Thomas Quick. Hannes Råstam
SÄTER MAN
THE UNSETTLING NEWS was delivered via the media. As usual.
The reporter from Expressen was in a hurry and got straight to the point: ‘There’s a bloke down in Falun who’s confessed to the murder of your son, Johan. Do you have any comment on that?’
Anna-Clara Asplund was standing in the hall – still wearing her coat, with the front door keys in her hand – at the end of her day’s work. She had heard the telephone ringing as she was unlocking the door.
‘I’m in a bit of a hurry,’ the journalist explained. ‘I’m having a hernia operation tomorrow and I have to hand in the article.’
Anna-Clara didn’t understand what he was talking about. But she did have a clear sense that the old wound would once again be torn open. From this day on, Monday, 8 March 1993, she would be forced back into the nightmare.
A forty-two-year-old patient at Säter’s forensic psychiatric clinic had confessed to the murder of her son, the journalist told her. ‘I murdered Johan,’ the man had claimed. Anna-Clara wondered why the police had informed Expressen before contacting her.
Anna-Clara and Björn Asplund descended into hell on 7 November 1980. ‘A completely normal day’, as people like to say. It’s always a normal day when it happens. Anna-Clara made breakfast for her eleven-year-old, Johan, before saying goodbye and rushing off to work. Her son left home at about eight o’clock. He only had a 300-metre walk to school, but Johan never got there. Since that day he had been missing without trace.
On the very first day the police deployed huge resources – helicopter surveillance, thermal cameras and search parties – without finding any sign of the boy.
Johan’s case became one of the great mysteries in Swedish criminal history. The parents took part in endless interviews, documentaries and debates. Again and again they described what it was like to lose their only child, not knowing what had happened to him and having no grave to visit. But to no avail.
Anna-Clara and Björn Asplund had separated when Johan was three years old, but they had a good relationship and supported each other on their long hard road after Johan’s disappearance, helping each other through the hopeless encounters with journalists and the legal establishment.
From the beginning they were both convinced that Johan had been abducted by the man Anna-Clara used to live with. Unrequited love and uncontrollable jealousy were said to be the motives. He had gone off the rails.
The ex-partner said he had been at home on that fateful morning, sleeping in till nine. But eyewitnesses had seen him leaving the house at a quarter past seven. Others had seen his car outside the Asplunds’ house at about eight. His friends and colleagues reported his strange behaviour after Johan’s disappearance. Even his best friend went to the police and told them he was convinced that Anna-Clara’s exboyfriend had snatched Johan.
In the presence of two witnesses, Björn Asplund said to him, ‘You’re nothing but a murderer. You have murdered my son and you will not get away with this. To everyone I meet from now on I will say it was you who murdered Johan.’
That the accused man did not protest, or even try to sue Björn Asplund for slander, was seen by the parents as yet another indication of his guilt. There were circumstantial evidence, witnesses and a motive, but no definite proof.
Four years after Johan’s disappearance, the Asplunds hired a barrister, Pelle Svensson, to bring a private civil case against Anna-Clara’s expartner, an unusual move that also carried with it considerable financial risk if the case was dismissed.
After a sensational trial, the district court found that the accused had indeed abducted Johan. He was sentenced to two years in prison. It was a unique case and a great victory for Anna-Clara and Björn Asplund.
However, their success in the district court was overturned after the defence turned to the court of appeal, which ordered the release of the ex-partner one year later. The Asplunds were instructed to pay their opponent’s legal expenses of 600,000 Swedish crowns, a fee the government later dropped for reasons of ‘clemency’.
Since then, seven years had passed without any sign of Johan. No one was looking for his murderer any more.
But now Anna-Clara stood immobile in the hall with the telephone receiver in one hand and her front door keys in the other. She tried to grasp what the reporter was saying, that the investigation into her son’s murder had been reopened and that a psychiatric patient had confessed to the crime. So no, she could not think of any suitable comment for the newspaper.
Anna-Clara Asplund contacted the police in Sundsvall, who confirmed what the reporter had told her. The following day she learned from Expressen that the psychiatric patient was claiming to have strangled Johan and buried the body.
The reporter had also managed to get hold of Björn Asplund, who took a fairly sceptical view of this new information. He still believed that Johan had been murdered by the man they had taken action against in the district court. But he was keeping an open mind on the matter.
‘If it’s shown that a totally different person has taken Johan’s life I’ll just have to swallow my pride,’ he told Expressen. ‘The most important thing is that we know the truth.’
Expressen continued following the case and a few days later Anna-Clara Asplund was able to read more details of the confession made by the Säter patient.
‘I picked up Johan outside the school and lured him into my car,’ the Säter Man – as he was known in the press from that day on – said to Expressen on 15 March. ‘I drove to a wooded area where I sexually assaulted the boy. I never meant to kill Johan. But I panicked and strangled him. Then I buried the body so no one would find it.’
The forty-two-year-old was clearly a very sick person. As far back as 1969 he had committed sexual assaults against young boys. His most recent crime had been in 1990, when he and a younger accomplice had been arrested for a bank robbery in Grycksbo outside Falun and confined to Säter Hospital. It was here, during a therapy session, that he had confessed to Johan’s murder. According to Expressen he had said, ‘I can’t live with this any more. I want to start clearing things up; I want atonement and forgiveness so I can move on.’
You can’t live with it any more? Anna-Clara thought, and put away the newspaper.
The public prosecutor, Christer van der Kwast, was an energetic man of about fifty with very short dark hair and a neat beard. He was renowned for his ability to present his views in a forceful tone and with such conviction that they were accepted as given, by both subordinates and journalists. All in all, he was a man who exuded self-confidence and seemed to relish taking command of his troops, plotting the course by which the whole army should march.
Van der Kwast called a press conference at the end of May. In front of a crowd of expectant journalists, the prosecutor announced that the Säter Man had identified various places where he had hidden the body parts of Johan Asplund. Police technicians were currently searching for his hands in a location outside Falun. Other parts of the dismembered body had allegedly been hidden in the Sundsvall area, but despite careful searching with a cadaver dog, so far nothing had been found.
‘The fact that we have not found anything doesn’t necessarily mean there’s nothing there,’ the prosecutor commented.
No other evidence had been found to connect the suspect to Johan Asplund’s disappearance and van der Kwast was forced to concede that there was little basis on which to call a trial. Yet suspicions remained, he pointed out, because although there was insufficient evidence in this case, the Säter patient was still tied to an entirely different murder.
Van der Kwast told the press that in 1964 the man in question had murdered a boy of his own age in Växjö: fourteen-year-old Thomas Blomgren.
‘The details provided by the Säter patient in his account are so comprehensive and well supported by the investigation that under normal circumstances I would not have