[ad_1]
A 37-year-old man was tried today for an unsolved double murder that gripped Sweden for more than 15 years until police compared his DNA on a popular genealogy website.
Daniel Nyqvist, who confessed to the crime shortly after his arrest last June, has been charged with the 2004 murder of a 56-year-old woman and an eight-year-old boy.
Unrelated to each other, the two were stabbed in a random act one morning in the quiet town of Linköping in southern Sweden.
The crime shocked the nation, and investigators were unable to find either the perpetrator or motive, despite finding the suspect’s DNA at the scene, the murder weapon, a bloody cap and eyewitness descriptions of a young man with blond hair.
The police even asked the FBI for help, but to no avail. Over the years, the case file grew to become the second largest in Swedish history, after the 1986 assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme.
The case was finally resolved when new legislation in January 2019 allowed police to search for DNA matches of suspects on commercial genealogy websites, which are popular with Swedes searching for long-lost relatives.
The researchers used the GEDmatch and Family Tree databases.
“We received a match almost immediately. And several months later, the suspect could be arrested. His DNA was taken and it matched 100%,” police said in a statement the day after his arrest.
Nyqvist, whose brother was also briefly a suspect based on the DNA match, later confessed to the double murder.
When he was 21 at the time of the murders, he admitted during police interrogations to having obsessive thoughts about killing and that he chose his victims at random, first stabbing the boy and then the woman, who had witnessed the stabbing of the boy.
Medical experts have concluded that Mr. Nyqvist suffers from a serious psychiatric disorder and was suffering from it at the time of the crime. If convicted, he will be sentenced to psychiatric care.
His lawyer Johan Ritzer told the court today that, while his client admitted the actions, he rejected the charge of premeditated murder and insisted that he should be tried for involuntary manslaughter.
“Daniel suffered from a serious psychiatric disorder at the time of the murder. It caused him obsessive thoughts about killing two people and he acted on these thoughts. He had limited ability to control his actions,” Ritzer told the court.
Nyqvist, who is due to take the stand tomorrow, told police investigators that he expected to be arrested or die immediately after the killings.
“I remember not brushing my teeth because I was going to die or they would catch me that day. But I had to. I did it mainly on automatic,” he said during police questioning.
Nyqvist, an unemployed loner who liked to play computer games, rarely ventured outside his parents’ home, where he was living at the time of the murders.
According to investigators, he continued to live an isolated life near Linkoping since the killings.
[ad_2]