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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  They drove past a motorcycle covered in a tarp. No, not that kind. He had used a green one. Thinner. When Therese turned down the driveway to Anders’s house, it had started raining. Heavy, scattered drops.

  She was not about to turn her back on Martin, and she was not about to go back inside the house. Not without some kind of backup. Not while he was still there—acting unpredictably, odd. Not a chance.

  Now that the adrenaline, the curiosity, the energy of his confession had faded, only the surreal realization remained: Martin was a murderer who had shot a defenseless old man in the head. He had dragged the dead body downstairs, through the woods, and out into the middle of a field to bury it.

  This man should be locked up, not walking around here in Anders’s backyard. He was talking about guns in the café, three of them. Had he brought any of them with him? Were they in his car?

  “That’s the kind of tarp it was. Thin and flimsy, that’s why it leaked so much,” he said, pointing at a tarp in Anders’s yard. It was a cheap, green plastic tarpaulin with a visible weave. He would be fine then, Therese assured him. That would hardly have been enough to protect the body. It would have had time to decompose quite a bit since Göran’s death.

  She ducked in under the eaves of the garage. Martin walked over to her and moved in for a hug. A kiss. Like a teenager on his first date, after the movie. Awkward.

  “No, we can’t do things like that in public,” she replied, smiling carefully while turning away.

  She was back in her role, the security guard, the head of Missing People. The official Therese.

  “What if the neighbors saw us? It’ll have to wait.”

  As they stood side by side next to the garage, Martin reached out a hand and patted her stomach. Pleadingly. Maybe, someday, they’ll have a baby together?

  Enough is enough.

  “Oh shit! I forgot the strawberries,” Therese said. “I have to go to the store. And Anders will be here any minute. I told you. You have to leave. Just do what we agreed. And I’ll see you later.”

  She set off toward her car. Her mind was a blank as she covered the short distance from the garage to her black BMW. She opened the door and climbed in. She looked over at Martin and smiled as she started the engine, then she pulled out of the driveway.

  Right away, she noticed that he was tailing her. Out onto the road, then southward toward Gamleby, past the veterinarian by the harbor. She took quick glances in the rearview mirror, hoping he wouldn’t notice her watching. When she turned off toward the town center, she watched as the Saab continued on, going past her in the direction of Kalmar.

  “But did he go home? How far did he go? I had no way of knowing. He might have stopped, turned around. Gone back to the house to lie in wait for me there,” Therese said.

  At this point, she could simply drive away, head straight to the nearest police station, sound the alarm, shout, scream, call. But no.

  “All I could think about were the damn strawberries. I really did go to the shops. Paid for them in a daze, I think, and then back out to my car.”

  There, in the parking lot, with a pint of strawberries in a flimsy plastic bag on the passenger seat, everything finally sank in. What had really just happened. And what she had managed to pull off.

  “I sat in my car for quite a while, just staring at the rain beating against the windshield,” she said. “It all washed over me at once. A million thoughts.”

  Her stunned epiphany couldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes before she started the engine. Her priorities were clear in her mind: make sure her family was safe, avoid continued contact with Martin, and find a safe place for herself. Then she must let the police know.

  The first three points could be ticked off quickly, once she finally got through to Anders. He had been summoned via radio, checked his phone, and started making his way home. His assessment was that his colleague Therese was in a self-defense situation. Simply put, self-defense is your legal right to defend yourself using the same level of violence as the person attacking you. Fists against fists, knife against knife. If you are strongly emotionally affected and have reason to be in a great state of fear, an added emphasis—the official term is self-defense in excess—applied. In such situations, you can use more violence, and fight back to eliminate the threat against your person. Permanently.

  Anders had given Therese the code to his weapon cabinet in the basement. It contained enough firepower to knock out a stampeding herd of cattle.

  On her way back to the house, she double-checked that her husband and children were safe before calling Martin again, despite having promised herself she wouldn’t. But she had to be sure.

  Where was he? She made him describe his surroundings and was persuaded, in part, because she could hear the sound of the moving car over the phone. She hung up with Martin, then it was time to tackle the most difficult call: the police. She could now give them all the puzzle pieces they would need to conclude an open murder investigation. If, that is, they believed her.

  None of her contacts were on duty, she was told. They were all out of the office until after the Midsummer holiday. Detective Martinsson was off as well, the on-call officer informed her when she got through to the central switchboard in Kalmar.

  “I told him they were probably going to have to postpone their time off for a bit,” Therese said. “Then I told him what I had to say. The on-call officer promised to make sure to get hold of Martinsson.”

  It took him fifteen minutes. At exactly 4:58 p.m. on Thursday, June 19, 2014, Therese made phone contact with Lead Investigator Martinsson.

  His report, typed up the same night, summarized the call:

  Therese told me that she met with Martin Törnblad privately for a number of hours today in a house in Gamleby to which he had driven from Kalmar. During their long conversation, Martin told her that he killed Göran Lundblad by shooting him.

  Therese stated that Martin was upset as he recounted how both he and Sara spent several months during 2012 planning to kill Göran Lundblad. A few days before the murder, they had planned for Sara to run Göran over.

  This didn’t happen because Sara was unable to go through with it. Instead, Martin fetched a rifle from his father’s weapon cabinet.

  With that weapon, Martin then shot Göran in his bed. He and Sara then wrapped the body in a tarpaulin together and buried it in a hole they had dug with a wheel loader.

  The hole is supposedly on Göran Lundblad’s land. Therese claimed to have a map showing the location of Göran’s body.

  It took Ulf Martinsson just over half an hour to cover the most salient points, as well as to assess and process the information. The broad strokes of the Göran Lundblad case were already clear to him. What the woman from Missing People was telling him fit in neatly with his own existing theories. He came to the simple conclusion that he needn’t complicate things unnecessarily. Just go with it.

  Sara and Martin were already under formal suspicion, a decision dating back to 2012, and now he had an identified murder scene, as well as directions to where the body, corpus delicti, was buried.

  Unless Therese had suddenly lost her mind. After all, something like this had never happened before in Sweden, that some sort of private investigator had cracked a murder case.

  He ordered Therese to cease all contact with Martin, to not answer if he calls, to lock her doors and windows, and to sit tight. She could expect to be interviewed by the police shortly.

  At 5:30 p.m., Martinsson made the formal decision to bring Martin Törnblad in for questioning. He would be found at one of three addresses, which he gave to the on-call commander. A patrol would be released from regular duty and sent to collect the young man. By force, if necessary. And quickly, before he had a chance to destroy anything else.

  22

  CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE

  A patrol car was cruising through Norra Förlösa at a leisurely pace. It would be impossible to miss for anyone who was still up and about and not y
et curled up on the couch after dinner.

  Police vehicle 9420, carrying Police Sergeant Möller and Police Constables Corlin and Jonasson, had been given three addresses where the wanted man, Martin Törnblad, twenty-three, might be found. They had already been to the first, Ställe Farm, but there was no one there. Now, as they drove up toward the Törnblad farm, they spotted a Saab 9-5 parked in the middle of the yard, the exact vehicle they had been told he was currently using.

  The charge was murder, but the three officers in the car had not been sent out to apprehend an armed and dangerous madman who could be expected to put up a fight or attack them. If that had been the case, they would have turned up in force. More cars, weapons at the ready. Bulletproof vests, maybe K9 units. They would have staked out the location from a distance, waited for the right moment, and tried to get through to the suspect via a police negotiator, even used force if gentler methods had failed.

  No one in patrol car 9420 brandished their weapon or readied their pepper spray. If the information they had been given was correct, this was a routine pickup. A legally enforceable measure, yes; the man would have to get in the car with them and that was final. If they found him, he would end up in the backseat. But pickups like this one were rarely contentious.

  At around 6:00 p.m. on June 19, Constable Corlin checked the barn. He found a woman milking cows. Martin was around, she said, but she didn’t know exactly where. The farm consisted of a number of buildings, and people did not keep track of each other during the workday.

  Corlin took a look around the rest of the barn. Empty.

  When he came back outside, his colleague Möller was speaking to a man who appeared to be the owner of the farm, Åke Törnblad. That very moment, the heavens opened up. Corlin quickly strode over to the patrol car to fetch his jacket. At that point, someone came jogging across the farmyard in the rain.

  Not a good sign, as every police officer knows. People running in the presence of the police could be trying to hide things, destroy something important, escape. But not this one. This man was running toward them.

  Excerpt from Police Constable Andreas Corlin’s report:

  The person, a young man, seemed to match the description we had been given for Martin Törnblad. He went over to stand next to the man I assumed was his father.

  I went over to the younger man who had come running and asked him whether he was Martin; he said yes.

  I asked to see his ID, which he showed me. Once we had ascertained that this was the person we were looking for, we explained to him that he was coming with us to the police station for questioning.

  In the car, Martin Törnblad asked what this was about; we explained again that he was going to be questioned and that we didn’t know exactly what it was regarding, but that the investigators would explain everything to him.

  Martin Törnblad was put in the back of the patrol car with a police officer next to him. No handcuffs, no fuss, although the doors to the car could not be opened from the inside.

  Through the windows, he watched as the familiar scenes of his hometown glided past. Off toward Ställe Farm, turning right at Mats Råberg’s farm, left in Melby, down the gravel road toward Mosekrog, and then the E22 highway south for twelve miles or so.

  He had been brought in for questioning before. It had always gone well, and he had been allowed to return home. On this day, he showed no particular signs of concern about having his Midsummer ruined. Therese had told him this could happen. He might have to spend some time in prison, but surely only a couple of days.

  He was hungry, though, and repeatedly asked for a sandwich during the ride. Maybe he should have eaten that cheese sandwich in Gamleby this morning after all.

  To the police officers, their passenger seemed strangely unperturbed at being picked up. He clearly didn’t grasp that it was game over for him, that he could write this Midsummer weekend off altogether, along with a great many subsequent holidays. Or perhaps he believed in miracles.

  By 6:55 p.m., Martin had been unloaded at the Kalmar Police Station and placed in an interview room along with violent-crime detectives Marcus Tinnert and Ulf Einarsson, both of whom had been briefed on the situation by their colleague Martinsson.

  It was a so-called 23:6 interview. The numbers refer to the Swedish Code of Judicial Procedure, chapter 23, section 6, which states that “anyone who is reasonably likely to possess information relevant to the inquiry” may be interviewed.

  He was informed of what he was suspected of. “Murder or manslaughter in Kalmar in late 2012 of Göran Lundblad.” But he did not possess any information relevant to the inquiry, he told them. Or any other inquiry, for that matter. He had already told them everything he knew, he insisted. And he stuck to that statement. He told them nothing.

  Marcus Tinnert and his colleagues wrapped up the preliminary interview thirty minutes later without any boastful confessions, and Martin was taken away to a cell. Meanwhile, two police officers were stepping out of their car one hundred miles farther north, on Loftagatan in Gamleby.

  Martin emptied his pockets, handing over his cell phone, driver’s license, debit card, and 1,500 kronor (180 dollars) in cash. The custody staff always relieved detainees of loose items, as well as belts and shoelaces, to prevent suicides in the cells.

  By the time the metal door shut behind Martin, police officers Ingrid Kristoffersson and Lena Ingesson had entered the house on Loftagatan and introduced themselves to Therese Tang and Anders Lindfors. They really only needed to speak to Therese.

  Interviews are best conducted in a controlled environment without potentially distracting secondary characters, who should, in fact, perhaps be questioned about various things themselves. But everything about this story was exceptional. They could hardly kick the owner out of his own house, and time was short. This was not the time to be fastidious.

  It took the police officers an hour and twenty minutes to navigate through the main points of Therese’s narrative and get from her what they needed to take back to the detective in charge. As they had no detailed knowledge of the people, locations, or events, Therese had to go back and explain things several times over and disentangle the chronology, especially since she herself had been jumping back and forth between things she and Martin had talked about in the past few days.

  This is a common phenomenon in witness statements, especially if the information is fresh and has not yet been processed by the witness, tidied up in their mind. All the information rises to the top of the person’s awareness. Everything is felt to be of equal importance. They have to get everything out. Immediately.

  But the fresher a statement is, the better, from a strictly legal point of view. The witness will have had less opportunity to adapt events to his or her own preconceived notions or experience, and the statement will be more credible in a court of law.

  The two police officers rarely intervened during their interview with Therese. They mostly nodded in understanding and asked questions only when something seemed incoherent.

  The result of the interview, also conducted in accordance with the Code of Judicial Proceedings 23:6, was, in the end, chillingly clear. Martin had given a detailed account of how he had shot Göran, something a pathologist could easily verify if the body were recovered in a relatively decent state.

  He had also identified the supposed location of the body with remarkable precision. With the help of Google Maps, Therese found the longitude and latitude for the police officers. She handed over the paper map where she had marked the spot. Now the machinery of justice could start grinding away in earnest.

  Just before 9:00 p.m., on the night before Midsummer’s Eve, the two police officers thanked Therese and Anders Lindfors for speaking with them and left. They took Therese’s cell phone with the recording of Martin’s confession with them.

  In Kalmar, the latest developments in the Göran Lundblad case had been recounted to the prosecutor on call, Anna Landner, who had just made the decision to charge Martin. Half an hou
r before midnight, when the results of Therese’s interview had come in and been evaluated, the same prosecutor decided to also charge Sara in her absence. The story was so detailed and coherent that it could be considered sufficient evidence to bring a charge.

  Several paths were open to the investigators and prosecutors now. They could choose to not detain the suspects and to attempt first to confirm the veracity of the purported confession by digging in the field. Or they could ask for a warrant to search Ställe Farm and conduct a crime-scene investigation. If they found something first, they could detain the alleged suspects afterward.

  On the other hand, none of those measures could reasonably be taken without the main suspects finding out. That meant running the risk of them absconding, harming themselves or others, or undermining the investigation in some other way, before the police had found what they needed.

  It would be safer, then, to round them up and see if their interviews led anywhere, perhaps even to full or partial confessions.

  During the night, the Södermanland police were informed that Sara needed to be brought in as soon as possible. Probable address: Tängsta Farm in Stigtomta, outside Nyköping. The prosecutor also granted a formal warrant for searching Tängsta and Ställe Farm, as well as the suspects themselves.

  And thus, the clock started ticking. Loudly. The arrest of alleged offenders is a temporary measure while awaiting a free and impartial hearing in court. People are locked up in order to allow the police to investigate things at their own pace, to keep suspects from leaving the country to evade a future hearing and potential punishment, or to prevent new crimes from being committed. The reasons for detention are defined as “risk of tampering with evidence, risk of absconding, and risk of continued criminal activity.”

  In the Swedish legal system, the police can normally detain you as a suspect for six hours. After that time, a prosecutor needs to assess the evidentiary situation. If things are looking bleak for you, you can be formally charged, which allows investigators an extra seventy-two hours to strengthen the case or dismiss it. They may, for example, want to interview people before you have had a chance to persuade them to provide an alibi. Or search for blood in the room where you stand accused of having shot someone, before you or anyone else has a chance to clean up more.