VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED. THIS PROGRAM CONTAINS STRONG IMAGES.
A woman rang the police early in the morning.
She said she had gone to see her stepfather, as she called him,
and check on him, since he hadn't answered the phone.
I thought it was weird that he wasn't awake,
and there was a blue glow in the bedroom
from when the TV is on standby.
After awhile, I went in through the veranda door.
But I don't even make it into the apartment,
I just stand by the veranda door frame,
and see he's lying there in a pool of blood.
MEAT AXE MURDER
Early in the morning on the 29th of November, 2019,
police receive a call from a woman.
She's gone to visit her stepfather
who lives in idyllic Gustavsberg, just outside of Stockholm.
Once there, she makes a terrible discovery.
It was a Friday morning,
2019, November, that we received information
that a dead man had been found in Gustavsberg.
And it was decided early on that our team would take the case.
We begin doorknocking in the area to try to find witnesses,
and it's important to check out the crime scene as quickly as possible,
to get an idea of what might have happened, basically.
When entering the apartment, we don't see signs of a break in,
but once inside, we see drops of blood and blood deposits,
like contact marks on surfaces, drops of blood in the living room...
We continue into the apartment,
at the far end of the apartment is a bedroom,
and by the entrance to the bedroom is a bedroom door,
and on the back edge of the bedroom door is a fairly large bloodstain,
blood smeared in the direction of
the bedroom, from the living room.
which means something bloody has moved.
And, on the bed, a dead man is lying on his back,
with his legs hanging over the edge of the bed, down to the floor.
It's quite bloody around where the man is lying,
and there are splashes on the walls.
He has quite a number of injuries
from violence with some kind of sharp-edged implement.
That's the first thing you see.
A sheath for a knife is also found next to the body,
and on the floor, by the feet, is a folding knife.
Based on the injuries, we quickly conclude he's been murdered.
We have contact with the forensics
who are out doing a crime scene investigation,
and it turns out the balcony door was standing open,
there's blood on the balcony door frame,
furniture in disarray, signs of a struggle,
before he died.
The apartment is searched for signs of a struggle, a fight,
anywhere other than the bedroom,
and we don't find any.
When we enter the bedroom to analyse the blood deposits there,
if you look at where the splash comes from, their direction,
their position, how concentrated the blood is in the pictures,
you can quickly establish the blood is coming from where the man is.
So the violence has mostly occurred while the man lay in bed.
On further inspection of the apartment,
drops of blood are found on the living room floor,
blood prints are found on several surfaces,
where they've come in contact with something bloody.
Blood deposits could be followed into a small cupboard
which is furnished as a little gaming room,
where he'd set up a computer, among other things.
There were brackets on the wall from which guns were hanging.
There were very many guns in the apartment,
hanging from walls and leaning in corners against walls.
when we look more closely at them, we see they're airsoft guns.
Fairly realistic airsoft guns.
And in one place, one of the guns is missing,
and one the wall where the gun should be, there's traces of blood.
We start profiling the murdered man,
and interviewed people close to him.
We got the sense that he lived a fairly anonymous and quiet life.
He'd previously been a Coastal Ranger
and had a certain interest in guns.
The murdered man is a 59-year-old divorced father,
a trained paediatrician with several years on the job.
We're both from Östergötland,
from the same small suburb near Norrköping.
And we both worked out a lot,
so we were both hired as security
for parties and stuff,
one, because we could keep calm,
and, two, we had the physical capability
to remove those who might have been drunk or rowdy.
That was the start of our friendship.
He could disappear for periods of time.
He went out and brought in a bit of extra cash from shows and stuff.
Breaking bricks and planks, through the karate he did.
But he was always kind, never disagreeable,
never disagreed with anyone.
He was the friendliest, kindest person I've known.
Someone who would never have been able to consider hurting anyone.
And I didn't understand how this could have happened.
He was brutally murdered at home,
and he was a fairly normal person,
not the kind of person we usually deal with.
He was unknown to police.
That's not usually the case in our regular murders, so to speak.
Police ask the question of who could have wanted to hurt the man,
but when they ask the stepdaughter,
something emerges that may turn out to be a motive.
It turns out this woman is listed as living there and has a bed there.
The stepdaughter mentions, among other things,
that she thinks a man from the Gävle area
who is behind this, and that he actually wants to get to her.
Police are now very interested in getting information about the man.
They search the police register
and consult local police in Gävle, where they see he lives.
It turns out he's had some form of relationship with the stepdaughter,
and has been violent toward her.
Then we find out he's in custody for that exact thing.
So he couldn't have been in Gustavsberg and done this.
Police are still without a suspect.
But forensics continue to work at the crime scene,
in the hopes of finding something that could advance the case.
In connection with a bloodstain pattern analysis,
we swab quite a lot of blood from the visible blood traces
of the veranda door which leads out from the bedroom.
Blood is also found in the gaming room connected to the living room.
Blood is also found on the inside of the door to the gaming room,
and analysis shows this blood does not come from the victim.
There was also blood from someone other than the victim
in the living room,
and this blood belonged to the same person.
We can't say when the person gets the injury the blood comes from,
but it shows that this other person has been injured at some point.
They might have been injured in the bedroom
in connection with the victim's murder,
and then has gone out into the living room and moved about.
Alternatively, he may have been injured outside the bedroom,
and then gone into the bedroom.
It's not unusual with sharp-force trauma or knife violence,
for the perpetrator to be injured as well,
and to receive a wound that bleeds at the location.
A realistic scenario is that there was a struggle by the bed
that left the perpetrator injured.
The stepdaughter's listed residence was with the victim in Gustavsberg,
but lived with a guy in one of Stockholm's suburbs.
and we want to interview the stepdaughter's partner
to get a sense of his relationship to the victim,
and if he posed any threat to the victim,
or any real reason to invade the victim's space.
We decided to visit him at work and interview him.
He worked at a bus depot here in Stockholm.
He's a regular guy without previous contact with police.
He has a job and minds his own business, generally speaking.
He was very accommodating and...
But, in an interrogation setting,
he was cryptic in answering questions.
We get the feeling he isn't telling the truth.
It was to the extent that we start to suspect him.
So we pause the interrogation.
My colleague, Bosse, went and called the boyfriend's dad,
and asked a few questions.
Talking to the father, I find out the son has had his car,
and used it all day and during the evening,
and the plan was to return it and leave it with the father
in time for the father to take it to his night job.
But that didn't happen.
So we returned to the interrogation and I tell the boyfriend
that what he's said so far doesn't add up.
"Come on, tell us what happened."
And he started talking pretty much straight away.
He borrowed his father's car and driven around,
as he put it, "a bunch of acquaintances"
in Greater Stockholm, who had run various errands.
And when we pressure him to tell us who he drove around,
he just says, "With regard to my own safety, I dare not say."
That's when we knew he was involved in some way.
He was very cryptic.
Naturally, he was asked if he had been in Nacka
or Gustavsberg at the time, and he says he hadn't.
So we contact the on-call prosecutor
and ask if we should take coercive measures against the boyfriend,
but were told we didn't really have enough.
We were frustrated but understood the prosecutor's decision.
But we felt he had more to tell
and was involved in this crime in some way.
That was our feeling when we left.
That very evening, we received witness testimony
that someone had seen a car at the crime scene.
On the evening of the 28th of November,
two people are walking along the footpath outside the apartment
where the man is found dead.
As we walk by, there's a commotion up there on the balcony.
Yes, it seemed to me it was a fight.
As we walk up here, I see a car.
Right on the road here, with headlights on.
Parked facing the apartment.
Just as I passed by, three or four people jump over the balcony rail.
Someone falls on the grass,
but no one speaks, so I figure it's a burglary.
So I try to memorise the registration number.
The plate is easy to see, it's completely lit up by a light.
As I stand approximately here, I hear a man shout from the car,
in a very overexcited voice,
"Get in! Come on, get in!"
We realised that, despite our proximity to them,
they didn't notice us at all.
I call and report what I believe to be a break-in.
I couldn't give an exact address because I didn't know,
so I described more where the apartment was.
And I come back in the morning around 7 AM,
and see them carry out a stretcher, and there are police and ambulances.
That evening, I'm there again and see a notice on the door,
that they want to hear if anyone has seen or heard anything suspicious.
So we call in and report this.
When we look up the car, it turns out it's the partner's father's.
And he's told us the son had the car the night prior.
Police receive another witness testimony from the crime scene,
on the same evening as the murder.
Another witness says he'd walked by the location
where a woman walks up to a car,
knocks on the window, and a person exits the car
and walks toward the door to where the victim lived.
The witness continues walking away from the crime scene,
and then sees the woman and man walking around the back veranda
where he also hears a scream that he wonders about.
Due to the testimonies and identification of the car,
investigators have enough to arrest the stepdaughter's partner.
He's taken to the Flemingsberg police station
where he is informed he is a suspect in the crime,
and they begin to interrogate him.
As we begin the interrogation,
before he has time to say anything, his lawyer says,
"My client will be invoking his right to remain silent
during the interview."
In order words, the lid is on.
The interview continues, but he was totally silent.
Not a peep.
We were silent, both he and I.
It was the lawyer who talked during the interview.
And at one point during the interview, he said to his client,
"Don't look at Stefan, look in another direction."
Because he found it difficult.
I waited, as it felt like something might happen at some point.
While the interrogation is being held,
police seize the car they suspect the partner has used.
The car is thoroughly examined,
and forensics find bloodstains in several places.
On closer inspection, it turns out it comes from both the victim
and the person who left blood in the apartment.
During the interrogations he was asked about a lot of circumstances
that looked very bad for him.
He suffered through them and found it very difficult to sit in silence.
But the lawyer said, "My client has the right to silence,
and there's not much to talk about. It's his choice not to speak."
Police examine the partner for injuries,
and compare his DNA with the blood from the car and apartment.
Other than a few bruises, he has no injuries,
and it's not his blood they found.
but the partner continues to stay silent during interrogations,
and doesn't say whose blood it might be.
If you're innocent, you might explain your innocence.
For us, the suspicion grows.
But there could be other reasons for not wanting to talk.
Since the partner remains silent,
the need arises to find something else to link him to the crime.
Police search his apartment but don't find anything significant.
But, after an interview with his boss,
it's revealed that the partner has a locker at work
which hasn't been looked at.
So we search the partner's locker at work.
We find a black garbage bag.
Inside is a rifle. It turns out it's an airsoft rifle.
There is also a meat axe in the bag. And it's bloody.
Analysis of the meat axe shows the blood to be that of the victim.
But forensics find no fingerprints or other traces on the seized items
that can be linked to a perpetrator.
The autopsy shows a large number of wounds
to the man's head and neck area, as well as his legs.
And there are at least two different types of weapons.
Something very sharp, and something causing blunt-force trauma.
There was a clear square wound,
or injury in the victim's head,
and the pattern matches very well with the meat axe
that was found in the partner's work locker.
Police hopefully now have sufficient evidence
to indicate that the partner is highly involved in the murder.
The question now remains, who are the other three people
that witnesses saw at the scene?
But in parallel to the continued investigation,
new information suddenly surfaces.
The stepdaughter contacts police and confesses to the murder.
We had been given information that a woman was at the address,
so she was naturally of interest,
given the information she herself presented.
So we try to weigh up what the stepdaughter has told us.
She might be involved in the crime.
She is the link to the victim, after all.
When you get a confession, it's satisfying,
because it assists further investigation.
What's significant, and what makes us suspect her,
is that she borrowed his car and not given it back.
She's got his card and used it to withdraw money after the crime.
But when we analyse the call data from her phone,
and checked witness statements,
we were able to dismiss her as the perpetrator,
as she hadn't been at the scene at the time of the murder.
We book an interrogation with her and her lawyer,
and during that interrogation, she withdraws her confession.
Police receive no explanation for the stepdaughter's confession,
and suspicions against her are dismissed.
But the question remains,
who is the woman whom witnesses saw at the crime scene?
When police analyse the partner's phone traffic,
they find something interesting.
A phone number turned up,
and when it was run through our register, it was a woman's number.
And she had been involved in an attempted murder...
the same evening.
Bosse and the other investigators obtain access to information
regarding the investigation of the attempted murder.
They find out it occurs on Nathorstvägen in Johanneshov,
just 45 minutes after the murder in Gustavsberg.
There, the woman was found in the company of a man
with knife wounds to the throat, and another man with bloody clothes.
We also find a note
from an observant police who had encountered a guy in the area.
He was wearing work clothes
and was assumed to have nothing to do with this.
But she recorded this person's ID information anyway.
We don't know what happened, it's quite turbulent.
You have to initially embrace the chaos.
None of these people really want to talk to police,
but we know someone has been injured with a sharp implement,
so we have reason to believe a crime has been committed.
On this side of the ambulance stands a younger middle-aged man.
I approach him and ask who he is and if he's seen anything.
He doesn't live here.
He's on his way through and sees the ambulance.
He's clean and uninjured,
I do a quick assessment
and look at the other people my colleagues are dealing with.
Two of them are bloody.
The woman is very worked up and screaming.
The guy I'm talking to is different from the other two.
He answers my questions and I find him quite...
cold considering the context.
None of the other three take any notice of him.
They don't address him, don't make conversation with him,
they're just carrying on while I talk to him.
It's getting noisy in the ambulance, so we have to put resources there.
I note this person's ID information and then he can leave.
And when we saw the note,
it turned out to be the stepdaughter's partner.
We then discover glass shards outside a damaged door.
But we don't get any real explanation here at the scene
of what's happened or where he obtained his throat injuries
or who caused them.
But in connection with the incident, police involved
have seized CCTV footage from the stairwell,
where a window has been smashed.
In the footage, the woman, the man with throat injuries,
and the man with bloody clothes can be seen.
The stepdaughter's partner can also be seen in the footage.
So here we have the four people who were at the crime scene.
So there's strong focus on obtaining the seizures from that case.
It turns out the case was closed,
and the seizures were discarded.
So a firetruck was sent in the morning to try to get them here.
Luckily, the clothes hadn't been collected or destroyed,
and remained in police storage.
The clothes are collected and sent immediately for forensic analysis.
Meanwhile, the woman and men are arrested.
We weren't confident regarding the next phase of the investigation.
We knew we had a lot of work ahead of us in finding out who did what.
When the blood from the apartment
is compared with the DNA from the new people in the investigation.
It turns out the blood belongs to the man with throat injuries.
He's 29 years old and previously known to police.
It turns out the 29-year-old has been at the crime scene
and he claims self defence, that he was attacked
as they enter the apartment.
He says there's a struggle then, and that he stabs the victim twice.
That's despite the victim having around 20 injuries,
both stab wounds and blunt force trauma.
Stefan commences interrogation with the other man.
He's 27 years old and is also known to police.
He denies everything, he hasn't been in Gustavsberg.
He's quite upset, questioning,
and doesn't understand where this is coming from.
The woman didn't say much.
At this point, we can't tie her to actually having done anything,
so the prosecutor lets her go.
But we begin wiretapping her phone.
We didn't really know if she'd been in Gustavsberg,
but there was reasonable suspicion of her.
While the woman is held under surveillance,
the analysis of blood from the 29-year-old
and the 27-year-old's clothes is completed.
It turns out that both of them have bloodstains from the victim on them.
The 27-year-old is informed there is blood on his clothes,
so he understands he has to admit to being on the scene,
and says he was in Gustavsberg,
that he went into the apartment through the veranda door,
but that's it.
He doesn't say anything else about what's going on in the apartment,
and he still hasn't explained how he got blood on him.
And I wonder which of them is telling the truth.
Has the 29-year-old done all the damage,
or was the 27-year-old also involved?
The bloodstain pattern analysis makes it clear
he's got bloodstains on him from both the victim, Mikael,
and his friend, the 29-year-old.
Despite interrogations with the 29 and 27-year-olds,
questions remain regarding what occurred at the scene,
and who is guilty.
But the wiretapping of the woman's phone starts to provide results.
It turns out she's had a role in this crime,
that she's been in the apartment and has,
we suspect, at least, seen parts of the incident.
She also expresses significant concern regarding one of her phones,
which we manage to secure through a search of her apartment,
and in analysis of her phone,
it emerges that she has witnessed the murder.
During the search of the woman's apartment,
a bag is also found
that she is seen carrying in one of the surveillance films.
And inside the bag, an airsoft gun is found.
The woman is arrested again,
and a new interrogation commences with her,
and she is confronted with the new evidence.
She then confessed she was at the scene.
She felt terrible about the whole situation,
and felt a bit tricked by the 29-year-old,
that he'd lured her out to the apartment,
and she started telling us that there was a plan behind it all.
The plan was to go there and,
as she tells it, steal these airsoft guns that were very valuable.
He talks about an apartment where there are replicas,
and that he already has buyers lined up,
10,000 per replica.
We travel through Gustavsberg and get to a building,
and I get out of the car.
I look inside and the whole apartment is dark.
There are blinds, but they're a bit twisted so you can see the replicas
all the way from the footpath, inside the apartment.
So I thought surely no one was home.
And when we get along the side of the building,
I see a terrace that's been left open.
She and the 29-year-old enter.
They go in and get the guns and then it all goes wrong.
I assume he puts up some resistance so there's a fight in there.
I can't see anything. It's very dark.
But I understand there to be a conflict between two people.
There's heavy breathing and so on,
so I run out to the car.
I ask for help. I show him the entrance and he goes in.
There's still loud screaming, and I go back in,
and then it goes totally quiet.
Then I just run out and jump in the car and when I get in the car,
I'm literally met by blood spurting from the 29-year-old's throat.
She says it's dark in there and hard to see what's happening,
so she hasn't been able to describe any part of the incident.
But there are text messages where she describes what she's seen.
She's told friends how she sees the victim bleeding out.
She doesn't want to admit that later during questioning,
instead, she says she hasn't seen anything.
She can't explain why she wrote what she wrote.
It comes from somewhere, and she's the only one who knows.
Our theory is that they've decided to go to Gustavsberg
to steal these airsoft guns that were in this apartment,
and there's been a struggle in there,
ending in the victim in his bed, badly stabbed,
and maybe even hacked with an axe,
and they're totally indifferent to the victim and leave him there.
So we think he dies quite quickly at the scene.
Everyone involved has different roles,
the boyfriend who drove.
That's what can be proven, anyway, that he drove the car there.
And drove them from the scene.
He's looked after at least a few weapons.
The 29-year-old has told us about his self defence situation.
In contrast to the 27-year-old who is just there, or so he says,
and gets blood on him.
From both the victim and his friend, the 29-year-old.
You have to wonder what really happened.
We don't know.
If, for example, the 27-year-old was also involved in the murder.
It's entirely possible that a person can use two different weapons.
You either have one in each hand or use one after the other.
In early June, 2020,
the trial commences against all four people suspected in the murder.
But it's still unclear as to who made the 20 stab wounds,
and the injuries from the meat axe.
You're watching him from the kitchen table, what happens next?
As soon as I come in, I see how he stands up from the kitchen table,
and goes totally mad and just flies at me.
I thought I was going to die. I screamed, "Help!"
And he keeps trying to stab me with this thick knife.
And it was no small knife, it was a big knife.
Where are you when you're attacked?
Maybe two steps in from the bedroom.
Yeah, from the doorway, it's maybe one or two steps in.
We're searched the whole apartment for signs of a struggle,
somewhere other than the bedroom, but we couldn't find any.
And then you stabbed him with the knife in his lower stomach?
Yes. And I stab him to get away from him.
There are three wounds quite close to one another in the stomach.
But you know which one you did,
despite lying on top of him as you stab him?
I know I stabbed him once.
And both the knife wounds you've made,
-you've done while still in the bed? -Yes.
Okay. Because, you know, on the door and shelf which are near the bed,
there's blood that comes from you going in a downward direction.
How could that have happened then?
I don't know. I can only tell you the story as it happened.
But the blood pattern analysis,
29-year-old's blood in the apartment,
and the 20 wounds on the victim's body show events
didn't happen how the 29-year-old describes.
The blood comes from where the man is lying.
The violence has mainly been committed while the man is in bed.
You can see the violence is repeated from...
Exactly, and it's too much to just be one time,
there are stains here and there.
And they're at slightly different heights.
It's reckless violence that has been committed against the victim,
and that's what causes us to not really believe it's self defence.
Then there's witness testimony that
the woman has collected the 27-year-old,
who we also believe to have been
by the victim when he's murdered,
but the incident has such a short timeline.
We therefore believe that
it was the 29-year-old who fought with the victim,
and dealt most of the injuries to the victim.
When trials in the district court and court of appeals are over,
the 29-year-old is sentenced to 16 years prison for murder.
The woman receives five years prison for aggravated robbery,
but is acquitted of complicity in the murder.
The partner is sentenced for aggravated protection of a criminal,
to one year in prison.
And, since it can't be proven how involved the 27-year-old has been
when the victim was stabbed to death in his apartment,
he's sentenced to one year in prison
for aiding and abetting aggravated theft.
We've managed to prove the course of events.
Where we didn't get further is proving who instigated it all,
and who was the recipient of these guns.
We only had traces from one person in the apartment.
Had we not obtained the seized property from Nathorstvägen,
it would probably have been harder to put the chain of events together.
That people have been prosecuted, it's an ending.
Even if it's a terribly tragic ending.
But I can consider it finished,
and so, hopefully, can his family.
Subtitles: Lily Ray plint.com