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– Can you tell what your attitude is?
– Guilty.
– You plead guilty. Okay. I have many questions for you.
The first exchange of words between interrogator Henry Jansén and the alleged perpetrator is in many respects typical of how the alleged double murderer has been questioned by police since he was arrested in early June. Direct answers to direct questions. There are no great extravagances or initiatives to say to yourself, but no resistance to trying to explain, even if it is “difficult”, as he puts it.
– That was what I had to do to… have peace of mind quite simply.
Says in questioning
The vast majority of Jansén’s questions have received at least some kind of response: why the alleged perpetrator did what he did, how it happened, and what he has done since.
– Eeh… I know… that I didn’t brush my teeth because I would still die or get stuck that day… But I had to. I did… almost automatically, she says.
In a fragmentary way, with many pauses, he describes how he, when he was 21 years old, dedicated himself to killing the eight-year-old boy and the 56-year-old woman.
– I attacked… with a knife… and then a woman… when I looked up… she stopped like ice cream there… she didn’t say anything… and I ran forward and hit her with… that… then I ran out of there.
He claims that he was driven by obsessive thoughts about killing and could only be relieved by living.
The National Board of Forensic Medicine (RMV) has stated in a statement that he suffers from a serious mental disorder and that he also suffered from it at the time of the murders.
Forensic psychiatric care
Given that the murders took place in 2004, four years before a change in the law that meant the sentence can be imprisonment even if there is a mental disorder, only forensic psychiatric care can be relevant if convicted.
Prosecutor Britt-Louise Viklund considers it unlikely that there will be any other result than that he is sentenced to that.
– It’s not what it looks like now. But you have every right to change your information in court and think of a completely different story. Now we also have other evidence, we have DNA, so I can hardly believe that he is not convicted of this, he told TT in relation to the prosecution.
“But we will also see how he behaves in court and what he has to say there, if there is reason to question the forensic psychiatric examination, for example,” he said.
When the main hearing begins Tuesday morning at Linköping District Court, case presentations and interrogations with the plaintiffs are expected. During the second day, the alleged perpetrator will appear in court.
Marc Skogelin / TT
Henry Jansén, inspector and investigator for the felony crime group in the Östergötland police area, is the one who kept the interrogations with the suspect during the investigation. Stock Photography. Photo: Anders Wiklund / TT
It is shortly before eight o’clock in the morning on October 19, 2004, and the street lights on Åsgatan in Linköping have just been turned off when an eight-year-old boy walks home on his way to school.
Suddenly they stab him in the back, with great force, many times. Die there, on the ground.
A 56-year-old woman who goes to work is also attacked, violently and with many blows. Then the perpetrator drops the knife and leaves.
At a newsstand in Djurgårdsgatan, on the outskirts of Ica, his bloody hat and bloody fingerprints are later found.
On June 9, 2020, a 37-year-old man was arrested in Linköping for the murder, after police, in a pilot study, recruited genealogists and searched genealogy databases using traces of the man’s DNA. The man later admits that he murdered the child and the woman.
The investigation is the second largest in Sweden after Palme’s investigation.
In recent years, many Swedes have submitted their DNA to commercial companies in the hope of finding out more about their genetic origins, or perhaps of finding a distant relative in America.
But DNA databases have also become an important tool for the police, who can use them to solve serious crimes.
An amendment to the law that came into force in early 2019 allows police to conduct so-called family searches, where DNA traces have been used to find possible relatives of the person from whom the DNA trace originates.
In a pilot project, the Linköping police decided last year to send the DNA profile of the perpetrator of the double murder in Linköping in 2004 to two commercial DNA databases initially: Gedmatch and Family Tree. The latter is one of the most used among Swedes.
In June, they managed to find two siblings who matched the DNA profile, and after beating both of them, it could be claimed that one sibling’s DNA matched the perpetrator’s DNA. Soon after, he confessed to the double murder.
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