VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED.
THIS PROGRAM CONTAINS VERY STRONG IMAGES.
I've been involved in strange cases, both disgusting, and cases
where you can't quite understand what someone was thinking.
But this case contains such unbelievably pure evil.
A person who can control others pretty easily.
And yet there's no element of physical restraint.
These people are captured psychologically.
They're made to believe their captor is in control of their world.
So they don't dare leave, they stay living there,
surely realising they're going to die.
It was a special kind of evil we encountered.
EVIL IN ASPA
At 19 o'clock, 30th of May, 2002, emergency services get a call
about a fire in a forested area outside of Skinnskatteberg.
The fire department went there immediately to extinguish the fire.
We came up this road pretty fast,
and saw, in the middle of parking lot,
there's a car burning like a torch, straight up.
We opened up the hood, put out the fire,
opened the doors, put that fire out.
Then we opened the boot and one of the boys stopped and said,
"I think there's a deer in here."
And another fireman who was a hunter as well,
he went up to it and said, "This deer is wearing clothes."
So then I thought, let's stop and get the police here quick
and make sure we preserve the situation.
But we realised there was a person in there.
Very burned, so it wasn't that strange
to mistake it for an animal body.
The police came very quickly, and when they came...
they took over and we just went home.
It made my stomach knot, this is not something you see every day.
This is something you see maybe once in the career of a fireman.
The police suspect it's a woman who's been found burned in the car.
A preliminary investigation for murder is initiated.
That same night, the police make contact with a person
who quickly helps the investigation progress.
He calls the police and says he's been in contact with an employee
who says he lit his car on fire, and that his partner is in that car.
A little later that night, the suspect,
the man who was the partner of the victim,
contacts the police over the phone and tells them where he is.
This is emergency services.
Is there a police car out searching for someone
who's done something bad?
Well, there almost always is.
What bad thing has happened near you?
I think I torched my partner.
You've torched your partner?
So it was pretty easy for the police to find him.
He's arrested and detained for murder.
He said he'd gotten into a fight with his partner
and he got sick of her nagging and that she had cheated on him
and that's what made him decide to kill her.
The day after the woman is found burned in the car,
the suspect's employer contact the police again.
He's received a letter in the mail,
supposedly written by the victim's partner,
where he writes that he's sick of her nagging and unfaithfulness
and has therefore decided to take her life and then his own.
It appeared to be a pretty straightforward case.
He killed his partner and then torched the car
and was arrested near the scene.
It seemed plausible at the start,
but just because you have a confession
doesn't mean you settle there.
You have to confirm a confession with the evidence you find.
The deceased woman is 42-year-old mother of two, Birgitta Lönnhager
from Karlskoga in Värmland.
She was very nice, very happy, loving.
A warm, caring person.
She... did her best as a parent.
I really only had the first six years of my life
with my biological family, my dad, my mum and younger sibling.
My parents couldn't cope with being parents...
in the way that parents are meant to be.
So child services intervened and placed us in care.
I've had relationships with her
after we were placed in a foster home.
The last time I talked to her, I was really angry at her,
because she had cancelled several visits.
With me and with my younger sibling.
She couldn't show up for various reasons.
The car was broken, she was sick...
Lots of, you know...
She was very sorry about not being able to come,
and she understood on some level
that I wasn't really that angry at her,
it was more angry concern.
Mum is always Mum, you know...
During this first week, a bunch of uncertainties cropped up.
The man who had been arrested for the murder...
He started telling us things,
when his original information was questioned,
that indicated there were more people involved
in the death of this woman.
It turns out that the man and Birgitta
had been living in the home of a couple in Aspa in Lindesberg,
since February the same year.
When police visit the house, they encounter a man and a woman
who are burning something in their yard.
They're asked why they're burning these objects.
It was clothes, furniture...
Their explanation was that the room was gross
and they wanted to clean out the room
where the victim and her partner had lived.
Then the police understand
that the couple are burning evidence.
They become suspected of protecting a criminal.
Because they are getting rid of evidence.
The man and the woman are arrested
and brought to the police station in Lindesberg.
It turns out the man who's been acting as
Birgitta and her partner's landlord
is the same man who told police
the partner had confessed to the murder.
The landlord and his partner, they had run a dog kennel.
They had several dogs they trained.
And...
The victim and her partner had a dog they had discipline issues with.
That's how they made contact
and the landlord said he'd train their dog.
Later on, they started talking about
starting a dog kennel
and dog-training business together.
The victim's partner was unemployed
and was in contact with the employment agency.
So they...
arranged it so that he was placed by the Department of Employment
with the landlord,
to work for his business with dogs.
Initially he and the victim commuted
from Karlskoga to this site outside of Lindeberg, but...
after a while, at the end of February, 2002,
they were offered housing on the property.
So the victim and her partner moved to the other couple's house.
And they lived there from the end of February
until the woman died.
It's now important to investigate the house in Aspa for evidence.
Forensics are brought in.
On the 7th of June, we got to the site.
The sun was shining and it was warm.
The whole property was cordoned off
according to the procedural code 27-15.
It was a functioning house,
but it had an unpleasant feel about it.
I wouldn't want to live there myself.
It was messy and a bit run down.
I got my video camera and started documenting what we saw
inside the cordoned-off area.
I've moved to the kitchen and I'm filming toward the hallway...
documenting the floor plan...
what rooms there were and what was laying about.
We made sketches and took regular photos as well of course,
of anything that might be interesting.
Among other things, there was something that looked like blood.
Blood spatter on a window, right by the entrance.
But we didn't get anything from that.
It was blood but we couldn't get any DNA from it,
I think that's because the window faced south,
so it got a lot of sun.
I think the UV rays destroyed the DNA in those drops.
Then we walked around the house and saw that there was a computer,
we confiscated that, there's always interesting things on computers.
Other than the computer, forensics also confiscated phones,
hard drives and cameras.
All of this was sent to the police's IT forensics department.
There was a lot of older stuff, old tech.
We didn't have a good feeling about finding anything,
that this would be a case involving IT at all.
A lot of old hard drives to go through
that didn't give us anything.
Then there was a digital camera we looked at.
When we started analysing the camera there were no pictures on the card.
But no one who works in IT forensics stops there,
you know it could have something on it.
For a layman, it's very hard to really delete something.
It always leaves some sort of trace. So...
When I, or we, realise it's been used, there is material on it,
that alone is interesting.
It took some fiddling to get to it.
You could say it's like doing Sudoku or something.
It's tricky at the start
but then you see this pattern and it starts getting easy.
The tension, sitting there,
not knowing what pictures you would get was...
both difficult and exciting, wondering what we'd find.
And then when the first image turns up, and you see that...
this is from the site in question, the property in Aspa.
And it's Birgitta in the picture.
They were unbelievable pictures...
and I had previously worked on child abuse cases, so I've...
seen a lot.
I think we saw pretty quickly
that there's another dimension to this story.
Technicians look closer at the pictures
they recovered from the digital camera
and discover a well-documented and horrible series of events.
It was an aha moment, when we saw... what the hell...
These are pictures of Birgitta.
Pictures of her injured and...
then patched up.
And in a state that showed abuse and severe injuries.
So it's a huge...
mix of both relief at finally having found something,
and then you realise the horror
that this is like a diary of a person's forced deterioration.
In the pictures, you can follow a person being broken down
over a long period of time.
Which was totally bizarre.
And this alternating of being seriously injured
and then in the next picture,
in quotation marks, patched up with horse liniment,
and then injured again.
That theme was striking,
those were the only kind of pictures on this camera.
The picture I will remember forever is a picture of Birgitta,
where she's got silver spray paint on her face.
And you can see in her eyes
that she knows what a hopeless situation she's in.
It was an odd feeling, it was...
unexpected that we'd find something like this.
The case took a very different direction after these pictures.
A completely different story about what happened to Birgitta.
In the interviews that will now be held with the victim's partner
and the woman who was the partner of
the person we've been calling the landlord.
They... tell us, consistently and independently of each other,
about events that are part of the build-up...
to...
the woman eventually dying
at the end of May.
The victim and her partner...
drank pretty much no alcohol
before they met the landlord and his partner.
But in their company they started drinking large,
or even copious amounts of alcohol.
And during these parties...
they played cards...
and...
eventually, over unrealistic amounts of money,
large debts arose, and disagreements.
They were taken out on the woman, who later died, almost every time.
She was abused in such a systematic way...
that you have to describe it as pure torture.
The arrested woman, the victim's partner,
had consistent information
about it being the landlord who was the real perpetrator.
They claimed that he was the strongest person
in this group of four
and that the other three weren't able to stand up to him.
Since the two other suspects blame the so-called landlord,
it's important for the police to investigate him more closely,
to see if they can find something to support their testimony.
The landlord is 47-year-old Kjell-Åke Johansson.
He and his partner started renting the house in Aspa in August, 2001.
They moved in pretty quickly.
I think it only took a week before they had started moving in.
They had dogs and liked that it was pretty secluded.
They wanted to live somewhat isolated.
He was very social, she was maybe a bit shyer...
But normal people, they were happy and...
that's the impression I got.
He came to visit me in my apartment.
Asked me if I had any coffee.
So we sat and had a coffee...
Then he said...
"These people will live with us for a while,
because they have nowhere to live right now."
I didn't think any more about that.
I was there a few times.
I collected some garden furniture once, for example.
And...
all four of them were there, they offered me coffee.
We sat and made small talk like any group of friends would.
He really was charming.
Came over to give me a hug and that sort of thing.
Since Birgitta's partner and Kjell-Åke's partner
are suspects themselves,
it's important to find technical evidence
to clear up what really happened in the house.
Are they shifting the blame, or are they telling the truth?
I was informed by the investigators
that there was testimony of Kjell-Åke using a power drill
to drill into Birgitta's ear.
And we found a power drill.
But...
there was no visible blood on it,
in the chuck, we couldn't find any, but...
I got testing paper
and rubbed it against the tip of the chuck
and tested it with leucomalachite green,
a chemical that reacts with blood.
It's green until you drip it onto another component,
and if it turns blue, it's blood.
And it did turn blue, so we could confirm...
that there were traces of blood on...
on the chuck, and normally there wouldn't be.
So that could support the testimony.
But it was a far too small an amount to use for a DNA match.
Then we received a bunch of clothes to examine.
There's a pair of underpants here, and it says...
The underpants contain indications of blood in two examined stains.
But a large enough amount to perform a DNA match could not be found.
The most interesting piece was probably
a camouflage pattern jacket,
which, we'd been informed, was often worn by Kjell-Åke.
On this jacket, I found several tiny specks of blood.
If you hit something bloody, a lot of spatter is created,
going everywhere.
The smallest drops only travel a short distance.
From that, you can draw the conclusion
that the jacket has been in the immediate vicinity of the injury.
The jacket was also sent away to the forensics lab.
We're hoping that the blood is from the victim,
to help us corroborate that part.
They could confirm that two stains they had examined
came from Birgitta Lundhager.
So that supported the testimony
that he'd beaten her and worn this jacket.
So two people have taken part in the crimes.
Even if they've had a subordinate role,
they're guilty of, for example,
desecration of a human corpse
when they helped carry the dead person,
getting rid of the body.
So the information we get from them
has to be handled carefully.
But everything they describe is consistent between them
and that it can be confirmed with technical evidence
makes their story appear believable.
Kjell-Åke is prosecuted for, among other things,
aggravated assault, unlawful threat and causing another's death.
On the second of September, 2002, the trial starts
in the Lindesberg district court,
where the prosecutor presents the testimony
of what Birgitta was forced to endure in the house.
It includes...
extreme threats,
being locked up and tied up...
and various kinds of humiliation.
For example, he poured a bucket of water and dog urine over the woman,
and forced her to clean it up.
He cut all the hair off... her head.
There's a large number of instances of aggravated assault.
He's twisted her arm, giving her a fracture.
The other arm has been dislocated.
He's thrown a knife at her, or stabbed her with a knife.
When he's injured her,
he's stitched up the injuries with needle and thread,
without anaesthetic.
And when she or her partner
have begged the landlord to let her go to a hospital,
he refused.
He used leashes, he used knives.
Chased them around the yard barefoot.
If they didn't run fast enough, he beat them.
And...
he poured lighter fluid over her...
and lit it.
He burned her with the blow torch.
He chased her with the blow torch while I had a noose around my neck.
She fell next to the table, so he caught up with her
and burned her foot and then her arm.
Before it was put out, there was a large burn on her arm.
The victim's partner and the landlord's partner
have also been subjected to abuse by the landlord,
and have therefore not dared do anything about it.
I stepped in and said, that's enough.
He was furious with me...
he put a knife to my back, at my neck.
We couldn't do anything.
He had too much power.
We had to take turns begging for each other's lives.
He threatened to kill.
The most evil thing possible.
It's indescribable, what he's like.
It's violence, blood and death.
That's what he lives for.
Living in the same house as him
was living with your life at stake every day.
The landlord had confessed to some things
in the interrogations before the trial.
During the trial, he confessed to further details,
explaining it as...
parts of the abuse, he categorised as bad jokes.
But that he wanted to discipline her
because she didn't behave in the way he wanted her to.
To me, it seems that this woman was the weakest person in the group,
and he took pleasure in abusing her.
During the trial, Kjell-Åke has to explain
why he photographed Birgitta and documented her injuries.
He said he wanted to show the victim
how she had behaved and what the results were.
But that was a very strange explanation.
I think he enjoyed looking at these pictures.
Kjell-Åke requests to be taken to the house
to poke holes in parts of the testimony
that he claims are incorrect.
In the interviews, they say I had barricaded Birgitta's bedroom.
But that isn't true, because her bedroom was in here.
The door I put a belt on was this one, attached to...
It's difficult to demonstrate with hands tied behind my back.
-I was gonna show you, but I can't. -Why not?
It's hard to show it like this, it won't matter.
It could be used against me.
But you used a dog leash, we know that, you told us.
-Where did you put it? -Here, with the loop.
-And the other end? -It was tied here.
-And you're indicating the basket? -Yes.
And that was just to make her stop sneaking up
and getting all the dogs going.
I tried to tell her, it's better that you get up properly.
And this is where she broke the toilet.
You can see that it's broken,
if you sit on the toilet on the right side, she fell again.
It's been pretty heated around here, if I'm being funny.
Yeah, I suppose, when we partied.
There have been fires and...
Yeah, that's where the fire was.
Is this the burn mark?
What happened here?
This is what we talked about with the lighter fluid.
How come there was lighter fluid there?
That's when I splashed some on Birgitta, and on the floor.
You splashed lighter fluid on Birgitta?
-Yes. -Why?
We had a fight and I was annoyed and was holding the lighter fluid and...
I splashed her and told her to get up off the floor.
But splashing lighter fluid doesn't set it on fire,
what made it catch fire?
It burned on the floor, but not on Birgitta.
But how did it catch fire?
How did it catch fire?
That was me, with the lighter.
-You lit the lighter fluid? -Mm.
Why did you do that?
I lit it because I was sick of all the damn fighting all the time.
Now...
there was solid testimony for the abuse.
But whether the abuse was the main cause of death,
that was difficult to know.
Why did the woman die?
The police can confirm large parts of the testimonies of the abuse
with technical evidence.
But they're having difficulty determining
what led to Birgitta's death,
and thereby proving that it's murder.
Because of this, the coroner is interviewed in court
about what he thinks could have led to Birgitta's death.
What he could say was that if you're subjected to trauma
and don't get time to heal from it
and something new is added to it,
it accumulates until finally it can reach a level
at which the body's systems break down.
Because there isn't any time for recovery.
And, in this case, the woman had been subjected to torture,
from the end of February until the end of May.
And there's been trauma pretty much every day.
Abuse or very serious threats.
This has led to stress constantly building in her body.
And that little bit extra,
to cause everything to break down,
doesn't need to be much.
To find out if there's any action
that can be tied directly to Birgitta's death,
the police map out what happened
in the days leading up to the 30th of May
when she was found burned in the car.
At the end of May, the abuse of the victim intensifies.
And...
the landlord kicks her on several occasions
in the stomach.
She tells her partner that she feels very unwell.
One of the pictures from the digital camera
was taken on the last night
that the woman could get out of bed.
She's sitting down, her hair is completely shaved,
she's got bloody wounds,
one broken arm and the other dislocated,
sitting on the floor.
On the 26th of May, she can no longer get up.
And on the morning of the 27th, she tells her partner
that she's lost her will to live.
He tries getting her up, help her shower,
but she collapses at nine in the morning, in the kitchen.
The partner and the landlord's partner try together
to resuscitate her, attempting CPR.
But they discover that she's dead.
The landlord tells them that they're all equally involved.
We will get life in prison for this.
And that they have to help him get rid of the body.
The landlord tells the partner to drive away and torch the car.
He's been forced to write these letters before he leaves.
The landlord has dictated,
and then the partner has written it.
So he's told to assume blame for the murder.
He brought a tie down strap
that the landlord instructed him to hang himself with
after he torched the car.
But... he didn't take his own life.
He drank the booze he had with him, and left the site.
The police look closer at Kjell-Åke's past
and find concerning reports
that support the theory
that he's the one who caused Birgitta's death.
It's relevant that the landlord had a previous conviction
for very serious crimes against children.
In one case, he abused two small children...
He had, for example,
pulled their tongues out
and put salt and pepper in their mouths as punishment.
He had dislocated arms.
He had used ice-cold water...
Actions approaching torture.
He was sentenced to four years in prison
for aggravated assault for that.
He served his time, got out
and met a woman who had a 6-month-old baby whom he abused.
Among other things, he twisted the child's head until...
the child died.
I asked him during the trial if he,
when he abused the woman,
if he considered the consequences he had received
for abusing the baby to death.
He said, no, he didn't consider that.
But you were sentenced to six years' prison for killing this child.
Did that not enter your thoughts when you abused this woman?
No, it didn't occur to him, he said.
I think that had a significant effect on the court's ruling.
Life in prison is the sentence for the Lindesberg resident
who stood accused of torturing a woman to death.
He is sentenced for, among other things, murder, assault
and unlawful restraint.
He will also made to pay significant reparations to the woman's family.
It went pretty well.
But it's a shame the previous events didn't have the effect,
that we could have stopped what happened here.
If you had looked at the risk of recurrence
of the earlier things he'd done, compared to what he did to Mum.
Maybe Mum wouldn't have died. That's just how it is.
The other two involved were sentenced to probation.
They had been very willing to cooperate during the investigation.
And...
it was completely obvious that they had been living in fear
of what the landlord might do to them if they didn't take part.
He told them he had weapons, he told them he had...
Criminal friends, he told them there was a contract on...
The victim and her partner from the criminal world.
It might be difficult for us, maybe...
to understand why it would scare you,
someone just claiming these things,
but if you're living in fear, it's probably easier
to believe stories that you wouldn't in a calm situation.
At the start of the case, a burnt out car that was found
and in the car, a burnt corpse.
There could have been a suicide,
and we would have stood there with two bodies and a note.
And I think that's frightening.
The case could have ended there.
And what also occurs to me is that
there are some gaps in Kjell-Åke's timeline.
Has this happened before?
I don't know, it's just speculation and phantoms making me...
It makes my hair stand on end,
that he could've done it before and not gotten caught.
But I'm very pleased and a little proud
that it went the way that it did.
And that we hopefully stopped
a lot of evil that could've happened after.
Torture in this way...
is not something I've come in contact with in any other case.
It's a very unusual case, there's no doubt about that.
I've never met anyone like him.
The main thing is that it was scary.
How a man can be so normal and then twist into something like that.
No...
It's nearly impossible to accept.
As part of working through this, Birgitta's daughter, Elin,
goes to the house in Aspa for the first time,
hoping to get a deeper understanding of what happened to her mum.
It doesn't feel as...
It doesn't feel as desolate as I expected.
I expected it to be even more isolated than it is.
There's the road.
I mean...
It's just a stone's throw away.
I was imagining something really desolate.
Even if there's...
lots of trees, you can still see in.
If it had been completely in the middle of nowhere,
even further up in the forest,
it would be easier to swallow nobody noticing anything.
I don't get how nobody could hear, that nobody noticed.
She's walked here, she's walked the dogs...
She must have been...
limping, or...
In some way, it must have been clear...
it must have been clear that she was not well...
Everybody said they didn't know.
That gets, like...
It...
it just makes me emotional.
Subtitles: Lily Ray plint.com