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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  But that is set against everything that has stagnated over time. Everything that has been eroded. Wrecked. Broken promises, harsh words.

  Later that same summer, Sara said, “Dad told me Martin would, like, ruin me and turn a lot of people against me, kind of exploit me. I feel like I should have listened to him. But that’s how it goes when you’re in love; you don’t see the flaws.”

  After three days, Sara finally relented, or at least claimed to. The only way to get Martin to leave was to promise to come back to Norra Förlösa. She just had to sort out a few things in Stigtomta first, she told him. Top priority was an order of Dollar Pipes for Swedish Match.

  With Sara’s words in his ears, Martin finally calmed down and drove back home. Holding the steering wheel was painful because he had injured his hand. He had punched a wall during one of his long conversations with Sara. No major damage, just swelling, but it was a stinging reminder of his own helplessness.

  During the drive home, he slowly realized that their relationship was over. Truly over. Sara was done with him and with life in Norra Förlösa in general. It was a pale June day, with Midsummer just around the corner. There was nothing left.

  Martin needed a new plan. And there happened to be a certain woman who had been on his mind for some time now.

  Therese fumbled with her phone. Her eyes were roving around the bedroom without really seeing it. Her thoughts were racing. It was almost midnight on an ordinary Tuesday.

  Something must have happened. Something had triggered Martin. The main suspect in a murder case was texting her in the middle of the night. Therese knew she had to seize this chance. She needed to reply quickly, kindly, and invitingly.

  Therese: Ok, do you mean call or what?

  Martin: Not sure. Having some personal problems I think and no one to talk to. Just thought you were a nice lady but don’t know if I can trust you, without you telling for example my girlfriend or anyone else. I don’t actually know you.

  T: I can promise you complete secrecy. What you want to talk about will stay between us.

  M: My head is playing some weird trick on me. I keep thinking about how you’re doing and what you’re doing.

  Don’t know why and I don’t want to wreck anything, for you or myself. But I don’t want to wait for an answer anymore.

  Really don’t want you to tell anyone that I’m telling you this. You thought I was going to have big news. Right?

  T: I feel like you think I could be helpful and listen, so I’m here! I have felt for the two of you from day one and feel that your dad really welcomed us and I’m here for you whatever way I can be.

  A few minutes passed between messages. The game was on. Her tactic: invite, but don’t exaggerate. She signaled familiarity by mentioning Martin’s father, for example. Not flirty, but still promising to be there in “whatever way” he needs. And the secrecy, the secret-making—they shared something now.

  While texting, she logged onto Facebook and the group chat with the Missing People management team to update them.

  “Maria Nilsson immediately said he was in love with me,” Therese said. “Not a chance, I reckoned, but he had some kind of plan. ‘This is as close as we’re going to get,’ I argued. This was our chance. Marie-Louice was worried, viewed him as unstable, and started talking about my safety.”

  The texting continued. It soon sounded as if Maria might be right. Martin was flirting with Therese.

  M: My head isn’t thinking about finding Göran when it thinks about Therese but about how she’s doing and what her life is like. Because I’m guessing it’s not always easy. You came from nowhere and suddenly I feel like you could mean more than a regular person.

  Feel a bit stupid writing this and a bit scared of how you’re going to take it.

  After just under an hour of texting back and forth, while Therese was simultaneously group-chatting with her colleagues, Therese and Martin switched over to a phone call. The conversation would go more quickly that way, and it would be easier for Therese to hear undertones, hesitation, and pausing, which might help lull him into a sense of security. She left the bedroom so as not to wake the children. Then she set things up to record the call.

  The day of Wednesday, June 18, 2014, was only fifteen or sixteen minutes old when Therese sank into an armchair to have what might turn out to be the most important phone call of her life.

  To Therese, the person on the other end of the phone sounded less like a man than a boy. Under the surface, she could sense the violence and fury she would need to work with, harness, preserve. Otherwise she wouldn’t get anywhere. His suppressed rage would boil over somehow, she knew.

  Therese was not a psychologist or therapist, even though some of her experiences had made her feel like one. And it was probably impossible to predict or train yourself for, let alone fully understand, situations like this one.

  Now, in this moment, in the middle of the night, she knew Martin was a murderer. Not in that formal sense—she could never prove such a thing beyond a reasonable doubt. But she knew it. She could tell as much from what he said as from what he left unsaid.

  He was a little boy with immense difficulties in his relationship with the world, a mere child hidden inside a grown man. A little boy in big shoes. Could she trip him up, make him fall on his face, unmask himself—tell her exactly how it happened?

  Possibly, but she would only be able to do so by being open in return. By going along with the conversation, with nothing but intuition—gut feeling—to help her predict what he wanted to hear.

  Open. She would need to lie and make things up, in order to give him exactly the image he was looking for, the exact building blocks that fit into his mental construct, without knowing what that construct looked like.

  At that moment, she knew, his construct was swaying precariously. The fundamentals of Martin’s very existence were creaking. When he shouted “you and me” into the void, there was no echo.

  Therese could pretend to be the soul mate he needed, the sounding board he could use to make himself feel significant again, important and strong.

  Therese knew that the objective truth about Göran’s death was probably already lost forever. No one would ever find the whole truth. That is not how it works, as Therese was well aware. But she could come close. Close enough for it to be decisive. Close enough to find the body.

  The transcript of what Therese and Martin said to one another that particular night would end up being 166 pages long. A verbal wrestling match. Therese rambled on about herself and her own invented relationship problems. She lied and told him she was getting divorced, but that she and her husband were staying together until after Christmas, for the children. She and Martin were in similar situations, she told him, though they were playing opposite parts.

  Then she changed the subject to a more everyday topic—pointed out that she was on his side, on his family’s side. She didn’t care about the gossip in Norra Förlösa. She also joined in Martin’s cursing of his neighbors, mirroring his disdain.

  The police investigation was a completely separate thing, she argued. The police could run or misrun that as they please. She represented a volunteer organization with a single purpose: finding missing people. And she could help with whatever he needed help with.

  He was open but cautious. Martin was very aware of the fact that his phones could be tapped. The police had already done that to him and Sara, he let her know.

  Therese kept carefully homing in on the core question. That he knew something big and important. And he was skilled at concealing it, at playing along without being caught out.

  Therese: But you screw up on certain things. Like your body language, for example.

  Martin: I screw that up?

  T: Yes, you do.

  M: Like how, for example?

  T: (Laughs) So you’re saying I should teach you?

  M: Yeah.

  T: Yeah. Yes. Well, it’s mostly when Sara’s around. Then you screw up all the time.r />
  M: What?

  T: Yeah. Your whole body language and everything. How you act around her. The looks you exchange.

  M: I had no idea.

  Therese pointed out a flaw—nothing big, nothing he could really take exception to. A statement, immediately followed by good advice—she could help him do better. She was on his side.

  Martin was in his home—the deserted Ställe Farm—with his phone pressed to his ear. For the first time in several years, he was talking to someone who wasn’t dismissing him as a liar, braggart, or saboteur. A woman, to boot, and older than he. A beautiful woman who knew her stuff. Unlike Sara, she was helping him, providing solutions.

  And her dreams matched his, he felt. She talked about having a farm in the country, horses—because she missed the horses of her childhood—and somewhere for her children to play, with fresh air and green grass.

  She wanted it to be a big place where large companies could hold conferences. That’s a moneymaker, she said. A hotel section, a small restaurant. Horse riding for guests who want to have a go. Clay pigeon shooting. Like a playhouse for adults. Therese implied that she had a tidy sum of money tucked away. She could easily start something up.

  T: You know, having worked in the modeling industry, I make two, three calls, and I get strippers to come over. Guys can come for bachelor parties and shoot guns with half-naked girls and stuff. Do you think you could make money that way?

  Again, the best lies contain a grain of truth. The idea was real—the dream of a hotel and conference facility in the countryside. And the modeling thing, well, it was true: she had been one. The rest were lies, of course. But she was counting on him buying them.

  What else was Martin supposed to do? Call various modeling agencies and ask if Therese had contacts in the stripper business? It is always easier to believe what you want to believe. She could almost hear the cogs turning in his head. Indeed, after they hung up, the farm idea would take deeper root than Therese could possibly have imagined.

  Intuitive interrogation strategy: validate the other person, then present alternatives. That is what makes people talk. And some talk more than others.

  “I talked about things I knew,” said Therese, “but I took them further and made them bigger and better. Among the first things I told him was that I’d had a glass of wine. It wasn’t true, but it gave him the upper hand a little.”

  Martin told her that he and Sara had gone through the safe-deposit boxes since Göran disappeared.

  “I’ve never seen that kind of money before,” he said.

  He also implied that he knew what had really happened to Göran. Or no, that he had a theory. “They” might be behind it. A group of people in and around Förlösa who had been laundering money since the 1970s.

  A conspiracy theory! One that fit in with a lot of the things he had said when they met by the pond, that crazy story about a mysterious couple claiming to work for Missing People, but who were more likely friends with Göran’s tenant farmer.

  This made Therese wary: Where was he going with this? But she accepted his statement without question. She played along, as though she instantly got who “they” were.

  T: Mm. Mm. I was just thinking. If maybe we could just nail all of them.

  M: No. Yes. I have no idea. I guess you need proof . . .

  T: What did you say?

  M: And stuff. You have to have evidence.

  T: Well, evidence. There isn’t any. That’s what I’m saying. There’s hardly going to be any evidence after two years.

  M: You mean Göran?

  T: Yeah.

  M: But . . . well, then they’d have to find him in that case.

  T: Mm.

  M: Before anything.

  T: Mm.

  M: Yes. And that’s not exactly easy, maybe.

  T: No. Well, I wouldn’t know.

  M: But I feel like . . . I feel like that’s impossible. Because then . . . I mean, I don’t know if they’ve done anything. I actually don’t want to judge them. And it’s just as likely to be Mats Råberg, I reckon, given that his tenancy had been terminated.

  She was so close.

  Martin was on the verge of being concrete several times. But every time, he backed away. As though he was just testing the waters, gauging reactions. Then he got personal again, told her that he had fallen for her that time they had talked by the tractor.

  She remained noncommittal but didn’t reject him out of hand. Instead, she continued to talk about the case and her job. Her loyalty was with the missing person, his family.

  The closest Therese got that night was when Martin suddenly started talking about how one of the employees at the farm had had visions. The medium.

  Anyone who believes in this kind of supernatural phenomena might by now be excused for thinking Kalmar County was crawling with people with paranormal abilities. Or that Göran’s spirit was particularly powerful in its restlessness.

  But this was not the time to argue. Keep him going, whatever he said. Sooner or later, it would come out. Martin claimed that the employee had seen signs that Göran’s body was buried in the fields south and east of Ställe Farm.

  M: And that’s right in front of our house. Those hills over there, you know, that stand of oaks with the hunting hide.

  An identified location. Was this a test? Was Martin checking to see what she would do? Call the police straight away, or go out and look? Or was it all nonsense? Words strung together to keep the conversation going while he planned his next attempt to get in behind her guard.

  The wrestling match continued as night drifted into early morning, those hours after 3:00 a.m. when humans are at their most slow-witted.

  At that hour, our levels of the sleep hormone melatonin are elevated, our digestion is at its slowest, and our body temperature and blood pressure are at their lowest, whether our body has been pumping out adrenaline during a potentially pivotal phone call or not.

  Film director Ingmar Bergman called it “the hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are at their most powerful.”

  As the sun started edging up in the east a few minutes before 4:00 a.m. on this summer morning, and a pale light started to break through the windows in Therese’s house, she was utterly drained. Stiff, her ears and throat exhausted. A happy coincidence, then, that her iPhone felt exactly the same way. The display had shown one percent battery for a while. The phone beeped, and the call cut out.

  The call had lasted for many hours. At the end, the conversation had just been moving in slow circles. Until the two of them could meet in person, there was nothing more she could do, she realized.

  The rest of that Wednesday, June 18, was a blur of calls, texts, and Facebook messages for Therese, who had only gotten a couple of hours of sleep. The nocturnal speculations, those castles in the air, had turned into harsh, bleak reality.

  She knew she had to contact the police, because things were getting out of hand. But she had nothing other than hunches and convictions to give them. No coordinates, no confession, no proof.

  She also had to keep any police involvement covert, without Martin even coming close to suspecting it, if she wanted to get further. He mustn’t stop trusting her.

  At the same time, she needed to keep her colleagues at Missing People abreast. She owed them that. They were a team, pulling at this tangled web from different directions. But she also needed to keep them informed for her own sake. If things heated up somehow, Martin might snap, fetch his father’s shotgun, and come after her, or, god forbid, her husband, children, and friends. That was the nightmare scenario. If it happened, she needed to be able to call for help. Better safe than sorry.

  Texts from Martin started flowing in before ten that morning.

  M: It might be stupid for someone in my situation to have these kinds of feelings for you. To think about how pretty your lips and eyebrows are, for exam
ple. You’re such a nice, bubbly girl. I’ve become really curious and want to get to know you. But if you don’t want anything to do with me, that’s just the way it is, I suppose.

  Therese was not just convinced that Martin was a murderer and that Sara was deeply involved, too, but she was also increasingly certain that Martin was sick. Not in a clinical sense, necessarily; she didn’t have the training to judge that. But she did have enough experience to realize his worldview was completely warped.

  But then, he was under intense emotional pressure, and burdened with guilt of epic proportions. One wrong move on her part or a twisted conclusion on his, and this could end really badly.

  “I called Detective Martinsson and told him Martin had his sights on me,” Therese said. “And that the whole thing was unsettling. ‘He’s not well and he’s going to come after me. I need your help!’ I told him.”

  Martinsson told Therese he would call back later that evening, but he never did.

  It is not difficult to imagine Detective Martinsson’s dilemma on that June day. A private individual was poking around inside the head of a suspected murderer. She seemed to have managed to get him on the ropes using borderline interviewing techniques, or more accurately, conversational techniques.

  Theoretically speaking, it could be helpful to the investigation. Therese had tools unavailable to him and his colleagues. In practice, she was now Martinsson’s mole in an otherwise utterly stalled murder investigation where the body was still missing.

  On the other hand, he couldn’t instruct her to act. That would make him guilty of professional misconduct. He also, both as a fellow human and as a professional, needed to be mindful of her safety.

  “What had happened did give them a new opening,” Therese said. “His spontaneous reaction was ‘be careful and abort.’ He told me not to contact Martin, but that I could respond if he contacted me.”

  Martin got in touch with her again later that evening:

  M: I was thinking about this thing that’s important to me, which is that if something happens between us, I want to think of your children almost as mine, because I could never imagine being without children. XO