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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  When the seventy-two hours are up, the prosecutor has to either release you or, if the case against you is strong, arrest you. Once that happens, a court has another twenty-four hours to hold a hearing, where you will have the assistance of a lawyer to counter the claims of the prosecutor, unless, of course, you prefer to handle it yourself.

  In other words, the Kalmar police had around one hundred hours, just under four days, over the Midsummer weekend to solve this case. They must find something to confirm the gory charges or they would have to open the cell doors, tail between their legs, and inform Martin and Sara that they have a right to apply for damages for unlawful detention. The police could even be charged with misconduct for believing the woman from Missing People so easily.

  Just before 10:00 p.m. on the same night that Martin was brought in for questioning, a police patrol arrived at the alleged murder scene, Ställe Farm. They used Martin’s keys to unlock the doors, then they had the locks changed and sealed the house tight.

  The basement door facing the road was cordoned off with police tape and a yellow and red sign: “Closed in accordance with Code of Judicial Procedure 27:15. Do not enter.”

  The intention was to secure the scene until forensic technicians could get to it with their solutions, brushes, hammers, chisels, cadaver dogs, and whatever else they needed to start verifying the confession.

  For those who like to keep an open mind, the case was by no means closed when the sun rose on Midsummer’s Eve and a police patrol up in Södermanland prepared to go pick up Sara.

  Let us suppose a blood-spattered murder scene was found at Ställe Farm, but no buried corpse turned up—the confession would then be considered false, at least in part. Under those circumstances, no one would likely be convicted, not after two years of rumors, lies, and accusations, during which various witnesses’ own conclusions had become entrenched.

  The body of the crime, the corpus delicti, was still missing.

  Or vice versa. What if the missing multimillionaire was found exactly where Therese said Martin had pointed on the map, but there is no proven murder scene? What if the bedroom turned out to be spotless?

  That would open several possible routes, all equally disagreeable. The best-case scenario would be, of course, that both Martin and Sara were convicted. But how could their involvement be proven without blood spatter and damage inside the house?

  Bird shot in the body would be a significant piece of circumstantial proof, as it would correlate with Martin’s confession to Therese. That the body was buried locally, on the Törnblads’ land even, would be fantastically awkward in and of itself. But theoretically speaking, Göran could have shot himself. The rifle in his mouth, his thumb on the trigger. Such things had certainly happened before in these parts, as everyone knew. The daughter and her boyfriend could have come across the body somewhere in the woods. They’d panicked and buried it. Implausible. But beyond a reasonable doubt?

  Sara could, furthermore, hardly be implicated in a crime based on a secondhand accusation alone. Conspiratorially speaking, the main witness, Therese, could be involved herself. She said she had playacted with Martin to get him to open up. But could they have been playacting together? Could they have planned the confession to get their hands on the millions by as-yet-unknown means?

  That would certainly be complicating things unnecessarily, true. But Sara could not be convicted without some kind of technical evidence, which meant Martin would stand to gain nothing by falsifying the confession. Not as things seemed to stand at first glance, anyway. But what do we really know about our fellow humans or their fantasies?

  As dawn broke on Midsummer’s Eve, almost all the balls were up in the air. It was time to start collecting them.

  According to the patrol’s own notes, Sara Lundblad was picked up at 12:41 p.m. on Midsummer’s Eve by Police Constables Jimmy Gustmark and Per-Emil Engström. She left her son, Vince, with her neighbors for the time being.

  Half an hour later, she was put in cell number 12 in the Nyköping custody suite to await transfer to Kalmar. Her car, the Ford Ranger her father’s body was transported in according to Martin, was seized for forensic examination.

  After almost two years, the chances of finding blood, or any other evidence, in the flatbed were small, but the Murder Bible checklist must be followed. Every chance of finding something to strengthen the case must be seized.

  About an hour before lunchtime on Midsummer’s Day, a demolition crew arrived at Ställe Farm in Norra Förlösa. To the untrained eye, they must have looked odd. They wore thin white overalls and carried aluminum toolboxes into the main house. Several cars were parked outside Göran Lundblad’s machine shed. The forensic technicians had also arrived, led by Anders Elmqvist. The demo crew intended to utterly disassemble the relatively recently renovated dining room, so that the forensic technicians could finally analyze the purported scene of the crime.

  If this tragic drama unfolded exactly the way Martin had claimed in his confession, there must be evidence to find at Ställe Farm. Blood tends to linger. Not just in the nightmares of murderers, but on objects, walls, ceilings. Ställe Farm was the police’s best chance.

  A bouquet of purple cloth flowers hung upside down from the dining room ceiling when the police officers entered. There were three small pictures on the wall and a wall sconce of frosted glass. A vacuum cleaner was sitting on the floor. Two dying plants wilted in the window.

  The police cleared the room, boarded up the windows, and turned on an ultraviolet light. On the west wall, a clearly visible stain, approximately a foot in diameter, emerged, though it was covered by a layer of wallpaper. A first box could be checked: this really was a bedroom, or at least it was before it was redone. The stain consisted of sweat and grease from the head of whoever it was who used to sleep here. No one had been able to remove that. The question was whether the murderers had missed anything else.

  The technicians dug deeper. There was no visible blood, though they discovered some darker patches behind the wallpaper. As a presumptive test, the police technicians coated those spots with leucomalachite green, a solution that turns blood stains fluorescent green under special lighting. To no avail.

  If a couple of amateurs had cleaned this room after murdering someone with a shotgun, and if they had used as many cleaning products as they could think of—water, soap, chlorine, or something even heavier duty—they had probably succeeded in scrubbing any visible surface clean. But blood was also likely to have had time to seep into all kinds of places, into the subfloor and other nooks and crannies.

  It was an old house. The interior walls were not covered in plaster or plywood, but Treetex, a porous, airy material that provides excellent insulation. Treetex walls are smooth and highly suitable for wallpapering, but they are also highly flammable and therefore rarely used in newer buildings. Furthermore, and more importantly in this context, a Treetex board will absorb moisture like a sponge.

  The last chance of finding enough blood to match it with the DNA of presumed murder victim Göran Lundblad lay, therefore, in tearing up the floor to reach the possibly drenched parts of the Treetex that would have come off the walls before the floor was built.

  To the investigators, it looked a bit odd that only one section of the floor had been smoothed down. Consequently, the police started breaking off pieces of Masonite board around the spackled surface.

  At that point, a visitor arrived.

  Excerpt from report:

  At this stage, a dog handler from the Skåne police arrives with a blood-detection dog.

  The dog is let into the room to search for traces of blood. The dog immediately indicates on the floor by the broken-off piece of Masonite board.

  The dog indicates only in this spot. The board is removed to determine whether it is the floor or the Masonite board that makes the dog indicate.

  The dog is asked to search again.

  The dog now indicates by the hole where the board was removed instead.

>   The dog didn’t indicate anywhere else in the house. When the broken-off piece of Masonite board was brushed with leucomalachite green, the hoped-for fluorescent light finally appeared. Blood. Blood in a location where someone seemed to have done their best to conceal it. There were traces of dried-in cleaner. Signs of tool use, possibly pincers, on the Masonite board, probably made by chipping away a bloody floorboard piece by piece. Then the entire surface had been spackled over.

  Further down into the floor, the traces became more abundant. Diluted blood had seeped in under the floorboards and been absorbed by the Treetex board, leaving behind a large dark-red, nearly black, stain, running about twelve inches from the radiator along the floor.

  OBTI (a rapid screening test) confirmed that it was human blood, and a considerable amount of it. Another box could be checked. Therese’s story was looking increasingly credible.

  Within a few weeks, the Swedish National Forensic Center in Linköping would confirm, with the highest level of probability, +4, that what had seeped into the wall was indeed Göran Lundblad’s blood, mixed with a cleaning agent. Already, even now in June, well before any DNA results came back, there was enough compromising material to easily extend those one hundred hours of respite.

  As the technicians in their white suits wrapped things up in the demolished, or at least severely stripped-down, bedroom, the main events of the past few days had already become widely known. First and foremost, no one in the area could have missed the police tape cordoning off Ställe Farm.

  Martin and Sara had also been appointed public defense counsels to accompany them during police interviews. Defense lawyers are routinely appointed by district and county courts and when they are, those appointments are made public. The media checks this information from the county courts daily to glean the identities of alleged offenders. Beyond all that, a prosecutor’s request to have someone arrested is almost always public news.

  From national newspaper Dagens Nyheter’s website on the afternoon of June 21, 2014:

  A man born 1991 and a woman born 1988 have been charged with the murder of the sixty-two-year-old. Both hail from Kalmar and were charged on good grounds on Thursday, Robin Simonsson from the Swedish Prosecution Authority’s press office informs Dagens Nyheter.

  The police also told the media that they had a recorded confession and that Missing People was involved. Therese refused to say a word when asked about it by journalists, referring to a police request for secrecy.

  During the first few days, the media was cautious about revealing details about the two suspects. It was not made clear that the alleged offenders were Göran’s own daughter and her partner; they were only identified as “a young couple,” “both without prior convictions and both known to the sixty-two-year-old, as his close family members.”

  On first inspection, the police found no signs of a grave in the identified location. No outline of a hole, no mound like in cemeteries after a funeral.

  They did note that the bucket of Åke Törnblad’s wheel loader was about eight feet wide, well-suited for grave digging. With only a couple of scoops, you would have a hole of six feet, the standard depth for burial. Under nearly six and a half feet of soil, gravel, and loam, a body could easily be buried somewhere down there. But if so, then there should have been soil left over after the hole got filled in, and there should also be color striations in the ground.

  But Martin could have topped it up with fresh soil, driven back and forth a couple of times, and smoothed the mound out with the bucket. Then he might have run a plow over it, going back and forth, this way and that, smoothing it over again and again during those late-August days back in 2012.

  Since then, the field had been harrowed, cultivated, harvested, and then harrowed again several times. Even if Martin had given the correct location and the grave was here, about twenty-five yards in from the barbed wire, it was something of a mission to move all that soil, especially since it had to be done carefully, more archaeological dig than construction site. Every stone had to be brushed out of the ground, and the soil should preferably be sifted. After all, there could be something in it, however small and insignificant, to tie a perpetrator to the scene.

  Given that thirty-five cubic feet of soil weighs something like 2,600 pounds, close to five and a half tons of it would need to be shifted by this method just to examine an area the size of a grave. Suppose the location was less precise; then the police might need to cover an area four times that size. The amount of earth they would need to move would be closer to twenty-two tons.

  If the only objective were to identify the grave and not bother to sift the soil, the task would become much easier. A team of archaeologists from the closest university could, with the aid of a skilled machinist, peel back the topsoil from half the field in under two days.

  Underneath, at a depth of maybe sixteen to twenty inches, the hardpan begins. That is the unplowed part of the uppermost layer of soil, which is normally lighter than the topsoil. Even an untrained eye can normally see if anyone has been rooting around in it, since that would cause the humus-rich topsoil to mix into the hardpan like a dark ripple.

  But in this case, the police decided to choose a different method. A few days into July, something that looked like a lawn mower rolled over the freshly mown meadow near Skyttelund Farm. The man who was pushing the handles wore a yellow hi-vis vest. The man, Lars Winroth, worked at the Swedish National Heritage Board, and his mower-like device was a GeoRadar.

  It is an invaluable machine for anyone examining, for example, historical battlefields. The GeoRadar is moved over the area in question, sending signals into the ground that bounce back, which are then interpreted. If there is a sword, a coin, or even a body in the ground, it shows up on a screen. The result is a simplified X-ray image of the terrain, a cross section of the different layers of soil and anything contained in them.

  Lars Winroth was not alone. A whole gaggle of police officers was watching him curiously. They had measured out an area of twenty-seven by twenty-seven yards for him to examine with the machine. A cadaver dog had already sniffed around but given no indication whatsoever. Hardly surprising. The soil would have been packed tightly around the body by now.

  The images from the GeoRadar were not easily interpreted. They looked like old black-and-white photographs of the Milky Way, a jumble of lights against a black background. But two interesting areas emerged right next to one another, both in the area Martin Törnblad had pointed out. Closer examination revealed that one was a cluster of stones, moraine, and glacial debris from the most recent ice age. The second area was smaller, and the cross section showed that all the layers of soil had been broken through here not too long ago.

  Next to it, no more than a few yards away, was a cement drainage pipe. The drainage system that began here stretched out to the southwest, in the direction of the forest, on toward Boatorp and on to a certain pond, a rather shallow pool of water near the road through Norra Förlösa. Whoever had dug the hole here was either well aware of the location of the pipe or very lucky not to disturb it.

  A wheel loader was called in. After careful scraping, inch by inch, a clearly visible dark rectangle appeared in the ground. It was the afternoon of July 3, 2014, when the hunt for missing man Göran Lundblad appeared to have, at long last, come to an end.

  After a few more scoops with the loader, police technicians in white overalls, hairnets, face masks, latex gloves, and shovels continued the work by hand. At a depth of almost exactly six feet, a green tarpaulin emerged, a package still neatly wrapped in blue nylon rope. More boxes on the list, checked off.

  When the police carefully folded back the flaps of the tarpaulin, the uncertainty was over, if anyone was, indeed, still unsure about what the package might contain.

  Göran Lundblad was lying in the same position as when he had been shot. On his side, but with his head turned back as if to look. So many things can be deduced from tracing the outlines of what otherwise looks like one big
fleshy, compressed mass. If you didn’t know it was a human, it might take you a while to figure it out. Without a DNA analysis, no one would be able to say for sure who it was.

  With the pivotal find secured, all the police could do was repackage the body in a body bag and send it off for a forensic autopsy at Linköping University Hospital.

  23

  THE INHERITANCE

  Date: Wednesday, November 26, 2014

  Time: 1:04 p.m.

  Location: Kalmar County Court, Room E

  Witness: Forensic Pathologist Erik Edston, The Swedish National Board of Forensic Medicine

  Topic of testimony: Autopsy findings

  When Göran’s body was recovered, a police technician was present when we opened the tarpaulin.

  The body was fairly well preserved on account of low temperatures and the wrapping. There was no presence of worms. The body was, however, radically transformed. Gray and pliable.

  The discoloration made it impossible to assess minor injuries, but it was immediately apparent that there were head injuries.

  There was substantial fracturing of the skull and up. Bird shot was found in the brain.

  In his right cheek were small plastic fragments, presumably from a plastic wad from a shotgun shell. The rest was subsequently discovered wedged under his right ear.

  Wads are not usually found in heads; this indicates a close-range shot. What would have smelled bad in connection with the shooting is urine and feces; evacuation occurs immediately.

  His left eye was hanging out of its socket. That was because of the extensive fracturing of the face—the eye was pushed out.