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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  Therese had no notion of this as she continued breastfeeding her newborn.

  “I wanted to make sure she ate, but the whole time I was forcing down more of what she was reacting to. It was horrific. All her skin was peeling off during the first four months; there were wounds and scabs all over her body.”

  At six months, Therese’s daughter suffered a pseudoseizure. It was something many parents would be familiar with: a child hurts themselves, is frightened or disappointed by something, or is admonished by a parent, and they launch into a fit. The world falls apart, and the child screams until they are blue in the face, perhaps even fainting or convulsing.

  But this was something else. Something worse.

  “Havannah had these attacks when she was six and seven months old and had just started crawling and moving about on her own. But she wouldn’t scream or anything when she hurt herself; she would just pass out in my arms and stop breathing. It was an unusual presentation; there was only one other registered case in Sweden. She would kind of just shut down—inhale until she passed out.”

  For Therese and her husband, parenthood became a balancing act on the edge of disaster.

  “I remember when Richard turned thirty. She was three years old then and had an episode. I did CPR on her for almost seven minutes. It was horrible watching the life drain out of her. We lived with this enormous fear. How could we even risk leaving her in day care? It felt like I was the only one who could fix her when something went wrong. It made me really overprotective. I’m always trying to anticipate the worst—keep everything under control all the time.”

  Two years later, in 2008, Emilia and Havannah got a new sibling—a boy named Dexter. They again had hoped to find a different name, something memorable. One night, they were watching the TV show Dexter, and the name struck them both. Although she and her husband did not necessarily want to honor a convicted violent offender, their son’s name was indeed taken from Dexter Morgan from the eponymous TV series—a fictional serial killer who leads a double life, as a blood-spatter analyst mapping out crimes and crime scenes during office hours and killing evildoers in his spare time.

  The same year the Linda Chen drama unfolded, another disaster struck the Tang family. Emilia’s stepmother, Anna-Karin, was found dead on the kitchen floor in her home.

  “She had a daughter with another man, but social services had already picked her up,” Therese explained.

  Therese got involved, even though it was not her own child. After going several rounds against social services, the child was at least allowed to celebrate Christmas with the Tangs.

  “I had five hundred kronor (sixty dollars) in my wallet and we had no Christmas presents for her, so we went to the nearest superstore and got as many little things as that money would buy us just so there would be a lot of presents. We cried and laughed and felt very close. It was intense, and really hard. She’s part of our family as far as I’m concerned, even though she’s not my biological child. I have fought social services a lot for her. Right is right.”

  “What happened with Anna-Karin was a milepost in my life,” Therese said. “I think it made me realize how important family is, that you have to cherish your life because you never know what tomorrow will bring. Live in the now and be happy about what you do have, not about what you could have. I started reevaluating what I was doing. I obviously wasn’t getting any younger; I was about to turn thirty. That’s when you start earning less in the modeling world and, eventually, you get replaced. What could I do to stay in that business for as long as possible?”

  Therese decided to start training to be a hairdresser and makeup artist, styling models, doing their hair and makeup, instead of modeling herself. In that context, she was noticed by a designer from Milan.

  “He invited me down to help with various outfits. This guy worked with both industrial design and fashion. He was A-list, so it was really cool to be part of his projects.”

  During 2010 and 2011, Therese traveled back and forth between Sweden and Milan for various jobs, such as the product launch of a big Italian makeup brand.

  “It was the first time I had done this professionally. It opened up a whole new world for me—an alluring one. Travel, hotels, successful people.”

  But back in Oskarshamn, her family beckoned—three children, a husband, and a newly built house. The question was growing ever more insistent: What is more important in life? Relationships, family, work? What is true success?

  Or put a different way: What is true happiness for a person who feels like half of her is missing when she falls asleep alone in a hotel room with her children six hundred miles away?

  “I spent a lot of time on planes and buses during those years. It gives you time to think. I’ve always found it hard to be away from the children. Working’s one thing; it keeps your mind busy. But then, when you’re alone . . . It made me restless, and I wasn’t enjoying myself.”

  In late summer 2011, she decided to quit. Models, styling hair and makeup and clothes: it was a decent side gig, but not the stuff to build everyday life on.

  “I didn’t want to lose my family. So I had to stop and consider: What jobs are available to me in Oskarshamn now, immediately?”

  Kalmar County is dominated by manufacturing industries, which can mean monotonous work on an assembly line for many locals. The more qualified work requires more education and experience. One of the county’s biggest employers was the Scania truck factory in Oskarshamn, established as early as 1946 as a supplier and later bought by the automotive giant. But for a female high school dropout of almost thirty, it would be difficult to find work there.

  There certainly was no niche for someone with Therese’s muddled résumé of restaurant work, styling, and modeling among Kalmar’s smaller employers either. But on the nearby Simpevarp peninsula, there was a nuclear power station with its three reactors.

  “One of Richard’s friends got me in there for an outage job. You can make forty-five thousand dollars a year after taxes. Long shifts and fairly heavy work, but the pay’s good. They gave me a job as a decontamination technician. It was very different from anything I’d done before. It was weird getting the question: ‘Are you planning to have more children in the near future?’ I told them no, so they gave me the job.”

  Instead of doing makeup in Milan, she was now a heavy-duty cleaner in a potentially radioactive environment at a nuclear power plant.

  “One of the units was called the submarine. It was a kind of cooling element that extended something like eight hundred feet down into the ground. You needed a headlamp to get down there, because there’s no lighting. You were climbing up and down narrow rungs in a wet, slippery environment. We wore orange overalls with an additional suit over the top, a face mask to filter the air, and doubled-up gloves and shoe covers. If anything were to break, we could have been exposed to life-threatening substances.”

  The elements in the submarine, essentially huge tanklike objects where heated steam is condensed back into liquid form when the power station is running, weigh somewhere in the range of nine tons.

  “I’m small enough that I was able to get in under them. The idea was to clean and then vacuum out all the water. Try to imagine what it was like pulling yourself along under these huge tanks, flat on your back. It was a tight fit, just two inches between my nose and the metal. That’s where we worked, with only the extremely faint lighting from someone shining a flashlight down one of the few gaps.”

  One day, a water pipe burst right next to Therese.

  “The panic. I couldn’t get up, couldn’t run. Couldn’t even crawl. And there was nothing to grab to pull myself out. The opening for getting out was ten or fifteen yards away. The only way to get there was to slide there on my back, heave my body in that direction, and push forward. Meanwhile, the water was rising all around me. The two guys on my crew, standing up at the top, kept calling out: stay calm, stay calm. I was not staying calm. The water was up to my cheek and still rising. I’m not
someone who’s easily spooked, but that really rattled me. I didn’t go down there after that.”

  Somehow, the experience didn’t deter Therese from continuing to work at the power station. In April 2012, the plant’s security provider was hiring security officers and welcomed female applicants.

  “I had no idea what it entailed, but I figured it would be fun to do the training, to learn something new. It seemed an interesting job, with all kinds of psychological drills and fire drills. And we were taught about how people react under pressure—to always be prepared. It suited me.”

  In the spring of 2012, Therese walked through the well-manned security checkpoint—“like an airport but so much bigger”—in a new capacity. She was now certified and approved by the Swedish Security Service.

  From the finer salons of Milan to the concrete floors of Simpevarp, where you were called for a medical screening if your dosimeter went off, where you wore a uniform and carried a nightstick that you had to be prepared to use. And where a perfect workday was one where nothing happens.

  One day in April, she and the other recruits, numbering about twenty, were brought in for orientation. They were given study materials, uniforms, personal dosimeters, and a tour of their vast new workplace.

  In the building housing reactor 3 alone, there were approximately fifteen hundred rooms, thirty-five hundred doors, and winding corridors, stairs, and passages. The building extended one hundred feet down into the ground and rose over three hundred feet above it. The reactor itself was two hundred feet tall and the size of a soccer field.

  Almost all the rooms were windowless. After turning a few corners in the corridors and walking down a flight of stairs and through a door, most of the recruits had already lost their bearings. It took them forever to learn their way around.

  One of the more experienced security officers present at the orientation was Anders Lindfors.

  “I was going up on the roofs to test the alarms after meeting the new recruits,” he said. “Two of them said immediately that they wanted to come with me and learn by watching. One of them was Therese. After only a few weeks on the job, she started talking about Missing People. They were all over the news at the time. She wanted me on board, because I know my way around and have spent a lot of time navigating the wilderness. It didn’t take me long to realize that she was special. Interested and eager to get involved. And she doesn’t let things go. Once she’s made her mind up, she never gives up.”

  7

  GOOD ENOUGH

  At the end of the 2000s, Sara Lundblad was a young person with a clear path in life. She was the heir of the Lundbladian multimillion-krona empire of forest, land, and properties. But she had to work for it. If her father, Göran, was his father’s serf all his adult life, then Sara was now his.

  She completed the economic track of the social sciences high school program and then worked alongside her father in the forest for a year to learn the business. She was taught forest management, planting, felling, and the subsequent handling of the timber.

  Her father wrote this in a reference around that time:

  She has become increasingly interested in the business and is now part owner and therefore wants a solid education. Her duties and work as a trainee on the farm can be verified by many people, such as the Swedish Forest Agency as well as various buyers within the forestry business, neighbors, and lumber merchants.

  After high school, she studied for a year in Värnamo in the so-called foundational forestry program—an advanced vocational program. The move across the county border, about 125 miles from home, was another step on the road toward becoming a tree farmer. The students there learned concrete things like how to best operate a chainsaw and a brush cutter and how to drive a logging machine over roadless terrain. They also studied theory: how forest management can maximize site productivity and how to deal with the administrative side of a business.

  In the autumn of 2009, Sara embarked on a two-year forest technician program at Gammelkroppa School of Forestry in Filipstad. She was now even farther from home, but the program would lead to a license to practice, with an optional third year to follow if she chose. The local paper reported in an article that the 2009 school year marked a revival for the one-hundred-year-old school; that fall, they had twenty-five students—compared to eighteen the previous year—accepted after an initial aptitude test.

  Among the people interviewed was Sara Lundblad. She told the paper that she had learned how to drive a forwarder on her family’s farm in the Kalmar area, but that she was attending Gammelkroppa to learn a proper profession.

  “I’m going to leave the forwarder in the garage unless someone else wants to drive it. That’s just how it is,” she said.

  A determined young person with a plan, who wanted to earn a bachelor of forestry degree and then work on the family farm.

  A photograph in the industry magazine Skogsaktuellt from September 2, 2009, shows a young, golden-haired woman in profile. Sara was hugging a compendium of books and pamphlets, paying rapt attention to her teacher, who was holding up various plants: water plantain, tufted loosestrife, and calla lily.

  During her time in Värnamo, she visited her father and sister almost every other weekend and during the holidays, and she talked to her dad on the phone almost every day. But while studying in Filipstad, her home visits became less frequent. It was an almost 250-mile drive back to Norra Förlösa through the forests of Värmland.

  A degree in forestry comes in handy when dealing with other people in the family business. But things came up, and Sara didn’t even finish the first two years of the program. She dropped out after the 2010 autumn term.

  She wasn’t doing as well in her classes as she’d hoped, and after her grades fell, she decided she no longer liked it at the college. And then there was the boyfriend at home in Förlösa, who had become a serious long-distance love affair.

  When the relationship with Martin Törnblad, three years her junior, began in 2009, Sara was twenty-one years old. Like her father, she was fairly short—around five foot three—and slight. Even so, she was able to carry out the heavy manual labor required in the forest and the long hours in the pipe workshop. She would work eleven, twelve hours a day, if necessary.

  Most days, Sara was functionally dressed in a simple top and pants. A summer picture shows her next to a picnic blanket in a clearing. Slanted sunlight illuminates the scene; she is on the ground, turning toward the camera, wearing jeans and a baggy top. A basket next to her, coffee in a thermos, and a big bottle of Coca-Cola.

  One or two of the countless people who would offer their opinions after Göran’s disappearance described Sara as badly dressed and unconcerned about her appearance. Others talked about her as a “young, attractive but reserved” woman. Her hair was mousy; she bleached it on occasion, as some summer pictures show a blonde. Her face was heart-shaped, without identifying marks. She had gray-blue eyes and a cautious manner, as though she didn’t quite trust anyone. In that respect, she was fairly similar to her father.

  “Sara is a kindhearted person. Shy. She is a person who is difficult to read,” her stepmother, Irina, said. “A careful person who it’s hard to get close to. She doesn’t let a lot of people in.”

  Sara was sometimes described as awkward, unfamiliar with the world, or ignorant about how things work outside of her home and the forest. She stuck close to her father, Göran. He was her mentor, in control of everything. In charge.

  “I never interacted much with Sara,” said tenant farmer Mats Råberg. “She always walked one step behind Göran and didn’t say much.”

  Cecilia Eriksson was one of the police officers who participated in the search for Göran in the autumn of 2012. “My impression was that Sara was fairly lonely. She had met her boyfriend because he lived on a farm nearby.”

  Others described her as slow-spoken, but mostly because she didn’t blather on, preferring to think before she spoke. They said she was smart, that she chose her words carefully.
She rarely smiled, but she did not lack a sense of humor. At the end of the day, she had been raised to be a businesswoman. An heir.

  The impressions of Sara Lundblad varied widely, as impressions tend to when people extrapolate from superficial interactions with someone. Very few people ever got close to her.

  Doris Nydahl, one of the Stigtomta tenants, eventually became one of Sara’s confidants. She had this to say: “Sara grew up very sheltered. I don’t know how many boyfriends she’s had, but it can’t be many. I reckon she met Martin from next door and that she may not have had much to compare him with.”

  Martin Törnblad was eighteen and attending Ingelstorp Agricultural College west of Kalmar when he and Sara started going out. He was still a teenager, but of legal age. He had two younger brothers, Mikael and Oscar. They were farmer’s sons, children, but by this time, at least Martin was used to doing the work of an adult. His days started at 4:00 a.m. or earlier, milking the cows. After that, he kept busy with general farming chores, such as feeding, mucking out, and maintenance.

  Martin was a child of divorce as well, or became one soon after he started dating Sara. His mother chose to leave the farm for several reasons. The last straw was when her husband, Åke Törnblad, asked to borrow fifteen million kronor (1.8 million dollars) for an investment.

  “He asked me to cosign the loan and I didn’t want to,” Martin’s mother said. “It was too much for me, so I decided to move out and start my own life. I wanted to get away from the animals, the cleaning, the cooking, the child-minding and from basically being a domestic servant. I had my own life to get on with.”

  Wicked tongues claimed that the Törnblad family was living beyond its means, being greedy and suffering from delusions of grandeur. Borrowing themselves into bankruptcy. According to the local gossip, their cows were going hungry and the farm was mortgaged to the hilt.

  “I have nothing against him personally, but he’s not humble when it comes to business,” said Mikael Schildmeijer, a business contact.