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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  Åke himself believed he was running his company to the best of his ability and wanted to develop the business further and maximize its productivity. He also wanted his sons by his side.

  Martin, his eldest, was tall and lanky with short, brown hair, a long face, and marked dark eyebrows. He knew how to talk, inexhaustibly and with seeming authority. He talked a big game, but rarely delivered; at least, that seemed to be the most common impression among most of the people he had a relationship with.

  Just like his father, the teenage Martin was described as hot under the collar, easily annoyed, and liable to get worked up over nothing. He was often perceived as bragging and being immature.

  “He’s not exactly a modest person. He wants to be in charge,” said Rune Jansson, one of the Stigtomta tenants, who saw quite a bit of Martin over the years after he became the boyfriend of heir apparent Sara.

  An employee on the Törnblad farm echoed the sentiment that Martin thought highly of himself: “He talks a lot. Always opening his trap. He says a lot of peculiar stuff, but you can’t take it too seriously—after all, he’s just talking, right?”

  Doris Nydahl in Stigtomta also took a dim view of Martin. “He’s arrogant sometimes in a way I can’t say I care for,” she said. “I can’t explain why I feel that way, but it could be that he’s actually shy.”

  Ann-Kristin Simonsson in Melby, who would soon become more deeply involved with the family than she ever could have predicted, insisted that Martin was a good boy at heart. “But something’s not right. He often lies about how fantastic his family is, that he has the biggest harvest, and that they are buying big, new machines.”

  At the same time, Martin did know his stuff. He was raised among all types of agricultural equipment, diggers, and bulldozers. But he tended to drive his car too fast around the village, which irked the other residents.

  “He would floor it. Turn his hazard lights on so everyone would know who was coming,” said Ann-Kristin.

  How the heir of Ställe Farm and the three-years-younger braggart at the Törnblad farm ended up together is the subject of quite a bit of gossip.

  The first time they met was on the school bus in the mid-2000s after the Lundblads settled in Norra Förlösa. But it took another year or so for anything to come of it. Then, at some point during 2009, Martin invited Sara over to his house. They watched a film and talked.

  “It was when I was doing the foundational forestry program,” Sara would later describe. “We’d see each other maybe once a month or once every other month for a year and a half.”

  That summer, the Törnblads were building a large barn. It was to feature, among other things, a milking carousel, for automated milking of the family’s cows.

  “I went over to the Törnblads’ when they were building their new barn,” Sara said. “Martin and I were friends then. And a month or so later, we went to Denmark together.”

  The investment in the barn led to financial difficulties for the Törnblad family. The milking carousel didn’t work right; instead of raising efficiency, it inflicted a loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars. But throughout this difficult time, Martin and Sara’s relationship only grew stronger.

  Sara commuted between her home and her school program in Värnamo and then, less frequently, to and from school in Filipstad. Martin stayed in Norra Förlösa with his own dreams and his daily toil at the dairy farm, every day, up and about at four in the morning.

  It is easy to imagine Sara, sitting lonely by the phone in her dorm room in Värmland, without the support of her until-then ever-present father. Talking to the boy next door, increasingly captivated, or at least interested enough to see where the relationship would go.

  They developed a recurring code phrase, one that popped up much later when the police began tapping their phones. The phrase “you and me.” An incantation of forbidden love.

  He would say, “you and me.” She would answer almost reflexively, “you and me,” only to then pick up the conversation where it had broken off, talking of the farm, the livestock, the milk, the forest, the neighbors, business.

  From the first, people had opinions about how serious Martin was about Sara.

  According to her stepmother’s, Irina’s, brother, Martin bragged to all and sundry at his school about having bagged the daughter of the lord of the manor. About how he had tons of other girls, but that he was using this particular one to achieve his main goal in life—to become rich. It supposedly upset his classmates to the point where they contacted Göran to warn him. His contempt for his intended son-in-law grew and grew.

  Finances were, indeed, strained at the Törnblad farm. Martin was never paid at all; he worked for room and board, and a small allowance. For even the most even-minded people, seeing how good everyone else has it has a way of tipping the balances.

  In this way, Martin’s childish boastfulness and outlandish claims can be understood. He so badly wanted to have more, to succeed, to get ahead. Now he, the pauper, had gotten together with the millionaire’s daughter. The future looked bright, if only he could seize the moment.

  But surely it is also possible to fall in love with a girl only three years older, one with whom he shared so many things in common? Perhaps possible to truly be in love and also think that eventually merging the two farms is a good idea? Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if the girl was rich. Or at least would soon become rich.

  “You can have anyone you want,” Sara was told, in no uncertain terms, by her father. “Martin’s not good enough for you. He’s only after your money.”

  One can’t help but draw the parallel to Stigtomta and Sara’s mother, who wasn’t good enough for the Lundblads either. Tiina had developed a drinking problem because she was so utterly miserable at the farm and was put on a boat back to Finland.

  Göran’s words about Martin not being good enough and Sara being able to “have anyone she wants” were a constant mantra. Even in conversation with casual acquaintances, he uttered these words again and again.

  From the time that Göran found out about Sara’s relationship with Martin, in 2009, until his disappearance three years later, father and daughter clashed regularly over it.

  Their fights were filled with spite. Göran dismissed the Törnblad family in general, given their financial situation and behavior, and complained frequently about the underlying gripe concerning the contentious parcel of land by Skyttelund. He often specifically demanded that Sara break off her relationship with Martin. When Sara refused to obey, he took heart in thinking she would lose interest once the novelty of the affair wore off.

  A vain hope. If Göran had known how long the couple had known each other before getting together and what they had been discussing, he might have acted differently. But he was unrelentingly dismissive, as if he couldn’t bear to take the relationship seriously.

  “It’s hard to say what Göran was like as a person,” said Pernilla Söberg, a Stigtomta tenant. “He didn’t exactly trust people, but he was still open. Not easy to read, and sometimes you had to feel him out. When Göran was troubled, he withdrew. He would speak to people only in private about what worried him. Göran told me Martin and Martin’s father were after his land. That Martin had wrapped Sara around his little finger in order to get his hands on the land and money. Göran was both worried about what was going to happen and angry about the situation, saying that Martin was after nothing but money.”

  Eva Sterner, also in Stigtomta, had this to say: “Göran was livid with the Törnblads, and he took it hard when Sara and Martin got together. It was the worst thing that could’ve happened. He said he couldn’t sleep at night. He was anxious and stressed.”

  Sara’s younger sister, Maria, lived at Ställe Farm while finishing elementary school, but she moved in with her mother in Norrköping in 2010 to attend high school. As far as she was concerned, her older sister and father seemed to be butting heads constantly. Granted, she was not there to witness the rest of Sara and Göran’s life together, whic
h likely revolved around practical matters for the most part. But all Maria heard about was the quarreling over Sara’s relationship with Martin, and that Sara wanted more independence, to find her own path in life.

  “He also said they fought about the fact that Sara wanted some land to look after all by herself,” Maria said.

  Göran was not entirely averse to that idea. That is, after all, how it happened for him—his father, Gustav, transferred his property to him in stages. But Göran was worried about subdividing the family land, about the family fortune being squandered.

  As Irina put it: “It was all about money. Göran was prepared to give Sara everything she wanted, if she would only break it off with Martin. He told her there was not an ounce of good in Martin. He would have bought her a farm. They went to look at three or four different ones. One of them cost thirty million kronor (nearly 3.6 million dollars). But none of them was good enough for Sara; there was always something wrong. And then there was the condition that she break up with Martin; she wasn’t prepared to do that.”

  The price of thirty million could be anything from a misunderstanding to a more or less conscious exaggeration. It doesn’t sound at all like Göran to have agreed to cough up that kind of money, which would have required leveraging more than half the family’s assets, to buy a new farm. But several people in Göran’s life confirmed that he was, in essence, trying to bribe Sara to dump Martin.

  “Dad kept saying the Törnblads were using Sara for her money. That she was going to get knocked up and then she’d be stuck for life,” Maria said.

  8

  THE HEIR

  On a summer day in the early days of the 2000s, the lord of Tängsta and Rogsta farms in Stigtomta, aging patriarch Gustav Lundblad, was through mulling things over. He was no longer young; in fact, he was to turn eighty-one in a few months. His wife, Majvor, would be eighty in August. Granted, they had a number of years left to live, but they were feeling their age. It was time to see to the future, to ensure that the family’s properties and capital remain undivided.

  The Comstedt law firm in Nyköping was tasked with formulating a mutual will:

  If I, Majvor Lundblad, die before my husband, I want the following conditions to be met: All my property shall fall to my husband without restriction or qualification and after both our deaths, all my remaining property shall fall to my grandchild Sara Lundblad.

  This shall be considered compensation for Sara’s mother likely dying without property of any kind to bequeath.

  As far as Gustav and Majvor were concerned, Sara’s mother, Tiina, was permanently out of the picture. The family consisted of their son, Göran, who lived with them in Stigtomta, and his daughters, with Sara being the chosen one, the one who would ride next to her father on the tractor whenever Majvor wasn’t looking after her.

  Majvor’s signature on the document is shaky; it seemed to have taken her some time to write. Perhaps she was ill, her health already in a poor state at that point. She passed away the following year.

  Over the course of the next few years, Gustav transferred many of his assets to Sara. He, who according to family legend was called a devil by his own mother, did everything in his power to ensure the family property would remain undivided in the future. Gustav gave his son, Göran, the lion’s share of the fortune, but also passed him over by transferring properties of a total value of almost eleven million kronor (1.3 million dollars) to his granddaughter as a gift in 2006, the year she came of age.

  Gustav did include several precautions in his gift to Sara—any future partner would, for example, be blocked from cheating her out of her money.

  If the donee is in or at any point enters into a legally binding relationship, the property shall not be included in a division of assets between the donee and her partner nor be subject to restrictions on the right of usufruct or transfer.

  Gustav also stood to reap practical benefits from transferring his ownership to Sara, including his half of the pipe company Patenta. He was, at that point, increasingly finding the daily routines challenging, and not just the forestry work. Even looking after himself—visits to the toilet, for example—had become more difficult. Being assisted by his son and granddaughter was too embarrassing, so he managed to secure a place at a nursing home. The fee structure there was income-dependent; residents with a lot of property paid more for room, board, and care. Poorer residents lived for free.

  As usual, it was all about money. Without the income from the pipe factory, his fee for the nursing home would drop substantially.

  No more than a year or so after Sara’s eighteenth birthday, in the summer of 2007, Gustav Lundblad died, leaving his only son in charge of everything, along with his two daughters.

  But all the arrangements made to keep the estranged mothers out of the picture and the fortune and business undivided were put in jeopardy when Sara started going out with the wrong boy.

  For this reason, it looked like a deliberate strategy when the gift from Gustav to Sara happened to be transferred on to Göran in its entirety in February 2011, just after Sara decided to drop out of her degree program in Filipstad. It seemed to be a carefully thought-out maneuver aimed at neutralizing the unwanted son-in-law. Göran drafted deeds of transfer for all Sara’s properties and made her sign them.

  Her stepmother was, for her part, sure that he had tricked his daughter, but only in order to protect her. “He said Martin was only going out with her because of her money and that he would cut and run as soon as he found out she didn’t own anything. Göran wanted to show her that he was only interested in her for her money,” Irina said.

  The story of how the wily father hoodwinked his disobedient daughter was told by the Stigtomta tenants as well.

  “He promised Sara that she and Martin would be allowed to live together in the apartment in Kalmar if she signed everything over to him,” said Eva Sterner. “She did, but then they weren’t allowed to live together anyway.”

  Sara told a different story, of tax planning, or stinginess, depending on how you looked at it. “I had an annual income of about forty thousand kronor (about five thousand dollars) but paid sixty thousand kronor in taxes (about seven thousand, five hundred dollars), which is to say I made a loss of twenty thousand (about two thousand, five hundred dollars) a year. According to the Federation of Swedish Farmers, the simplest solution was to transfer everything to Dad,” she explained. “Dad also wanted to make it possible for me to get financial aid for studying, which was out of the question while the properties were in my name, he told me.”

  Later that year, in October 2011, Göran changed his will. He dropped Sara as the heir apparent and instead decreed that everything be divided equally between her and her sister Maria.

  Point four of the will was a familiar safeguard in Swedish law:

  All property inherited through this will or by descent by any person shall be that person’s separate property.

  The same stipulation shall also be applied to any property replacing the property as well as any income arising from the property.

  In cases where the Cohabitation Act is applicable, the stipulations set out above regarding separate property shall be binding.

  No boyfriends would ever be able to get their grubby mitts on the Lundblads’ money or land.

  Even so, Göran seemed concerned that Maria’s mother might still be able to get at the money. And he didn’t entirely mistrust Sara; she was, after all, the one who worked in the forest and had shown that she was both able and willing to take over the business. In point five of the will, Göran appointed Sara as Maria’s financial guardian until she turned twenty-five if Göran were to die before then. Maria’s mother, Irina, would be kept out of it.

  Göran also put several different measures in place to paint his oldest daughter into a financial corner.

  “I had named Sara as my sole heir, but Göran wanted me to change my will so he would inherit instead,” said Göran’s aunt Stina.

  She, who took G
ustav’s side in the family feud, had about a million kronor (about 120 thousand dollars) to pass down. Göran regularly assisted her with her paperwork and various communications with the authorities and so on, but this time he made an extra visit, just to discuss the will.

  “It was urgent, Göran felt. I signed the new will,” said Stina. “The reason was that Sara couldn’t be trusted, he said. She was doing shady deals, and he didn’t trust her.”

  Whether you see it as Göran conning his daughter out of all her money, or as him consolidating the family’s—including Stina’s—capital for business reasons, one thing was clear: neither Sara nor her father openly admitted that by signing the deeds, Sara had been made virtually destitute.

  It would be a long time before Sara’s boyfriend, Martin, found out that the daughter of the big landowner was flat broke. She saw no reason to tell him; on the contrary, she was raised to keep mum about her family’s business interests. Martin for his part shouldn’t care either way, since he was in love.

  Theirs was a relationship under siege. Both Sara and Martin were just starting their adult lives. They had no more clearly formulated plans than to keep working for their respective families’ companies. Both dreamed of merging them somehow into a bigger, more functional business with forestry, land, and cattle, with its headquarters in Norra Förlösa, ten miles from Kalmar.

  Ställe Farm, which is registered as Norra Förlösa 124, is a peaceful spot. The main house sits on a small hillock. There is no well-kept lawn or kitchen garden or flower beds; the occupants had no time for things like that. A handful of pines are scattered around the house, as if in remembrance of the forest that once covered the area.

  When arriving at Ställe Farm for the first time, a visitor could be excused for thinking the door to the basement is the main entrance. The split-level house is built on a slope with the basement entrance facing west, from which a staircase, barely shoulder-width, leads up to the ground floor, which comprises a kitchen, living room, study, hallway, and one bedroom. Another set of stairs leads up to the first floor with its two additional bedrooms.