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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  Several media outlets reported on the Göran Lundblad case and made it known that Missing People was about to conduct another search. As it turned out, the disappearance of a multimillionaire was still newsworthy two years after the fact.

  “Our motto is to never give up,” Therese told local paper Barometern. “For the sake of the relatives, we are giving it another shot.”

  But the enthusiasm of the volunteers was not what they’d hoped—less than thirty showed up, nowhere near enough to do a big grid search. But you have to work with what you have. Therese rallied the group, divided people up, gave them hi-vis vests and maps, and sent them out into the terrain.

  The police had flagged two areas as especially interesting—the fields around Norra Förlösa, but also Göran Lundblad’s land in Balebo, further inland. This was where Knut Lundblad, the man who panned for gold in Alaska and established the family fortune, had been born. Several relatives were buried here too. It is to the Balebo forests that both Göran and Sara would go when they wanted to be alone.

  As luck would have it, one of Missing People’s organizers had a contact in the area: a relative who ran a mushroom farm in a closed-down petrol station. It became the gathering point for one of the groups on the search day, May 17. The other group gathered by a biogas installation in Läckeby, north of Norra Förlösa.

  “It was mostly locals from Norra Förlösa who joined the search,” said Marie-Louice Strannemark, who had joined the organization’s management team in early 2014, around the time of the search for Stig Karlsson in Ruda. That day, she was the responsible field organizer in Läckeby.

  “The sense of community among the volunteers was palpable; most were from the village. Many seemed anxious. They were huddling in small groups, talking about what might have happened to Göran,” she said.

  Marie-Louice noted that one of the volunteers seemed particularly enthusiastic. She did so with a measure of suspicion, since it was not unheard of for perpetrators or colluders to participate in searches or other efforts to find missing people. The volunteer in question was Mats.

  “I obviously didn’t know that then, in Läckeby,” Marie-Louice said. “It took us a few days to get a handle on who everyone was and what had been happening in the area.”

  The volunteers were sent out to walk in long lines through the terrain, following predistributed maps. As they set out, a few more volunteers joined them.

  “One of the women who turned up was talking very loudly,” said Marie-Louice. “We tried to separate her from the rest. She talked a lot and wanted to be seen and heard and to speak her mind and give her account of what she thought had happened.”

  Marie-Louice and the other field organizers ushered the woman into the gathering room. Her name turned out to be Eva Sterner, the tenant from one of Göran’s Stigtomta properties, and she had brought her partner, Kurt Jädersten.

  “She said she was a friend of Göran’s, that they were close, and that she was convinced something had happened to him, that it wasn’t like him to disappear,” said Marie-Louice. “It is not unusual for all kinds of peculiar information to surface when we do a search. But this was special. I didn’t know anything about Martin and Sara being suspects, but considering what the police told Anders and how the sisters reacted when we contacted them, it really confirmed my feeling that something was amiss.”

  Marie-Louice sent the determined Eva and her partner to Balebo so that Therese could hear the story for herself.

  “They called to tell me they had a woman there talking incessantly, to anyone who would listen, about how Göran must have been murdered and that everything has to come out,” Therese said. “She continued talking when she arrived in Balebo. It was hard to focus properly, because she was telling me so many things at once. From time to time, her partner managed to get a word in, correcting or curbing her a little.”

  Therese asked a colleague to take notes while she listened, asked questions, and nodded attentively, because it quickly became clear that these two knew quite a bit about the Göran Lundblad case.

  Eva revealed that Göran had been in Stigtomta for work just a few days before he disappeared in 2012. He was supposed to come back again quickly to continue the drainage work he had started there. That is not the kind of thing a person leaves once it is begun, with the ground dug up around the house, piles of pea gravel and drainage pipes, machines left sitting outside. But after two weeks, there had still been no sign of Göran in Stigtomta. At that point, Eva called his daughter Sara, who told her Göran might have gone to Italy. The next time she called, Sara mentioned Thailand.

  Odd, Eva felt, considering that Göran got heat rash and was afraid of flying. In addition, Eva had heard from a tenant farmer in Stigtomta that Sara had claimed her father had gone to a rest home abroad. Even stranger behavior from a man Eva had always thought of as organized, who would never leave things unfinished.

  Eva went on to tell them everything she knew, thought, felt, and to some degree, assumed. That Göran didn’t like Martin Törnblad—“a guy who had no limits and was in possession of a shotgun.” That Sara was spoiled, but that Göran had taken the properties away from her. She also told them a little about the business, about the convoluted quarrel with the guardian, and a great many other details she had ferreted out. She told them that Sara was virtually unreachable these days, staying holed up with a couple of other Stigtomta tenants—Henry and Doris Nydahl.

  If Therese and her colleagues were not suspicious before, they certainly were now. Not to mention more than a little confused; there were so many twists and turns to keep track of.

  Eva had been in touch with several other interested parties, such as Sara’s sister, Maria, some Stigtomta tenants, and people in Norra Förlösa. This was far from ideal, with regard to her credibility, given that her views and information could be influenced by both her own agitation and the interpretations of other people. Moreover, several of the things she reported were not entirely factual, strictly speaking.

  A game of telephone again, impossible to avoid in criminal investigations, when the police must provide a certain amount of information to be able to ask relevant questions. The information is naturally interpreted by the interviewee and then tends to get passed along, often in a new form.

  But that didn’t matter too much here and now at the mushroom farm in Balebo. These people were not the police, who need to back up every claim they make, but a group of volunteers who were gradually turning into something else—a tiny army of makeshift private investigators, detectives without badges and guns, wielding their inquisitiveness as a weapon.

  They could completely disregard that some of what Eva was telling them was postevent information and just absorb it. It might come in handy at some point. They could arm themselves with this information to sound a little bit more informed than they really were once they came into contact with the principal players in the Norra Förlösa intrigues—for example, when they finally met Martin and Sara.

  With their relatively small number of volunteers, MPS was not able to cover much ground on Saturday, May 17, and nothing was found. That afternoon, they packed it up to start afresh the next day. As they set off toward Kalmar, Therese decided to give Sara Lundblad another call. They were passing through Norra Förlösa anyway. Forensic dogs were available. So why not try to get into Ställe Farm, Göran’s last known location, just to check?

  “I got it in my head that I had to get into that house,” Therese said. “We had gone there two weeks before to tell Sara that we were planning a search, but there had been no one there.”

  In hindsight, she was unsure what it was that drew her there; she had no police checklist to work through, no clear strategy, only a mental list of interesting circumstances that she felt should be checked out, a list that had been changing constantly as she and her colleagues spoke to people. She simply wanted to have a look at the place for herself and get a sense for the context, as though she could absorb the truth through osmosis. Maybe
she would see something others have missed.

  She had tried unsuccessfully to reach Sara on her cell phone several times. Now, in the car on the way back from the mushroom farm, she decided to try a bluff. She had been given a few different contacts, names, and numbers by Eva Sterner. So she dialed the number for Doris Nydahl, Sara’s confidante.

  “I just said, ‘Hi there, this is Therese, Sara’s friend. She’s not answering her phone, but she’s at your place, right?’ ‘Yep, hold on,’ Doris replied and handed over the phone,” Therese said.

  “She went completely quiet when I introduced myself and mentioned Missing People. I pressed on with an update, but I really talked up the search to make her think there were a lot of people going out. Then I asked her when she was coming back, because we wanted to search the house with dogs if she would let us.”

  To persuade her, Therese mentioned that Missing People had specially trained cadaver dogs. She told Sara that she didn’t think the dogs would find anything dodgy at Ställe Farm, but that after the search, she would be able to tell the locals that the house was “clean” and that there were no signs of death and horror. That could take the edge off the speculation and smearing, Therese argued.

  Sara said that it would be fine, but that she was in Stigtomta and didn’t know when she would be back in Norra Förlösa next. Unfortunately, she had the keys with her, so it would have to be some other time.

  “Her tone was curt and anxious,” Therese said. “I knew straight away that she was lying, and everyone else listening in that car did too.”

  So where did that leave Missing People’s efforts on that Saturday afternoon? Put plainly: they were back to square one. No finds. No clues. Just a set of puzzle pieces consisting of bad vibes, suspicions, rumors, interpretations, and gossip. Hardly any corner pieces, and only one or two edge pieces to help try to complete the rest of the puzzle.

  Yet at the same time, no one could ignore the growing feeling that something was clearly wrong. It was the same feeling the first officer on the scene, Jonas Blomgren, formally noted in his report in 2012. The gnawing suspicion that there was more to know meant Therese wanted to do some more digging. She was going to have a chance to prove that she’d meant what she had told the local paper just a week earlier: “Our motto is to never give up.”

  Either way, further searches were planned for the next day, and the car she was driving in was rolling toward Norra Förlösa. The landowners in the area needed to be contacted, to make sure they were comfortable with volunteers moving across their property. Her next call was to someone who had clearly been significantly affected by the events in Norra Förlösa. She dialed Åke Törnblad.

  “Even as she was picking her phone up, she said, ‘We’re going to solve this damn case,’” Anders said.

  It was time to prod the bubble around the Göran Lundblad case, to see if it would burst.

  “See that stand of trees over there?” Åke said, pointing. “That’s where I’d look; Mats Råberg has been moving around there quite a bit. It’s a very interesting place.”

  He had just told Therese that he was sure Göran had been killed by his tenant farmer Mats.

  “So what did he do with the body, then?” Therese asked.

  “Well, I suppose the best way to get rid of a body is to cut it up in the kitchen, wrap up the parts, and dump them in various places. Then no one would be able to find the corpse.”

  Therese and her colleagues Anders Lindfors and Morgan Lifberg were sitting on Åke’s porch, listening to him talk. She had called Åke to tell him that Missing People would like to check in with him, introduce themselves, and ask permission for the volunteers to move across his land. They would also love to hear anything he had to say that could help them in their search, she told him. And more importantly: they were very interested in hearing another point of view from a local. He had welcomed them in.

  Therese, who recorded over half an hour of the conversation, did everything she could to win his trust. She repeatedly underscored that she and Missing People didn’t take sides; they simply wanted to help, and that they were there for Sara’s sake.

  The story she and her colleagues were told on Åke’s porch was miles apart from the one told by the other villagers, let alone by Eva Sterner from Stigtomta. According to Åke, he and Göran were fast friends. Furthermore, he assured them that Göran had begun to accept Sara and Martin’s relationship and to wish them both well.

  They were told quite a bit about the mood in the village—how so many people had it in for the Törnblads, but that it was really Mats Råberg who was behind everything because he was so desperate to keep his lease land.

  Åke also showed them the threatening letter that had supposedly been placed in the Ställe Farm mailbox just a month earlier, the one in which “the neighborhood watch” threatened Martin, Sara, and their son, Vince, if they didn’t move.

  The convoluted logic of the imagined intrigue—let alone the potential contradictions in the purported motives for murdering and dismembering a person and hiding the body parts, then for sending threatening letters—was not discussed in any detail. The three Missing People organizers merely nodded their heads in agreement and asked some more questions.

  During the conversation, they were also told that Åke had a couple of extra sets of keys to Ställe Farm. Which meant, Therese noted, that Sara had lied on the phone to her just a little while earlier.

  “When I told him I had spoken to Sara and that she had told me she had the only keys, he reacted like, ‘Really? She said that? Well, I don’t want to speak out of turn,’” Therese recounted.

  It was with decidedly mixed feelings that the three Missing People organizers left the Törnblad farm and drove south. The more they heard, the more questions they had, the more layers the Göran Lundblad case turned out to have.

  The Missing People management team gathered at their Kalmar hotel later that evening. Together, they decided to discontinue the Balebo search and instead focus all their resources on Norra Förlösa. That was where the conflict was; that was where people stood accused of murder. They needed to maximize the effectiveness of their small number of volunteers, and they wanted to focus on a particularly interesting place to search.

  “Therese took a phone call that evening,” Anders remembered, “and she came running over to the rest of us after she’d hung up, saying, ‘I have the solution, I have the solution.’”

  Therese refused to say much more than that she had had a tip-off, that she wasn’t allowed to say more, but that they would see soon enough. It wasn’t until the next morning, Sunday, May 18, that she finally revealed she was going to let the spirit world direct Missing People’s work.

  The tip-off she had received over the phone at the hotel the previous evening was from Mats Råberg’s partner, Britt-Marie Einarsson, who had been in contact with a medium. Britt-Marie had, over the past few months, come to trust Missing People’s COO, who seemed so confident, focused, and bright.

  It was with a degree of desperation and anguish that Britt-Marie had called Therese about the medium’s information. She didn’t know who else to turn to. She could hardly speak to the police about it, that much Britt-Marie was adamant about. She knew if she did, she would likely be branded as simple at best, someone who believed in fairy tales.

  Granted, the police had been known to use information from fortune-tellers and mediums before. A formal collaboration of that nature had been initiated as early as the 1950s by policeman Tore Hedin in Skåne, Sweden, in connection with a murder case. The national police had called in fortune-teller Olof Jönsson in an effort to unstick the so-called Tjörnarp Murder in 1951.

  The way that story had ended was that the policeman Hedin himself, later known as the Hurva killer, was tied to the murder. The killer himself had guided Olof Jönsson around the crime scene for a whole day without the spirits telling Jönsson the truth.

  By August 1952, Tore Hedin had killed nine more people, including his parents and ex
-girlfriend, before drowning himself in Bosarp Lake, at twenty-five years of age. The police in Sweden had never warmed up to listening carefully to tips from mediums after that debacle.

  But Britt-Marie had been living for so long with the terror and mistrust in Norra Förlösa, and like so many other locals, she was frustrated about Göran having simply vanished. Under those circumstances, no information could be casually dismissed, she maintained. All avenues should be explored. Also, the medium’s information was eerily detailed:

  Göran Lundblad was killed and dragged down a flight of stairs. Paint and wallpaper have been scraped off the walls in the house where he was murdered. And the body is supposedly hidden near water or somewhere wet, next to a red house built on a slope. Down the hill and to the right.

  Britt-Marie told Therese that her house on the outskirts of Norra Förlösa fit that description perfectly. It was next to a body of water as well—a pond.

  17

  THE POND

  Behind that red house on the western outskirts of Norra Förlösa ran something that could only generously be described as a brook. It was more of a dirty brown stream that trickled rather than flowed over stones along the ground drain that appeared out of the undergrowth about ten yards from the house.

  It was the runoff from the forest to the north and from the fields beyond, where drainage pipes had been laid down to absorb and redirect moisture, drying the soil out enough for the plants to grow better. The drainage system started in a triangular patch of dirt a little over a mile away, a small patch of land that would soon become the focus of a lot of attention.

  The pipes led to a pond, a pool of water that, after a particularly wet period, could swell to about six or seven yards in diameter. The pond was waist-deep at most, just a depression in the forest floor, muddy and rocky. A few thick tree branches had fallen into it and gone black with damp.