One single missing-person case remained unsolved in Kalmar County since Missing People had established a local branch there. The very first case they’d had: missing multimillionaire Göran Lundblad, sixty-two, who never normally went anywhere and always kept his appointments until one day, he vanished without a trace.
On an October day the previous fall, in 2013, it had been Therese’s colleague Anders who had made the first calls to reopen the search for Göran Lundblad. In the summer of 2013, Missing People’s national headquarters had urged all local branches to review their cold cases, which is to say cases where the missing person had not been found, dead or alive. At the same time, Therese and her fellow organizers were discussing the need to better train both their members and themselves, as well as streamline the organization to be able to launch a professional search as quickly as possible. They considered various training efforts like practice searches: in other words, they simulated searches with no missing person, to get used to the situation, identify shortcomings, and improve.
Now there was an opportunity to hit two birds with one stone—a practice search based on a cold case. If Kalmar had had more of a backlog, Therese would probably have chosen the most recent one, one where public interest could be expected to still be high. But there was only one unsolved case in the county at that time: Göran Lundblad’s.
In this case, Missing People’s first search had been limited to an urban environment and smaller patches of forest. What could be better than to run a practice search out in Norra Förlösa? Woods and fields—searching bigger swaths of terrain—made for a more useful practice search than a fragmented cityscape, for both humans and dogs.
An enthusiastic Therese declared that Missing People Kalmar was going to be the best in the country, or at least conduct the best training effort ever. They would pull together all the K9 teams from across the country that had participated in successful searches, work with other local branches, and have everyone involved learn from each other’s experiences. And they would do it all as soon as possible.
It always falls to the group leader to contact the police and any relatives if they are hoping to undertake a search, so in October, Anders Lindfors sat with a phone in his hand. In front of him on the table were handwritten notes, written with a pen on a letter-size notepad picked up from a security-officer training course. At the top of the page was the name Göran Lundblad, with the notation “Förlösa farm.”
Then a list:
* Daughter 1, Sara Lundblad, approximately twenty-five years old.
* Daughter 2, Maria Lundblad, approximately twenty years old. Not the same mother. Lives in Norrköping.
The next name on the page was Ulf Martinsson, the detective in charge.
Had the two daughters been listed inversely, things may have turned out differently. But Anders had simply copied down what he had been told during the organization’s previous search for Göran. Sara was “daughter 1.”
But he decided to start with the detective.
“I introduced myself and told him who we were and said we were planning a search,” Anders said. “I asked if there was anything we needed to know, if there had been any developments since the last search. Which is to say whether the police thought we might be better off searching somewhere else. It had been over a year, and if someone doesn’t turn up in that time, they never will. That was my thinking. There didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary. A straightforward training search.”
He was told that there had been no new developments. The Göran Lundblad case was ice-cold.
“I know the police can’t always tell us everything—in an earlier case, a man disappeared and was later found dead, but for various reasons, the police couldn’t tell us that straight out. But they can at least word things differently, such as, ‘There’s no need for you to be out there anymore.’ We know what that really means. I mentioned that to Martinsson, but he just replied that he had no information to give.”
It was a short call, three minutes at most, and the first minute was spent on Anders introducing himself properly. Now, having cleared it with the police, everything was good to go, as far as Missing People was concerned. They were unlikely to find anything, but they could at least proceed with the training as planned. The only thing remaining was to contact the relatives, of course.
“I called the oldest daughter, Sara, first, because she was the first on the list,” Anders said. “That was when things changed for me.”
“Her first words were, ‘What? I don’t want to talk to you, I’ve told you.’ So I tried to counter that she was the one who called us. ‘No, that was my sister,’ she replied.”
When Anders apologized, Sara calmed down slightly and explained that she was trying to put her father’s disappearance behind her and move on.
Odd, Anders felt, given that it had only been a year. But he ended the call and tried to call Maria next, only her number had been disconnected.
“So I had no choice but to call Sara back and explain my predicament,” said Anders. “And she exclaimed: ‘It’s the fucking guardian: he’s had them disconnected.’”
“I had no idea what she meant; I’ve been a guardian myself and know what guardians can and can’t do. But it wasn’t the time to ask her more about that, though I did feel everything about this was off. Then she asked me what we were planning to do. And when I told her about the dogs, she explained that the police had already been to her house. Several times. That they were still out there on occasion, snooping around. She was conspicuously aggressive. Normally, relatives are extremely helpful, verging on impossible to get rid of. This was the complete opposite.”
During the conversation, Anders was given Maria’s new number. Her reaction was very different. An eager Maria asked whether Missing People had any news and explained that she hadn’t heard from them or the police in a long time.
“She seemed incredibly relieved just to have a chance to talk about it,” Anders said. “It seemed as though she hadn’t been able to with anyone else. Not even with her sister, as far as I could gather.”
After finishing the call and pausing to think for a few moments, he picked up the phone and called Detective Martinsson back.
“‘You think the oldest daughter did it,’ I said. And the other end went dead silent.”
Martinsson had not in any way confirmed that a prosecutor had taken over the investigation as early as November 2012, that the case was being treated as a suspected murder, or that Sara Lundblad was in fact formally under suspicion for the murder of her father, together with her boyfriend, Martin Törnblad.
These were all perfectly natural things to withhold, since the suspicions were based on circumstantial evidence, evidence that would never hold up in court. The police were quite certain but couldn’t prove anything. There was, after all, no crime scene, no blood, no body.
When an external individual, who can’t possibly have all the information, calls and confirms your suspicions, what does one say to that? Martinsson didn’t say a word.
“I tried to explain that we didn’t want to cause any problems,” Anders said, “and that if the police were in the middle of doing something, it would be a shame for Missing People to come bumbling in. Maybe he could just say something about us holding off or something.”
Anders pointed out that the organization’s searches often brought a lot of media attention and that things like that can leave potential suspects badly shaken, make them act unpredictably, and thus muddle a police investigation—in other words, that Missing People’s search could hurt more than it helped.
“In the end,” said Anders, “he asked me to call him back two weeks later, since they were experiencing an unusually large caseload at the time. And that it might be for the best if we were to hold off for a while. I took that as confirmation of my suspicions about Sara being involved. But we simply had to wait. Because something seemed to be in the works. We thought the police were on top of things and working on it since Sara
had told me they were out there with dogs from time to time.”
Three weeks later, he called the detective back.
“Martinsson told me they were in shock over the double homicide in Flakeböle,” Anders said. “They were still busy with that and were short-staffed. They wanted us to wait a little longer.”
In December 2013, Anders made yet another push.
“It’s almost Christmas,” Martinsson told him. He had only managed to free up one officer to work on the Lundblad case and that wasn’t enough. But he was careful to point out that he wanted to be on board when Missing People did the search. The organization didn’t want to mess anything up for the investigators, so they postponed their training search yet again.
As the January evening turned into night in Ruda, the proprietor of the restaurant started serving volunteers free pizza between search rounds. Police vehicles and four-wheelers crisscrossed the village between patches of forest. Missing man Stig Karlsson must have been somewhere.
The last verified observation was just over twenty-four hours earlier, outside the old station house in Ruda, no more than fifteen minutes after he had left his home on Saturday. But even though the search went on well into the night, he was not found. The search continued for another few days, with police involvement and helicopters, before the old man’s body was finally discovered, just about a mile from his house.
“He walked the same route every day, but he had gone a different way this time for some reason,” Therese said. “Then he fell into a hole by the road and wasn’t strong enough to get back up. It wasn’t even a hole, more like a hollow, but he wasn’t able to get out of it. You could see that he had struggled. He must have had a terrible final night.”
16
REWIND AND RESTART
By early 2014, the situation at the Kalmar Police Authority had finally started to improve somewhat, after having been so strained for such a long time. The double homicide and arson in Flakeböle on Öland in the winter of 2012 had been a constant drain on their resources, even though a suspect had been arrested as early as April. At long last, carpenter Pierre Karlsson, who had been remanded in custody throughout the summer, was formally charged in August 2013.
When Missing People’s Anders Lindfors had contacted the police back in the autumn of 2013 to open up the discussion on the Göran Lundblad case again, the Flakeböle case and its after-effects had still been weighing heavily on the Kalmar police. The appeal process was not concluded until March 2014, when Pierre Karlsson was placed behind bars for the foreseeable future.
They were now finally ready to turn their full attention back to their old cold case: the still-missing Göran Lundblad. Although the case had never been far from their minds, there were several interesting leads that had surfaced in the intervening months that had yet to be fully examined.
For example, the new guardian in the Lundblad case, lawyer Knut Lewenhaupt, who had been in charge of Göran’s affairs since November 2013, had now informed the police about Bäckebo Sawmill paying Sara one and a half million kronor (180 thousand dollars) for lumber back in September 2012.
This had also now come to the attention of the Swedish Tax Authority, which was demanding that tax be paid on the income; to be precise, the government was owed four hundred thousand kronor (forty-eight thousand dollars), which Knut was planning to pay using Göran’s money, and drafting an IOU so that everything would come out right when Göran’s will was executed in the future. Finally, the police had some new evidence to chase.
Over the past year, while the police’s attention and resources had been so focused elsewhere, Sara had been spending a lot of time in Stigtomta, especially since late 2013 and early 2014. Martin had not been accompanying her as much as he used to, and there were rumors circulating about their relationship foundering. But so far, they were just rumors.
Sara had, for months, been spotted dragging things out of the main house at Tängsta and burning it all. No wonder, according to tenant Doris Nydahl, considering the house was jam-packed with junk.
“Göran was a real hoarder,” Doris said in a police interview. “The house was full of stacked boxes—boxes everywhere—full of several generations’ worth of clothes. Göran seems to have collected everything—whether big or small. For instance, we found his grandfather’s old gold teeth.”
The idea was to clear out the house to make it possible to renovate it and rent it out, although the landlord situation in Stigtomta wasn’t going perfectly smoothly either. Some of the Stigtomta tenants found Sara bossy, compared to how lenient her father had been with rents and fees. Other tenants were unfairly favored, according to the local gossip, as reported in police interviews.
As the investigation picked up speed again, the police also took another turn interviewing some of Göran’s relatives in early 2014, as well as some of the residents of Norra Förlösa, where Sara and Martin were consumed in an all-out war with their neighbors. No one had any new facts to contribute, but everyone had pondered and reflected on the disappearance, and more than a few had things to say about Sara’s behavior. Some perceived her as cold and aloof, unfeeling; for example, she called her father “the old geezer” in a conversation with Eva Sterner in Stigtomta.
The police also sat down with Göran’s elderly aunt Stina. Great Aunt Stina, now over ninety years old, was so hard of hearing the police had to write their questions to her on a laptop. She said Sara hadn’t been in touch with her for over a year, that she had many things she wanted to ask Sara, and that she thought the boyfriend, Martin, was behind everything somehow.
Stina then said: I think they want Sara’s money and Göran was standing in their way.
When asked what she meant by that, Stina said that is how she sees it, and that Sara is the one who would know.
The bulk of the interviews in early 2014 at least still seemed to corroborate the police’s view: Sara and Martin killed Göran and got rid of the body. But as more and more time had passed since the disappearance, the observations of the people involved carried less and less probative weight. Prejudice, suppression, reevaluations, and wishful thinking affect our memory. Gaps are filled with conscious or unconscious confabulation, because humans crave logic and connections.
Aunt Stina had, naturally, been talking to other people in the family, all of whom had already shared their views after being interviewed soon after the disappearance. Stina had then mulled everything over, recreating meetings with her missing nephew, Göran, augmenting them with what other people had told her. She and others were also likely to have been influenced by the media reporting on this case and others.
Taken together, this is termed postevent information and is vehemently loathed by every prosecutor looking to have a suspect convicted. It is just as eagerly searched for by every defense lawyer who wishes to question the reliability of a witness.
The interviewees have rationalized, to find answers to the questions haunting them. And by the same token, they have undermined their own credibility as witnesses.
The perceptions of the interviewees are also colored by their own views on how a bereaved daughter ought to behave if she were innocent. But what do people really know about that? What do we know about the suffering of others, their loss, and their grief? And what do we know about how other people rationalize to survive?
More interviews and more evidence continued to be added to the once-again-growing pile of documentation in the Kalmar police’s files, like the report from the Swiss bank. Credit Suisse had finally handed over lists of Göran’s accounts and investments. This clarified, in writing, that he had four and a half million kronor (540 thousand dollars) in various assets in Switzerland, even after withdrawing that two million (240 thousand dollars) himself back in the spring of 2012.
Around the same time as the Swiss bank report finally came in, the company MaskinGruppen confirmed an impression of Åke Törnblad’s finances. They were in a very poor state indeed.
“He has had a few close shaves,
” said Per-Olof Svensson from MaskinGruppen.
In 2014, Åke’s debt amounted to 120 thousand kronor (fourteen thousand dollars), and several unpaid invoices had been passed to the Enforcement Authority. All this was well after Sara had let Åke borrow over a million kronor (120 thousand dollars) without even a written agreement.
In mid-February 2014, the last of the scheduled interviews of the investigation took place. On February 18, Göran’s old friend Rodney Ahlstrand was given his chance to speak. He seemed to be the only interviewee with any degree of hope left. Not a lot, but still, he had hope.
“Göran could definitely have gotten on a plane. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had rented a whole plane just to get away,” he said.
But even he seemed to know, in his heart of hearts, the truth. Göran had asked Rodney to design a new logo for the distinguished Dollar Pipe, Gustav “Jösse” Lundblad’s invention, patented in the 1960s. He had planned for the pipes to be marketed using a new logo in 2013. Göran would never have skipped out on an event of such magnitude, not the Göran Lundblad that Rodney knew, at least.
By this time, the police had used every tool available to them, but they were no closer to a solution. Missing People was finally given the go-ahead to plan their search.
Therese and her Missing People colleagues started to concretize their search plans in April, just over four months after Martinsson had asked Anders to hold off because the police were understaffed.
“‘Make it as big as you can,’ Martinsson told me when we met to discuss it,” Therese said. “He wanted as much attention as possible, of course. He was probably hoping the suspects would react in one way or another.”
It is an age-old, very simple police tactic to use when things have ground to a halt—figure out a way to shake things up, then hang back and observe, and hope something happens. That old loyalties have changed, that guilty consciences might start to bubble over, or that a suspect starts to feel anxious and sets about checking that all their tracks are truly covered. This time, however, the police would have no phone tapping in place, so they would have to observe carefully.
The Dark Heart: A True Story of Greed, Murder, and an Unlikely Investigator Page 18