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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  In early November 2012, the police apparatus rumbled to life in earnest. Before long, it began picking up ominous signals.

  One of the first steps the police took in this new phase of the investigation was to request from network operators all available data connected to several phone numbers. The request included Göran’s known cell phone and landline, as well as the cell phones of Sara and Martin.

  This is not the same as phone tapping, but rather a request for long lists of how these phones had been used since the disappearance, how the phones themselves had moved, and what other numbers they had been in contact with.

  When the lists arrived, an unexpected pattern quickly emerged. Sara Lundblad had, for example, not exactly exerted herself trying to locate her father via his phone. During the first seventy-four days after his disappearance, she called his cell phone a total of eleven times.

  None of the calls lasted longer than four seconds—maybe enough to get his voicemail, but certainly not long enough to leave a message. She sent no texts. (As a point of comparison, Göran’s friend Rodney in Stockholm would call Göran’s phone more than two hundred times after he found out about the disappearance.)

  Alternative means of communication could be disregarded—Göran knew nothing about computers, let alone things like Facebook. He did not even own a smartphone.

  In fact, Sara hadn’t used her phone much at all, even in those first few days. On August 31, the day she realized her father was missing, she made precisely three calls to her father, none of which lasted longer than three seconds. Shouldn’t an anxious daughter try a bit harder?

  Another circumstance also called Sara’s story into question. The last known call from Göran is from the night of August 29, when he talked to his younger daughter, Maria, for half an hour. Between that time, around 9:30 p.m. on August 29, and the afternoon of September 1, when Sara called Maria and her stepmother, Irina, in tears, Sara’s phone barely moved. It remained in Norra Förlösa the whole time, connecting only with three local towers.

  There is nothing to suggest that Sara went into Kalmar during these days, or to Vasallgatan, where she claimed to have found her father’s Chrysler. She had definitely not been driving all over the county, checking every conceivable location, as she had claimed.

  But perhaps Sara had left her phone at home when she went looking for her father. That may seem implausible to most people, as one would think a phone would be the one thing you would want to bring when you’re out looking for someone who has gone missing—to receive calls, to call for help, or to contact emergency services. Yet another suspicious circumstance was added to the slowly growing police log.

  After the decision to initiate a preliminary investigation was made in November 2012, the circle of interviewees was expanded. This is a process that can become complex, and elaborate planning is needed to ensure there are no leaks. The next person interviewed, and the next one after that, could have advance information about both questions and answers and therefore adjust their narratives—consciously or unconsciously.

  When dealing with regular citizens in particular, rather than professional criminals, there is a greater risk of memory alteration. The interviewee is often eager to be helpful and therefore adds irrelevant details to the answer they believe is expected.

  But even when the results of the interviews in the Göran Lundblad case were stripped down as much as possible, they were unambiguous.

  “They painted a picture of a slightly odd man, a bit of a recluse, who was nevertheless very caring toward his children,” said Martinsson. “And the people we interviewed spoke well of him. He was old-school, a dutiful person. When we searched his house, there was no indication he was wealthy. His home looked almost impoverished.”

  Through tenants and previous interviews, the police were given new names to follow up with, such as Göran’s friend and sometime-business-associate Rodney in Stockholm. His reaction upon being contacted was one of shock. Until the police contacted him that day, he’d had no idea about the disappearance.

  “Why haven’t his daughters contacted me?” he asked. “We’re best friends, me and Göran.” But he had no clue as to where Göran might have gone, other than that his friend often talked about Scotland.

  The Stigtomta tenants were equally bewildered when contacted. Tenant Mats Söberg told the police that Göran had looked a bit physically run-down the last time they’d seen each other, at the end of August, but that he would never take off without finishing his ongoing renovation projects.

  “His disappearance just doesn’t seem natural, it’s not like Göran,” he said. “Not like the Göran I’ve known for the past four years.”

  Once the news was out, Mats Söberg’s neighbor Henry Nydahl contacted the police of his own accord and pointed out how much Göran had to live for.

  “He was happy about the new car he had bought, and he had just purchased a tractor for his farm,” Nydahl said.

  He then added this: “Göran told me that if Sara continued to date Martin, he would disinherit her.”

  They now had a clear financial motive, which would become more prominent as the investigation progressed.

  Rune Jansson, another Stigtomta resident, stressed, like so many others, that Göran really didn’t like Sara’s boyfriend, Martin. “He often talked about removing her from his will because Martin was a bad influence on her. He was sure Martin was only after his money,” he said.

  In other interviews, a similar claim about Göran planning to drop Sara from his will, in favor of her sister, Maria, were common. And that Göran was planning to sign his new will in connection with Maria’s eighteenth birthday on September 6, 2012.

  On their own, each claim about how Sara was going to be cut off amounts to little more than hearsay, secondhand information, easy to disregard. The interviewee might have misunderstood or misinterpreted something. But the plausibility of the claim naturally increased as more people said the same thing; hearsay can be highly significant in the course of an investigation, even if such information carries low probative value in a court of law when left unsupported.

  A conceivable motive was emerging: Sara Lundblad had killed her father—with or without assistance—to prevent him from disinheriting her.

  Göran’s ex-wife, Irina, presented another possible scenario in an interview recorded on November 7: that Göran had gotten into a fight with his despised future son-in-law, Martin.

  Göran had told Irina that “as long as I live, that chump won’t be getting his hands on my property.” Martin wasn’t even allowed to stay overnight at Stigtomta.

  Irina speculated about Göran finding Sara and Martin in his apartment in Kalmar and things coming to a head. That Göran might have told Martin he was in for a beating, that Martin defended himself and Göran fell, was struck, or something along those lines.

  The interviewer asked where she had gotten this scenario from—had someone told her about it? If so, there might be a key witness. But no, it was all Irina’s own conjecture and speculation, partly because she had been told about Maria’s suspicions and partly because Martin and Sara had started renovating the apartment on Vasallgatan so soon after Göran’s disappearance, probably to cover something up, she believed.

  The same scenario figured among the police’s hypotheses.

  “It wasn’t necessarily a premeditated crime,” Martinsson said. “Göran disapproved of their love, they had words, a quarrel that ends with him being pushed, taking a bad fall, and breaking his neck. And then they’re terrified and take various steps. Causing death by negligence, not manslaughter.”

  Toward the end of 2012, Martin and Sara moved into Ställe Farm, making her childhood home their shared abode. They started removing things from the house as early as November. Göran was a man who found getting rid of things difficult, even when they were old and run-down. His daughter did not share that difficulty.

  It raised a lot of eyebrows in the area when the couple was seen carting Göran’s pos
sessions off. Some were burned in the forest, which is standard in these parts, environmentally friendly or not. Some of it was brought to a recycling station.

  Martin and Sara had become a couple for real, not married but cohabitating in their own house. Göran would never have approved if he had known, the neighbors exclaimed, as news of their annexation of Ställe Farm spread.

  What the neighbors couldn’t have known was that in early November, Martin and Sara had built a new dining room. It had happened around the same time as the police reclassified Göran’s disappearance as potential manslaughter, and no more than a week before the police would arrive to search the house with specially trained forensic dogs that could pick up the scent of most bodily fluids, including blood. From that perspective, the renovation seemed suspiciously well-timed.

  Sara and Martin dragged the weapons cabinet out of the cluttered room next to the kitchen and then they redid the room—not dramatically, more of a spiffing up.

  Together, they removed the wallpaper, especially in the corner by the window, where a wallpaper steamer was used. But it turned out to be too much of an effort to peel the wallpaper off the wall, which was made of porous wallboard that absorbed fluids like a sponge.

  After a lot of hassle with the steamer in that corner, they switched tactics to just washing the old wallpaper with an all-purpose cleaner. Then they sanded down the worst bumps and slapped on the new rolls of wallpaper, light with gray stripes. Very similar to the old pattern.

  They also ripped up the old vinyl floor and put in an almost identical new one, faux wood, meant to look like a hardwood floor, but cheaper and easier to keep clean.

  Martin and Sara finished the renovation quickly, in just a few days. The job was far from professionally executed. The wallpaper was not cut at the moldings, for example—little flaps of wallpaper were left sticking out.

  Later on, they bought a new dining room set—an edge-glued, oiled oak table. The chairs were oak as well, with black seat cushions. Now, in their new shared home, they had a dining room next to the kitchen, in the very room where Göran used to sleep. His bed had been moved, his wardrobe emptied. Not much remained of him now, after only a few months.

  Martin and Sara slept on the first floor, in one of the old children’s rooms.

  Mere days after the renovation of Ställe Farm had been completed, and right around the time Therese and her Missing People volunteers were gearing up for the search for Göran in Kalmar, a handful of police officers gathered outside Ställe Farm on November 17. Sara met them there, let them in, and showed them around the house, the study in particular. Jonas Blomgren was back to seize computers for a forensic search.

  Granted, two months had passed since Göran had gone missing, and if Sara really was behind her father’s disappearance, she should have had ample time to erase anything incriminating. But maybe not fully—some residual data can usually be found, depending on the technical skills of the suspect.

  No one had yet formally identified Sara or any other individual as a suspect, despite hypotheses, musings, and hunches. The confiscation of the computers was just another item to check off the Murder Bible’s list.

  Police officer Cecilia Eriksson noted that Sara was guarded and seemed remarkably unperturbed by her father’s disappearance, even though it should have been clear to her by then that he was dead.

  “Her voice was very calm and collected,” Eriksson said. “It was hard to judge whether her manner was caused by grief, shock, emotionlessness, or something else. She gave the impression of being ‘tough,’ as though she wanted to prove that she was equal to the situation and didn’t need any help.”

  Eriksson and Sara had to carry on their brief conversation in the yard in the November cold, because once the computers had been carried out, two dog handlers and their cadaver dogs entered Ställe Farm, one at a time. Both dogs indicated in front of the washing machine in the basement. One of them was also interested in a rug on the first floor. The dogs don’t know exactly what to look for, but they’re primarily trained to search for three things: corpses, blood, and semen.

  An indication could mean anything from a bleeding murder victim having lain in front of the washing machine to some other bodily fluid having ended up there, when bedsheets were laundered, for example.

  But an indication is an indication. And this was a manslaughter investigation, after all, so forensic investigators were called in.

  “I was told the room where the dog indicated was so bright, they had to black it out to be able to look for blood spatter,” Eriksson said.

  But in the end, the examination of the indicated location revealed nothing to suggest a crime had been committed in the house.

  During their search of the house, both cadaver dogs passed through the Ställe Farm dining room, the one that had been serving as a kind of junk room when Blomgren had done the initial visit in September, with no reaction. During this visit, police at the scene were still unaware that this had once been Göran’s bedroom, nor did they know that it had been renovated very recently.

  “If photographs had been taken during the first visit, we would have had a point of comparison. It would have been clear things had been changed,” said Martinsson. “That routine would have been useful in this case and in all similar cases. But as it was, we had no point of reference.”

  Under the basement stairs, a sticky wallpaper steamer sat in a cardboard box that had once contained pipe-making materials. During the house search, it went completely unexamined.

  In parallel with the search of the house, one of the county’s own dog handlers had been given high-resolution maps of the Lundblad lands around Ställe Farm. His assignment was to head out there whenever he had some time to spare and search the terrain little by little for clues. Someone might have discarded an item or dropped something important. There might be a hidden grave, possibly even a dead body.

  The land around Ställe Farm, roughly one-third to two-thirds of a mile from the house, was divided into six segments labeled A through F and classified as everything from fields to forest, but also “horse pasture with rough terrain; difficult to search.”

  The border of the northernmost segment, A, was drawn along a road that passed close by Skyttelund Farm, just where the fields began to stretch out northward. Beyond that line, no canine searches were conducted.

  A pity, as it turned out. Granted, the tracker dogs were having a hard time, with November temperatures and quite a bit of rain during those days, but dogs’ noses are wondrous things. With the right wind and other auspicious circumstances, they can even pick up the scent of a dug hole.

  Although the canine search was a bit of a long shot for the police, especially since so much time had passed since Göran disappeared, it was well worth a try. If nothing else, it was yet another box to check off to rule out other possibilities.

  “Lots of thoughts and ideas are thrown out there during an investigation,” Martinsson said. “And it’s not always possible to tell what’s right and what’s wrong at first. You have to prioritize the steps you can take and work through them one at a time.”

  But sorting through and stacking up possible steps in a murder inquiry takes time, no matter what order you undertake them. Time is always scarce when possible leads start to trickle away. Or where they run the risk of being buried.

  11

  THE MONEY TRAIL

  Either something momentous happened during the renovation in November, triggering a collapse, or Sara had stored up enough anxiety and doubts about the repeated police searches to make things unbearable. She, who had held together so well over the past few months that she had come across as cold, hard, dead inside, maybe even calculating by the people around her, had an unexpected nervous breakdown.

  On the afternoon of November 7, she sought psychiatric help. Her first police contact, Jonas Blomgren, had advised her to see a therapist if things started feeling too difficult. He had pointed out that when someone goes missing, it can be very trau
matic for that person’s loved ones, especially considering that there is very little they can do but wait. Wait and wait, for the police, or for the authorities, or for the missing person to be in touch. While they wait, people do have to go on living their lives—eating, sleeping, working, spending time with the people who are still around. If things became too difficult, seeking help was the right thing to do, he encouraged her.

  After Sara’s breakdown, she did decide to talk things through with a psychologist. They partly talked about the stress of not knowing her father’s whereabouts and partly about her work situation. The properties, the companies, the accounts that had to be kept—it was all just too much for her. Martin had even asked her to handle his own family farm’s paperwork.

  “Reaction to severe stress,” the on-call doctor wrote in her records, noting also the code F439—without further specification.

  Sleeping was difficult, Sara told the doctor. She was beset with too many thoughts. The doctor prescribed her the sedatives and antianxiety medications Atarax and Theralen, mild drugs, marked “nonaddictive” in Sweden’s national drug registry. They were medications that were to help calm her racing mind at bedtime, the doctor told her, perhaps make it easier to fall asleep and to have the energy to get through the overwhelming list of things she needed to accomplish every day.

  And there was a huge number of things Sara had to see to that autumn. For example, two large orders for pipes had to be filled by Christmas, which required working the machines in the basement at night. She couldn’t miss the deadline on the order, because they needed the money desperately. There had been no significant payouts to Sara. None at all, in fact, aside from the standing order of seven hundred fifty kronor (ninety dollars) monthly from Göran’s account and whatever she could make from the pipe production.

  There were other ways of making money—the forestry business, for example—but formally speaking, Sara had no access to her father’s assets in autumn 2012. For any money to be forthcoming, the missing man had to be declared deceased. That could take up to ten years and would require a great deal of paperwork and multiple court appearances to persuasively argue that the missing person really was dead. Only then would the process of executing the will begin. In the meantime, society protected the missing person’s rights and took care of whatever needed taking care of.