Linda - As In The Linda Murder

by Leif Persson

  He’s like a child, Holt thought. I wonder what he’s going to come up with next time.

  Lisa Mattei would be going on leave to finish her studies at Stockholm University. She was hoping to be finished by the end of the year, when her leave ran out. But she was still worried. Every academic problem she solved seemed immediately to generate two new ones, usually more interesting than the one she had just solved, and the only appealing alternative she could see ahead of her was something like the job that Anna Holt had just turned down, which Johansson would never dream of offering her.

  Funny that such a highly talented man doesn’t realize what would be in his best interests, Mattei thought.

  Before they left, Anna Holt had a lengthy meeting with Prosecutor Katarina Wibom, during which she handed over the hundreds of pages of interview protocols, all bar one in the form of a dialogue, and now neatly typed up and bound with the national coat of arms in blue and yellow on the cover, along with the logo of the Växjö Police. And prefaced by an introductory summary addressed to the prosecutor.

  ‘I’m not going to get any further with this, so you can take over now,’ she said, nodding towards the pile of files on the desk between them.

  ‘Well, thank you very much indeed, Anna,’ Katarina Wibom said. ‘This is more than I have any right to ask for, and certainly more than I’d hoped for.’

  ‘How’s it going to go, then?’ Holt asked. ‘What’s he going to get?’

  ‘At a guess, life for murder,’ the prosecutor said. ‘The way I see it, Månsson and his lawyer have two possible defences.’

  ‘And they are . . . ?’

  The first was that he and his victim had been engaging in sexual games that had gone wrong. Voluntarily on her part, even enthusiastically, then an unfortunate accident, manslaughter and a few years in prison.

  ‘And what do you think about that?’ Holt asked.

  ‘Forget it,’ the prosecutor said, shaking her head. ‘I wouldn’t even have to come up with a charge of death through neglect. What we’ve got from forensics and the medical officer would be more than enough.’

  ‘And you’re sure about that?’

  ‘Don’t forget, we’re talking about the District Court in Växjö here,’ the prosecutor reminded her. ‘Leaving aside the fact that it’s simply not what happened, even if he tries to claim it was. Hopefully his lawyer is smart enough to advise him against even trying.’

  ‘What else, then? What’s the other option?’

  The memory lapse, the prosecutor explained. If nothing else, then as a suitable marker to show how psychologically disturbed he is. To prepare the ground for all the sexual abuse and everything else that he was subjected to when he was little, which he’ll talk about the minute he becomes the subject of a mental health examination alone with all those doctors who, unlike everyone else, can see inside people’s heads.

  ‘Since those nice people in white coats got the chance to add memory lapses to their box of tricks, there isn’t a single criminal who can remember a thing any more,’ the prosecutor sighed.

  ‘Whatever happened to the good old pathological rush of blood to the head, a decent Swedish drunken rage?’ Holt said, sighing as well.

  ‘That disappeared when they started to sentence all the drunks to life imprisonment even though they had absolutely no idea that they had stabbed their best friend with their pocket knife the night before. Nowadays it’s more complicated. Schnapps and vodka aren’t enough any more. Not even if you’ve spent twenty years or so pickling your brain. Forensic psychiatry is always making new advances. The whole time. Leaving people like you and me standing where we were.’

  ‘Will that get him off, then?’

  ‘Never, not in Växjö District Court,’ the prosecutor said. ‘You can forget that. Mind you, I wouldn’t want to bet on the Court of Appeal, because I’m sure that’s where we’re going to end up.’

  ‘Found guilty of murder, and sentenced to a secure psychiatric unit with specific parole conditions,’ Holt summarized.

  ‘Possibly, maybe even probably,’ the prosecutor said. ‘The only consolation under the circumstances may well be that most lawyers have a very peculiar image of what secure psychiatric care is like these days.’

  ‘Not exactly a bed of roses,’ Holt said.

  ‘Not exactly a bed of roses,’ the prosecutor agreed.

  95

  ON THE SECOND Monday in October the Swedish Newspapermen’s Association in Stockholm held a large meeting where they discussed various matters of legal principle arising from the now notorious Linda murder. A number of the most elevated media figures in the country were on the panel, and the jewel in this media crown was naturally the editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter.

  However, he was far from being the loftiest person present, if one were to try to arrange them in order of precedence at a state banquet, because the introductory speaker and guest of honour was none other than the Chancellor of Justice, CJ himself.

  CJ expressed serious misgivings about the manner in which the police had investigated the Linda murder and other similar cases in recent years. According to the information he had requested, the police in Växjö, in collaboration with their colleagues from the National Crime Unit, had collected voluntary DNA samples from almost seven hundred people, samples which proved that their donors had absolutely nothing to do with the crime in question.

  According to information that his investigators had gathered from the National Crime Unit, the crime had actually been solved in the traditional way, through a combination of information received, witness statements and detective work. The perpetrator’s DNA had played a not insubstantial role in the evidence presented by the prosecutor in the preliminary investigation. That notwithstanding, and without prejudicing the outcome of the trial, CJ believed that the evidence gathered by more traditional means was more than sufficient to support the prosecutor’s decision to bring the case to trial.

  Speaking personally, CJ was strongly opposed to the use of the word voluntary in a context which actually concerned the ability of the police and prosecutors to employ so-called mandatory legal methods. As he saw it, these could not be reconciled, and so he welcomed the proposal of the so-called DNA inquiry to expand the judicial authorities’ powers to gather DNA samples, conduct DNA analysis and record the results of these. The question of whether or not this was voluntary would soon be obsolete, and in the best of all worlds obviously everyone’s DNA would be on file from birth in a comprehensive national database. For their own good, naturally.

  In conclusion, he also took the opportunity to compliment the media for their scrutiny. With touching modesty, he declared that he couldn’t be sure that he would have noticed the problem unless the media had alerted him in time.

  The representatives of the media hadn’t had any serious comments on CJ’s analysis and conclusions. This was an important question, of decisive significance to every democracy under the rule of law, and, according to the editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter, it would be given even greater prominence in his own paper, if that were possible. From a personal point of view, he was both proud and happy that he and his talented colleagues had got the ball rolling.

  The chair of the Swedish Newspapermen’s Association, who was leading the debate, finally took the opportunity to ask the editor-in-chief of the Småland Post – since he was actually there, and because they didn’t exactly meet every day – why one of the smaller regional papers had declined to publish an article which Sweden’s largest morning paper had gone to press with immediately, following it up with numerous editorials and other reports in the news pages.

  The editor-in-chief of the Småland Post thanked him for the question. Without going into detail, he felt he could none the less reveal that the decision had involved his personal knowledge of the author of the piece, knowledge which might not have been possessed by his colleagues at Dagens Nyheter, or which they might have chosen to disregard. What did he, a simple peasant from the provinces, know
about the decision-making process at the country’s finest paper?

  Nevertheless, he had personally taken the decision to turn down the article by the librarian Marian Gross. He hadn’t regretted the decision for a moment, and if he was presented with a similar choice in future, he was confident that he would make the same decision again.

  After that they moved on to the Opera Bar, the veranda of the Grand Hotel, and other nearby watering-holes catering to a wealthier clientele, and, as usual, carried on the debate long into the night before the participants finally headed home to their families for a few hours of well-deserved rest.

  96

  ON MONDAY 20 October, proceedings against Bengt Månsson began at the District Court in Växjö, and the judgement was made public almost three months later, on 19 January of the following year. The reason why it took so long was that the court had decided that Bengt Månsson should undergo an extensive psychological evaluation, to provide as thorough a foundation as possible for any potential verdict.

  On 20 December a report was received from the forensic psychiatry clinic in Lund, but by then it was time to celebrate Christmas and the New Year and all the other holidays. And the court needed plenty of time to finesse its conclusions and generally to think things over.

  It was clear from the non-confidential conclusion of the forensic psychiatric report that Månsson was severely psychologically disturbed, but that this disturbance was not sufficiently severe for him to require treatment in a secure psychiatric unit. So the District Court decided unanimously to accept the prosecutor’s recommendation and sentenced Bengt Månsson to life imprisonment for murder.

  The verdict was taken to the Court of Appeal, which requested a new forensic psychological evaluation, which this time was conducted at Sankt Sigfrid’s Hospital in Växjö, under the leadership of Professor of Forensic Psychology Robert Brundin.

  Brundin reached a completely different conclusion from that of his colleagues in Lund. It was his firm conviction that Månsson was suffering from a very serious psychological imbalance, and, in the Appeal Court’s verdict at the end of March, he was found guilty of murder, and sentenced to a secure psychiatric unit with specific parole conditions.

  The week after the verdict was announced, Professor Brundin took part in a lengthy television interview in one of the many social-programming strands of the state-run channels. What this was really about was an extremely disturbed perpetrator with severely chaotic aspects to his personality. These in turn could be traced back to seriously traumatic experiences in his childhood.

  Admittedly, these weren’t the sort of war experiences that traditionally chaotic perpetrators demonstrated, but their qualitative content and consequences were entirely comparable. And they were also covered by the laws of patient confidentiality, for which reason Brundin was unable to go into any more detail. But this certainly wasn’t a question of a sexual sadist with clearly developed sexual fantasies. Nor a stereotypically chaotic personality. He was more of an interesting hybrid somewhere between a sexual sadist and a chaotic perpetrator.

  ‘By which I mean that I have finally found the missing link between these two basic types, so to speak,’ the eminently satisfied Brundin declared, simultaneously wishing himself and his new patient every success in the close contact that lay ahead of them.

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever be able to cure him?’ the interviewer reporter asked him.

  With all due respect to her and her programme, Brundin thought that the question was incorrectly framed.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘This is really about how we can help future generations of people like him. But if you’re referring to the length of time his treatment will take, I’m rather afraid that this patient belongs to what is already a lost generation,’ Brundin said, because he also happened to be very well read.

  Bäckström saw the programme on television. He was sitting at home in his cosy abode not far from police headquarters, with a beer, a small whisky, a sick note, an investigation into sexual harassment that would soon be dropped, and a fair amount left inside the brown envelope. Life could certainly have been a lot worse.

  It would still have made more sense to boil the bastard down to make glue, Bäckström thought. For in spite of his many failings and shortcomings, he was still a man with a strong sense of basic justice.

  97

  ON FRIDAY 24 October, Linda Wallin’s mother had been due to stand witness in the District Court in Växjö about her contact with the man who had murdered her daughter. The previous day she had spoken to Anna Sandberg over the phone, and they had agreed that Anna would collect her from her summer house the following morning. She was actually feeling better than she had for a long time, and was looking forward to putting this all behind her, so that she could start to deal with her grief at the loss of her daughter.

  When Anna Sandberg arrived the next morning, the front door was wide open and blowing in the autumn wind. When she saw the gap in the neat row of polished rocks edging the raked gravel path she understood immediately what had happened. The divers found her that same day, four metres down. Before she jumped in the lake she had put on a winter coat with big pockets, and filled these with stones. Then she had tied a belt round her chest and upper arms, in case she changed her mind at the last minute.

  In her top pocket she had a photograph taken at a midsummer party out at Linda’s father’s home some three years before. Linda in the middle, flanked by her mother and the perpetrator. Someone had circled the faces of Lotta Ericson and Bengt Månsson, and written the word Murderers above them. The envelope that the photograph had arrived in was on the kitchen floor, with no sender’s address, and had been postmarked in Växjö on Wednesday.

  The coroner’s report into the death was finished long before the trial was over, and the conclusion had been clear from the moment the body was found. Linda’s mother had committed suicide. Her grief at her daughter’s death meant that she didn’t need much of a push, and the identity of the person who had sent the photograph was never discovered. Linda’s father had had no suggestions when the Växjö Police spoke to him about it, and he had already got over the loss of his former wife.

  He was left to nurture the memory of his beloved only daughter.

  98

  IN APRIL THE following year the CPR, committee for personal responsibility, of the National Police Authority finally concluded the case against Detective Superintendent Evert Bäckström. The reason why it had taken so long was that the prosecutor had only been able to drop the complaint against Bäckström for sexual harassment the previous week. Lack of evidence.

  It had been a complex inquiry, in part because the evidence was unclear, since Bäckström had stubbornly stuck to his version of events. The complainant had more or less forced her way up to his room even though he had suggested that they meet in the hotel bar after he had taken a much-needed shower and changed into a fresh shirt. Towards the end of the investigation the complainant had also refused to cooperate, because she didn’t think there was any point, and under the circumstances the prosecutor hadn’t had any choice.

  Which left the financial irregularities, amounting in total to some twenty thousand kronor. There were numerous mysterious cash withdrawals, one remarkable laundry bill, a strange list of materials detailed on an invoice for conference equipment which included, amongst other things, thirty-one whiteboard erasers at 96 kronor each, an invoice for porn films debited to one of his colleagues’ rooms, and various other things. Most remarkable of all: on the day that the finance department brought all of this to Bäckström’s attention, he had settled all their demands in cash. Considering his reputation, this was probably the biggest mystery of them all.

  None the less, he was still reprimanded for a number of transgressions against the rules and regulations governing members of the national police, and his union representative had to work hard to find a compromise solution that Bäckström’s ultimate superior, HNC Lars Martin Johansson, coul
d live with.

  Bäckström had had to return to his original posting with regional crime in Stockholm, where they had placed him temporarily in the lost property office. Or Lost & Found, as every proper police officer, including Bäckström himself, called this final resting place for unclaimed bicycles and lost police souls.

  He was, however, allowed to keep the rank of superintendent. Johansson wasn’t the sort to bear a grudge, although Bäckström himself would happily have surrendered it if it meant he could escape sharing a workplace with his old brother-in-arms Wiijnbladh, who had worked part time in the same office since trying to poison his now ex-wife fifteen years before. Sadly, he had only succeeded in poisoning himself, which was why he had been transferred out of the forensics division and into the Stockholm Police’s very own gulag archipelago.

  99

  IN MAY THAT same year, during the now annual police conference in the Älvsjö exhibition centre on the outskirts of Stockholm, Detective Superintendent Bengt Olsson gave a well-received lecture on the main theme of the conference: conflicts between different cultures of policing. He took his illustrations from his experiences as head of the preliminary police investigation into the Linda murder.

  On one side, he himself and his colleagues from the Växjö Police. They had limited resources, but a lot of local knowledge and a wealth of practical experience. On the other side, officers from the National Crime Unit, who never needed to worry about costs, and possibly as a result of this preferred to attack problems on as broad a front as possible.