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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  When the topic of Ann-Kristin, the guardian, came up again, he thundered: “I’m going to shoot the fucking bitch!” He also promised to drive up to Mats’s house and break the windows of his tractors with a shovel. The threats seemed petty, bordering on the ridiculous, coming from an adult, but at the same time, his need to vent his growing frustration was obvious. He said, “It makes me so fucking furious that we never get anywhere.”

  At regular intervals, that familiar phrase popped up again and again: “you and me.” In the recorded conversations, Martin was always the first to say it, then Sara responded. Like a secret code.

  “Later on, we realized they had counted on having their phones tapped,” Martinsson said. “They had come up with a plan, which relied on their feelings for each other. They each had something to hold over the other. I do imagine, though, that it must have been difficult for two people to build a relationship and a future on the basis of having killed one person’s father.”

  There it was, a very concise summary of what the detectives at the police headquarters on Galggatan in Kalmar had gradually become convinced of: the daughter and her boyfriend had killed Göran and had done away with his body in some mysterious way. What remained, of course, was to prove it.

  The recorded phone conversations unfortunately didn’t reveal where they had buried him. Sara and Martin were too tight, not just because of love, but also due to the pressure. The pressure was coming at them from all sides—the police, neighbors, tenants and tenant farmers, the guardian—pushing them closer and closer together.

  On Thursday morning, November 22, the Kalmar police launched a coordinated effort. It had to be low-key, not involving violence and handcuffs. Although Martin and Sara must have known that they were under suspicion, given the gossip about them and the sudden intensification of police interest, they were probably unaware of the extent of the case being built against them.

  But what had come to light so far was certainly not concrete enough to prove the existence of a violent crime. So the police had to ask nicely—they requested an interview with both Martin and Sara as “others,” as if they were just any other potential witness who might have seen something.

  Around ten that morning, both were asked to come in at the same time to tell the whole story once more, but in front of separate interview teams.

  When Sara was confronted with the fact that everyone who knew Göran felt that the disappearance was very unlike him, she was dismissive, claiming she and his closest family knew him better than anyone. She reiterated her theory, now with more confidence, that he had probably taken off to force her to take on more responsibility. She had little time for questions about the old feud with the Törnblads; her father, she insisted, had already given her relationship with Martin his blessing.

  Over the course of the interview, police could find no chinks in her armor. She confirmed the course of events exactly as she’d given them in the first report: she and her father had quarreled, she’d left, then Göran had disappeared; she had held off on reporting it mostly because her stepmother, Irina, had felt it was best.

  But when the interviewers showed her the signed annual report of the family’s management company, she failed to keep her cool. Her face flushed violently.

  From the interview record:

  Sara flushes and says she signed the document before Göran disappeared. Göran wanted her to sign.

  The interviewer informs Sara that the two signatures look very alike.

  Sara claps her hands to her mouth and says she wrote both signatures. She knew she had to send in the report and didn’t know what to do with Göran missing. Sara is aware that she has done something wrong.

  During the police interview, Sara admitted to forgery, blaming the legal requirement to submit annual reports to the Swedish Companies Registration Office, which is what the Federation of Swedish Farmers, who helped with the financial side of things, had told her.

  That much was true—the legal obligation does exist. But the deadline is generous. The report would have had to be submitted only by January of the following year, 2013. Sara could have, in other words, waited several months longer for her father to come back to sign it himself. Instead, she forged his signature and dated it several days before even contacting the police, as if she were certain he wouldn’t be coming back.

  After questioning them both for a couple of hours, the police searched Ställe Farm yet again. This time, they seized Göran’s Chrysler to examine it meticulously with special lights in search of fibers and biological traces. They also looked for blood—perhaps Göran’s body had been transported in his own car? The inside of the car was sprayed with a special solution called Bluestar. But nothing was found.

  The police also seized Göran’s toothbrush and comb from Ställe Farm to construct a DNA profile. Theoretically, traces of DNA matching the profile could turn up in other investigations. And if blood or anything else was discovered by investigators, they’d need something to compare it to.

  After two weeks, the forensic technicians released the car, and it was driven back to Ställe Farm. It was December, and Martinsson’s investigation team had formed a firm impression: Göran Lundblad was dead, and Martin and Sara were more deeply implicated than they cared to admit.

  If the two of them had not been so close, it may have been possible to turn them against each other. But as it was, the investigation was stalling. Not even the phone tapping had yielded any useful results.

  The Göran Lundblad case finally screeched to a complete halt at exactly 9:37 a.m. on December 14, 2012, when emergency services received a phone call about an unrelated house fire. Hundreds of such calls are made in Sweden every year, but this one turned out to be different. The fire had started in a garage in the small village of Flakeböle in Borgholm Municipality, fifty miles north of the Öland Bridge.

  The flames had spread to the main house before emergency services could get there. But the signs of what happened inside remained after the fire had been put out. In what was left of the garage, firefighters came across two charred bodies, the corpses of Gustaf and Annika Nordander. They had not died in the fire.

  Upon further investigation, the police concluded that Gustaf Nordander had been beaten to death with a blunt object, and Annika Nordander had been shot at close range with a shotgun. Their dog was dead, too, also beaten to death. The couple’s safe had been opened with an angle grinder. The autopsy would later establish that Gustaf Nordander had still been alive, having suffered severe head injuries, when the fire started.

  It was a spectacularly gruesome lethal robbery and subsequent arson, and in this case, there were two bodies and copious amounts of other technical evidence to investigate. The police were forced to redistribute their resources.

  On December 19, the phone tapping in the Göran Lundblad case was discontinued with no significant results to show. The searchlight had been turned away from Norra Förlösa, despite the fact that other conflicts there were about to reach their boiling point.

  12

  LOST AND FOUND

  After the first search of her Missing People Sweden career, Therese Tang had let the image of Göran Lundblad slip away to the back of her mind. No big deal, she was a project person anyway. Göran’s disappearance and the ensuing search party was as good a reason as any to focus on building a highly effective branch of MPS. It was a process she was happy to immerse herself in, given the lingering effects of the Linda Chen affair on her psyche.

  Make a name for herself in the process? Maybe. Make a difference? Far more important.

  But Therese knew she needed to keep the different strands of her life from getting tangled up into a bundle. Rather, she had learned to compartmentalize them. Leave one strand lying there as she picked up the next and gave it her full attention. Then she would move on again.

  Such a mind-set was needed to keep all the aspects of her life up and running. The family part of it for one, with her somewhat rocky relationship with her husban
d. She still loved him and had a lot to thank him for, for giving her stability in life all those years ago. He had given her a solid, warm home to return to between her missions in modeling, styling, and designing, and for that she would always be grateful.

  He still worked long hours at the restaurant, with Therese helping as much as she could. As of 2012, she was no longer putting in several hundred hours a month, as in the early days, but it still required her attention, as any family business would.

  And the kids, of course, with Havannah’s seizures a constant threat looming over their daily life, keeping Therese constantly on guard. But Emilia and Dexter also needed her attention and love—let alone help with homework, school, and activities. Therese wanted to be as good a parent as her own mother and father had been.

  “They divorced when I was three years old, yes, but they kept living close to each other and prioritizing their children,” Therese said. “I always had them near when I was growing up. There were three of us kids. I was my mother’s second and my father’s only child. He was a great father to all of us.”

  The family had their share of problems and tragedies. The father of Therese’s half sister, Linda, for example, committed suicide in his own garage when Linda was in her teens. She was left with his house and a deep hole in her heart.

  Therese also had personal problems early on. “My first school years were very bad, with me getting beaten up a lot. The other kids cut my hair sometimes.

  “In fifth grade it was too much, so I was moved to another school and things turned completely. I went from being looked on as a nerd to being one of the most popular girls in my class.”

  But the experience of being bullied stayed with her and perhaps made her even more set in her own ways.

  “I have my opinions and I say what I think, even if it doesn’t suit everyone,” she said. “So be it. I’d prefer to be on my own. Even today it bugs me that they moved me—the one being bullied—rather than the ones doing the bullying.”

  Therese had always been good at staying busy, even when she was younger. She got her horse when she was a teenager, but she also did gymnastics and played handball, and at fourteen she entered the Air Cadets, a sort of voluntary group to prepare teenagers for the military.

  “That went on for several years. Two weekends a month, we went to the barracks. It was very exciting—I got to fly gliders at the age of fifteen. It probably helped me with my self-discipline as well.”

  And self-discipline was just what Therese needed to juggle all the aspects of her life at the end of 2012. She was working nearly full time as a security guard at the nuclear plant, which at least wasn’t too far from home, but as a job was sometimes rather tedious. It was mostly just going through the motions—the daily, never-changing routine of making sure all the alarms worked and all the sensors were clean and in good working order so that possible trespassers would get caught.

  But nothing much ever happened there. She was merely marking off her checklist. Every day. And then doing the same thing again the next day. Perhaps it was no surprise that MPS became a release valve for her pent-up energy—an escape from the daily grind, a way to find the excitement she needed to feel alive.

  Together with her colleague and mentor from work, Anders Lindfors, she formed a board for MPS in Kalmar, with herself at the helm as COO. She and Anders traveled together to Gothenburg for courses at the MPS headquarters; they also networked with other groups across the country and held rallies in their home region to get more people interested. Locally, more and more people volunteered as the hype around MPS spread. And they began to have just enough local success to keep the momentum going.

  Several months after the first MPS search for Göran Lundblad, in the summer of 2013, a man in his sixties took his car out for gas and simply vanished. Therese and Anders had gone out looking for him in various places around the county after their initial meeting with his loved ones. They searched an associated address on Öland, the missing man’s office, and several addresses in Kalmar.

  They had kept at it for several days, a long way from their own homes—though finding accommodation had proven easy, given the good reputation of the organization. Therese could usually just call ahead and introduce herself as Missing People, and hotel owners would give them rooms for free, as a form of sponsorship.

  It was only when they finally had a chance to speak with one of the relatives alone that they found out the missing man had tried to kill himself in the past and had a history of alcohol abuse and failed business ventures. They were even given the approximate location of the previous attempt. To Therese, it seemed as though the other relatives neglected to mention these things out of respect for his memory.

  “Families know much more than they let on, we realized,” Anders said. “If the police show up, they might tell them something like 25 percent of what they know. If it’s us, with no uniforms and a different approach, they might share something closer to 50 to 75 percent at first.”

  Unfortunately, this time the missing man had indeed succeeded in taking his own life. He was found dead in his car by a farmer. If more information had been forthcoming sooner, might things have ended differently? How could they have gotten more information, and sooner? And the question Therese couldn’t stop thinking about: How could Missing People Sweden become a stronger, more successful organization?

  Over time, they were learning the answer to that question. They needed to become better at relating to the relatives’ situation in order to build trust. They also needed to learn to assume the worst—that the missing person could even have been murdered by his or her loved ones.

  During 2013, MPS in Kalmar had a total of six missing-person cases. All were solved, although sadly, all but one had been found dead.

  “We formed a good connection with the police during this period,” Therese said. “It was mostly coincidental: the same police commander just happened to be on call several times in a row when we were called in, so we met up out on the searches and he came to trust us when he saw us work. He saw we were quite effective when we got enough people together to do a proper search.”

  By 2013, the American-developed technique, Managing Search Operations (MSO), had been applied for about fourteen years in Swedish police tactics but was still not widely used. And it was seldom applied with a bunch of volunteers at hand. The knowledge and training were there—probability theory, lost-person behavior studies, clue awareness, search detection probabilities, and research, all of it—but it wasn’t used systematically. That all changed as MPS expanded its organization.

  “They obviously wanted to know that our methodology worked together with their tactical deployment of the method,” Therese said. “We sat with the police several times, talking through how we worked and how they wanted us to work. We quickly developed a good working relationship with them, to where they started handing us lots of information at an early stage. And we showed we were worth trusting. They called us in much more quickly than they did with MPS in other parts of the country. I think this was because we were very clear, early on, that we didn’t want to play cops or do their job for them, but we wanted to complement the police effort. We were humble and said we just wanted to help.”

  As it turned out, their help would be much needed in the Lundblad case. Because life in Norra Förlösa had its own dynamic, and the events unfolding there were becoming more and more troubling.

  13

  ALONE TOGETHER

  On an early spring day in 2013, a handful of people gathered in the Chief Guardian Committee’s offices on Smålandsgatan in central Kalmar. One person was already upset. Another was about to cry.

  The missing man, Göran Lundblad, was being represented by caseworkers Ann Wribe and Olof Andersson, who were accompanied by the incoming guardian, Larz Bimby, a resident of Öland with fifteen years of experience working as a guardian.

  Larz was now in charge of the Lundblad estate, because, back in December 2012, the Lundblad sisters had as
ked for a new guardian to be appointed. The reason given was that Ann-Kristin Simonsson was “spreading rumors around the village,” gossiping about Göran’s affairs and assets. In addition, they complained, she was too rigid when it came to the finances. Sara felt she didn’t have enough to live off, even though she was putting in the same amount of work—in the forest, with the pipes, and with the maintenance of the Stigtomta properties—as always.

  Ann-Kristin had no objection to being relieved of the task; on the contrary, she wanted it out of her hands as soon as it could be arranged.

  The relationship between Ann-Kristin and Sara was made even more difficult because of the Mats Råberg situation. The tenant farmer’s long-standing one-year lease contract to use just over 115 acres of the Lundblads’ fields, a contract that had been in his family for forty years, had become a contentious issue.

  According to the 2012 contract, he paid less than one thousand kronor per acre annually. This amounted to an unfair discount, according to Åke Törnblad, who paid double that—approximately two thousand kronor per acre—for the land he rented from none other than Göran’s guardian, Ann-Kristin.

  As early as the spring of 2012, it had become clear that the Törnblads wanted to take over at least part of the rented land. A former employee at the Törnblad farm could recall at least one occasion that spring when the Törnblads had discussed building a barn for their yearlings. Martin wanted to build it down in the fields, the fields Göran leased to Mats. Another employee said, “Surely that’s not your land,” to which Martin had replied ominously, “It will be soon.”

  On December 14, 2012, Mats received a letter by registered mail, a termination of his lease contract. It was especially odd, Mats thought, because the termination was dated July 8 and carried Göran’s signature.

  The termination came as a complete surprise to the tenant farmer, according to the document he drafted to contest it: