The Annals of Unsolved Crime by Edward Jay Epstein Read Free Book Online

charismatic prime minister of Sweden with a radical foreign policy that had attracted worldwide attention—and concern. His assassination in 1986 bedeviled, divided, and haunted the country for over a decade.
    On February 28, 1986, at 11:21 p.m., while walking home with his wife from the Grand Cinema on Sveavägen Street in Stockholm, Prime Minister Palme was fatally shot from behind at close range as he neared a subway station. His wife, Lisbet Palme, was then shot by the assassin and critically wounded, but she survived. Palme had no bodyguards or escorts, and no one witnessed the shooting. By the time Lisbet turned in his direction, the shooter, wearing a heavy overcoat, was calmly jogging away. He then disappeared from Lisbet’s view through a tunnel at the end of the street.
    No one else saw him, and no murder weapon, or any other physical evidence, was found at the crime scene. The Swedish police were able to methodically reconstruct the timeline of the Palmes’ movements from cell phone records, but the inferences they drew only added to the mystery. Calls made between Palme and his wife and their son Marten established that the decision to go to the 9:00 p.m. movie was made at 8:00 p.m. The police checked and found no bugs on any of their phones. So, if this was a pre-planned murder, someone would have hadto follow Palme to the movie theater and then wait for him to emerge at 11:00 p.m. The assassin would then presumably have followed the Palmes to the deserted street leading to his Hötorgart subway station, shot them both with .357 magnum bullets, and escaped the crime scene. Since the murder weapon was a revolver, no cartridge case was left behind for the police to match to the weapon. Nor was ballistic matching possible on the fragmented bullets. So the killer left no trace. There were two possible explanations: either this was a professional killer who knew how to cover his tracks, or a deranged person who left no evidence by pure chance.
    The Swedish investigation focused for the next twenty-one months on the latter possibility, searching Stockholm for a deranged loner who might have been on the street that night and who had a prison record for drug abuse. Then, in December 1988, Lisbet Palme picked out of a police lineup Christer Pettersson, a brain-damaged drug user, who had previously been convicted of manslaughter. Even though she had only seen a man running away from the murder scene, Pettersson was arrested, tried, and convicted of Palme’s murder. The only evidence against him, other than that he fit the police’s profile of a loner, was Mrs. Palme’s testimony.
    On appeal, however, that verdict was thrown out because no motive had been established and no murder weapon had been found. The court found inconsistencies in Mrs. Palme’s testimony. Pettersson was subsequently acquitted on all charges, released, and died in 2004 from a head injury. No gun was ever found, although, in 2006, a Smith & Wesson .357 revolver, consistent with the type of gun used to kill Palme, was recovered from a lake. But the Swedish National Laboratory of Forensic Science was unable to match it through ballistics to the bullets fired in the assassination. No one else has ever been arrested. Even a $7 million reward failed to produce any further evidence or credible witnesses. So, although the Palmeinvestigation generated some 700,000 pages of documents and cost over $45 million, the case remains unresolved.
    There have been many theories offered to explain this unsolved crime. Even after the acquittal of Christer Pettersson, police tended to stick to the loner theory. A gunman saw an unprotected Palme as a target of opportunity, and he simply walked up to him, shot him, shot his wife, and disposed of the weapon. Another theory claimed that the Kurdish militant organization “PKK” had organized the assassination because Palme was cutting off their sources of finance. After receiving a number of tips, Swedish police