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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  The undersigned has . . . never before seen this termination or been informed of it verbally by Göran. During the period July–August ’12, Göran and I met on a number of occasions and a termination was never discussed. I have until the arrival of the termination letter assumed the tenancy would continue.

  Mats had also planted on just over one-third of his rented land the previous autumn, an investment that would go down the drain if the contract were to be broken. Besides, he claimed, the termination was formally invalid: according to the tenancy contract, a termination would have to be undertaken at least eight months before the last day of the contracted tenancy.

  Oddly enough, the termination letter is dated July 8, which is eerily close to exactly eight months before the current contract’s end date, March 14, 2013, and yet, it hadn’t arrived until mid-December.

  Sara, for her part, claimed that she had found the termination letter in a binder several months after Göran’s disappearance, that she assumed it was her father’s copy of the document, and that Mats had not signed and returned the other copy. Consequently, she had sent it, by registered mail, for his signature.

  “And Martin was hassling me about it as well,” she said.

  She never explained why she didn’t contact the tenant farmer first, by, for example, walking the three hundred yards to Mats’s farm to talk it over with him in person.

  Practically speaking, there wasn’t a lot to discuss. As autumn turned into the winter of 2012/2013, Ann-Kristin was still Göran’s sole representative. She drafted a new one-year contract with Mats, which was signed on January 7, 2013. Shortly thereafter, she resigned her post as guardian.

  Now, to the meeting to acquaint the new guardian, Larz, with the details of the Lundblad case, Sara had brought her partner’s father, Åke, who had in fact applied to take over as Göran’s guardian. His application had been rejected.

  “When we did the usual background checks, things didn’t look too good for Åke with the Enforcement Agency,” Ann Wribe said.

  For anyone with a firm grasp of the situation in Norra Förlösa at this time, several other plausible reasons to not let him be Göran’s guardian might have sprung to mind. Village gossip and more or less well-founded claims about there being bad blood among the farmers on account of a disputed piece of land would have been impossible to ignore. But the fact that Åke Törnblad had already been given around 1.3 million kronor (160 thousand dollars) by the missing man’s daughter, without documentation of the loans or collateral, was something else entirely.

  The institution of guardian is defined by law; its objective is to help anyone who can’t fend for themselves with anything to do with their estate or their financial matters. Plainly speaking—the guardian takes over everything, almost as a stand-in parent, or at least a manager of all practical affairs. The caseworkers and the new guardian explained to the family how it was supposed to work. The question remained whether Åke and Sara really understood what they were being told.

  At one point, Åke raised his voice and started talking about Göran’s will. Only a few months had passed since he’d found out that Sara was broke. But he apparently had detailed knowledge about what the will from autumn 2011 said: that any inheritance would be split between sisters Sara and Maria, but that Sara would be formally in charge until Maria’s twenty-fifth birthday.

  “She has lost her father,” an irate Åke exclaimed several times.

  Not that he could really know that. The police were still treating the disappearance as potential manslaughter. But the body was missing, and there were no outstanding clues to investigate. As long as there was no evidence to the contrary, Göran was still alive in the eyes of the law.

  “I reflected on his word choice and replied that Göran’s death had not been proven,” said Ann Wribe. “Which is why a guardian had been appointed, and that was final. It had nothing to do with wills.”

  The tenancy agreement, the purportedly terminated but recently renewed contract with Mats Råberg, was also brought up for discussion yet again.

  Sara repeatedly claimed that the guardian and the Chief Guardian Committee were mistreating her. She cried several times but was also noticeably angry.

  “She said she wanted things to be like they were before, when Göran was alive,” said Ann.

  Any hopes she might have had to that end were dashed utterly when Larz Bimby took over.

  “I made it clear to both Sara and Maria from the get-go that I would be in charge of and manage Göran’s assets,” he said. “I said explicitly that I wanted things as neat as a pin, and I drafted guidelines for Sara.”

  By the time they had the initial meeting at the Chief Guardian Committee’s offices, he already had a firm grasp of Göran’s finances. He knew that over a million kronor had been deposited into Sara’s account—the lumber payment from Bäckebo Sawmill. What he didn’t know, however, was that she had already transferred that money to Åke.

  Shortly after the spring meeting at the Chief Guardian Committee’s offices, a few days into April 2013, Larz drove out to Ställe Farm to inventory the machine shed because there had been reports of unauthorized vehicles being kept there. Either they needed to be removed or their owner would have to start paying rent.

  “Sara didn’t want to give me the keys to the padlock, so I called a locksmith to let me in,” Larz said. “At that point, Åke came running over from his farm and started yelling and shouting. When things had calmed down, it came out that Sara had called Åke and riled him up.”

  Larz was accompanied on his visit by Ann Wribe from the Chief Guardian Committee. This is how she described the event, according to interview records:

  When Larz and Ann were outside the machine shed Åke arrived with Sara, Martin, and his younger brother Mikael Törnblad. After a while, Åke approached Ann in an intimidating manner, raising his hands close to Ann’s head like a cat scratching.

  While making this gesture and using threatening body language, Åke screamed at Ann, “I want to scare you.” Ann found the situation very unpleasant and was frightened.

  Larz changed the locks on the machine shed and ordered Åke to either remove his property or start paying rent, or he would sell his equipment.

  During an inspection of the Stigtomta properties, Larz also noted that the buildings were in a poor state of repair. And to his surprise, he noted several cases of nonexistent tenancy agreements.

  Göran’s relationships with the tenants often rested on oral contracts, Larz found, sometimes several years old, where rent was not always paid in cash. Instead, the tenants could work in lieu of payment by renovating or taking care of the upkeep. Larz felt the setup was impossible for a guardian, whose office was hundreds of miles away, to keep on top of, so he set to work regulating all agreements with formal contracts, complete with signatures, terms, end dates, and termination clauses.

  Now Sara was no longer the only one who wanted things to “be like they were before, when Göran was alive.” Doris and Henry Nydahl, new Stigtomta tenants, immediately locked horns with Larz. In the summer of 2013, they wrote in a letter:

  We consider Larz Bimby to be an unpleasant person who will not tolerate disagreement, and we feel that he is trying to be a bully and that he demonstrates enormous ignorance and a sarcastic manner.

  Tenant Eva Sterner, on the other hand, felt grateful that Larz was finally sorting things out—renovations were being completed and promises kept.

  Regardless of how Larz Bimby was perceived by Göran’s tenants—effective and rational or insensitive and pushy—his fundamental view was that Göran should enjoy market-based returns on all his assets. Sara should, for example, pay rent for staying at Ställe Farm, keeping her horses in his stable, and using the car.

  She was welcome to pay herself a salary from Patenta, Larz announced, but no other money would be forthcoming, given that she did not in fact own anything else that could pay dividends.

  Larz, who had felt disrespected every time he had asked
for transparency, keys, information, papers—the kinds of things he needed to do his job—had decided to take a hard line with Sara.

  A letter he wrote Sara on April 10 delineates his frustration with her clearly:

  You never showed up to a meeting with the accountant, nor did you cancel.

  You have shown in a number of ways that you are unwilling to cooperate, even though I have stated several times that I want to work with you. You have also said that going forward, “you will have to speak to my advisor.”

  Your advisor, who has a foreign accent and goes by the name of Ove Andersson, refuses to give his address and has only provided a phone number, which is not in service.

  Sara, you’re not taking this seriously.

  “Ove Andersson” was, in fact, a half-American man named Owen, and was Maria Lundblad’s boyfriend who lived in Nyköping. Sara had asked him to act as a liaison, which Larz, clearly, refused to accept.

  During the first half of 2013, Larz instead threatened Sara with debt collectors and the closing of pipe manufacturer Patenta. He was of the impression that someone other than Sara was pulling the strings. He and Sara would have a meeting, discuss matters, agree on a solution, and plan how to proceed, only to have everything thrown overboard a couple of hours later when she would send him an email retracting previous promises and demanding other arrangements. As though she had come home, told someone else about the meeting, and been persuaded, or ordered, to change her mind.

  “I had the feeling that Åke controlled his son Martin, who in turn controlled Sara,” said Larz.

  Åke had on one occasion asked Larz how long it would go on like this before Sara would be allowed to take over the farm, forest, and so on after Göran. Larz had replied that he would not be surprised if it was ten to fifteen years before Sara would be able to take over Göran’s assets. That had made Åke heave a deep sigh.

  In August 2013, Larz Bimby summed up his efforts as Göran Lundblad’s representative in a report to the county court. Sara and Maria Lundblad had, at that point, already begun a long fight, with the assistance of a lawyer, to have Larz removed as guardian.

  The end of Larz’s time as the Lundblad guardian coincides with the beginning of a different relationship. That same month, a black stroller of a fairly ordinary model rolled eastward along the road through Norra Förlösa, with a baby boy, no more than a few days old, asleep inside. He had been given his own room in his parents’ yellow house that sat on a hill farther down the road.

  Sara and Martin were walking home with their newborn son, Vince, in the stroller. Gravel crunched under the wheels. It was late August 2013, just under a year since Göran had vanished without a trace. There were many hypotheses about what might have happened to him, but most contained one commonality—the man was dead and buried.

  The past year had scarred the couple with the stroller. They were entangled in a number of things that seemed impossible to unravel. Yet the harder they tried to sort things out, the more knotted they seemed to become.

  Time had not been kind to their relationships with the other locals in Norra Förlösa. And the police were still hounding them. Not very actively, granted—it had been a long time since they’d had to deal with nosy officers, forensic dogs, and technicians—but they could both still feel the eyes on them.

  Money was another big problem. They were broke. Martin had virtually nothing to his name; he still worked for room and board on his father’s farm, which was encumbered with debts and cash flow problems. Sara’s resources had long since been depleted after she had pumped over a million kronor into the Törnblad family business.

  The great Lundbladian fortune—fifty million kronor—was a mirage on the horizon. Since Göran had still not been declared dead, his will had not come into effect. At the moment, all they had was a lot of work to do: the pipe-making, the forestry maintenance, and the upkeep of the Stigtomta properties. And now the baby. It seemed endless.

  The stress and anger over their situation was never far from their minds as they wandered through the landscape of their childhood, saturated with memories and pictures. Martin had never lived anywhere else. This was his entire world. They turned down the gravel path toward Ställe Farm, that spacious but run-down 1940s house on the hill.

  Their son, Vince, had not been born into the most harmonious of situations. After being together for several years, and living together for some time, everything had changed, and not for the better.

  For Sara, the birth of her son was also the start of something new. It was not just that there was a new little creature to care for; his birth had also triggered a fundamental change in her life. Her focus had suddenly shifted away from her own career plans and toward her wish to build a solid life for her new baby. More importantly, her focus had moved away from what Martin had been talking about for so long and painted as some sort of vision to strive toward: the merging of their family farms, a shared future as wealthy farmers.

  The new baby boy’s birthday, as it turned out, would mark the beginning of the end for the couple with the code words “you and me.”

  14

  SABOTAGE

  The dog took off without warning from where Annika Karlsson was standing outside her garage. It made a beeline for the mailbox, where a car was just rolling away. The man behind the wheel had stopped to put a note of some kind into her mailbox. He was wearing gloves, which wouldn’t have been odd if he were out walking in the middle of winter. But it was early April 2014, and he was in a car.

  Annika ran after the dog, primarily so it wouldn’t get lost in the woods or get injured attacking the car. The dog actually belonged to her sister; she was dog-sitting. The driver stopped when he noticed both dog and woman were chasing him.

  The man behind the wheel was Martin Törnblad, who had been a neighbor of Annika’s for a long time. The Törnblad farm was several hundred yards away as the crow flies, but that was still next door in the countryside sense. Ställe Farm, where Martin was registered as residing at that point, was only about five hundred yards away.

  Annika, for her part, lived at the end of a three-hundred-foot spur road off the road that led past both Ställe Farm and Mats Råberg’s farm, beyond which it wound through the fields on its way to Melby, Förlösa proper, and eventually, the city of Kalmar.

  Martin’s seven-month-old son, Vince, was asleep in the passenger seat. For unknown reasons, Martin seemed noticeably discomfited by the unexpected meeting.

  “I have welding burns on my hands, that’s why I’m wearing gloves,” he said, even though Annika hadn’t asked.

  He came across as shamefaced, unfocused, and unsure of how to handle the situation, as though he had been caught red-handed at something. He then told her he had been out putting notes in several local mailboxes. Not everyone’s, but some people’s. He didn’t say what for, or what the notes were about.

  Instead, Martin quickly launched into a tirade about how badly Sara and he were being treated by the world at large. Then he composed himself and reeled off what sounded like a well-rehearsed spiel, basically that everything was Mats Råberg’s fault and that the man had it out for Martin and Sara.

  He told Annika that the Lundblad properties in Stigtomta had been burgled, for example. Mats’s farmhand was probably behind it, at his boss’s behest, Martin claimed. He continued to slander Mats, who up until Göran’s disappearance had rented land from the Lundblads for decades without a hitch.

  Supposedly, Mats had deliberately knocked Martin and Sara’s mailbox over when he plowed the road last winter. On another occasion, Martin said, he filled their mailbox with manure. He had also reported the Törnblads for cruelty to animals and fed Sara’s horses some sort of concentrate to harm them. Moreover, he was secretly colluding with Göran’s guardian to secure unfair advantages. Or at least he had been until last autumn, when the most recent guardian had been appointed. This one, Martin noted, was less hostile and more accommodating and willing to compromise than the previous ones.
<
br />   These accusations, taken separately, in isolation from the history and relationships in and around Norra Förlösa, probably seemed fairly petty, bordering on laughable, to most people.

  Manure in the mailbox—who does that? What is to be gained by it? If anything, it seemed like the kind of prank a bored child would pull, not fully cognizant of the impact on others. Or perhaps a severely disturbed individual could potentially think to do it, guided by some twisted form of logic. And trying to harm animals by giving them the wrong feed? That was the same thing—silly, cowardly, petty, and with potentially grave consequences for some innocent animals.

  But Annika was well aware that a number of things had happened over the past year that indicated the presence of a madman. A psychopath. Two chainsaws had been stolen from a trailer, for example. Cat feces had been found in a mailbox, a cart intended for animal feed had been moved, an electric fence had been cut four times in the same day, and a combine harvester had gotten a flat tire after someone had opened the valves. Hours after Mats Råberg had taken delivery of expensive concentrate feed, someone had opened the feed bin so most of it had poured out on the ground and been lost.

  Another local resident had found two screws in his flat tire, which he was sure couldn’t possibly have ended up there on their own. A saboteur must have gotten into his garage.

  Each incident on its own wasn’t overly disturbing. But taken cumulatively, there was a clear wave of low-key attacks, things that had never happened before in Norra Förlösa. Here, everyone had always gone about their own business in peace, worked hard, paid their bills. Shown respect.

  In fact, the one-sided conflict between the Törnblads and the tenant farmer had grown so inflamed that Mats had to do everything he could to avoid Martin. When Mats needed to visit his yearlings on the other side of the Törnblad farm, he never went alone. He always brought a witness, just in case something happened. The tenant farmer was deeply afraid of the unpredictable young man who was very clearly after his livelihood.