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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  This text unsettled her. Therese was no longer sure who was holding the reins in their interactions. She was not dumb enough to miss that Martin wanted to sleep with her. That much had been made painfully clear from his many hints over the phone and via text. She had dealt with things like that before and had no problem keeping him at bay. But that a guy would, after half a day’s pondering and fantasizing, be talking about building a new future with her and helping to father her children was something else entirely.

  “He had implied before that he knew where I lived,” Therese said. “He knew the registration number of my car, and then he started talking about my children. It felt like he had a good grasp of my life and knew a lot about me. And he kept saying he had to see me in person. Martinsson told me I couldn’t meet up with him. But here Martin was, wanting to come over that same night. What was I supposed to do?”

  20

  THE TRUTH

  In the early hours of June 19, 2014, a champagne-colored Saab 9-5 turned off the northbound E22 highway. The car set its course for the second-largest town in Västervik Municipality, Gamleby, home to just under three thousand people. Then it roared past Baggetorp with the shores of the Baltic Sea just a few hundred yards to the east.

  Farther out is Ullevi Island, and if you were to follow the inlet south-eastward, you would soon see Västervik. There is a jumble of islands before you reach open water, and the next stop on an easterly trajectory is Gotland. Gamleby is very close to the coast, a bit like the Stockholm archipelago, but without the ferryboats and outrageous property prices.

  Martin Törnblad was driving his mother’s car. He had borrowed it under the pretext of meeting friends on Öland later in the day. At 7:35 a.m., the Swedish summer sun had already been up for hours, and Martin had been on the phone to Therese for the last forty-two minutes.

  Only a smattering of people were out and about on this Thursday morning, the day before Midsummer’s Eve in 2014. Martin rolled along Östra Ringvägen toward Varvsgatan and up around Garpedan Hill, the home, according to local lore, of the giant Garpe.

  One of the stories about the giant says that one day, lovelorn and grumpy, he came across the humans in his search for a giantess to marry. Employing various kinds of trickery, the humans made him eat hundreds of unproofed bits of bread dough. Later, when Garpe was dancing, the dough swelled and he burst. The dead dough-filled body of the giant continued to rise until it hardened into the rocky outcrop that looms over Gamleby. A wicked creature brought down by human cunning.

  A little before eight in the morning, Martin parked the car outside Anders Lindfors’s house on Loftagatan and was welcomed in by Therese.

  “I had decided not to seem weak,” Therese said. “Because that’s never a good thing in these kinds of situations. Martin came in and took off his shoes and jacket. Then we went up to my bedroom. He wanted us to sleep together and hang out and watch a film. But I asked him what it was he wanted to tell me, the thing he didn’t want to say over the phone. At first he replied that I was in Missing People and security-guard mode. I told him again I was not a police officer. That I was there for support if he wanted to tell me something.”

  Martin wasn’t too keen on playing that part. He wanted something else—more validation. Someone who understood him.

  “He told me several times that he had things to say,” Therese said. “But that he didn’t know if he could trust me. He was anxious and veered pretty wildly between subjects. He kept coming back to me. How I was doing and who I was privately. I could tell I wouldn’t be able to push him on the topics I was interested in, so we started talking about his dad and my dad, who had something in common—they had both been diagnosed with cancer.”

  It was a slightly more neutral subject than her private life, but still a way to share intimate details, the way people do when they’re forming a friendship. Or a romantic relationship, for that matter.

  But nothing could happen between them. Not the way things stood, she stressed to Martin. She worked as a security guard for the police and was the head of Missing People Kalmar. She could not date a person who figured in a murder investigation. She couldn’t build a future with a suspect. He had to understand that.

  The enormous elephant in the room, the big secret, was a palpable presence between the two people on the second floor of the 1940s detached house in Gamleby. It emerged as a crucial obstacle, a roadblock on Martin’s road to salvation.

  Therese was careful to avoid the name Göran. She talked about the case and said that she and her colleagues were going to keep on searching. She waited for another opening.

  It was clear to her that Martin had reached his limits. The psychological pressure was so strong, it was manifesting physically. Even when he first arrived, he was more nervous than anyone she had ever met.

  “He was sad, too, because his relationship with Sara was tricky,” Therese said. “She would nag Martin that she didn’t think he was taking care of Vince. Sara had said that she felt more like Martin’s mother than his partner. I replied by saying what I thought he wanted to hear, rather than what I really thought. I told him I was there for him.”

  When Martin recounted the story of catching Sara with her new boyfriend, Johan, he told Therese that he had punched him. Therese immediately called him out, telling him he was a liar. She pointed to his knuckles, which were unharmed as far as she could tell. No teeth marks. No swelling, like there normally would be after you hit someone.

  She was taking a chance. But it worked. Because she was right, he had punched a wall, not a person. Once again, to him, she became the mystical creature who noticed what others missed, who could see around corners and read Martin like an open book.

  The one who could take away his pain.

  “He thought I’d looked him up in the police database because I told him that if he had punched someone in the face, he would have been reported, but no report had been filed. I didn’t answer when he asked about it; I just smiled at him.”

  The first rule of a skillful liar is to stick as close to the truth as possible. The second is to avoid statements that are too easily checked. The third: to let your dupe’s imagination feed the lie.

  “When I just smiled and didn’t answer, his pupils exploded and got incredibly big. So I told him I knew he was lying. That I’ve seen him do it before. He wanted to know how I could tell. I replied that Sara was in the house the entire time when I was there with Agneta and the dog and he wouldn’t let us in. His pupils dilated again.”

  He admitted she was right. When the two members of Missing People had rung the doorbell, Sara had run upstairs, covering Vince’s mouth so he wouldn’t give them away.

  Whether the poetic turn of phrase that “the eyes are the windows to the soul” is true or not, there is scientifically proven data demonstrating that our eyes react involuntarily to both feelings and thoughts.

  When we are working on solving a problem, our eyes try to take in as much light as possible to find the solution. More light, more details. If the problem is too thorny or terrifying, on the other hand, when our processing capacity is insufficient, we switch off. Our pupils contract. Our subconscious is telling us: “avoid, move on.”

  The apertures of our eyes open and close as ancient animalistic mechanisms are activated in our brains. The same is true in cases of overwhelming tension or emotional stress. When faced with something terrifying, dangerous, our pupils go supersized. Our bodies prepare for fight or flight and need as many impressions as possible to perceive threats and obstacles, to act.

  Therese hadn’t made a particular study of how to detect a lie, but she had no trouble reading Martin’s reactions based on, among other things, the way his eyes changed.

  “Martin asked how I could read him so well when the police had been unable to for two years. I told him we were more relaxed together, that maybe that was the reason.”

  And then, finally:

  “He asked: ‘Do you think I had something to do with Göran as w
ell?’ I said I knew he did, and his pupils went big again.”

  From time to time, over the course of their long conversation, there was a faint knocking sound from the ground floor. Likely a bird, coming to perch on the windowsill, looking for food, pecking with its beak.

  Several hours had ticked by when the moment of truth finally came. Lina’s Pantry down in Gamleby town center had opened a long time ago. Therese was hungry, but she knew this was not the time to interrupt the conversation. That would break the spell.

  Then her phone rang. The screen of her phone was in full view; the caller’s name was clearly shown: “Ulf Martinsson, Kalmar Police.” The detective, the lead investigator in the Göran Lundblad case, was calling her as she sat right next to his prime suspect. He was supposed to have called her back the night before but never had.

  Therese had a quick decision to make. If she picked up and Martin realized that Martinsson knew about their long conversation the night before, if he figured out that Therese was basically a double agent, it could turn everything on its head.

  Martin could snap and attack her. He was, at that moment, sitting between her and the stairs. There was no easy way out. Martinsson would probably be able to hear if there were a ruckus on the other end of the line, but Martin could beat her to death many times over before the detective could get a patrol car there. In the meantime, Martin could kill her in his own good time, set fire to the house, and slowly roll away in his Saab, long before anyone could arrive to save her. On the way back to Norra Förlösa, he might stop by her house in Oskarshamn. The children might be home.

  If she didn’t pick up, Martin could be suspicious anyway. Even if he didn’t lunge at her, the moment, their cocoon of trust, might disappear. The chance of getting a confession from him would be lost.

  She just had to roll with it. She could not be seen to hesitate.

  “Well now, speak of the devil,” she said, holding up her phone.

  She had just finished telling him a made-up story about Missing People’s forensic dogs being out searching that particular day. She referred back to that, telling Martin that the police probably wanted to know whether the dogs had found anything.

  “He’s always calling me to check up on us. But let’s ignore him, okay? He can keep his snooping to himself.”

  She put the phone down and looked Martin straight in the eye without blinking. Now it was just the two of them again. No police, no neighbors, no partners, and no parents. No one to lie to.

  “He said, ‘Maybe I know more than I should,’” Therese recounted. “He started talking about how Sara was psychologically terrorized by her dad. About how that was the reason Göran was missing. ‘But what do you mean, missing? People don’t just vanish, do they?’ I asked. ‘I know you know where he is, and I know you’re involved somehow,’ I told him.”

  Martin went in and out of the bathroom several times during their conversation. Quick visits, never longer than a minute, but long enough to lean over the sink and stare into the mirror with empty eyes and nausea gripping the back of his throat. To spit a little as saliva filled his mouth and he felt the vomit rising up. Breathe deeply, take stock, then make a decision, splash water on his face to snap out of it, then return to the conversation.

  When he came back, Therese decided to push one more time.

  “I can read you. Haven’t you realized that?”

  Martin was painted into a corner, by his own actions and everything else that had happened since August 2012. Now she had blocked his last escape routes, doggedly and stubbornly. She was not going to give up. There was nowhere for him to run. That left only two options for him: fighting or giving up.

  “It just all came rushing out of him,” Therese said. “He told me Sara had wanted to kill Göran on an earlier occasion with a forestry vehicle when they were out working in the woods. It was supposed to look like an accident. But she was unable to do it for emotional reasons. Instead, they planned for Martin to shoot Göran. Sara wanted it to happen at night, but Martin thought early morning would be better, because then it would just look like regular farmwork when they buried the corpse.”

  Simple, direct, and clear. We killed him. I killed him. Therese had succeeded. But she had yet to solve anything. All she had done was find the first loose end in a quickly unraveling tangle.

  Martin contracted on the bed in a fetal position. He complained that his stomach hurt, leaning against Therese as if to draw strength. She could no longer see his pupils or facial expressions. She couldn’t see his face at all, but she put her arm around his shoulders, bringing her other hand up to his head. She massaged his scalp, stroking him like a mother does with her child when he is in pain.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” she said. “It must have been awful carrying that around for so long.”

  The murder had been meticulously planned. The grave had been dug the day before. On the morning of the crime, Sara was already at Ställe Farm to let him in.

  Martin took one of his father’s shotguns from the weapon cabinet and loaded it with two kinds of ammunition, both 3s and 5s. One kind is bigger than the other, but he was unsure which one he would need. Might as well load up both kinds. He was not an experienced shot; he didn’t even have a hunting license.

  Therese said, “He told me how he walked up to Göran, who was on his side with his face to the wall. When Martin was about five feet away, Göran turned around and was about to cry out. So he fired.”

  What had happened next looked nothing like films or video games; it was so much gorier. One of Göran’s eyes almost flew out of its socket. And the smell; he cannot forget the horrible smell that filled the room.

  Martin relived the retching, the stabbing pain in his gut. It was not the shot itself that haunted him, not the blood or even the knowledge that he had killed someone.

  “It’s his eyes,” Martin said. “Those eyes still haunt me.”

  He visited the bathroom yet again. But now the floodgates had opened. All his inhibitions were gone, and getting it all out in the open seemed to make him feel better. Like cleansing himself of something foul that had been putrefying inside him for years.

  “It is really hard to say how long it took Martin to confess,” Therese said. “I lied to him and said Anders and another person would be home at four, even though they weren’t due until six, just to have a fixed end point. I was focused on memorizing everything Martin was telling me. It turned into a long narrative that lasted for hours. It was tough for him, but he didn’t cry once.”

  His phone rang several times while he was talking. It was Sara. But he didn’t pick up.

  It was midday on June 19, 2014, and Therese now knew everything. She knew everything about how Martin and Sara had discussed, planned, prepared, and then gone ahead and killed Göran Lundblad.

  In that moment, she was a coconspirator. Martin had told her about pulling the trigger, about all the blood. About the tarpaulin Sara had to fetch to wrap her dead father in. About the dragging, carrying, and heaving they did to get the body down to the basement. About all the blood that had trickled out of the package, down the garage floor drain. And about how they had gotten the body into the flatbed of the pickup truck together to transport it to the grave. Just the two of them. Against the world.

  Therese knew everything. And yet it was unusable in practice. Without a body—no crime.

  Martin and Sara cleaned up the same day. The body had been done away with and the bedroom cleaned by 2:00 p.m. on August 30, 2012. It was clean enough that dog handler Jonas Blomgren did not notice anything amiss when he visited about a week later.

  Among the first things Martin got rid of was the shotgun shell. Just to make extra sure, he drove farther inland, to the village of Trekanten, and threw the shell into a stream. He smashed Göran’s cell phone with a sledgehammer and discarded the pieces in a slurry pit. He burned the dead man’s passport in the wood-fired stove at his father’s farm. Other private possessions ended up in a burn pile in the
forest.

  Since then, he and Sara had also renovated the bedroom thoroughly. Burned furniture and smaller items. Cleaned and washed the floors and walls with pint after pint of industrial cleaner. Sanded, scraped, and put up new wallpaper to get rid of the blood spatter on the walls and ceiling.

  They had ripped up the vinyl floor in the room, only to find dried-in blood on the subfloor—they scrubbed that with more cleaner. They had even taken the shotgun apart, cleaned it with a strong cleaning solution, rinsed it with water, and let the weapon air-dry. The basement drain had been hosed clean.

  Therese had been given a narrative and a context so detailed and precise, she couldn’t help but believe all of it. But Martin could deny every word in a police interview or in front of a judge and be released the same day he was called in. No matter how convincing Therese’s recounting of his confession might be, or how convinced she might be, it was of no use.

  Maybe the forensic technicians would be able to find some evidence in the renovated bedroom, now that they knew where to look. Perhaps they would even find traces of blood matching the DNA from Göran’s toothbrush.

  But what would that prove? That Göran Lundblad had, at some point in the past, bled a lot in his own house. When? Determining the age of blood stains is a difficult science, easily challenged and called into question. There remained both unreasonable and reasonable doubt.

  It is true that people have been convicted of crimes without a body being found, but that has only happened on the basis of more substantive evidence than the claims of a notoriously untruthful, boasting, and now jilted farm boy, made to a security guard during a secret meeting. A meeting that, moreover, occurred contrary to the express orders of a Kalmar police detective.

  As much as Therese was sure she was right, that she finally knew exactly how it happened, she was well aware that there were still too many unsubstantiated aspects here. Most importantly: Where was the grave?