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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  Anders cut in, saying that they were going to search the entire area. He pointed out across the fields, asking who owned what, and where a body could be buried. He nodded as Martin responded, then continued to ask more questions.

  The subject soon shifted to the local conflicts, and Therese was quick to position herself on Martin and Sara’s side against the world. She implied that the other villagers might have an interest in messing with them. She almost exclusively addressed Martin, once again led by her gut. Sara had been dismissive on the phone, so attempting to push beyond her hard shell would likely be pointless.

  Therese angled for Martin’s version of the situation, after having heard “everyone else’s” in the village. She wanted accusations. They were quick in coming, along with an unexpected anecdote.

  “We actually had two people over at the house a while ago,” Martin said. “I think it was late April. They said they were from Missing People. They had a key and everything.”

  The visit had supposedly happened when he was home alone at Ställe Farm.

  “I wasn’t too keen on letting them in. One of them was about forty-five, your height, beard, just like you,” he told Anders. “I’m almost sure I’ve seen him before. I could almost swear he was one of Mats Råberg’s relatives.”

  The tenant farmer again, their nemesis, being fingered for a possible involvement in Göran’s disappearance.

  “I wouldn’t want Göran found if I were him,” Martin said. “Then he would be declared dead, and we would take over, and he [Mats] would be given notice and made to leave.”

  It must have been Mats who had provided the key to Ställe Farm, Martin claimed. He used to have a key to the main house and had probably made copies. The Missing People imposters must have been acting on his orders, for unknown reasons, but they must have been up to something.

  In hindsight, it fit perfectly into the preexisting pattern of lies—something malicious happening when Sara was away. Yet another lie to fortify the wall against the world, to keep anything or anyone from undermining their pact.

  Furthermore, Martin seemed to be copying the exact scene from yesterday—when Therese knocked on his door with her colleague and a dog. He even included a character who looked like Anders.

  Therese didn’t believe him, but she was unsure how to interpret the story. What could Martin possibly gain from telling it? Other than further damaging Mats’s reputation. As was the case with most of his stories, there were no witnesses to verify his claims. For the moment, they just had to swallow it.

  “Ah, I hadn’t considered that. Interesting,” Therese interjected during Martin’s narration.

  Spontaneous questioning—back away, play dumb, but not too dumb. Ask, but don’t question. Play along to make your interlocutor take the bait.

  One detail of the story that would turn out to be unexpectedly significant: the claim that there were keys to Ställe Farm floating about. According to Martin’s story, there may have been copies as early as 2012. Therese committed the information to memory and improvised.

  She said that she and her members always wore vests and badges to identify themselves, and that Martin should report the incident.

  “Sure—but that never does anything,” he replied.

  And then the infamous threatening letter came up, the one Mats had supposedly put in their mailbox, or possibly delivered verbally, in person, the one that Martin later made copies of and distributed. The story behind the threatening letter was, as they knew, full of contradictions.

  “The police never do anything,” Martin said. “They take our reports, but then they don’t give a shit.”

  Therese tried to offer a shoulder to lean on.

  “I feel for you, I really do,” she said. “I’m impressed you can bear living like this.”

  A white lie? Of course. But unlike the police, she didn’t need to bother with objectivity, regulations, and interview procedures. This wasn’t an interview at all, just a regular conversation between two civilians, a conversation that Therese continued to push back to the subject of Göran, to the fact that his body must be somewhere close by.

  She opened up a broader perspective by talking about other missing people. Like the Linda Chen case, the missing woman in Falun where a cause of death couldn’t be established because by the time they had found the corpse, animals had disturbed the body. That could be the case here too.

  Which is to say: even if Göran was found dead, there was a significant risk that no one could be tied to the crime. It might not even be possible to prove there was a crime at all. It was a candy-coated way out for a murderer with a lively imagination: the body is found, the inheritance gets paid out, and whoever committed the murder gets off scot-free.

  Therese wanted to shake things loose. Not just to find out more, hear more, and hope that Martin let something incriminating slip, but also to make the couple think about things differently, to offer them the hope of a way out.

  A private investigator looking for openings, however small. But the hunt was what mattered, the truth that Therese knew could be found somewhere nearby. If she had not been so firmly convinced of that, she wouldn’t have spent the past few days here, in this godforsaken backwater; she would have stayed home with her family in Oskarshamn.

  She pressed on, using her most authoritative voice.

  “Regardless, we’re going to keep working on this. We have clear indications; they point to something. We are going to figure out what it means. We have scheduled more searches in late June, no matter what happens with the police investigation and the dogs and everything.”

  After about forty-five minutes, Therese reckoned it would be too pushy to keep Martin and Sara any longer. Better to retain the initiative and break it off herself before they did.

  “Right, well, I suppose this has to be today’s big news in the village,” she said conspiratorially. Then, to her colleagues: “Let’s go, we have to get something to eat. If you think of anything, Martin, just call me, that would be great.”

  The Missing People car drove off in the direction of Boatorp, where the road curved in an arc to the east through the fields before narrowing further and turning back down toward Norra Förlösa, Åke Törnblad’s farm, the main road, then eastward toward the Lindsdal Junction and the E22 highway.

  Excerpt from memo regarding the K9 search, undertaken the next day, written by dog handler Johan Esbjörnsson, Skåne police:

  We were informed that the organization Missing People had been searching for a missing person in the area in question, and that one of their dogs had indicated a find in a water-filled natural dam.

  According to Missing People, their dog is trained to find dead bodies.

  The area in question measures approximately twenty by ten yards. The technicians from Kalmar had drained the pond to help with the search.

  We decided to search both the pond and the adjacent wooded area. In conducting the search, one dog team searched the forest first while the other searched the pond, then we switched search areas.

  This is done to maximize the efficacy of the search.

  Neither one of our forensic dogs indicated. Not in the drained pond nor in the nearby forest.

  “Police suspend search,” local paper Barometern noted on page four on Wednesday, May 21, 2014. It was a brief article, but in a prominent spot.

  Back to square one. Or it would have been, if not for one woman who refused to give up.

  Two cars rolled into Norra Förlösa on the same morning that the news about the failed K9 search was made public. Missing People was back, though in smaller numbers.

  The four people in two cars were led by Therese Tang. They visited both Åke Törnblad and Mats Råberg to talk to them about continuing their search in the area. They wanted to be extra cautious to avoid being reported for anything—trespassing or criminal damages. It was a litigious neighborhood, as they had come to understand. Now they would like to go out and climb hunting blinds, search abandoned buildings, we
lls, dams, burn piles, everything, so they were careful to request permission first. It was time to shake the tree and see what fell out.

  Over the next few days, members of Missing People moved about Norra Förlösa constantly. They were not doing grid searches—there were no official searches at all—just a handful of people, the organizers. They did what they could to make themselves as visible as possible.

  “Drive by and stress them out,” Therese told everyone.

  “Drive through the village whenever you’re in the area,” Anders said. “And make sure you have the Missing People signs on your cars.”

  They undertook all this with the tacit approval of the police.

  “‘Go out there and stir the pot; it’s good you’re keeping at it,’ they said,” recounted Marie-Louice Strannemark. “We decided internally that we were going to drive around as much as possible.”

  “Don’t lose heart,” Therese told tenant farmer Mats Råberg and his partner during one of their conversations. “Things are just getting started.”

  People in the area were hugely disappointed that nothing had been found in the pond behind the house. After the police packed it in and left, people started to turn to Therese and her private investigators. She was the one who received the tip-offs, ideas, and suggestions. The neighbors were eager to keep the search alive and, as always, the people involved in a missing-person case seemed to find it easier to talk to Missing People than to the police. They felt free to air their wildest theories and notions. Therese encouraged this; she wanted to shake out every last theory, every possible clue she could.

  “As a child, I wanted to be a police officer,” Therese said. “I suppose that never went away. I wanted everything neat and orderly. Plus, I found the police exciting, but I suppose all children do.”

  She refused to give up. She was filled with determination, bordering on obsession—the locals in Norra Förlösa could clearly see that. She herself put it this way: “I have my opinions—I’ve always been like that—and if they’re not welcome, I’m out. I’d rather be alone.”

  Although she didn’t have much in the way of a formal education, what she did have in spades was drive—to see justice done, to be proven right. She also had experience of a lot of other things—including naked violence.

  “I was fifteen when I first fell in love. He was a few years older and so cool. My mom would barely allow me to have sleepovers with my girlfriends, but I lied and stayed out with him.”

  She carved the first letter of her boyfriend’s name, an A, into her arm, by scraping and cutting to make scar tissue.

  “But he wasn’t well, and it took me a while to realize it. He was jealous and beat me up several times. The third time he nearly killed me.”

  One night in the 1990s, the relationship went off the rails. Therese had been helping a badly intoxicated male friend get on a bus. Her boyfriend had seen her with her friend’s arm around her shoulders. Jealous, he confronted her when they were back in his bedroom.

  “His eyes were black. He grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me.”

  Then it got worse.

  She tried to get away, half-dressed, together with a girlfriend who was staying over in the same apartment. But the boyfriend wouldn’t let them leave. He threw their clothes out the fifth-floor window and went to fetch his baseball bat.

  The night no longer smelled of drunkenness and alcohol; it reeked of fear, blood, and death, as the teenaged Therese dodged her boyfriend’s bat again and again. She was shaken by the ringing noise of the bat hitting the sink. In the end, when her back was literally against the wall, she had no other choice than to fight back. She used one or two judo techniques she had learned, to punch, kick, pull, and wrest the bat from his hands.

  The episode ended with a police intervention; the girls were eventually taken from the apartment by officers. The boyfriend was convicted of assault on Therese’s testimony. She came out of the affair with a scar on her arm that will never fade and emotional wounds she consciously chose to transform into energy rather than self-pity.

  Regardless of what the psychiatric term is for handling setbacks and horrible events the way Therese had, she had always felt she had the ability to channel her experiences into something good, and to always, no matter what, stand by her opinion.

  Therese was now working as a jail guard—the security officer who works in the police station and wears a police uniform, but is not in fact a police officer. In this job, she had access to every police station in Kalmar County in the spring of 2014, but she was still a private citizen, unencumbered with the regulations restraining the police. She was beholden to no handbook telling her how she had to treat suspects, no preliminary investigation regulations dictating how an investigation must be run to hold water in court.

  She answered only to herself. She could lie, fib, spice up stories, and angle things as much as she liked, without putting the investigation in jeopardy. The end—getting closer to the truth—justified the means, she decided.

  Her methods could potentially cause trouble down the line if she and her colleagues were to uncover important information, statements, or claims. If they hadn’t followed protocol, they could accidentally invalidate potential evidence and testimony in a future trial.

  On the other hand, Swedish jurisprudence is based on the so-called free sifting of evidence. It doesn’t matter if the material was obtained using shady methods; the prosecution can still use it. In effect, a police officer could steal, bribe, threaten, or use any other questionable techniques to get information or gather evidence against a defendant, and it would still be accepted in a court of law. The officer in question would have to answer for any and all possible crimes committed in the course of getting that evidence, and possibly even be sentenced for it, but the evidence would nevertheless be admissible.

  In the US, the exclusionary rule states that evidence collected or analyzed in violation of the constitution is inadmissible for a criminal prosecution in a court of law. But while a Swedish court would obviously downplay the value of evidence beaten out of a subject, to put it bluntly, the more tangible pieces of evidence—objects or other corpus delicti—would be deemed to be as valuable as any other piece of evidence, notwithstanding the manner by which it was brought into the investigation.

  If you were to record an acquaintance with a secret microphone, and he revealed himself to be a thief, embezzler, or murderer, you could be charged with illegal surveillance. That said, the recording could still be used against him in a court of law.

  On the flip side, Therese didn’t have any of the rights granted to the police either, like the ability to interview anyone at will, either as a suspect or an “other.” She would have to rely on her ability to connect with people, her ability to seem more knowledgeable than she really was.

  The Missing People management team did all they could to proceed with the search. One example was the dilapidated barn in Boatorp—Therese entered the ramshackle building wearing climbing gear.

  “We searched the gaps between the hay bales on the top floor—no one had looked there before—mostly just to show that we were doing something. The aim was to be seen, after all,” she said. “I wanted to scare them as much as possible by keeping up our patrols and making sure we were seen around the village.”

  Martin rolled around the area in his tractor every day. He could hardly avoid noticing Missing People wandering all around. Therese had also been in touch with his father, Åke, on the subject: Where do you think someone could have buried a body? Where were the wells, ditches, drain pipes?

  The dilapidated barn was located some distance north of the pond. Next to the building was a slurry pit—like a cement tub dug into the ground, three feet deep and filled to the brim with manure. They dragged the muck and, on the possibility that there might be something down there, Therese arranged for help emptying the pit, acquired permission to dump the manure in an adjacent field, and persuaded a volunteer to come slosh around the bottom wi
th a rake, dressed in a full-body suit and a gas mask.

  “All that was just for show,” Therese said. “I wanted to show we were serious about never giving up, checking everything we could.”

  It was actually Therese’s ex—the father of her oldest daughter—who helped her drain the slurry pit, a useful tidbit Martin caught wind of when he rubbernecked on the way past in his tractor. He even learned that Therese had once lived with the man on a farm up near Mönsterås, yet another piece of information he set to work fitting into a new possible version of reality.

  Nothing turned up in the slurry pit. Therese was left at the scene with only her colleagues, the powerful smell of excrement, and a very well-fertilized field on the other side of the road.

  Marie-Louice Strannemark often went by Norra Förlösa when she was taking her dogs out. She liked to drive an extra lap through the village with the magnetic signs on the sides of her car to alert the locals about the presence of Missing People, certain everyone would soon have heard about it through the grapevine.

  One day, going down a spur road, she came across something that appeared to be bone fragments, a garbage bag, and a pair of plastic gloves. She had brought her camera, so she took some pictures to show her colleagues. They informed the police, but after an examination of the pieces, it was determined that they were animal bones.

  Some distance from the house by the pond, a set of items that did not belong in nature, and may therefore have held some interest, were found, so Therese turned them in. The police listed the items as: “fan belt, small rubber mat, soil with plant parts (slightly spongy), and pieces of something hard she describes as desiccated skin.” But when forensic technician Anders Elmqvist examined the items, the skin-like substance turned out to be “either a large fish scale or a piece of plastic.”

  It would be easy to scoff at the amateur detectives out there searching, climbing, and snooping, or to dismiss the whole thing as shadow chasing, as if Therese and her colleagues were merely out on a ghost hunt, looking for shapeless bogeymen and imagined perpetrators, dreaming up convoluted conspiracy theories.