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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  On October 26, 2012, the Kalmar County Chief Guardian Committee had decided that a guardian needed to be appointed to safeguard Göran’s rights. A neighbor, Ann-Kristin Simonsson, was chosen. She had some experience in the role, having assisted elderly locals with their paperwork and liaisons with authorities in the past.

  It was also assumed that she knew something about forestry and property ownership. In addition to being nodding acquaintances with Göran and familiar with the Lundblad family, she had also long leased her own land to Åke Törnblad.

  Göran’s guardian lived a couple of miles south of Norra Förlösa, in Melby. Her assigned tasks included mapping out Göran Lundblad’s assets, companies, and commitments, and doing an inventory of properties, vehicles, machines, buildings, business accounts, stocks and shares, bank accounts, and any safe-deposit boxes—anything she could find. She was to write it all down and submit it to the Chief Guardian Committee.

  She also was asked to see to the day-to-day business and look after the missing person’s interests to the best of her ability, such as paying bills and collecting rent and other incomes. But Ann-Kristin was having a hard time of it. Sara and Martin did not seem to grasp that they had no say anymore. None whatsoever.

  In addition to renovating the main house at Ställe Farm and moving into it, Sara had also given the Törnblad family permission to make use of the machine shed at Ställe Farm. There had already been mutterings among the locals about Sara and Martin being a couple and moving into Göran’s house; when Martin and his father, Åke, parked several of their machines in the Lundblad machine shed, the neighbors reacted strongly.

  Tenant farmer Mats Råberg rented space at Ställe Farm’s facilities himself, and when he noticed the Törnblad machines in the shed, he reported this to Göran’s guardian. Such privileges were normally the kind of thing you pay rent for, after all.

  “It was obviously well known that Göran would not have approved,” said Ann-Kristin. “And Sara didn’t have a mandate to make decisions about that anymore.”

  Ann-Kristin called Åke Törnblad to lay down the law, telling him that she and no one else had been appointed to handle Göran Lundblad’s affairs and safeguard his interests.

  “He replied he thought it best left up to Sara, since she owned half,” said Ann-Kristin.

  At that point, Åke, and likely his son Martin as well, were plainly unaware that Sara was flat broke and that she had signed assets worth eleven million kronor (1.3 million dollars) over to her father a year earlier.

  The guardian’s phone call with Åke quickly turned unpleasant. “He also said Mats Råberg had refused to sign a termination of his lease. That came as a surprise; Göran would never have allowed a termination, and the lease contract ran until March,” said Ann-Kristin. Why was anyone even discussing a lease termination, when that would plainly be against both Göran’s and Mats’s wishes?

  In the background, Ann-Kristin could hear Martin losing his temper. He had been listening in on her call with Åke, and now he started shouting and swearing.

  “He said he had to talk to me. I refused to meet with him and told him I only discussed my work with Sara. I was simply Göran’s representative. And then I ended the call.”

  A few minutes later, a car turned into her yard. It was Martin, who brought his car to a screeching halt, climbed out, and strode toward the house angrily. He entered without knocking and sat down at her kitchen table.

  “He was incredibly worked up,” Ann-Kristin said. “He told me that Mats had been in Göran’s house around the time he disappeared, going through his papers. He also claimed that he and Sara had called Irina when Göran went missing, and that she had told them to stay calm, that Göran could be like that sometimes.”

  Exactly what Martin was trying to achieve with his outburst was difficult for Ann-Kristin to judge, but it was clear that he was very upset about Sara not being able to make decisions about her own farm. The visit was a distressing and intimidating experience for Ann-Kristin. Why was Martin talking about the disappearance at all, about Mats, about Irina, with her? She was merely the guardian who had been discussing business affairs with his father, which had nothing to do with Martin or Sara’s guilt or innocence.

  Several circumstances had colluded to begin to put pressure on Martin and the people around him at this point in time. The police had become frequent visitors in the area. They popped up with little notice, looking around the house, having their dogs sniff around everywhere, and asking a lot of questions.

  The police visit with forensic dogs might well have unnerved Martin. Furthermore, Martin was of course aware that the disappearance had just been reclassified as a potential manslaughter. The newspapers had been reporting that Göran might have been the victim of a violent crime. The day before Martin’s brief visit to Ann-Kristin’s home, Missing People and their volunteers had performed their well-publicized search, scouring several areas in Kalmar, near the apartment on Vasallgatan, an area the police had already cordoned off.

  And then there were the finances. That Sara was both broke and unable to make decisions about the farm were grievous setbacks for anyone planning on merging the two farms. His own father was knee-deep in debt and struggling to make his farm profitable.

  In Martin’s tirade at Ann-Kristin’s, he had defended himself without even having been accused; she had simply been trying to explain her guardian duties to the unwelcome visitor. The two were at odds when Martin finally left. Ann-Kristin made a note of the visit in her report to the Chief Guardian Committee and informed Jonas Blomgren about it that very same day.

  Martin’s actions at Göran’s guardian’s house did nothing to improve his and Sara’s standing in the eyes of the police. Declaring yourself innocent of everything without prompting tends to indicate the opposite.

  Director of the Chief Guardian Committee Ann Wribe summed the matter up in a memo:

  Ann-Kristin Simonsson very soon discovered that it was difficult to impose structure in the matter and to work with the relatives. Shortly thereafter, slander and rumors about her started spreading.

  At this point, neither the guardian nor the Chief Guardian in charge of the case knew that Sara had been, for quite some time, transferring funds to Åke Törnblad. As early as the spring of 2012, months before Göran’s disappearance, Sara had used her own savings to transfer one hundred thousand kronor (twelve thousand dollars) to Åke, without collateral and without an IOU. Åke had received the money into his company account.

  “Martin asked me for the money, and I transferred it from my account,” Sara said. “I didn’t know what the money was being used for. I didn’t ask. Dad didn’t like it, but I did it anyway. He thought I should demand some kind of collateral.”

  It was in conjunction with her father finding out about this money transfer that Göran had asked his aunt Stina to remove Sara from her will.

  On August 31, just one day after Göran’s disappearance, Sara transferred a further sixty thousand kronor (seven thousand dollars) as something akin to a personal loan to help Åke pay that month’s bills, which suggested that the Törnblads were in direr financial straits than ever before during her relationship with Martin.

  A few days before she finally contacted the police to report her father missing, she closed a savings fund that her father had opened, a value of one hundred eighty thousand kronor (twenty-two thousand dollars). On September 10, the same day she made her missing-person report, that money, plus an additional seventy thousand kronor (eight thousand dollars), was transferred to Åke Törnblad. In a little over six months, she had transferred close to half a million kronor (sixty thousand dollars) to her boyfriend’s father.

  “I did it because I thought there was a future for me and Martin,” Sara said to explain the multiple loans.

  On September 28, 2012, Bäckebo Sawmill paid Sara Lundblad one and a half million kronor (one hundred eighty thousand dollars).

  “She contacted us about a week before, demanding payment fo
r the felling,” said Ulrika Fransén Friman at Bäckebo Sawmill. “She both called and visited Bäckebo in person. We felt unsure about paying her the money; we had always dealt with Göran before. It felt odd to pay Sara without speaking to Göran first.”

  It was only when the sawmill administrators asked to speak to her father that Sara informed them that he was missing and that she had reported it to the police.

  At that point, Sara signed an order, and the money was paid out, mostly so the sawmill would be in the clear should Göran turn up at a later date. It was the simplest possible solution for the sawmill’s administrators, since there was in fact a contract in their possession where Sara was listed as part owner of the business. The contract was dated 2010, the year before Göran assumed ownership of Sara’s property, but that was, of course, unknown to the sawmill.

  When the money from Bäckebo came in, on October 3, she transferred the largest sum to date to Åke Törnblad: seven hundred thousand kronor (eighty-four thousand dollars). Later that winter, she sent another three hundred thousand kronor (thirty-six thousand dollars).

  It would be difficult not to be suspicious of such a rapid series of transfers after Göran’s disappearance, as though everyone involved was completely unconcerned about how he might react when he came back. If he came back.

  In addition to the loans, Sara also purchased various pieces of equipment for the Törnblads, including a corrugated roller and a manure spreader, all together worth around four hundred thousand kronor (forty-eight thousand dollars). All resources available to her were, in other words, pumped into her future father-in-law’s business. Her accounts were utterly depleted in less than a year. And yet, the Törnblad farm still made a loss of over a million kronor (one hundred twenty thousand dollars) in 2012.

  Åke Törnblad’s accountant, Sara Widerström, described how she reacted to the large sums of borrowed money: “I had informed Åke that a promissory note had to be drafted, primarily for Sara’s sake, since it was her claim. Åke told me that he would bring it up with Sara. I haven’t seen any promissory notes,” she said.

  There were further circumstances of interest with regards to Göran’s money. On September 5, Sara visited Swedbank in Kalmar. She had brought the key to her father’s safe-deposit box. The bank’s internal system showed that she entered the vault at 1:25 p.m. on the day in question.

  According to the log, the safe-deposit box was open for exactly one minute and fifteen seconds, not enough to do inventory of a large number of items, but enough to grab something you already knew was there.

  Exactly what Sara brought with her—a purse, a plastic bag, or something else—will never be established, nor can we know exactly what she took from the bank. The CCTV footage was only saved for thirty days, which had long since passed by the time the police reclassified the disappearance as a manslaughter and gained the right to request such a thing.

  Just over ten minutes later—a bank employee noted the time as 1:36 p.m.—Sara signed a form to gain access to Patenta’s safe-deposit box at another bank, Handelsbanken, fifty yards farther down the street in Kalmar.

  When asked later by the police, Sara would claim that she had been alone when she visited the banks. Martin, however, would claim in other contexts to have gone with her.

  “I had never seen so much money before,” he would tell people. Phone logs also showed that Martin had called his father, Åke, in conjunction with the bank visits. What they talked about on those calls remains unknown.

  It was yet another circumstance that could be added to the others regarding the motives for making Göran Lundblad disappear, one way or another. The only thing that was certain was that after the visits, there were still vast amounts of valuables in the safe-deposit box at Handelsbanken: around two hundred thousand kronor (twenty-four thousand dollars) in dollars and euros, two gold bullions worth around thirty thousand kronor (three thousand, six hundred dollars) apiece, two pocket watches, two wristwatches, a gold necklace, cuff links, and a gold ring. But there was no Swedish cash left.

  Considering that Göran was inclined to keep large sums of cash on hand, it seems likely that Sara emptied both safe-deposit boxes in Kalmar of the Swedish money they had contained. But this cannot be proven. Sara herself claimed that there was only “jewelry” in the well-guarded boxes.

  Either way, at this point, the police were quite clear that if anyone stood to gain from the multimillionaire’s disappearance, it was his neighbor Åke Törnblad, a man of whom Göran never thought very highly.

  Another nugget of investigatory gold soon rolled in. As the police began looking into Göran’s business dealings, more red flags popped up almost immediately. There wasn’t a lot to say about the properties, as Göran had been listed as the sole owner, for over a year, of the forest, the land, and all the buildings.

  The companies, on the other hand, were a different story. As it turned out, Sara owned half of pipe manufacturer Patenta. She was also alternate director of the company Göran and Sara Lundblad Management AB. She owned half of the stock in the company, which had been founded for tax reasons after the sale of a property in Stockholm.

  According to the most recent obtainable annual report, which ran until mid-2012, the company had assets totaling almost two and a half million kronor (three hundred thousand dollars), tied up in stock and bonds. The annual report had been submitted to the Swedish Companies Registration Office and approved at the company’s annual meeting, exactly as it should have been. It was signed by both Sara and Göran.

  The date of those signatures: September 6, 2012. Precisely one week after Göran’s disappearance.

  The police’s surprise when the document opened on their screens on the morning of November 13 is easy to imagine. Were they to understand that Göran came back, signed a paper, and then disappeared again? Or had everything been signed in advance and set aside for a later date? How odd.

  Toward the end of the third week of November, the investigation results that had been compiled were well above what was required for probable cause—tangible, objectively well-supported circumstances clearly pointing in a certain direction. At this point, prosecutor Gunilla Öhlin formally took over the preliminary investigation.

  Early in the morning of November 17, 2012, two and a half months after Göran’s disappearance and the same day Missing People’s volunteers set out on their grid search for Göran Lundblad in Funkabo, Martin and Sara were formally registered as murder suspects. Öhlin requested and was granted permission to wiretap the two main characters under investigation.

  No one outside the core team of investigators who had access to the case log had any idea of this turn of events. The suspects were to be given as little warning as possible that interviews were being scheduled to take place within the next few days. The two suspects would be interviewed simultaneously, so they wouldn’t have a chance to compare stories.

  At this point in the investigation, the interviewers had several awkward questions to ask—especially about the counterfeit annual report and the substantial sums that had been transferred to Martin’s father. Even if the interviews yielded no concrete results, there was some hope they might unsettle the suspects and cause them to start discussing sensitive matters over the phone.

  Tapped phone call between Martin Törnblad and Sara Lundblad. Sara is in the Ställe Farm yard with her phone to her ear. Two K9 teams have just searched the house and the dogs have indicated in a couple of places.

  Martin: Are the police inside?

  Sara: Yes.

  M: They’re inside with the dogs?

  S: No. The dogs are outside now. Now there’s just a lot of police in the house.

  M: All right. The dogs are outside.

  S: Mm.

  M: All right, then.

  S: Well, now they’re coming out again.

  M: Oh well. (Giggle)

  S: Now they’re . . . Yep. Yes. Now they’re all out.

  Was this a murderer beset with the curiosity of the guilt
y talking to his coconspirator? Or a naturally curious boyfriend wondering what is going on and how long he and Sara will have to put up with constant intrusions?

  The recorded call was not particularly focused or concentrated. Neither one of them asked the other suspicious questions or gave incriminating answers. The main impression was that Martin seemed to want to know what the police were up to and what they might have found in the house. In other recorded phone calls with Sara, he asked whether the dogs had been searching the forest as well.

  When he talked to other people—with his brother or his cousin—Martin swore solemnly that the companies were in a poor state, that there was barely enough money to keep them afloat. He stuck almost exclusively to workaday topics of conversation for a farmer. He also continued to complain about Göran’s appointed guardian—Ann-Kristin was still refusing to do what he and Sara wanted and cancel tenant farmer Mats Råberg’s lease, and Martin was furious.

  In one phone call, Sara and Martin had been discussing the tenancy they wanted to take over and all the paperwork Sara was forced to do together with the guardian, when Martin flared up:

  Martin: Do you want me to tell you that I’m going to go blow my brains out or do you want me to just do it and shut up?

  Sara: No, you’re impossible.

  M: I don’t know.

  S: Aaahh, just stop it.

  M: I suppose that’s the only way to get some respect in this fucking world.

  S: I don’t think you should say stuff like that, Martin.

  Sara dismissed his purported suicide plans as some kind of joke, which made it clear that Martin routinely expressed himself this way—he could flare up quickly and become quite dramatic.