This program contains scenes of a graphic nature.
I've not personally seen another case as violent as this one.
So many stab wounds, it was crazy.
It put a knot in my stomach and was hard to take in.
This isn't much of a murder weapon if you're going to go kill someone.
Someone could have been at any of these windows and seen it.
She told me it was completely unprovoked.
It's hard to believe anyone can live with this all their life
without being arrested for another crime.
I wouldn't say I ever felt hopeless, it was more a frustration.
There is a clear risk that this kind of person will do it again.
Could there be another murder?
- SOS Alarm, what has happened? - A knife attack. On Åsgatan.
Two people lying on the ground. A young boy, who looks dead.
And a girl, or a lady, who's badly injured.
There may be one more. Send an ambulance.
Is the perpetrator still there?
- I don't see him. - No?
A cloudy, windy autumn morning just before 8 am,
something terrible happens in a residential area in Linköping.
Residents and people on their way to work call emergency services.
Paramedic Peter Hermansson has just arrived at work.
He and his colleague set off immediately for Åsgatan.
This is not an address we associate with disorderly behavior.
Quite the opposite. This is a peaceful place.
It was bizarre to get an alarm like this from there.
It put a knot in my stomach and was hard to take in.
A few minutes later, we got more information from SOS Alarm.
It could be a serious assault, possibly with a knife.
And someone may be dead.
On the way, we prepared ourselves for the worst.
As the ambulance approaches,
Police officers Claes Solid and Camilla Larsson arrive at Åsgatan.
They see an injured middle-aged woman on the ground.
When we get there and get out of the car,
we can see a woman lying in the intersection.
Some people are standing around her.
I tell my colleague to go talk to the woman
and see if she can give any information about what happened.
When I get to the woman, she's lying on the ground.
I sat down with her to make contact with her.
She's conscious. I ask her name, also to be able to assess her status.
She answers, with her name and address.
She was completely alert.
She asks a few times if the ambulance was coming.
And it is. I heard on the radio that it's not far away at all.
She tells me, without being asked, that it was completely unprovoked.
But we don't have a chance to talk much more.
She's anxious and wants the ambulance to get there.
Then I see a child lying on the ground and a woman behind him.
So another colleague and I run towards them.
When we get there, we see it's a small child.
A boy. Lying on his stomach.
His head was towards the grass. He was wearing a backpack.
The woman standing behind him says, "He's dead. He's dead."
Our information is still to take care of the little boy.
I tried to see how he was. We went down on our knees.
I turned him over so I could see his face.
You could see he had extensive injuries.
Paramedic Peter Hermansson and colleague arrive at the scene.
They already know that a young boy is badly injured and needs CPR.
They need to prioritize him over the injured woman.
There is a woman lying here.
I walk up to her. She is conscious.
I tell her, "An ambulance is coming soon to take care of you."
She wants me to stay with her, but I know there's another one coming.
The way she looks at me, it burns into me. It's still there.
Those eyes.
But we have to make a judgment.
Someone who may be in cardiac arrest takes priority.
Since she's conscious, we leave her.
And go over to the policeman and the child.
The child is lying at his feet.
So there's a little guy lying here. On his back.
I follow the procedures we have and am responsible for his airways.
I clear them, and my colleague starts removing the boy's clothes.
We look at him and determine there's no breathing and no pulse.
We start CPR. I handle the airways and breathe with him.
My colleague connects the fibulator and starts compressions.
After a few minutes, we decide to put him on the stretcher
and bring him to the ambulance.
We put him in and take the shortest route to the hospital.
Peter Hermansson continues heart compressions
all the way to the hospital.
At 8:06 am, the boy is handed over to the doctors.
It all goes very quickly.
We think we got it right at every stage.
We haven't wasted any time on anything
that didn't help our patient.
It's important to know that we did everything we could.
The events have already reached the media.
Peter Hermansson sees news of the attack on TV in the hospital.
It was hard to read that news.
We weren't used to that kind of information transmission.
It hit me hard. That we could read about it when we got there.
It got there before we did.
It is also through the media that Peter gets the news he fears.
The boy's life could not be saved.
There was nothing else we could have done.
We have to live with it, what happened.
We are very saddened by it, of course.
But we couldn't affect it. It wasn't possible.
The injured woman goes to the hospital in the next ambulance.
She is conscious when she arrives and talking with personnel.
She is worried about the boy. But her injuries are serious.
Doctors discover at least five stab wounds in her abdomen.
She says it is difficult to breathe.
As doctors prepare for surgery to save her life,
the search starts for the person who committed these brutal crimes.
No one knows what happened, at first.
We're faced with something and don't know what it's going to be.
At first, I thought it might be some kind of domestic violence.
A little boy and a woman, you think maybe it could have been the father.
As soon as the ambulances have left the scene,
the police start the work of finding out what happened.
I told my colleague we need to rope off this whole area.
We need to secure witnesses. We need to start knocking on doors.
Someone could have been at any of these windows and seen it happen.
Someone who could be a witness.
One of the first interviews is with a neighbor to the injured woman.
She was one of the first on the scene.
The woman who was a witness was very upset.
We had to go sit in the car to have the interview.
She said that the injured woman said it was a man in his 20s.
She said he was completely crazy.
I realized this was a case of two people unknown to each other
who were attacked by an unknown man.
I didn't even know what we were looking for.
The first hours were very chaotic.
The dead boy is 8-year-old Mohamad Ammouri.
He lives a few hundred meters away and was on his way to school.
The woman fighting for her life on the operating table
is 56-year-old Anna-Lena Svensson.
She was a middle-aged woman who worked as a teacher.
She taught Swedish to immigrant children.
She was going to work that day, and happened to walk right into it.
She sees the perpetrator, an unknown man, attack a little boy.
She's in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And falls victim to this killer.
Anna-Lena Svensson lives right next to the crime scene.
Her husband is in their home when she is attacked.
He realizes something happened when he sees flashing lights.
As Anna-Lena is put in the ambulance,
he gets a shock as he recognizes his wife's clothing.
I went with the police. We followed the ambulance to the hospital.
Right after 11, a doctor came in, walking quickly,
and says, formally, "I must inform you that Anna-Lena has died."
I find out about it on the radio.
There is a lot to process, all at once.
I'm concerned that her husband got over to her.
I'm upset that two murders have taken place.
The investigation also becomes harder.
I needed to talk to her more. There's a lot in my head.
This is a double murder. A young boy and a middle-aged woman, murdered.
And we don't know who did it.
The police are faced with investigating a double murder
by an unknown killer.
Commissioner Tommy Håkansson heads the investigation.
He and Jan Staaf build the team.
The first thing you think about when confronted with a murder...
is that this is a problem we need to solve.
It's just a question of when and how.
I got in to Linköping right before lunch.
Many police are conducting interviews and knocking on doors.
We wanted to talk to as many people as possible in the area
and hopefully get a description of the killer.
This little dead-end street, Åsgatan, is unknown to me.
But quite a few pedestrians and cyclists
use it every day to and from work.
I think many people saw the killer both before and after it happened,
but it was someone who didn't stick out, one of many.
It was a rainy day, there were lots of umbrellas. It's hard.
A big problem for the police is that the few witnesses
who can describe the killer, disagree with each other.
Unfortunately, a description went out that morning on the police radio.
It was open so that the media could listen to it.
We gave two different descriptions of the killer.
One said that he had very dark clothes on.
The other one said he was wearing a beige coat.
It's unfortunate that this information comes out.
It influences certain witnesses who hear it on the radio.
It creates confusion for the investigators,
as well as for police in patrol cars who are hunting a killer.
I didn't know who we were looking for.
We are looking for a perpetrator who is in his 20s.
Between 180 and 190 cm long.
He's broad shouldered.
He was wearing a knee-length beige-colored jacket.
The description of the killer that Anna-Lena gives at the scene
is vital to the investigation.
Anna-Lena was still alive at the scene.
The paramedics who took care of her so quickly
said that Anna-Lena managed to tell them something.
It was a person in his 20s, and was completely unprovoked.
That is important when we are looking for this perpetrator.
It's a person in his 20s, but we keep it open.
So we chose to take a spectrum of 15-30 years old
to provide some parameters.
Policeman Claes Solid makes an important find.
Some things have changed here since then.
There was a flower bed here then.
When I was walking here, I saw a knife in there.
I told the technicians who were on the scene,
"We have something here."
The suspected murder weapon was secured
and sent for examination to the national forensics lab,
now known as the NFC.
Technician Christer Branthammer is surprised by the kind of knife.
This is a butterfly knife, it folds up and can be carried in a pocket.
It's pretty low quality, sort of floppy.
It's not much of a murder weapon, I think, but...
It worked.
This knife isn't very sharp and it's a little bent.
That could be because of how it was used.
Around lunch time, police receive an interesting call to the hotline.
Someone found a strange hat outside of an ICA store.
The forensics team rushes over and find a cap in a newspaper stand.
This newspaper stand was new here in Linköping.
There weren't any papers in it.
On the lid, which you lift up, we found four fingerprints.
There was blood on one of the prints.
I have a theory about how this came to be.
He's injured, here on his hand from the stabbing, and it's bleeding.
He's going to open the lid but he can't get it fully open.
So he holds it with his left hand, under the lid.
Then he takes off his cap, gets blood on it, and puts it inside.
He probably does this to change his appearance.
Then he continues on his escape route.
This is the hat we found in the newspaper stand.
It's an ordinary hat, a Pointer. You can buy it at a gas station.
The discovery of the hat along with witness statements
help police map out the killer's escape route.
This is where Anna-Lena was overtaken by the killer.
Where he stabbed her and she fell to the ground.
There was a garbage truck a little further down on Tränggatan.
The driver says he hears a shriek and looks in his rear-view camera.
He sees a person hurrying down the street
and then quickly walk down to Tränggatan, and turn left.
He disappears down Djurgårdsgatan and takes a u-shaped route.
A few hundred meters later, he throws away his hat.
His trail ends after that.
We don't know which witnesses are correct or who the killer is.
People gather at the crime scene all day long
to express their grief over the brutal murders.
We visited the crime scene later that evening.
There were many flowers and candles
where these two victims fell prey to the killer.
It was a eerie feeling,
and made me understand that we need to work hard to solve this.
The people of Linköping were very shaken up.
Whenever I see something Mohamad liked, I think of him.
When I sleep, I think of Mohamad. When I wake up, I think of him first.
The double murderer in Linköping is still at large. This is Efterlyst.
We've made discoveries. Clothing, among other things,
Some of these finds match information from witnesses.
Our technicians have secured evidence but so far...
we've no results back from forensics that can give us leads.
While waiting for lab results,
investigators receive the autopsy reports.
The autopsies of these two victims show a use of great force.
Mohamad was stabbed many times in the neck and back.
But there were no injuries in the middle of his back.
We wondered why, but realized he was wearing a backpack.
So the killer chose to stab him around the backpack.
The map of the injuries in this case was macabre.
The boy had many stab wounds, around twenty of them.
About the same on the woman, around twenty stab wounds,
but not of all them got through her thick coat.
This kind of excess force is not common in murder investigations.
I have never seen this level of violence in any other case.
This can not be a sound person.
If someone wants to kill another person for some reason,
there's no reason to stab them so many times. It was insane.
My theory is that he stabbed the victims like this.
This is a very bad knife.
It slipped, and this edge cut his hand.
The hand of the killer. The knife has a crossguard here.
So it's not a good tool for murder.
One week later, the killer is still at large.
But the results of the technical study of the knife
brings a great breakthrough to the investigation.
We found DNA profiles from Anna-Lena Swensson,
from the little boy, Ammouri,
and from a third, completely unknown person.
It's very likely we have the DNA of the killer.
On the shaft, blood was found in one of these two holes.
It was a mixed profile of the boy and the killer.
Blood from the newspaper stand and the hat are also a match.
More evidence is found on the hat.
Several strands of hair were found on the hat.
One of them had a root attached.
It's possible to extract DNA from hair with the root.
DNA analysis shows the hair strand comes from the same person
who left the blood traces. We're pretty sure it is the killer
who's thrown away his knife and his hat.
The hairs are sent to the Board of Forensic Medicine.
They are tasked with extracting more information.
They examine the hair strands,
and from them can determine that this person uses nicotine
and that the person does not have any drugs in his body.
He also has no medicine in his system.
This was a person who does not use drugs
nor does he regularly take medication.
We got new information about the killer.
After just one week, we have lots of knowledge about our killer.
We know this person has a specific DNA profile.
We have evidence in the form of the knife and the hat.
We know the DNA comes from a person with light hair.
Knowing so much about this person,
we all thought he could be arrested quite quickly.
We will find this person.
Police know a lot about the killer, but he is still at large.
Police starts the important work of looking into the victims.
Was it an attack against one of them?
Or were they chosen at random?
There were many theories.
But we didn't know why these two were killed.
We tried to see a connection between these two and the killer.
Or is it someone who just randomly chose his victims?
For Anna-Lena,
we looked at those close to her. Her husband.
Her colleagues at school, students at the school.
To see if there was anyone there
who might have wanted to hurt her so badly.
Nothing came up.
It looked like the killer wanted to get at Mohamad.
Anna-Lena just came out at the wrong moment.
So that's why she was attacked.
The police focus on 8-year-old Mohamad and his family.
Is there anyone who has a motive to kill him?
These investigations start from the inside.
You start with the family, and then friends.
Then acquaintances, and work your way out.
I was assigned to interview the Ammouri family.
It was a large family who had moved to Sweden from Lebanon.
Most of them settled down in the Stockholm region,
except for the murdered boy and his family who ended up in Linköping.
You're looking for a motive. Something that made someone...
A business relationship.
Something that made them want to punish the family.
And do this by murdering a child in the family.
The family was quite successful, and had several businesses.
We looked at a computer store that Mohamad's father ran.
We got reports from various sources.
People were said to be dissatisfied in the store and its owner.
We wanted to find out if a customer of the store
could be so dissatisfied that they would have hurt Mohamad.
But the investigation found nothing to say that could have happened.
We looked into these people very thoroughly.
No. We found nothing there that would have given a motive.
The lack of a motive
leads police to believe it was the work of a mentally ill person.
They start looking among those in psychiatric care.
They receive a tips on a man who resembles the perpetrator.
Someone in the Garden Association, in dark clothes,
who appeared under strain and not well.
A lookout in the garden hangs out with the addicts
to see if the perpetrator was there.
This went on for a few weeks but produced nothing.
They also interview public transportation workers.
We talked to bus drivers early on
to try to track the perpetrator from Linköping to an area outside.
He had an injured hand. A bus driver might have seen him.
A young man gets on board with an injured hand.
To see if we could make some progress that way.
We explored all these avenues and more, for months.
But we did not find the killer.
To get in more information on the murderer, still at large,
police in Linköping get help from the profiler group.
A forensic psychiatrist, a coroner, forensic specialists and police.
Together, they build a team to create a profile of a possible perpetrator.
The profiler group tells us to look for a person who is a loner.
Someone who might be out walking at night.
Probably in contact with mental health services.
An odd person without many social contacts.
If he works, it's a simple job. We work along this thesis.
The investigators turn to international experts for help.
When we have information on the killer and have a DNA profile,
the National Forensic Center contacts a lab in Rotterdam.
They are knowledgeable and do research on DNA.
After a few weeks we get an answer from Holland. This is what they say.
"The DNA profile of your perpetrator indicates
that he comes from northern Europe."
One more step in the hunt for the killer, one more clue.
We constantly get new facts on the perpetrator.
But we don't find him,
Since the first day, police have had a hotline open.
Many tips have come in and been rejected.
But in March 2005, a tip comes in that interests investigators.
One tip comes from social services in Sweden.
They say that this person could be a person who was moved
from Linköping to a city in western Sweden.
This person is of interest to us, and we drive there.
We talk to the person and ask for a DNA sample
to compare it to the evidence from Åsgatan.
This person says, no, I won't do that.
The prosecutor decides to arrest the person.
Five months after the brutal murder in Linköping,
police finally have a suspect.
The person is arrested, we do a DNA swab.
The forensics lab runs a fast DNA test.
But hopes that they found the killer are crushed
when the result of the DNA test comes in.
This person has nothing to do with this crime, and is promptly released.
As the years go by, the police receive more and more criticism.
Criminology professor Leif G.W. Persson
thinks they got stuck on the wrong track.
Objectively speaking, it was a failure.
If you haven't succeeded, then you've been wrong somewhere.
So you need to rethink it.
I think he's between 13 and 17 years old.
One reason we've not found him
is that he might be much younger than we thought.
If I was to point at a flaw in this investigation,
I'd have gone full throttle
looking into Mohamad and his friends and siblings' friends.
I think this killer is close by. He lives there, goes to school there.
And I'm right eight times out of ten.
- Not so bad. - And police usually agree with me.
When we disagree, I'm usually right three times out of four.
Six years after the murders, police still have no culprit.
They've conducted thousands of interviews,
and DNA tested hundreds of people.
And yet, the murderer's identity remains a mystery.
Anna-Lena's husband gives one TV interview after the murder,
and tells how it feels not to know why.
It's now been six years and there is still no suspect.
How does that feel?
Well. It's...
I hurts, I can tell you that much.
We understand that it's happened.
We have no answers to questions. Why it happened.
Or who did it. And so on.
How it happened. I don't know that either.
Those questions spin in my head.
They're in the back of my mind and come up all the time.
I did everything for Anna-Lena. This should be able to be solved.
Both the family and the police are feeling frustrated.
Why has the killer not been found?
Will the crime ever be solved?
As time passes, the odds grow smaller
as witnesses' memories fade and all traces disappear.
Worst of all,
the investigators are afraid the murderer will strike again.
The profiler group has warned them of this.
There is a high risk that this kind of person will commit another crime.
That thought has been in the back of our minds the entire time.
That this person can strike again.
I read of other cases and think, is it our killer who's done that?
I wouldn't say I ever felt hopeless, it was more a frustration
that we never found the perpetrator.
The worry was that he could commit another murder.
Many people in Linköping were afraid.
Afraid for their children and themselves.
Despite the forensic psychologist's belief
that this person may kill again, no new crimes are committed
where the DNA profile matches that from the murder scene.
They ask the public for help and release a composite picture.
We drew up this image with the help of the national police.
A picture of the killer was created based on witness statements.
We had two witnesses who gave descriptions of him.
We made a composite from that.
We sent it out to the media, asking "Who is this person?"
It was maybe not a good thing to do.
We received thousands of tips on people who resembled this image.
From all the way in northern Sweden down to southern Sweden.
Most of the tips were not relevant, but we couldn't dismiss them
since it might just be the killer.
This caused anxiety and disorder in the investigation.
More than we realized it would.
Jan Staaf gets in touch with investigators at the American FBI.
He hopes to find new angles and methods of approach.
Even by American standards, the case is extraordinary.
One of the suggestions from the FBI is to offer a reward.
This is not allowed by the Swedish police.
But there is an individual willing to offer 1,000,000 SEK
to anyone providing conclusive information.
A million is a good amount. This should be able to be solved.
We find this person, and it's done.
The new reward generates hundreds more tips
that are sent on to the police.
But neither they nor the other investigative actions that follow
lead to the arrest of the killer.
One hypothesis is that he's no longer alive.
It's hard to believe a person can live with this all their life
without anyone else knowing, or being arrested for another crime.
So he might commit suicide.
I was involved with what we call "mamma testing."
This is when you test the mothers of youths who've killed themselves
or are no longer alive.
You take a DNA sample from the mother's mouth
and compare that DNA with the DNA we have from the killer.
We quickly find out if it's the killer, or not.
The response from the mothers...
varied greatly. Some were sad or got upset
but most understood why we did this.
They wanted to help, but it was hard for them,
that the police suspect it was their son who committed this murder.
It took a lot of time.
And a lot of sensitivity was needed when interacting with these mothers.
But it was very helpful.
This unusual method
allowed investigators to eliminate a number of potential culprits.
But they are still no closer to finding the double murderer.
The threat of the killer striking again
is a constant concern of the few investigators left.
This is why they refuse to give up.
Police are always looking for new methods and techniques
to help push the case forward.
After thirteen years,
police are hopeful about a new refined DNA technique.
In 2017, we went back to the lab in Rotterdam.
The answer from them this time
is that this is a person who comes from northern Europe.
Sweden or Denmark. Scandinavia.
They also tell us this person almost certainly has blue eyes.
We have one more puzzle piece but still don't find him.
In April, 2018, US police arrest the Golden State Killer.
He's guilty of at least thirteen murders and fifty rapes.
A unique method has been used for the first time.
They found a match for his DNA in a commercial geneology register.
Jan Staaf sees the potential in this for his own investigation.
Can they find the murderer using this new method
before he kills again?
Why can't we do that in Sweden?
We want to do what they did, and find the culprit
in an entirely new way, using commercial geneology databases.
The investigative team felt that we could really be on to something.
As police in Linköping start looking into the unique possibilities
offered by using geneology,
new DNA methods make it possible
to get a better idea of what the killer looks like.
We contacted an American company, Parabon Labs.
From the DNA profile, they can develop an image
of what the killer looked like in 2004, and what he looks like now.
This time we knew we wanted a composite picture
only for internal use, not to send to the media and ask for tips.
When we received the image, of course we wondered -
when we finally find the killer, will he look like the image?
Finally, finally, finally.
I would never have believed
that I'd solve a crime using family geneology.
Now perhaps they can find a motive for why this happened.
You wanted to be sure you'd succeed in killing people.
Yes. I had to get it done.