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

by Joakim Palmkvist

  The skin on his back was cracking, which I ascribe to the body being moved after it was found. The body was dissolving. It takes a few hours for rigor mortis to set in.

  Before that happens, the body would have been limp and difficult to move. Under these conditions, I believe it would have taken approximately two hours for rigor mortis to set in. It would have been fully developed after six to eight hours.

  Considering the injuries, there ought to have been a lot of blood. Bleeding ceases when the heart stops beating, but due to the pressure, two to four pints are lost during the first minute. The blood flow will, however, continue if the body is moved.

  Pathologist Erik Edston had thirty years’ experience with autopsies. He had performed something like five thousand in his career, he told the court, which lent considerable weight to his statement.

  The many days of the trial were eagerly followed by a curious general public, witnesses, the plaintiffs—such as Göran’s daughter Maria, her half sister Eleonora, and their mother, Irina—as well as a number of journalists.

  There was a great deal of coverage of this trial. A dark and deranged Romeo and Juliet story about star-crossed lovers in a rural setting. Lovers who murdered the girl’s father. All the money added a bit of extra spice, as those are the kinds of things that naturally stoke curiosity. But how the case was solved—thanks to a private investigator who put herself in harm’s way to find the truth and convict the perpetrators—really raised the interest from mere curiosity to public frenzy.

  On this late November day in 2014, when the pathologist told the court about the autopsy of Göran Lundblad and drew conclusions about how the murder had taken place, Sara Lundblad was in a separate room. The court required her to listen to accounts of how her father’s remains had dissolved, as well as the injuries on his body. But she didn’t have to look at the pictures the pathologist showed.

  Was it a sign of her guilt—that she couldn’t bear to look? Or of grief, a feeling she didn’t want augmented further by images she would probably never be able to forget? It was open to interpretation. Nothing was settled yet. It was the fifth day of a twelve-day trial.

  Five months had passed since Martin and Sara were arrested and Göran’s body was recovered from the hole in the field next to the ground drain. It had been an intense time for the police, who had checked every box in the Murder Bible checklist before the case had gone to trial.

  They ran new interviews with all relevant people: relatives, tenants, neighbors, and friends. The reactions ranged from “I told you so” to shock, distress, and skepticism. The interviewees still didn’t have any pivotal information to give, only their persistent hunches, their opinions about how the alleged offenders had behaved: Martin’s sudden presence in all Stigtomta contexts, something Göran would never have accepted. Sara’s coldness and lack of reaction. That she didn’t look, call, search. But also, her exaggerated reaction in the first few days. That she cried so much on the phone to her stepmother, Irina. Melodrama? Grief? Remorse over the horrific crime? Paradoxical. Plenty of both reasonable and unreasonable doubt.

  The probable murder weapon was quickly identified. One of Åke Törnblad’s shotguns showed signs of amateurish cleaning. The weapon had been rinsed, likely with both cleaner and water. Having then been left to air-dry, it had begun to rust. This was bad for the weapon, but actually good for the killer, if there had ever been blood on the barrel. The police were not, in other words, as lucky as they had been with Pierre Karlsson, the double murderer in the Flakeböle case, who had left dried-on blood stains on his rifle. But the incompetent cleaning of Åke Törnblad’s weapon could, at the very least, be considered circumstantial evidence.

  The technicians also came across an interesting puzzle piece when they carefully combed through the burn pile behind the Törnblad farm. Everything from defective briar pipe bowls and plastic to foam and metal furniture was discarded there to be burned in due course. But a pair of sooty, cracked glasses were also found among the debris. They had been there a long time and were a perfect match for the model Göran used to wear.

  Why would an innocent daughter and an equally nonplussed son-in-law throw something like that away? Only someone who knew that the owner was never coming back would do that, no?

  There was no help to be had from the suspects, who were both interviewed a handful of times before the trial.

  Sara denied everything from the outset. She and her dad quarreled before he disappeared, but that wasn’t unusual. When she entered Ställe Farm a few days later, she didn’t notice anything unusual. Not that she was a hundred percent familiar with the place, since she didn’t really live there, but, rather, with Martin.

  And Göran was her rock. She would never have hurt him.

  Confronted with the blood stains in the bedroom, she was completely uncomprehending. Yes, she had renovated recently, but she never saw any blood. The spot in the corner, by the Treetex board and the spackled subfloor, that was mostly Martin’s area, she claimed.

  And fine, she had forged her father’s signature on the company’s annual report, but only because she wanted to keep the business running as smoothly as she could manage until he came back.

  The only explanation she could see as to why Martin would point the finger at her is that he wanted to get back at her for breaking off their relationship. He must have done it all himself.

  The resentment she felt toward Martin was palpable in a message she wrote to him in the exercise yard of the pretrial detention center, a well-known way for inmates to communicate:

  Thanks for ruining my life, Martin. I have nothing to give Vince now. Disinherited. Thanks!

  One might expect different behavior from an innocent young woman, locked up on false charges.

  Such as: “Why? What have you done?”

  Or: “I hate you because you killed my dad.”

  But instead, a sarcastic thanks. Thanks for getting me caught. At least, that was the undertone the police investigators read into it.

  In a cumulative assessment, as a county court would put it, several circumstances and strange details were incriminating for Sara. But to quote the legislative history: “A conviction may . . . not rest on an overall impression; an assessment must be made of individual proofs.”

  Martin also denied guilt after finding out that Therese had turned him in. He didn’t seem to want to believe that she would betray him like that.

  Excerpt from summary of interview 140621:

  Martin was told the police had interviewed Therese Tang, who described her meeting with Martin and their conversations.

  Therese first called Detective Martinsson to inform him that she had met with Martin; a decision was then made and a time scheduled for an interview.

  Martin was informed that Therese had had plenty of time to think about what to tell the police.

  Martin replied that he thought someone else had told the police this and that the police were making things up in saying it was Therese.

  Martin was then told it doesn’t work that way. That the police do not make things up or say that someone said something they didn’t.

  Even so, Martin refused to accept it. After two more interviews, he stopped answering questions entirely and refused to cooperate with the interviewer. He would only sit in silence when brought to the interview room.

  The investigators had to go back to the drawing board with the body, the blood, and the claims, to try to piece together the many circumstances that pointed to Martin and Sara being murderers.

  It would have been an impossibility if not for Therese. Her efforts and the story she had coaxed out of Martin and partially recorded were the very foundation of the prosecutor’s case.

  When Therese took the stand, the day after the pathologist, the court janitor had to hand out tickets for the long line of spectators hoping to observe the courtroom that day.

  After a few hours spent on setting out the background, Therese got to the material point in Martin’s narrati
ve: “It just all came rushing out of him. He told me that on a previous occasion, Sara had tried to do it with a forestry machine when they were out working, that it was supposed to look like an accident. But that she had been unable to follow through for emotional reasons. After that, they started planning this. Sara wanted it to happen at night, but Martin thought the morning was better because then it would just look like farmwork. He told me he had dug the grave himself the day before. He claimed they decided Martin would come by in the morning and be let into the house. He went up to Göran, who was on his side facing the wall, slightly propped up in the bed. When Martin was about five feet away, Göran turned and was about to shout something, and then Martin fired.”

  She gave a precise and detailed account. Almost too good, the defense lawyers reckoned, trying to paint her as an overconfident witness. She was too sure of herself, Martin’s lawyer argued. She wanted the suspects convicted at any cost, in order to gain renown and fame for having solved the Göran Lundblad murder. This, the lawyer implied, caused her to alter her story, whether consciously or unconsciously.

  The court dismissed that statement, because the details of her testimony were established as early as the evening of June 19 and had provided the basis on which the police had built their entire investigation ever since.

  Take, for example, the fact that cell-phone tracking showed that Martin’s phone moved from Norra Förlösa via Trekanten to Kalmar and back again on the morning of Göran’s death. This was not necessarily significant in its own right, but coupled with Therese’s assertion that he had told her he’d thrown the empty shotgun shell in a lake outside Trekanten that morning, his phone’s whereabouts took on new meaning.

  The same thing was true of the fact that Martin’s phone had been in contact with Sara’s at 6:28 a.m. on the day of the murder. That could simply be a morning greeting, an early declaration of love, or a quick call to check in about something happening in their shared life later in the day.

  But when combined with the information from Martin’s confession to Therese about Sara spending that night at her father’s house, and her letting Martin and his borrowed shotgun in, that phone call took on a graver significance as well.

  Checking in, absolutely. Or was he actually checking that everything was as expected, that Göran wasn’t on to them, that Sara’s father was still in his bed, and that the execution could proceed as planned?

  When Martin was confronted with the probative weight of the many puzzle pieces, something unexpected happened. Martin confessed to a crime.

  Or, rather: his lawyer confessed for him. Not to the murder, but to being involved as an accessory. A different person, “the shooter,” a close friend of Martin’s, supposedly called him on the morning of the murder. Showed him a fait accompli—Göran, dead—and ordered him to help get rid of the body.

  That fits with parts of his confession to Therese. He may have seen the body, with the dangling eye. Might have even taken part in wrapping the body in the tarpaulin, which leaked blood. Driven it to the grave. Maybe even helped clean up.

  But the picture had already been set by Therese’s testimony, which was well supported by the things the police had already uncovered. Martin’s new version didn’t fit. Was “the shooter” supposed to have let himself in without a key, killed Göran, called Martin in, helped bury the body, and cleaned out the room without Sara noticing? Where was the call on Martin’s cell-phone log from this mysterious friend?

  It was so far-fetched that it needn’t even be taken into consideration, according to the Kalmar County Court, which concluded:

  The circumstances that suggest that Sara Lundblad participated in the murder also strongly suggest that no one other than Martin Törnblad shot Göran Lundblad.

  On January 20, 2015, the Norra Förlösa couple were given their sentence. Eighteen years in prison each, the longest determinate punishment Swedish law allows.

  They escaped the indeterminate lifetime sentence because Göran Lundblad’s death had been so quick. He hadn’t had time to feel much fear, there was no drawn-out suffering before the shot was fired and his brain exploded. Given that, lifetime imprisonment was inappropriate, as established by the Supreme Court in 2013.

  Even though the victim was a close relative, even though he was “defenseless” in his bed, and even though the murder was carefully planned, Göran Lundblad didn’t suffer enough before he died, in the court’s opinion, for his daughter and her partner to be sentenced to lifetime imprisonment.

  The sentence of eighteen years was upheld by the appellate court to which all parties appealed, including the prosecutor, who wanted life. Almost three years after the murder, on June 4, 2015, the Supreme Court declined to grant a review permit. The case was, at long last, closed.

  Since Sweden practices parole after two-thirds of a sentence served for good behavior, Martin and Sara can count on being released in the summer of 2026. That year, their son will turn thirteen and will have lived in foster care for the greater part of his life. Both his parents will be destitute.

  Martin’s father, Åke, went bankrupt shortly after his son’s arrest. Because a killer may not inherit the estate of his or her victim, all of Göran Lundblad’s possessions, including the expensive Mercedes, the pickup truck Sara used, everything—approximately fifty million kronor (six million dollars) in all—was awarded to younger sister Maria, the one who had called Missing People in October 2012 and set all the wheels in motion.

  EPILOGUE

  People usually don’t speak much after a court session ends. When the presiding judge declares “thus, this trial is concluded” and, on occasion, underscores his or her point with a pounding of a gavel, there is rarely much to add.

  The formal sentence is normally promulgated a couple of weeks later, and on that occasion, everything is so well rehearsed, structured, and formulaic that most people are cowed. Everyone gathers up their thoughts and belongings in silence. A couple of sighs, scattered exhalations. The rustle of clothes as people stand up.

  When Therese Tang got up from her chair in the gallery after the final day of the Förlösa trial, it was with a strong sense of relief.

  “It was a natural close to so many weeks of tension,” she said. “It was like pulling out an enormous plug.”

  The autumn of 2014 had been filled with strange occurrences in the wake of all the attention surrounding the murder case. Almost every paper in the country published interviews with Therese alongside their reporting on the investigation into the murder of the wealthy farmer.

  Therese was called “the murder witness” in the headlines, as well as on the radio and TV news. Not everyone liked it. Apart from the usual crop of emails and texts full of hate and sexual innuendo that every renowned or famous woman is forced to put up with, other, more inexplicable things happened.

  Her car was vandalized, both when it was parked outside her house in Oskarshamn and down in Kalmar. All four tires punctured at once—not a coincidence. Twice, she came home to find dead animals by her front door. Her mailbox was broken, and someone left notes in it that read “I see you.”

  Anonymous Facebook users told her she was going to “burn in hell.” In addition, someone seemed to be skulking around the neighborhood, spying on her. More than ten times, she noticed someone sneaking around her backyard, and on one occasion a man in a parked car stared up at the house through binoculars.

  Was it jealousy, potentially insane people, or was it someone affected by the criminal investigation? A relative, friend, or acquaintance of Martin’s or Sara’s? There were many conceivable explanations, but no certainty, because no one was apprehended or formally placed under suspicion, despite Therese’s reports to the police.

  The most serious event happened on the way out to Göran’s grave in the field, in November 2014. Therese was accompanied by journalist Anders Blank from local paper Barometern, a photographer, and a couple of colleagues from Missing People. Martin and Sara had been coincidentally charged on the same
day. On the way to the gravesite, they happened to meet Martin’s younger brother, Mikael.

  The young man was driving a small excavator and obviously had no intention of letting them pass, even though the small forest road they were on was a public highway. He threatened to hurt them if they continued down the road.

  In the end, Anders Blank climbed out of the car to talk to the younger brother. After a brief conversation, the brother snapped. He turned the boom of his excavator around swiftly and hit Anders Blank with the large metal bucket. Not with full force in the head; that would have been the end of the journalist. Instead, the bucket struck him around his elbow, but with enough force to throw him several yards into the undergrowth.

  Everything was filmed with a cell phone from inside the car—which turned out to be crucial evidence in the subsequent assault case against Mikael Törnblad. This time, the situation was resolved without serious injury, despite shouting, yelling, and threats from the young man in the excavator. The news team turned around, reported the matter to the police, and after a process that ended up taking more than a year and a half, Martin’s brother was finally convicted of both assault and intimidation in December 2015.

  The “murder witness” could not, in other words, simply do her duty. After contacting the police, giving a statement, and subsequently testifying in court, she could not go on with her life as though nothing had happened.

  Feelings are, of course, stirred up when relatives are tried for murder. Therese stayed in close contact that autumn with Sara’s half sisters Eleonora and Maria.

  “They were the ones I spent the most time with during the trial,” Therese said. “I did what I could to support them. Asked how they were doing, explained the process, and answered their questions as best I could. On the day of the closing statements, I had lunch with them and their mother, Irina. They had made me a flower arrangement and little Santa Claus cards with lovely messages. It made me cry.”

  Throughout the trial, Maria and Eleonora tried to leave through the back door to avoid the press, as Therese used the main exit and answered questions from the gathered media. On the final day, it was no different. Therese was greeted by a wall of reporters, cameras, and microphones before she could make it to the car where Anders Lindfors was waiting with Eleonora, Maria, and Therese’s husband, Richard, in the backseat.