generation away from nineteenth-century Småland, a place of starvation and despair. In those days, hoarding money was the only way to survive if something went terribly wrong. And in the Lundblad family especially, it was imperative that you be able to stand on your own two feet.

  Outside Göran’s closest circle, the rest of his contacts were of a more fleeting kind, mostly tenants or people with whom he did business. Family connections were scant. In that loneliness, he relied on his firstborn, Sara, the way his father had once relied on him. Sara was the one who was supposed to take over after he was gone, tend to the inheritance, take care of the family legacy.

  His shock must have been substantial when Sara, when the time came, refused to do his bidding and bow to family tradition. Instead, in his mind, she betrayed him utterly by going out with the neighbors’ boy—the oldest son of the family who had tried to steal the Lundblad family land those many years ago.

  6

  THE SECURITY GUARD

  The first time Therese Tang heard about missing multimillionaire Göran Lundblad was in the autumn of 2012, right after starting the local branch of Missing People. It happened almost by chance.

  “I had liked the organization’s Facebook page, and someone from there spotted my name and recognized me, so they got in touch,” she said.

  Several circumstances conspired to place her at the heart of the Göran Lundblad mystery. One of them was the fact that the organization, Missing People Sweden, existed at all, that it was founded that same spring on the west coast, and that its founders were keen to spread the organization to other parts of the country.

  Another is that there was a case in her area almost immediately. Once Maria Lundblad finally felt suspicious enough to contact the police in October, believing that the Kalmar investigation was being neglected, the case popped up on Missing People’s radar.

  A third circumstance was more intangible. As it happened, an event in her own life from a couple of years earlier had profoundly unsettled Therese, and as a result, she had started to care deeply about cases of this kind.

  “I was friends with a woman I used to work with,” Therese explained. “One day, she found out her husband’s sister Linda had disappeared. The woman was from my town, so it resonated with me for that reason.”

  Therese’s husband and mother-in-law hailed from Asia, and her friend and the missing woman also shared those roots. All of them had ties to Oskarshamn, where there is a strong sense of community among the Asian residents. They help each other out when needed and consider themselves parts of the same family.

  Linda Chen’s disappearance became one of the most talked-about Swedish court cases of the new millennium. One Saturday evening in August 2009, Linda, dressed all in white, left her fiancé, Mats Alm, in their apartment to go outside. It was one week before their wedding.

  After that, she seemed to vanish from the face of the earth. The next day, Sunday, the police received a call from a worried Mats, who told them Linda had never come home.

  The police seemed only mildly interested at first. Perhaps it was a case of cold feet? But her family and friends didn’t believe that, so they joined forces. Therese’s husband and her friend used their annual leave to travel up and help Mats Alm look for his missing fiancée, Linda. They handed out fliers with her picture to anyone who might have seen something and drove around the area in ever-widening circles, asking people if they had seen Linda. It was an unsystematic search, which obviously could have been conducted in a more professional, organized, and effective manner, but what was to be done? There was no one to turn to for official help, and Mats told the volunteers that the police were dragging their heels, even though her friends and family were sure that something terrible must have happened. There was just something odd about her disappearance.

  “My friend called me after being up there for just a short while, saying that Mats was acting weird,” Therese said. “He had a manic need for control and was incredibly pedantic. If they set down a cup without a coaster, for example, he would get upset and cause a scene. They had a bad feeling about it. I tried to suggest that anyone would act weird if their partner went missing. ‘Sure, but something’s wrong,’ she replied.”

  Back in Oskarshamn, Therese followed the search and tried to help figure out what might have happened as best she could.

  “When they talked to the police, I was on the phone, explaining certain words and concepts and such. It was incredibly frustrating to try to help from so far away. She [Linda’s sister-in-law to be] asked me for help as well: ‘Since your blog has so many readers, can’t you send something out?’”

  Therese, who at the time had a hugely popular wedding blog, posted a call for help and information, along with a link to a newspaper article about the disappearance. Enough people shared her post that even more people started looking for Linda, but she remained missing.

  Linda’s relatives made some progress in their search after a few days, when they came across a potentially promising witness. He said he was out riding his bike when he saw a man usher a woman matching Linda’s description into a
dark car with tinted windows. The police stepped up their investigation at that point and reclassified the case as a kidnapping.

  Linda’s partner, Mats, went on TV to talk about the case, crying openly during prime time. But although he denied everything, he continued to behave strangely, according to Linda’s relatives. He went out drinking with his friends the day before the wedding was meant to take place.

  “What I remember most clearly is probably when they were out with Mats, driving around outside Falun, looking,” said Therese. “They stopped by a patch of forest they have driven past several times before. Linda’s brother asked if they should get out and search it, but Mats said he’d already been there. So they drove on. And it turned out that’s where she was. Of course he had already been there.”

  More than a month after the disappearance, Linda’s dead body was found behind a rock near a parking spot in a patch of forest. The discovery happened under mysterious circumstances. First Mats went missing—he failed to turn up to a scheduled police interview—only to later appear in the middle of the woods, acting confused and with burns on his clothes and body.

  He claimed he had been kidnapped by two “Chinese men”—drugged with white pills and abducted. A series of circumstances contradicted him—the most glaring one being when pictures of him turned up that had been taken in Stockholm during the time he claimed to have been held captive.

  “He was clearly lying about being kidnapped by Chinese people,” Therese said. “The Chinese men supposedly dumped him in the woods near Linda and set him on fire, but he woke up and managed to get away.”

  Mats’s story contained any number of other odd elements: for example, that he supposedly had information from a fortune-teller or medium about where his partner could be found.

  Once the body had been found, Mats was finally arrested, charged with the murder of Linda Chen, and was put on trial. But the case built by police and prosecutors collapsed. Linda’s body was in a bad state—there were, among other things, bears in the area. The investigators suspected strangulation, but vital parts of the bones and soft tissue of the neck were missing, so the forensic doctors were unable to even establish a cause of death.

  Theoretically, her death could have been an accident. At least that was the view of the court, which did not consider Mats’s guilt proven beyond a reasonable doubt. He was, however, convicted for crimes against the peace of the grave, meaning for handling a dead body. Instead of serving a lifetime for murder, he was sentenced to a mere eighteen months in prison.

  Therese was furious at society’s apathy in the face of what seemed so crystal clear to most people with any insight into the case: a murderer had just gotten off scot-free. Innocent in the strictest sense of legal procedure, but guilty beyond all reason.

  “It could have ended very differently if she had been found sooner,” Therese said. “Then she could have had justice. That was when my interest in missing people began. I wanted to be able to help where there was a real need. The police do great work, but they don’t have the resources to solve everything, especially not to search for a deceased person.”

  Consequently, when Therese was contacted by Missing People at the end of the summer of 2012, it was as though a missing puzzle piece had finally fallen into place.

  “Are you really interested?” they had asked.

  “‘Absolutely,’ I replied. ‘Fantastic,’ they said. ‘You’re in a region where we need people. What are your qualifications?’ ‘I don’t really have any,’ I replied, but I told them about the Linda Chen case. And that was that.”

  By the autumn of 2012, Therese could look back on a more eventful life than most, even though she was only thirty. Over the course of her relatively short life, she had been a fashion designer and had had many gigs as a fashion stylist, all a result of a short but successful modeling career. After that part of her career life was over, she went on to add many more skills to her résumé.

  Therese grew up in Mönsterås, in Kalmar County, with divorced parents and a couple of siblings. She spent most of her time with her mother, but her father bought a house fifty yards away to stay as involved as he could.

  “I tried a couple of different high school programs,” Therese said. “First I started a tourism program in Högsby. It was brand new, and they took all the students on a two-week trip to Spain. That was obviously a really good time, but the education was terrible. Half the class dropped out after the first term.”

  Instead, she arranged an internship at a stud farm in Rävemåla. Several of the animals were world-class national-team horses. Her plan was to transfer to the equine high school program at Ingelstorp Agricultural College outside Kalmar. She had owned a horse back in Mönsterås for years and felt at home in the stable. Safe.

  “It was among the horses I found peace and quiet and was left alone,” she explained. “That was where I could just be. If I’d had a bad day, I would ride my moped out to the stable and just sit there and cry. It was my haven as a teenager.”

  But she soon realized that, while horses made a fine hobby, they were less conducive to making a decent living, so she abandoned those plans and dropped out of school.

  “While I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, I worked at a nursing home. And then I got pregnant.”

  Her boyfriend, Magnus, worked in agriculture, and at the time, Therese was taking temp jobs as a care assistant. They lived in a house her sister had inherited. It was hardly the ideal situation for starting a family.

  “We had been together for quite a while and were serious for two people our age. I was eighteen weeks pregnant when I found out, so having an abortion would not have been entirely straightforward. At the same time, I was terrified of telling my mom. I mean, I was eighteen, a child myself. We had been to the ultrasound appointment and seen the baby move in there. After that, I took pictures and sent them to his parents, my sister, my dad, and finally my mother. ‘Here’s a picture of your grandchild,’ I wrote.”

  Then Therese unplugged her phone.

  “Mom was on my answering machine as soon as she got the letter: ‘Call me back, damn it.’ And: ‘Therese, I know you’re there. Pick up now or I’m coming over.’ But just an hour or so later, she relented. She called in tears: ‘I’m going to be a grandmother.’”

  Waiting out her family’s fury proved a smart move.

  After the death of one of Magnus’s relatives, he and Therese were given a farm a couple of miles inland, in the middle of nowhere. They planned to farm and raise beef cattle. But before the farming plans had a chance to bear fruit, the new family broke.

  “Our daughter Emilia was barely eight months old when I found out that Magnus was cheating on me with my best friend. I had known for some time that something was wrong. He was distant, and I suspected something was going on.”

  Therese took her firstborn and left both the farm and her partner. In May 2002, at just twenty years old, she moved back in with her mother. It would be several years before she and her daughter’s father were able to resume regular relations.

  Therese worked as a care assistant in Oskarshamn to pay the bills and establish a new routine, a new role. Not a farmer’s wife, but a single mother with shared custody. Then, during a night out in Oskarshamn in 2003, something unexpected happened.

  “I was on my way out for a night on the town when a guy approached me and said, ‘You’re good-looking.’ What does one say to that? I just replied, ‘Okay, thanks,’ and was about to walk away, but he was determined, handed me a business card, told me he was a photographer, and asked me to call him the following Monday.”

  The man turned out to be exactly what he said he was; he worked for a serious modeling agency. She had her picture taken and quickly built up a portfolio. It was one of those on-the-street discoveries you only ever see in films.

  This was not, as Therese immediately realized, the beginning of an international modeling career. But still, it was completely different from what she’d thought her
future would hold.

  “I ended up booking quite a lot of jobs over the years, for various catalogs, Swedish magazines, even farming magazines. And I did fashion shows for hairdressers and stylists. I probably stood out among the other models. I wasn’t skinny or anorexic; I had curves and shapes. It was interesting to experience that world. I had a chance to see the different sides of the industry that people have preconceived notions about—people snorting cocaine, models with serious eating disorders, all that bullshit. But mostly just good things.”

  Extra money, a glimpse of glamour and of what the wider world looked like outside of her small town. She averaged one job a month for most of the 2000s, not enough to live off for a single mother, but an exciting break from everyday life. She was able to travel, see new sights, have interesting gigs, and meet new people.

  When a restaurant in Oskarshamn was looking for waiting staff in May 2013, Therese applied and was hired straight away.

  “That was where I met Richard. It was his mother’s place; he worked there too. He was good-looking and so kind—an enormous security for me in life. He was my knight in shining armor. We became very close because the restaurant was so busy. I worked more than sixty hours a week.”

  Over the next few years, Therese was given more responsibility at the restaurant. She did the work of a restaurant manager, being in charge of both staff and ordering. She worked those long hours, from five in the morning to late at night, while also finding the time to become a mother again. Twice.

  “Havannah arrived in 2006. There are not a lot of people by that name in Sweden; it was pretty unique.”

  Therese’s daughter had an early brush with death. At only two weeks old, she had a violent reaction while breastfeeding. Her breathing just stopped, and she was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. It was to be the first of many visits.

  “The doctors didn’t know what had gone wrong, but they thought she might have had residual amniotic fluid blocking her airway. They didn’t consider allergies until she was six months old. When they tested her, they knew right away that’s what the problem was.”