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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  Yes, they could be dismissed as civilians without any level of insight into murder investigations, who enjoyed playing detective and feeling as if they mattered. It would be just as easy to speculate about how the figments of their imaginations were amplified by the attention they got whenever they meddled in things, through the media, and also from the local residents, who had no one else to turn to. But they carried on.

  The playing field in the Göran Lundblad case looked different now than it had just a few months earlier, when the police had been conducting their additional interviews in early 2014. And it was virtually unrecognizable from when the original interviews and phone tapping were being conducted back in the fall of 2012.

  During the spring of 2014, several of the people involved had been mulling things over, speculating, and working together to add up the facts in new ways. The main suspects, meanwhile, had undergone quite a few changes as well.

  Only a few days after her conversation with Martin and Sara and the search of the pond, Therese’s conviction regarding who killed Göran was confirmed beyond doubt.

  “We were checking out the last place of the day, beyond Boatorp. As we were parking, Martin arrived in his tractor,” she said.

  Therese had been telling anyone who would listen that Göran’s body must be buried somewhere nearby, that the cadaver smell must have traveled along the drain pipes. Without more precise information, it would be a Sisyphean task to search all the covered ditches, wells, and pipes that had been dug over the decades without ever being recorded on a map.

  Therese, who on this day was accompanied by colleagues Marie-Louice Strannemark and Fredrik Mundt, wanted to approach the search systematically. They drove past the dilapidated barn in Boatorp in the direction of Skyttelund, then they parked the car.

  Fredrik walked down across the field to the wooded area to have a look at a spot where one of their dogs had indicated in the past. The other two were joined by Martin Törnblad in his tractor.

  “He was very nervous and couldn’t sit still, but he stayed and talked to us for over an hour,” Marie-Louice said. “He tugged on his ear, scratched his arm, wouldn’t look us in the eye, things like that. He seemed to have a lot on his mind. I’m no doctor, but his behavior was not that of a healthy person. There was something in his eyes, too, that I couldn’t put my finger on.”

  Marie-Louice kept a low profile during the conversation, observing while Therese talked. It was a strangely gory conversation that was nevertheless conducted in dry, neutral tones. Therese and Martin talked about whether body parts really would decompose in a slurry pit or would be preserved.

  “I rambled on as best I could,” Therese said, “though I interspersed my suppositions with things I knew for sure, and I could tell he believed me.”

  She mentioned Switzerland and the millions of kronor that Göran had stashed there. “I told him my dad used to have money there, but that he moved it to somewhere else because it was so difficult to get money out of Switzerland,” Therese said. “Around that time, Fredrik came back and heard what I was saying. He added something about how there were people still struggling to extract the money that belonged to relatives who died in the Second World War. His spontaneous comment somehow finally convinced Martin I was credible.”

  They could see the cogs turning in the mind of a shaken Martin. In front of them was a twenty-three-year-old man without much education or experience of life or society outside the two hundred fifty acres that made up Norra Förlösa. Therese realized it could be eminently possible to help him redirect his thinking in many different directions, to persuade him of any number of things, as long as she didn’t stray too far from the truth.

  “I explained to him that the reason they’re seeing us about so much is that I’ve been told the time frame for declaring a missing person dead is set to change in 2015, that they are raising it to fifteen years.”

  This was a vitally important consideration for Martin. All Göran’s assets would remain frozen for as long as he remained missing. There would be no execution of the fifty-million-kronor (six-million-dollar) will until he was declared dead. And there were only two paths to that outcome: that the body was found or that a court ruled him to be deceased.

  It was, in fact, true that a death certificate could be a long time coming. In the case of a man named Carl-Eric Björkegren, who had disappeared from his luxury villa in Viken in Skåne in the nineties, it took two decades before the Stockholm District Court declared him dead.

  But for anyone who knew where to look for information, it would be easy to expose Therese as a liar. According to a Swedish statute about declaring a missing person dead, a missing person can in fact be declared dead immediately under certain conditions—like after a natural disaster or major incident. Under other circumstances, a motion can’t be filed until five years have passed, at the earliest. And the Ministry of Justice had not proposed any changes to that time frame in the spring of 2014.

  “I also told him that the new time frame was going to be evaluated in 2017 and potentially raised even more,” Therese said. “That riled Martin.”

  “What the fuck?! Why are they doing this to us when we’re already having such a hard time?” he roared. He mentioned that criminals were murdering each other all the time. In those cases, he could buy their argument, but here, when Göran was just missing? Why couldn’t he and Sara be allowed to move on? He told Therese he didn’t think much of the police. He said they did everything they could to make life a misery for him and Sara.

  Martin then started to ask her some very specific and rather odd questions. Therese played along, continuing to build the image of herself as an inexhaustible private investigator, a person who knew a little bit more than most, a woman who could predict things, see around corners.

  In response to a specific question, she told Martin that, no, the police couldn’t track shotgun bullets back to specific guns. She managed not to let on how strange it was for the young man to be asking her that. Yes, she told him, it was the same with fingerprints—there would hardly be any of those to find on or around a body after such a long time. She used her most soothing voice. She was a shoulder to lean on.

  Who except a murderer or an accessory to murder would need to ask about identifying ammunition and fingerprints? But Martin had most definitely taken the bait. He clearly had no one to talk to about these things, and he just as clearly needed to talk, think, and make plans. She could tell that more things were waiting to come out of him, and she planned on being there, right next to him, when they did.

  The only way for her to get in close to him would be to show him even more of herself, to give him more details he could build his elaborate fantasies on, his slightly tweaked details, like that thing about her father’s bank account. Personal information, presented with feeling.

  “I was surprised by how much she revealed about herself to him, that she would give him such intimate details,” Marie-Louice noted.

  The best lies always contain a grain of truth. That also makes them easier to keep track of. Therese wanted to keep shaking the tree, as the fruits of this particular tree felt ripe for the picking. She suspected—rather than knew—that this tree was not just shaking; it was about to be completely uprooted by the storm that was brewing.

  19

  NO ONE MAY KNOW

  I would like to talk to you but without anyone knowing. And I mean no one . . .

  It was exactly 22 minutes and 48 seconds past 11:00 p.m. on June 17 when Therese’s phone buzzed. She saw the message pop up on her screen.

  She had already turned her brain off for the night and was lying in bed at home with her youngest children. It was time for everyone to go to sleep.

  It was far too late for her kids to be awake, but June nights in Sweden are as bright as day, and school was out for the summer. In her house, that meant the kids got to stay up late and sleep until lunchtime if that was what they wanted. Mother and children were chatting among pillows and blanke
ts while their eyelids grew heavier and the day came to a close. They were half dozing, warm and snug.

  Until now. The message woke her up instantly; she was suddenly icy cold. She started to disentangle herself from the children. The message was from Martin Törnblad, and there was only one possible way to interpret it: He had been broken. She had won. She felt as if she had just scratched off the winning combination on a lottery card and was sensing the first whiff of all those millions.

  Winning might be overstating it. But she did feel somewhat victorious; he had something he wanted to share. The only question was how to make him take the final step, how to wring the details out of him. She wanted the location—the grave. That was the most important thing.

  A few weeks earlier, a day or two after the pivotal conversation by the tractor, Martin had added her as a friend on Facebook. She assumed he had already found out most of what there was to know about her. Therese was not a private person, quite the opposite. She had long been making a living by exposing herself and her work.

  Photographs of her as a model or stylist were publicly available online. As were pictures of herself, her children, her husband, her entire private life on the popular wedding and maternity blog she had written for years. They hadn’t been updated in years, but the material was all online, out there for the world to see.

  As anyone with online experience knows, a general impression of when a person was born and in what part of the country they live is enough to get quite a lot of their personal information with just a few clicks of the mouse. What someone paid for their house, who they vote for, where they live, what kind of cars they have, etc. The process is even more straightforward if a person has an unusual name.

  Like Tang. Not a common name in Sweden at all.

  The personal identity number is the key to every public database in Sweden. It is similar to a social security number in the US, except that instead of hiding it away, you use it everywhere—in the grocery store, in the bank, in the schools, at the hospital—everywhere. All your interactions with the authorities can be collated in less than a day—run-ins with the law, fines and sentences, debts and incomes, your benefits, even the complaint you sent to the Swedish Consumer Agency about your hairdresser.

  It was with a sudden sense of vertigo that Therese replied to Martin’s text that night. She had to assume that he had found out everything from her home address to the names of her children. As far as she knew, he could be parked in the street outside her house, texting her, right now. It was imperative that she choose her words carefully going forward. Therese, it appeared, had found herself a stalker. A stalker she suspected of being a murderer.

  On the other hand, she knew a lot about him and his situation too. Not only what the police had told her, but also what she had read and what he and Sara had told her themselves. Therese had spies in the field as well.

  “It felt like everyone would call me all the time,” she said. Both from Norra Förlösa and Stigtomta. The locals reported everything they had seen and heard.

  “We’re a lot more like detectives than a group looking for a missing person,” Therese wrote in Missing People’s closed Facebook group as early as late May. She had, at that point, handed over the surreptitious recording of her conversation with Martin and Sara to the police upon their request. It was yet another tiny piece of the puzzle.

  Missing People’s next large search was planned for the weekend of June 19 and 20. That information, too, had been disseminated in the area to ratchet up the pressure and sow seeds of doubt and discord.

  On May 28, the day he first contacted her on Facebook, Martin had also called Therese. There was this medium who sees and knows things, he told her. The medium in question supposedly saw Göran’s body close to a stone wall. There might be more information, but the medium didn’t want to draw any attention, or end up in some police register.

  “How do you deal with something like that?” he had asked Therese.

  Therese had explained that a person could tell her anonymously about his or her visions, then she could go out and have a look with her colleagues. There was no need for the police to get involved, at least not until it became clear what they were dealing with. It was a bit like it had been with the pond, she had explained. They would just get a couple of dogs out to have a sniff around.

  It didn’t take Therese long to figure out where Martin’s questions were coming from. Here was a murder suspect suddenly talking about fortune-tellers who could help locate the missing body. She texted in a group chat with the rest of the management team:

  We have to make it obvious we’re around. Martin is coming along; he’s going to talk “through” a medium. This is coming to a head now.

  At Ställe Farm, just over a week before Midsummer 2014, an engine revved and someone screamed. The words could not be made out from a distance, but there was fear in that voice. Despair. The car drove off.

  Sara Lundblad had trailered her horses and carefully placed her son, Vince, in his car seat. Martin was running behind the vehicle across the farmyard, chasing her.

  He watched his future disappear as his partner drove off toward the E22 highway and the road north, to Stigtomta. After twenty or thirty yards, he slowed down, stopped, turned around, and walked back to the house. It was June 11. Martin had been left alone with his thoughts and dreams.

  The problems in their relationship had always been worked out before. After a few rounds of texting and calling, Sara’s tone would change, overwhelmed by Martin’s energy and powers of persuasion, by his nagging. Then she would start including hearts and pet names in her messages again. She’d come back to him. “You and me.”

  But this time, it was not enough. She had actually left him. It was final, she said. She wanted to move on, to be left alone. She repeated that again and again when he called, begging and pleading for her to come home.

  So he went after her.

  Martin turned in between the Tängsta houses a little after three in the morning. It was not a calm and collected man who climbed out of the car after the 180-mile drive from Norra Förlösa. The main house was undergoing renovations, he knew that, so he marched over to the annex. The pipe manufacturing equipment was housed on the ground floor, and there was an apartment above it. Martin made a racket entering. He banged and pounded on the front door at first, before realizing that Sara had forgotten to lock it.

  The scene that played out next was straight from a tragic relationship drama. The rejected man who turns up unexpectedly in the middle of the night. The woman and infant rudely awakened. And in the living room, on the couch, the lover. The new leading man.

  That was how it played out in Martin’s mind, anyway. Johan Nydahl, the young man whose parents were tenants, who had been helping out with the pipe-making, was in the apartment. As part of his salary, he was permitted to stay in the apartment when Sara wasn’t there. But now stronger feelings seemed to have developed between them.

  Where Johan Nydahl had been sleeping is open to debate. Both he and Sara claimed afterward that he had been on the couch when Martin arrived. But by the time Martin had entered, he was already on his feet and on his way out the door. He could certainly have been laying his head elsewhere.

  Even so, there was no violent reckoning, only a verbal one. With Martin hurling insults after him, Johan headed over to his parents’ house across the road and waited. He wanted to give them the space to work out whatever it was Martin had come to discuss.

  The couple had quarreled before. Many times, especially over the past few months. But Sara couldn’t ever seem to break free. She had even gone so far as to consult Göran’s guardian, Knut Lewenhaupt, to see whether he could help her get a restraining order. Perhaps formal measures could keep Martin from dragging her back every time she decided to break it off. But that would be very difficult to secure, Sara had been told. She couldn’t point to a risk of violence, because Martin had never assaulted her physically, not even close.

  That she fel
t psychologically abused and stalked might have helped with a restraining order, but it would require a manic slew of texts, emails, and other messages to persuade a prosecutor to take up the case.

  Everything was also made more complicated by the child they had together. It would be easier to slap a restraining order on a person who had committed a violent crime. But Martin was innocent as a baby lamb, legally speaking. Granted, he was still officially registered as a suspect in an ongoing, if low-key, murder investigation. But that was a long way from a formal charge and even further from a conviction in court.

  Sara would simply have to manage her own breakup.

  After several hours, Martin brought his baby son over to the neighbors, asking them to look after him. Sara and he had more things to work through, he told them.

  When he returned to Tängsta without Vince, Sara tried to escape. She ran from the house at full speed, out into the fields, with Martin hard on her heels. Her head start lasted for about a hundred yards, then she slowed down, and he caught up, refusing to let her go. Talking and more talking and more talking.

  To Sara, it was the same old rhetoric—about how they belonged together, how he couldn’t live without her. On previous occasions, Martin had even talked about a suicide pact, so they could be together forever. But she had moved on. New friends, a new job. A different life. She wanted to look to the future, not bury herself in the past.

  The two young parents talked for hours over the following days. The endless conversations associated with the breakup of a long-term love affair is something most people who have ever ended a relationship can relate to, even without the added complication of being suspected of murder in the case of a missing multimillionaire.

  You weigh your options, for and against, more or less rationally. Maybe remember first encounters. The hand-holding, hugging, closeness, the first kiss. The feeling of being invincible together. You and me against the world.