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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  It was clear that Martin had been wasting a lot of people’s time with his litany of lies. Mats’s, of course, as well as the other local residents’, even his own father’s and Sara’s. Not to mention the police’s, who are legally bound to accept reports of crime, regardless of the context.

  It is not easy to put a price on unease, worry, stress, and the violation that being accused of a crime entails, or on the work the police force does recording, logging, and interviewing, but Martin’s lies must have cost the police thousands of kronor in wasted work hours alone.

  The residents and landowners in Norra Förlösa assumed Martin wanted the land and was terrorizing Mats to make him abandon the property. But who could possibly imagine it would work? The whole affair gave Mats countless sleepless nights, forced him to look over his shoulder wherever he went, and made him feel constantly worried about what was in store for him next. But making Mats leave his farm and a successful business? That would take a lot more than empty threats and serial harassment.

  But Martin’s motives for what at first glance seemed like petty attacks, lies, and fantasies, were likely not altogether rational. They could also have been the rantings and delusions of an ill or disturbed person.

  Martin had had a taste of both powerlessness and isolation in his months-long war with Göran’s guardians over the Lundblad lands and fortune, the failed attempt to terminate Mats’s tenancy and take over the lease land, and his stress over the poor financial state of his father’s farm. Add to that, of course, the fact that he and his girlfriend were murder suspects.

  Now, there is a world of difference between cutting up sacks of manure and murdering someone. A more rational motive for him to conduct a campaign of terror against others and to fake his own vulnerability was to create an external enemy. Partly to get Sara back to Ställe Farm in the immediate term, and partly to tie her closer to him in the long term.

  This is classic behavior in geopolitical contexts: a government painting another country or people as wicked. In this case, the intention was to amplify the feeling that it was “you and me” against the world, in order to save his relationship with Sara.

  Because that relationship was on the rocks, and far more so than Martin realized.

  In the summer of 2013, when Sara had been six months pregnant with their child, Martin had been unfaithful. It was confirmed by both him and the woman he slept with a couple of times. Sara didn’t learn of this infidelity; if she had, she would likely have left him. She almost left him as early as the year before, in the spring of 2012, after checking Martin’s texts and discovering that he was having a fairly romantic relationship with a girl from a gym in Kalmar. She wanted to break up then, but Martin somehow persuaded her to carry on.

  She increasingly felt, however, that Martin was changing. Whether it was the constant fighting over the lease land and with the guardians, his father’s financial distress, or maybe because he himself made no money and needed to be supported, was unclear. But after Vince had been born, Sara felt Martin trying to seize the reins in the family.

  The terror he was accused of spreading in Norra Förlösa was taking another form inside their family home. Martin was clearly jealous of the attention Sara gave their son and also sought to force Sara to stay home at Ställe Farm and look after the house. She felt downtrodden and abused. Not physically—Martin had never gone further than to restrain her—but psychologically, because she could never be sure how he was going to react. His mood changed from day to day when he came home from work—if he was in a bad mood, he would give her a hard time. Several times, mired in a deep depression, he talked about the two of them committing suicide together just to get away from it all.

  It was psychologically exhausting to adapt to, she felt. She also felt that Martin was shirking his parental responsibilities. He wouldn’t change diapers, refused to cook, and wouldn’t do any of the things a parent should. One fight between them ended with Sara getting in her car and driving away from Ställe Farm. Martin climbed into his own car and chased her down the gravel roads, trying to force her off the road, or so it seemed to her. After a couple of miles, he succeeded; she veered onto the shoulder, opened the door, and bolted into the forest before he caught up with her. They eventually reconciled after a lot of talking, at least temporarily.

  The young parents at Ställe Farm had been living under immense pressure for quite a long time—both before Göran’s disappearance, because he didn’t approve of their relationship, and after, being under criminal suspicion and fighting with Göran’s guardians. Sometimes external enemies can help hold a relationship together, even if that relationship lacks important components—such as genuine love.

  When Göran’s third guardian, Knut Lewenhaupt, assumed his position in November 2013, the pressure eased slightly, and Sara started to see that there might be a way out of all this. Granted, not all the Stigtomta tenants thought well of her, but the atmosphere there was nowhere near as toxic as the one down in Norra Förlösa.

  Up in Stigtomta, there were no quarrels with tenant farmers, no demanding fathers-in-law who wanted to borrow money, no neighbors throwing sidelong glances. These were just the houses and farms of her childhood. There was pasture for her horses. And just a couple of miles away, in Nyköping, there was the guardian who had literally handed her back her keys.

  Sara now had full access to Ställe Farm and the Stigtomta properties again. Knut’s view was that she should be able to support herself as she had before, when Göran gave her money from the forestry business or the pipe manufacturing.

  Knut saw Sara as “a fragile little girl” and found it impossible to believe that she could have murdered her father. She was easy to work with, he felt, and they stayed in regular, professional, constructive contact.

  The long fight with Larz Bimby, the lawyers, and the county court had lasted for over six months, and it had certainly taken its toll on Sara, both mentally and financially. A few months earlier, back in August 2013, Sara had sent an email to her sister, Maria, about Larz:

  I want this to end. I’m not exactly someone who wishes people would die, but with him I really do. I wish he would just drop dead, have a heart attack, or something. I hate him!!!!

  After Knut assumed his position in November and the external pressure had started to ease for Sara, the problems, injuries, and conflicts that had been lurking under the surface reappeared. Sara’s feelings were gradually changing. She was tired of Martin’s emotional outbursts, his attempts to dominate her, and his endless harping on about how stupid everyone else was—everyone except him, of course.

  Several times during the winter of 2013/2014, she had wanted to break it off. She talked to Maria about seeking a restraining order to get away from Martin. But she went back to him again and again, faced with out-and-out threats about everything, from him taking Vince from her to him killing himself.

  The “you and me” pact was crumbling.

  There was one other factor contributing to the crumbling of their relationship that Martin, at this point, knew nothing about. His name was Johan Nydahl, and he was the son of tenants Henry and Doris Nydahl, who had been so supportive of Sara over those last few difficult months. He was around the same age as Sara, and he was both kind and responsible, even to children, Sara felt. She had noticed as much when she had brought Vince with her to Stigtomta.

  In early 2014, Johan had moved back in with his parents and started working for Sara, making pipes for Patenta. In April, he was allowed to rent an apartment in the Tängsta annex, above the pipe workshop. Their friendly relationship would soon grow into something more.

  15

  A SINGLE CASE

  Night was falling at the pizzeria in Ruda. Stig Karlsson, eighty-three, had been missing for over twenty-four hours. Far too long for an old man to be out in the cold at this time of year.

  It was a chilly Sunday in early 2014, and daytime high temperatures had been around forty degrees Fahrenheit that weekend. The previous night it h
ad gone down to freezing before it had started to warm slightly again. There was a morning frost on car windshields and a thin film of ice on the ground.

  The factory town of Ruda, with its six hundred or so inhabitants, is located in the countryside about twenty miles southwest of Oskarshamn. At the heart of the town is a combined pizzeria and unmanned gas station that remains open until 8:00 p.m. There is a yellow letter box to the left of the entrance and a sign outside that reads “Café and Dining Ruda” and promises gambling and tobacco in addition to pizzas. At the other end of the building is a small supermarket, and behind that, a rest stop where no one in their right mind would have coffee on this cold day.

  Bundled-up volunteers were stomping their feet outside the restaurant. Missing People had announced a search, and many people had come to lend a hand. During the day, the local branch had been in charge, but now, as night started to fall, MPS’s Kalmar branch was taking over. COO Therese Tang had taken up a post inside the restaurant, together with her friend and security-officer colleague Anders Lindfors, to prepare the evening’s search.

  “Over a hundred people came out during the day to help look for the old man, and the evening shift numbered around sixty,” Therese said.

  There were a lot of people to coordinate, both before and after the actual search, when the organizers had to take stock of which areas had been cleared. Therese liked the responsibility, though; it gave her validation and made her feel as if she was making a real difference.

  It was not easy, granted, to find time to juggle everything; she was a working mother of young children, who had now also gone back to school to get her high school diploma. In just a few days, she would be starting a new job, this time with the police.

  “They were looking for custody officers, and a police officer I know told me I had to apply,” Therese said.

  It would only be a part-time job, only 40 percent of full time plus a shift every other weekend, a schedule that would make it much easier to keep her family’s everyday life running smoothly. It would also put her in closer contact with the police and, legally speaking, make it easier to gain access to the information her branch of Missing People would need.

  The police had been called to the town the night before, when Stig Karlsson had been missing for almost eight hours. Officers on foot and dog teams had done a hasty search, and there had also been helicopters, all to no avail.

  The missing man was blind in one eye and his other one was failing. He wore thick glasses and double hearing aids, was about six feet tall, weighed 190 pounds, and might still be wearing his black coat with yellow reflectors.

  The search area was large to say the least, about three miles in every direction. The missing man was used to walking long distances for exercise, anything from one to five miles at a time. He preferred flat ground, because he had some trouble lifting his feet. No one knew where he had planned to go this time, and his usual route had already been thoroughly searched. He must have struck out on a new path.

  The volunteers were going to head out in their hi-vis vests and march in a straight line, at arm’s length, minding each other, the ground, and the trees. The forest drew close to the houses in Ruda and the terrain was difficult in places, but Sweden’s Volunteer Automobile Corps was also participating in the search with four-wheelers. Off-road vehicles are not usually allowed in Swedish fields and forests, but emergency provisions for missing-person cases applied here.

  In January 2014, Missing People was still having a good run in Sweden in the wake of several notable successes in 2013. As they gained recognition for their work, the organization was building a gleaming reputation for itself.

  There had been the discovery of a dead man in the trunk of a car in Billdal in October 2012, a car the police had overlooked during their own search, even though it belonged to the victim. That one had been a suicide.

  And in Boden, Missing People’s search teams had found the dismembered corpse of twenty-year-old Vatchareeya Bangsuan in an abandoned house in May 2013, a discovery that had made it possible to convict her boyfriend for her murder.

  In cities all over Sweden, including Gävle, Norrbotten, and Halland, the police had publicly thanked MPS for successful searches during 2012 and 2013. Starting in 2013, the Gotland police had even incorporated MPS as a permanent resource in their local actions plans.

  The attention had encouraged yet more people to join, including specialists of various kinds, such as scouts, orienteers, equestrians, the Sea Rescue Society, and priests. This gave local branches across the country access to valuable competence and experience, both in terms of technical skills—how to conduct a search—but also when it came to dealing with loved ones and their grief, loss, and fear, whether a search ended with sad news or the missing person being found alive.

  The successes also led to interest and involvement from companies and organizations of all kinds. Saab, for example, donated an infrared camera worth one hundred thousand kronor (twelve thousand dollars), and a technology company developed a special tracker for the grid search that mapped exactly which areas had been covered.

  In the summer of 2013, the organization was renowned enough to be able to drum up close to 1,500 people for a five-day MPS search for a twenty-three-year-old mother of two who had disappeared near Trollhättan.

  MPS had clearly met a pent-up demand, both for people who want a worthy cause to contribute to and for society more broadly. The police had quickly gotten used to having access to hosts of volunteers, summoned via a quick Facebook post or a phone chain. Volunteers even contributed their own vehicles, technology, and know-how.

  It was, however, also a fine balance for the authorities. Exactly how knowledgeable were these volunteers? How reliable? What we are talking about is, after all, giving a motley crew of people, their backgrounds unknown, access to sensitive information about another person and their closest relatives, personal information that could be injurious and must not be distributed casually—details about their psychological status, illnesses, conflicts, possibly even criminality.

  In the case of murder or other crimes, there is also an obvious risk that investigatory information could be leaked, undermining the police investigation. Someone could let something slip, and a perpetrator might get off scot-free.

  The ends do justify the means, however—in life-or-death situations, neither the police nor anyone else tends to worry too much about confidentiality regimes, data protection, or anything along those lines. The police are obviously most eager to see results, as well as a lack of detrimental side effects, when they give information to outsiders. And in the case of MPS, they certainly had seen good results.

  As Therese sat with the other organizers in the restaurant in Ruda, directing the large group of volunteers, she knew enough to be cautiously proud of their organization’s successes. The word success is deceptive, though, because in many cases, the circumstances had been deeply tragic.

  There was the depressed nineteen-year-old woman in Västervik, for instance, who had a history of suicide attempts. One September day, she tidied her room in her parents’ house, and then wrote in her diary that she had gone to a secret place in town where she had decided she would end her life. She was found late that evening, unconscious after an overdose of prescription drugs; her life could not be saved.

  “She was still warm when she was discovered,” Therese said. “Just fifty yards from our gathering point. The frustration you feel in a situation like that is awful. And the what-ifs. There’s obviously no guarantee she would have been alive today if we had started sooner, but maybe. We had people ready to go hours before we were given the green light. The chances of finding her would have been greater if we had been allowed to start sooner.”

  Therese and her fellow organizers have had to learn to turn their frustration, anger, and despair over unnecessary deaths into energy. Call it stubbornness, a refusal to quit. Instead of being defeated, she and her colleagues studied, discussed, improved.

&nbs
p; Another important lesson they had learned from several cases was that people don’t always tell you everything when someone goes missing, at least not of their own accord. One might imagine they would. A person close to them disappears; they contact everyone they can think of, search as best they can, volunteer any information that might be useful. But something embarrassing might be lurking. More often than not, there is something or someone that must be protected.

  In the early days of 2014, it had been almost two years since Therese had worked in the fashion industry, doing modeling, hairdressing, and design. Now, as a security officer, she was in a completely different world. On a daily basis, she was in direct contact with violence and evil. Once, when she was on loan to Visby during 2012, she noticed something that looked like a fight break out some distance from the building she was protecting together with a colleague.

  “It was definitely assault, seven people kicking a guy who was on the ground,” Therese said.

  “I didn’t really stop to think. I just hurled myself over the fence, pulled my nightstick out, and ran toward them. I guess I counted on them being scared. Nine out of ten people who see a person in uniform, brandishing a nightstick, should be scared.”

  “When I got involved in the fight,” Therese said, “one guy was just about to have his head kicked in. He would’ve died. The assailants moved off when they realized there were more of us coming, but we were able to identify them to the police later. It was experiences like that one that helped foster a kind of general security awareness in me.”

  Even in her work for the volunteer organization Missing People, she needed that kind of broad perspective on security. With Missing People, the topics of discussion included survival times in various temperatures, segmentation of high-resolution maps to maximize search efficiency, search lines, and methods of communication.

  And there was all too often cause to ponder the darkest depths of the human psyche: mental illness, depression, substance abuse, suicide—and murder.