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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  In the winter of 2013/2014, Göran’s newly appointed guardian, lawyer Knut Lewenhaupt, visited Ställe Farm after inspecting the room where Mats Råberg kept his sacks of manure. Several of the large sacks had been cut open; manure worth hundreds of thousands of kronor covered the floor. While he, Mats, and Mats’s partner, Britt-Marie, stood there staring at the devastation, Sara and Martin came home.

  “Mats and his partner looked terrified and made themselves scarce,” Knut Lewenhaupt said.

  Several people tried to talk to Martin, but to no avail.

  Daniel Emilsson, one of Mats’s employees, was interviewed by the police as early as October 2013, following a couple of reports and counterreports.

  “Martin talked a lot of trash about Mats,” said Daniel. “He broke Mats’s things to force him to close his farm. We have no proof, but it couldn’t possibly have been anyone else.”

  Daniel told the police that everyone in the village believed that Martin had killed Göran. It was clear that Daniel was genuinely upset by his interactions with Martin, whom he had first met soon after starting his employment on Mats’s farm in the spring of 2013. One day, Martin simply appeared behind him in the barn.

  Martin introduced himself—they had both gone to the same high school, Ingelstorp, but at different times—and they exchanged phone numbers, just the way any professionals in the same business would. But Martin also talked quite a bit about how badly run Mats’s farm was, that it was a bad idea to take the job, because it was about to go out of business.

  “And that’s when it all started,” Daniel said.

  A curious Martin was suddenly calling him on the phone, all day, every day.

  “He would talk for hours.”

  Martin wanted to know everything that happened on the farm—whether they were investing in new machines, animals, equipment—and was eager to hear what they talked about as well. “He told me Mats was about to have his tenancy terminated,” Daniel said. “‘You’ll be out of here soon,’ he said. And he said that he and Sara had been to meetings with various lawyers. Then the sabotage started.”

  During the winter of 2013/2014, something happened, the full significance of which would not become clear until much later. Daniel Emilsson was a hunter, with a gun license, and Martin Törnblad had been badgering him for a long time to come help him get rid of the pigeons in the Törnblads’ barn. The birds perched high up under the ceiling, and their droppings were everywhere. Pigeons are not just untidy, but they are also a health risk and could spread infections and other things to the livestock.

  Granted, there was an air rifle on the farm, but according to Martin, it didn’t work. When Daniel finally gave in and stopped by to help with the birds, Martin led him up to the small office in the loft, where there was also a bed. On the bed was a gun, a break-action shotgun, the kind where the barrels are hinged open above the trigger to reload.

  “Do you know how it works?” Martin asked after picking the rifle up and unlatching it. At the time, Martin had loose shells in his pockets, Daniel noted.

  It felt to Daniel like an invitation to use the shotgun to shoot the pigeons. But that would be a rather daft idea, since the weapon would do a lot more harm than good, compared to a small-bore hunting rifle or an air rifle.

  It would be perfectly natural for a gun enthusiast to handle someone else’s weapon, assess it, hold it in their hands, maybe even aim and dry-fire it. Or it would be—if they felt comfortable. But Daniel didn’t. Martin, who had neither weapons training nor a license, should not be handling a gun, Daniel felt. It was likely his father’s, Åke’s, rifle, but still.

  “I don’t handle other people’s weapons,” Daniel said, and they left the office.

  Twenty-two dead pigeons later, Daniel was handed a couple of hundred-krona notes for his trouble, then he left the farm.

  If he hadn’t already had a bad feeling about Martin, or if he hadn’t had time to think twice up in that office, Daniel’s fingerprints could easily have ended up on Åke Törnblad’s shotgun. That would have complicated things.

  The head of the Norra Förlösa Road Association, Lars Melhager, summed up several of the events in the area when he was interviewed by the police in connection with the Göran Lundblad case in January 2014.

  Lars’s contacts with Martin had mostly been limited to complaints about road maintenance—complaints aimed at Mats, who was contracted to plow, sand, and maintain the road through the village.

  “I informed him that Mats was performing his duties and that he would not be replaced,” Lars said of his conversation with Martin.

  He described Martin as rough, undiplomatic, and in the throes of megalomania, particularly when it came to acquiring farming machinery.

  “Everyone in the village is afraid of Martin,” Lars said. “And they can’t think of any other logical explanation than that he’s the one doing all those things to Mats.”

  Several obvious lies made the locals pull away even more. Martin told one of them that he had come across a man in black, skulking around the village.

  “It’s going to get worse,” the man muttered before disappearing, Martin claimed.

  One man from Melby recounted an occasion when a group of local men gathered after one particular act of sabotage to help Mats shovel cattle feed back into slashed thousand-pound sacks. Martin showed up, too, but he was asked to leave—the men with the shovels were convinced he had been the one who had cut open the sacks.

  “Then he said something about Sara’s sister’s boyfriend being a commando with a night-vision scope. He said, ‘When he gets here, he will put an end to this,’” Stig Karlsson said.

  Yet another threat, in other words, but not concrete enough for the police this time either. Even if ten or twenty people had heard it, Martin would be able to find some explanation for his comment on what a soldier with a night-vision scope could do to his enemies.

  The supposed commando he referenced was Maria’s boyfriend, Owen, the same person Göran’s guardian Larz Bimby thought was named Ove Andersson. In fact, Martin had quite a few fanciful notions about Owen.

  Mats claimed Martin threatened him with this mercenary in December 2013. “You have until March 12, 2014, to get off the land. After that, Maria’s boyfriend is going to come down and plug you,” Martin supposedly said.

  Martin called him a superhacker, a person who could plant illegal pornography in Larz Bimby’s computer, who used several false aliases, and who had been to Iraq with the American Marines, where he had been trained to kill. Martin seemed to think Owen was his own pet mercenary, who—if Martin was to be believed—would do almost anything for him.

  The “mercenary” in question, Owen, was born in 1988, lived in Norrköping, and was still dating Maria. He did in fact have a military background in America, but as a dog handler in the Marine Corps. He remained unemployed throughout his relationship with Maria, but he made some money helping people train their dogs.

  From a legal perspective, his record in Sweden was clean, aside from a handful of rent defaults. He figured in only one criminal case, but as the victim, after being threatened by a drug addict outside a corner store by the railway station in Norrköping. He was hardly a battle-hardened mercenary or superhacker with the capacity to assassinate anyone at will.

  “I’m afraid of what Martin could do; he’s out of control,” Mats stated when he was interviewed in connection with several reports of intimidation. But when the interviewer asked for something concrete—proof, observations of Martin in the wrong place at the wrong time, witnesses—Mats could only recount his own impressions.

  “It’s just his manner . . . He has no respect,” he said.

  The police noted, logged, and then, in practice, ignored report after report. Just like with Göran’s disappearance itself, there was nothing tangible for them to work with. Closer scrutiny revealed that the opinions of the Förlösa residents often rested on their own musings, thoughts, and speculations about what other people had told the
m.

  One rumor, for example, had Martin in one of his darker moments supposedly blurting out that “you have to kill a few farmers to get enough land.” An alarming statement for any farmer to hear, indeed. And a sign that he really did have a hand in the murder of Göran Lundblad, several listeners concluded.

  But the words passed through several people before they reached the police, it would turn out. Martin supposedly said it to a man named Mikael who worked at a garage, who then supposedly repeated it to Stig Karlsson in Melby, who in turn told a mechanic, possibly going by the name of Billy, who in turn told Mats’s farmhand Daniel.

  Four times removed from the original utterance. Like a game of telephone, where a whispered phrase is passed from participant to participant. And as every child who has played the game knows, the phrase eventually transforms into something completely different from what was first uttered.

  Gossip, hearsay—not the kind of thing a prosecutor could build a case on. They could interview Martin, of course, but he denied everything.

  Searching for DNA and fingerprints was another option, but what would it prove in connection with an act of vandalism if Martin’s DNA were found in, for example, the machine shed at Ställe Farm? He had unrestricted access to it.

  The police were free to install CCTV cameras for a limited time without special permission to catch any future sabotage, but the crime needed to be more serious to justify it. Besides, an awful lot of cameras would be required to cover the whole village.

  Patrolling Norra Förlösa around the clock? Not an option. If someone had blown up a building, for example, or systematically killed or harmed animals, fired a handgun, or set fire to houses in Norra Förlösa, it would be a different story. But the criminal acts in this case were so minor and so surreptitiously performed that the police couldn’t justify diverting resources to them. What was happening in Norra Förlösa was low-intensity terrorism. Seen from the outside, from the police’s perspective, the villain of the piece could not be unequivocally identified. Because accusations were streaming in from all directions.

  When Martin was reported to the police for vandalism or intimidation, he responded by making counterclaims, arguing that he himself was the victim of the crime. He claimed that someone had, for example, loosened the lug nuts on the wheels of the car he used. He reported the incident as “endangerment,” since he could have lost control of his vehicle and died if he had driven the car somewhere and the wheel had come off. Martin also took pictures of the front wheel with the loosened nuts and sent it to Sara. He also sent her pictures of a padlock that someone had sabotaged with glue and cable ties.

  Sara replied via text: “So fucking childish. Is that all—just your car and the lock? Sissies.”

  She seemed to be unquestioningly on his side, convinced of Martin’s innocence. She even encouraged his plans to mess with the neighbors from time to time, urging him at one point to dump big piles of snow at Mats’s farm, for instance.

  Several of the incidents occurred when she was elsewhere, working in the forest or attending to things up in Stigtomta.

  “Almost every time Sara went up to Tängsta on her own, something happened down in Förlösa. There were threatening letters and other things,” Henry Nydahl said.

  His wife, Doris, who was on increasingly friendly terms with Sara after they moved in during the spring of 2013, had the same impression.

  “Something always happened down in Kalmar when Sara was up here,” she said.

  And every time something happened in Kalmar, Sara had to go back home.

  When Annika Karlsson met the gloved Martin Törnblad by her mailbox in April 2014, he had simply recounted things he himself had been accused of by other locals.

  Martin, for his part, certainly sounded convinced about his version of things when he was speaking to Annika. After their conversation, he and his infant son had continued along their improvised mail delivery route around Förlösa.

  Annika walked back home with the dog, but she found the whole situation so absurd and Martin’s behavior so erratic that she took the time to write down an account of the mailbox encounter. The note she brought in from the mailbox further confirmed her impression.

  The note turned out to be a copy of a threatening letter that had supposedly been sent to Martin and Sara:

  This is what’s going to happen now.

  Mats is going to be given a multiyear contract.

  Mats is not obligated to fix any damages to buildings.

  The neighborhood watch asks to be spared from hearing all the nonsense made up about Göran’s tenant farmers and former guardians.

  The neighborhood watch also doesn’t want Sara and Martin to be allowed to stay in or make use of any of Göran’s assets.

  If these demands are not met, there will be consequences:

  Your son, Vince, will come to the same end as Göran . . .

  The neighborhood watch will do to you what you have done to Mats.

  We just want to let you know that you will never have a moment’s peace, so our advice would be to move immediately.

  In order to fully understand the contents of the letter, it is necessary to rewind to December 2012, when Mats had received the notice of termination of his tenancy. When he had refused to accept the termination, the contract was renewed by Göran’s then-guardian Ann-Kristin Simonsson. The reference to damages in the letter related to Mats, for example, having moved supports in the machine shed that was included in his tenancy.

  The threatening letter had supposedly arrived in Ställe Farm’s mailbox, unsigned, just over a month earlier, in March, which was when Martin had reported it to the police.

  At the time, he told the police the following: Around lunchtime on March 10, Mats Råberg had come to Ställe Farm uninvited and had behaved threateningly. He talked about his tenancy.

  “You had better start moving; if you don’t, you know what’s going to happen to your son,” Mats had supposedly said before leaving the farm.

  Though upset, Martin continued to work, and didn’t react strongly until that evening when he found the threatening letter in the mailbox, he had told the police officer who was recording his report.

  The next day, he called Sara to tell her about the incident. She was, as she so often was when something happened at Norra Förlösa, up in Stigtomta. Martin read her the letter and also sent a picture of it to her phone.

  Sara was distraught, even terrified, when she read that one or several people wanted to make her son disappear. The letter left her so shaken that she later, in the middle of the night, went over to the home of the tenants she had built a relationship with, Henry and Doris Nydahl.

  They listened as she talked through the incident with them. They were supportive and kind, and she calmed down. Over the coming weeks, the friendship between them would grow stronger still.

  What neither Sara’s nor Martin’s relatives knew at the time was that Martin had penned the letter himself. As early as the end of January, he had been writing drafts and considering different versions. He concluded that he needed assistance. The computer had spelling and grammar checks, but he was dyslexic. He turned to Karin Karlberg, a woman his age who had been working on the farm for about a year.

  She had training in, among other things, cattle breeding and was very experienced in successfully inseminating cows. When she joined the farm, the proportion of cows impregnated through insemination rose from 60 percent to close to 90 percent. More calves born, simply put, meant more money for a business under severe financial strain.

  “Martin came and asked me to help him with the computer, and I went with him to the office,” Karin said. “He asked me to spell-check a document for him. I read it through and corrected it, then I asked what he wanted it for. He said it was verbal threats he wanted written down, threats made by Mats Råberg. He wanted to light a fire under the police, because they weren’t doing anything.”

  Martin was, in other words, admitting deliberate lies. Perhaps
they could be called white lies, exaggerations for a good cause. He wanted to stir the pot, prod the police into action, so they would finally take action to help him and Sara against the malicious and intimidating Mats.

  It is indisputable, then, that Martin had lied to the police in his report about someone else putting the threatening note in his mailbox on the evening of March 10. The letter had been written over a week earlier, which in turn begs the question of whether Mats really had threatened him around lunchtime that same day, using words drawn from the forged letter. It is difficult to see the whole business as anything other than a sloppy framing of Mats.

  No one other than Karin Karlberg knew anything about the origins of the letter when Martin reported the purported threats to the police. Only a month or so later, when copies were handed out to local residents, did the police interview the accused. It was indicative of the police’s position that Mats was interviewed as a “witness” rather than a “suspect.”

  “The only person talking about me fixing damages to the machine shed is Martin,” he said. “I think Martin and Sara wrote the letter together. The rest of us in the village never talk about neighborhood watch or community. We have no need to talk about it because we’re part of the village. The only one who has mentioned there being no sense of community in the village is Martin, since he and Sara are not part of the community nor the neighborhood watch.”

  The break with the community became ever more obvious in the days after Martin distributed his notes. Martin’s father, Åke, turned up at a road-association meeting at the start of April, brandishing a copy of the threatening letter.

  He read it aloud and invited comments. Did anyone recognize it? He left the main question unspoken: Which one of you wrote this?

  Åke also promised that the Stockholm police were going to investigate the threat, since the Kalmar police were twiddling their thumbs. He had likely been told this by Martin, which revealed the liar’s lack of knowledge, because that is simply not how it works. A person reporting a crime is not allowed to choose which police region handles the case.