VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED. THIS PROGRAM CONTAINS STRONG IMAGES.
It's awful. It's horrible.
You can't describe how someone could do such a thing in cold blood.
She was awake, subjected to physical violence,
beaten, and began to burn.
She tries to escape, but can't.
She was definitely alive during the fire.
Her fear of death must have been awful.
I'VE NEVER HEARD HER SCREAM LIKE THAT.
BURNING LOVE
In the middle of the night, emergency services in Borås
receive a call about something that will prove to be just one part
of a series of incidents of lethal violence against women,
which will eventually lead to a much more serious and frightening case.
The call received by emergency services
reports a raging fire in an apartment building.
We get to the scene and see that the fire is on the second storey.
It's more or less chaos. People are very scared.
They're standing on their balconies and need to be helped down
by rescue services.
After a while, emergency services get the fire under control
and manage to put it out, and gain control of the situation.
It's an incredibly dangerous and serious incident.
It's the middle of the night, people are asleep.
Had emergency services not gotten there so fast,
there would have been devastating consequences.
The fire is concentrated in an apartment on the second floor,
and in the fire-ravaged apartment,
police technicians begin an investigation to discover where,
and more precisely, how the fire started.
Fires can start for various reasons.
It can be a TV that's been on for a long time,
it can be a candle someone's forgotten to put out.
There are many ways a fire can start.
During this investigation, signs of flammable liquid are found
inside and outside the door to the apartment.
This is confirmation that the fire was purposefully lit.
The theory is that one or more people entered the building,
poured flammable liquid through the letterbox and then lit it on fire.
When the fire starts, the inhabitant of the apartment,
who is a woman in her 60s, and her male friend,
were sleeping in the apartment.
But, with difficulty, they manage to escape to the balcony
before the fire takes hold of the apartment.
Just before the fire, a neighbour hears loud voices
outside the building, apparently in a foreign language.
Someone has seen a person walking with something in their hand,
but we receive very vague witness statements from the scene,
and we didn't see it as information we could base an investigation on.
But the same night, a few hours after the fire was extinguished,
a witness notes two cars in the parking lot,
at the entrance to the building,
and the cars have had their tires slashed.
These cars turn out to belong to the woman who lives in the apartment,
and her friend who is visiting.
Now we're feeling hopeful.
We have other things to investigate.
We have the tires and the car,
and we hope the perpetrator has left clues by the car.
When examining the car, forensics find traces of fingerprints,
but, on closer investigation of the prints,
they can't see papillary lines,
which means they can't be connected to a person.
Everything suggests the perpetrator was wearing gloves.
It's incredibly frustrating to get stuck in a serious case like this,
but some people are questioned,
including, naturally, the woman who lives in the apartment.
Of course, we want answers as to what may have taken place.
Who wants to hurt these people? Have there been any threats?
This woman is shaken and shocked,
and has absolutely no idea why someone set fire to her apartment.
But then she realised it actually could have been her ex.
The man in question is looked up
and police bring him in for questioning.
During questioning, he says he had nothing to do with it,
and that he'd been in Skåne at the time of the fire.
And it turns out his alibi can be backed up.
Arson is very hard to investigate from an evidence perspective,
since evidence is incinerated in almost all cases.
That was the case here,
and, at this point, the investigation is going nowhere.
As Borås police are faced with the fact that they have no leads,
something suddenly happens in Gothenburg
that could give the investigation new impetus.
On the night of July 20, the fire department and police
were alerted to an apartment building on Hisingen in Gothenburg
where someone smelled a strong and pungent odour in the stairwell.
I'd gone to bed and fallen asleep,
and, around 2 AM, I heard something going on somewhere.
After a while, I heard the front door,
and thought it was so strange that I got up,
looked through the peephole, and saw it full of firefighters and police.
I realised there was probably a fire somewhere,
and they were banging on all the doors to get us out of the building.
But as I'm standing in the call, I can feel that it's wet.
My feet are somehow cold.
But, "My God, there's water on the floor. What's going on?"
So when I open the door, they ask me, "What's going on in there?"
And I reply that nothing's going on. "I don't know, I was asleep."
"It's petrol, can't you smell it?"
"Yeah, I can, now that you mention it, I can smell it."
"Yeah, someone's poured petrol through your letterbox."
The same thing that happened in the apartment building in Borås
seems to be about to happen again,
but this time, in Gothenburg.
Could the incidents be connected?
Is there an arsonist on the loose?
When we get to the scene and enter the stairwell,
right away, we can smell something that smells like petrol.
We go up to the second floor where the apartment is,
and the smell is even more prominent there.
And on the outside of the door to the apartment,
we see a little scorch mark above the letterbox.
When we enter the hall, we see it's well-furnished,
and the plaintiff has taken two rugs and some catalogues,
put them in a bag and thrown the whole lot out on the veranda,
because it smells strongly of petrol.
In the hall, we only see the petrol running down the inside of the door,
no obvious signs of fire or scorch marks.
As well as the significant quantity of flammable liquid
on the hallway floor, and the scorching on the door's exterior,
forensics also learn that police personnel
have found and secured a paper slip
that had been put through the letterbox,
and the paper was partly burnt.
Now we reach the conclusion that this fire was intentionally lit.
And it's an attempted aggravated arson.
A perpetrator has entered the stairwell,
walked up to the plaintiff's apartment door...
poured flammable liquid through the letterbox...
and set fire to a slip of paper, opened the letterbox,
and dropped the slip of paper through the letterbox.
But this burning slip of paper gets stuck in the letterbox.
When the perpetrator releases the outer part of the letterbox,
the cover tag on the inside traps the paper in there.
The slip of paper burns,
and the flammable liquid in the letterbox itself burns too,
but then the fire self-extinguishes.
In this bag that the plaintiff had put on the balcony,
there was a lot of flammable material like rugs and clothes.
They're totally wet when we examine them.
And this rectangular rug with the rubber backing,
the rubber backing had been broken up and it was wet along the edges.
All in all, it shows us that quite a lot of liquid has been poured in.
If the paper had fallen in,
it would have become a very big fire.
It wasn't far from the front door to the bedroom door in that apartment.
Would I have woken from the fire alarm in time? Who knows?
I can be a deep sleeper.
Then I'd have had to get to the balcony,
and, first, I would have had to go into the hall.
Where it's burning.
The fire might have already made it to my bedroom door.
And then out onto the balcony, screaming at 2 AM.
I'm not sure anyone would have heard me if I'd made it out.
This woman had a guardian angel.
She could have burned to death in there.
It's a big thing, that someone tried to kill me,
and my mind didn't take it in as I was standing there.
Naturally, I had a hard time psychologically after the incident,
and I was very scared.
This woman can't understand it.
She doesn't know of anyone who would want to hurt her.
She has a nephew living in the apartment with her,
and she wonders whether he's the target.
He's no gangster, but it must have something to do with him.
It must, because I don't have any enemies.
I'm older, I've got nothing to do with untoward things.
And he wasn't at home that night, he slept at a friend's place.
He'd never slept at a friend's place before, but he wasn't home now.
Fires are very hard to examine and investigate.
Evidence and clues incinerate in fires.
You can figure out what's happened and how it started,
but... who did it,
the link to the perpetrator is really hard.
But despite the fire not establishing in the apartment,
forensics realise when their investigation is complete,
that evidence is sparse,
and that the most valuable clue found is the slip of paper.
We sent the slip of paper to the lab
and request they look for DNA.
This is our chance to maybe, potentially,
get traces of DNA or fingerprints from the perpetrator.
There's no witness testimony at all in relation to this incident.
We have no leads to a potential perpetrator.
We have a bit of a look at this nephew, his friends, and so on,
but we can soon confirm he had nothing to do with this,
so we have very little to go off.
Police now have two unsolved cases.
One arson and one attempted arson,
both with similar methods, and both in the homes of middle-aged women.
But police have no leads that help the cases advance,
until something is revealed during questioning
that turns out to be vital.
When police ask me if anything out of the ordinary
has happened recently in my life,
I thought, "Yeah, I ended a relationship via telephone."
"Okay, and what was said?"
Well, it wasn't a pleasant phone call, of course.
I said, "I want to end the relationship,
I don't want to do this anymore."
And when he realised I was serious,
that I really wanted to end things,
he said something before he hung up, that I didn't think about until now.
He said, "You'll regret this." And then he hung up.
This is of great interest to us.
When we look into the person in question, we notice something.
It turns out he's had a relationship with the woman in Borås.
These two women have had a relationship with the same person,
and then been subjected to similar attacks.
And we feel it's impossible that it's a coincidence.
The man the women have been in a relationship with
is 50 and lives in Malmö.
Questioning the women reveals they had similar experiences
with the man.
We came in contact via a dating site.
We wrote for a bit, and he was super pleasant,
and funny, and...
he wanted to meet up after a while.
They decide on a day that suits them both,
and the man drives from Malmö, up to Jeanette in Gothenburg.
We started cooking, hung out,
drank some wine, played music and had so much fun.
I thought, "He can stay," he was so nice.
He gave a lot of himself, was very generous, laughed a lot.
He was great to talk to, about all kinds of stuff.
And we said we'd begin a relationship and see how it goes.
But, with time, the relationship slowly begins to change.
From having been attentive, the man becomes more and more controlling.
After two and a half months,
Jeanette decides to end the relationship.
He always wanted to keep me close.
Thought up ways for us to do things on our own,
instead of seeing family and the kids.
His behaviour wasn't normal.
Eventually, I couldn't take out the trash by myself,
he had to come with me.
Both these women had met this man via a dating site,
and begun a relationship with him quite quickly.
Early in the relationship, these women saw him
as very charming and thoughtful and a good listener.
But he made himself at home very quickly with them,
which they picked up on. He could stay several days at a time.
The first priority is now to try to place him at the crime scene.
One way we could see if he was in Västra Götaland
is to look at traffic cameras to give us clues if he drove a car.
So we try to gather evidence in the form of security footage,
bank data, all kinds of evidence that could help us make progress.
But this didn't give us results.
Investigators also look at the suspect's phone usage,
to see if they can place him closer to the scenes of both incidents.
It gives us nothing.
He didn't use his phone at these times.
He obviously remains a suspect in the investigation,
but it's incredibly frustrating that he can't be placed at the scene.
Despite a lack of evidence, the man is arrested,
on suspicion of arson and attempted arson.
Meanwhile, a search of the man's apartment is carried out.
A huge amount of technical equipment is found in the apartment.
There were memory cards, there were hard drives.
The whole apartment was filled with things from floor to ceiling,
it was hard to move around.
so we seized things,
and IT forensics had a huge job ahead of them,
getting through all the material.
We choose to start with the computer,
and it's not long before certain things stand out,
for example, there are many images of one of the women's screen.
And then we see, when we continue the analysis,
that there is software installed that shouldn't be there.
The program IT forensics find is so-called spyware.
With the program's help, a person from another computer
can see the websites visited, gather image material,
and see what's written and who it's written to.
My assessment is that the purpose is to monitor a computer.
What is going on? What is the user doing?
The log function also gives me access to login information,
passwords, most importantly.
He's used this to gather information on these women.
Police begin interrogations with the man,
and ask him how he pleads to the charges.
He continues to deny all involvement.
He claims he wasn't there,
that he was in Malmö at the time of both incidents,
and says that his parents were visiting.
He describes this visit in great detail,
and it's backed up by his mother.
When he's confronted about the spyware,
he says he lent it out to a few guys.
We still have hope for the paper that was stuck in the letterbox
during the incident in Gothenburg.
We hope the perpetrator has left traces of DNA or fingerprints on it.
But since it's partly burnt, we know it's a small chance.
But it is a chance.
When results are returned,
they show that neither DNA nor fingerprints could be found.
Of course it's a bit disappointing,
when you don't find DNA or fingerprints on the material.
We felt like we were back at square one.
It was our last hope.
As police lack technical evidence,
and a way to connect the man to the scene,
they're forced to release him.
Is the risk now that, on top of the two unsolved cases,
more arson will be committed?
But when the investigation reaches the police department of cold cases,
it picks up new momentum.
The two attacks have similarities to an incident 14 years prior,
in which yet another woman was the victim.
The cold case unit exists to give a second opinion,
go through old cases again and, if possible, find technical evidence
or witness testimony.
In 1998, a dead woman was found
in an apartment on Docentgatan in Malmö.
She worked at the prison in Malmö, had two children,
and at the time of the incident, one of the children was home.
a 14-year-old girl.
Neighbours woke to a fire.
And there was screaming,
and the daughter was woken by the mother's desperate cries for help,
and needing help to escape.
But the daughter doesn't manage to help her mother,
and runs out into the hallway, herself.
After the fire, the mother is found lying in the apartment.
She's badly burned and it's clear she tried without success to escape.
She's suffered horribly,
and the fear of death would have been impossible to imagine.
The woman's apartment is completely destroyed,
which suggests a very rapid fire.
This complicates forensics work in finding evidence.
But, traces of flammable liquid are found where the woman was found,
and three separate points of origin are found,
which leads to the suspicion that the fire was started intentionally.
The apartment basically consists of an entrance door,
and coming off the hallway is a little room that is the daughter's,
and then there's another door that leads to the rest of the apartment.
and the mother was found lying through that door.
The daughter also says she heard a commotion and several voices
as the fire started,
which neighbours also witnessed.
But no signs of a break-in were found.
What we think has happened is that,
the mother has woken from something.
Whether she woke from the fire starting,
or from the perpetrator pouring the flammable liquid,
we don't really know.
She's gotten up been beaten back down,
the perpetrator has lit a fire,
gotten out, closed the door to prevent the mother from escaping,
and has then left through the front door.
He's entered the apartment, probably with his own key,
as there's no other way to get in and out of the apartment
without a key.
We also undertook a technical investigation to see
if the lock had been picked, but there was no such evidence.
The deceased woman's name is Ingrid, who is 38 years old.
Her two daughters are from two different relationships.
In recent years,
she had been together with the father of the youngest daughter.
A man named Arnold.
At this point in time, Ingrid is trying to separate from Arnold,
but Arnold doesn't want to accept it, trying to stick around.
He monitors Ingrid,
comes around even though she doesn't want him to.
What awoke suspicion was his behaviour.
He didn't want to accept the relationship was over,
he was controlling.
He was, in a way, an archetypal stalker who couldn't accept this.
There was a chance he did this out of revenge.
It also emerged after further investigation
that Ingrid had kept a diary
in which she had noted she was afraid
that Arnold would do something to her.
What was also noteworthy in this context was that on this night,
Ingrid and Arnold's daughter wasn't sleeping in the apartment.
She was with her paternal grandparents.
This would have meant that Arnold
could get at Ingrid without risking his own daughter's life.
Witness testimony also describes Arnold as a controlling
and sometimes threatening person.
Arnold is arrested and detained, but is released after a short time.
There is not enough evidence.
They had very little evidence.
There were actually indications that Arnold was the kind of person
and could be a potential perpetrator,
but they didn't really have any immediate concrete evidence.
Everyone agreed it was arson and that Ingrid was murdered,
but they didn't have a murderer. The murderer walked free.
They didn't get anywhere. The investigation was closed in 1998.
But now, 14 years later,
new opportunities to advance the case suddenly appear.
Investigators have discovered that Arnold is the same man
both women had relationships with in 2012.
This is a method that's reoccurred,
and it gave us hope that we may be able to solve these three fires.
We decided to compare them. Has anything been missed?
Can we find anything new, a little piece of the puzzle.
At this point in time, we're not totally certain it's Arnold,
though there is a lot to suggest it.
He's our main lead, you could say,
but we're not so closed-minded that we exclude all else.
And it must, from an investigative perspective, follow proper protocol.
Because a murder investigation isn't just about
making a case for who is guilty.
There's an obligation to investigate and rule out all other alternatives.
Investigations are now faced with a 14-year-old murder,
an arson, and an attempted arson.
All with one common denominator, Arnold Livin.
It's a huge job we're facing.
There are several interviews to be held,
and a lot of technical evidence to be gone through.
And our hope is that something further
will emerge that has been missed before.
We also hope, above all, that
with the help of new forensic technology,
we might be able to find some new, very tangible evidence.
Because a lot has happened between 1998 and 2012
in terms of forensic technology,
and a lot of material has been preserved,
so we spend a lot of time recreating what happened in 1998,
and, meanwhile, get a picture of what happened in 2012.
Arnold used both his phone and computer a lot.
There was activity basically around the clock,
but at the time that these crimes took place, it was quiet,
and he did searches on fires very shortly after the fires.
This is of great interest to us, as he's done these searches
before the fires became public knowledge.
There is one piece of concrete of evidence
that investigators don't want to let go of.
It's the slip of paper found at the crime scene in Gothenburg.
Investigators request a new analysis
to see if some form of DNA can be found.
We know that today's methods can identify very small amounts of DNA.
So we really try hard to chase that lead as far as it goes.
Results have come back previously basically that nothing can be found,
but we don't want to accept that result,
so we stubbornly ask forensics new questions.
The results are that complete DNA can't be found.
However, it may be possible to search for mitochondrial DNA.
We tell them to go for it.
Mitochondrial DNA can't be used to identify a person,
but it's not insignificant if it can be found on the slip of paper.
It can be used in some cases to rule out potential suspects.
Investigators receive results
that mitochondrial DNA is present on the slip of paper.
So we ask if there are statistics
as to how many people have this kind of mitochondrial DNA,
and it turns out there are.
And the results we receive, after quite a long wait,
is that only 4% of the population have this kind of mitochondrial DNA,
that was found on the slip of paper.
And Arnold has it.
Arnold's activity around the dates of the incidents is examined again.
Under scrutiny is his credit card usage and phone activity,
to see what his movements were.
We hoped to find data that showed he'd used his card,
or to be able to place his phone in connection to these events,
but Arnold's phone had been switched off during the arson,
so it was a bit of a dead end.
But it's common knowledge that when a phone is switched off,
something dodgy is going on.
So it's not evidence, but it's an indication
that something's afoot when people turn off their phones.
In all investigations, you get to a point
where you have to ask where to go from here.
And, in this case, we conclude that we have to bring Arnold in,
we have to search his home, we have to get more evidence.
Investigators decide to arrest Arnold again,
but he continues to deny accusations in initial interrogations,
and continues to claim he was in Malmö
at the time of both fires in 2012.
During the incidents in Borås and Gothenburg,
Arnold's mother confirmed he was at home in Skåne.
Quite a while after our interviews with Arnold's mother,
she comes back to us and says she has notes in her calendar
that prove Arnold was in Skåne at the time.
That makes our hair stand on end.
Why hasn't she mentioned this earlier?
Why didn't she tell police who first interviewed her?
It was of such significance that we seize the calendar
and send it for analysis.
The analysis we get back clearly shows that the writing
that says Arnold was at home in Skåne at the time of the crimes
was written afterwards.
RESULTS SHOW THE USE OF DIFFERENT INK AND DIFFERENT PENS.
This information obviously weakens Arnold's story,
and indicates the mother is trying to create a false alibi for her son.
We now start to feel we have a good theory and chain of evidence.
We could see Arnold had motive.
He was very controlling.
We had mitochondrial DNA on the slip of paper,
we had the spyware, which was related to his controlling nature...
We also had windows of missing computer and phone activity.
With the fires in Borås and Gothenburg,
we felt we had enough evidence.
With the help of forensic technicians,
the prosecutor obtains a probability assessment
summarising facts from all three fires.
Analysts conclude, among other things, a similar modus operandi,
that it happened at night, that petrol has been used,
and it targets women who have had a relationship with the same man,
Arnold.
Then an assessment is made,
is it likely that someone other than Arnold could have done this?
And the conclusion is that it's extremely unlikely.
We're convinced he's guilty.
The prosecutor says there's enough to prosecute, so we're satisfied.
The prosecutor presents the cases from 2012,
and the trial begins against Arnold Levin in Malmö District Court.
On the 15th of July, 2014,
Arnold is convicted of aggravated arson and attempted arson
and sentenced to eight years' prison.
The prosecution for arson in Västra Götaland is successful,
and he's convicted,
which means he's safe in custody for a number of years.
But we don't want to drop Ingrid's murder from 1998.
So we begin working intensively with that.
We refuse to give up. We go through everything again.
The perpetrator who entered Ingrid's apartment,
we concluded they must have had a key.
He's probably entered while Ingrid was asleep,
and even locked the apartment as he left.
Something we start to wonder about
is, did Arnold have the opportunity to come and go from Ingrid's place?
Did he maybe have a key?
Police now investigate what opportunities and in what ways
Arnold could have entered the apartment.
When they read Ingrid's diary,
they find something that could advance the investigation.
She's written in her diary that her diary has suddenly gone missing.
She's very careful with where she puts her diary,
so she's completely certain that someone had taken it
and then put it back.
And, in this diary, she writes, could Arnold have taken the diary?
In that case, he must have had a key.
If Arnold did take the diary,
there could be traces of him on it. His fingerprints might be on it,
his DNA could be there...
It could prove Arnold has taken the diary
but also put it back when Ingrid wasn't home,
which would mean he had a key.
When we discuss this with Arnold, he says, "Yes, I used this diary,
I looked at the diary, but before Ingrid started writing in it."
We send the diary to the lab and cross our fingers
that Arnold has somehow left some trace in it,
and preferably not just on the cover, but inside somewhere it.
When analysis of the diary is complete,
it turns out Arnold's fingerprints have been found inside the diary.
But not in the way he described.
His fingerprints are on top of Ingrid's writing.
That his fingerprints are in the diary
indicates he might have a key, but isn't really direct evidence.
During the search of Arnold's house, we found a lot of keys,
an unjustifiable number of keys.
We begin by quite simply trying them. Just physically testing them.
But we found no key that fit the lock at Ingrid's apartment.
Now something unexpected happens.
We ring around to everyone who still lives in the stairwell,
the same stairwell as Ingrid,
and ask a few questions about the incident,
about people's memories and so on.
And there is a person who spontaneously mentions
that they saw Arnold just after the fire, right outside the building.
The person who gave us this information,
he says he's just never been asked these questions by police before.
The witness also says, "It wasn't unusual that I saw him,
he'd lived there on and off for a couple of years,
so it wasn't strange."
So he didn't understand how important it was,
but for us, it was almost a hallelujah moment,
that we could place him there.
And in connection with the information we get from the witness,
we decide to do a witness recreation,
which involves trying to recreate how it was at the time.
The weather and lighting conditions should be more or less the same,
and then an assessment is made at the correct distance.
And the assessment is that
yes, it's possible to see who it could have been,
and we finally feel we can place Arnold at the crime scene.
And this was the last piece of the puzzle.
In May, 2016, Arnold is finally prosecuted for the murder of Ingrid,
and attempted murder of her 14-year-old daughter.
Did you see Arnold Levin that evening or night?
We're standing on the other side, just talking.
Then he comes walking from over here,
if this is the house, we're here, he comes walking like...
-On the road, or...? -No, the footpath.
-Okay. -I just see him from a distance.
After that, I don't see him again...
Despite the evidence against him,
Arnold continues to deny involvement in the murder.
A note was also found at your home.
It says something like "Ingrid will suffer."
That she's an asshole, and so on.
Did you write that note?
I can't answer that, but it feels like a pretty slim possibility.
A slim possibility? Why?
That's not how I express myself.
I don't know how many times I've said it,
but I only use capitals when I write.
That's the first thing you can check to see if I wrote it.
Does that mean you didn't write it?
Like I said, I only write with capitals.
Who wrote it if you didn't?
I don't know what people do or don't do.
I don't have any memory of the note at all.
The district court doesn't consider the evidence to be sufficient,
and acquit him of the murder charge.
But the decision is taken to the court of appeals,
and on 10 March, 2017,
19 years after Ingrid, comes the decision from the court of appeals.
I have very vivid memories from the day we got the decision.
We were working another case. A lot of the same group were together.
It was 11 o'clock when the decision was handed down.
We got it up on the computer.
Those seconds, scrolling down to the verdict itself.
Life imprisonment, convicted on all three counts.
There were cheers and tears of joy.
During the closing statement of the Court of Appeal hearing,
Arnold asked to speak.
And I can say the speech he gave was probably not to his advantage.
It was a huge relief,
and my thoughts immediately turned to the daughters.
They finally got some form of justice.
The daughter they have together has,
during the years leading to Arnold's arrest,
believed her mother died after smoking bed,
that her mother was an alcoholic and couldn't look after herself.
So she's lived with this lie, told to her by Arnold.
Subtitles: Lily Ray plint.com