Palme

(This unpublished English version is more detailed than the Swedish version)

Who killed Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme?

Olof Palme, the former Prime minister of Sweden, was murdered on February 28, 1986. The crime is still not solved and it is possible that during the twenty years that have passed the murderer himself has died, and that no conviction is possible.  Yet, the question of who the murderer was, can still be answered. In Sweden, a sizable proportion – perhaps the majority – of the population have come to accept that a violent alcoholic, who died last year, Christer Pettersson, was the perpetrator, although he had earlier been acquitted in the High Court of Appeals (Svea hovrätt). In spite of this acquittal, even the police investigators appear to have continued to regard Pettersson as the main suspect in spite of the acquittal, and they continue to attempt to collect new evidence against him. The Chief Public Prosecutor even tried to reopen the case against Pettersson but the Supreme Court decided that no new important evidence had been submitted, and declared that there were still alternative hypotheses that had not been fully explored by the Chief Prosecutor in the case. 

The main evidence against Pettersson was that the Prime Minister’s widow, Lisbet Palme – who was present at the murder and briefly observed the perpetrator running away from the crime scene – identified with great certainty Pettersson as the murderer, and it was her certainty over this which succeeded in convincing both the general public and the police investigators that the identification was correct. Yet, most people do not realize that numerous scientific studies have shown that this kind of ”certainty” in identifying a suspect does not at all mean that the identification is in reality a correct one. In the USA there are several cases of false convictions that are now on record, where the convicted men have been later acquitted when DNA analyses have proven their innocence. In most of these cases the false convictions were due to false identifications. In 1956, long before formal studies revealed the fallibility of human judgments, Alfred Hitchcock’s had produced the film The wrong man showing that justice could be completely mislead in this way..  In Great Britain the problem of using witness identifications as a sole basis for securing convictions, was subject to a judicial investigation that resulted in the Devlin Report, a report that influenced the Swedish Court of Appeal in its decision to free Pettersson.

The legal assessment of Lisbet Palme´s testimony is in full accordance with the scientific analyses that have been made, both concerning the witness psychological analysis of how her statements came to centre on Pettersson.  It is also in accordance with a later experimental investigation using the video recording made of the actual identification parade in which Lisbet Palme picked out Pettersson. The video was shown to American students, who did not know the identity of the suspect. When they had no further information about the suspect, their success at picking out Pettersson as the suspect was no greater than expected by chance, but when they were told , that the suspect  was an alcoholic – a fact  that had been released to the Swedish public and was known to Lisbet Palme prior to the line-up – no less than 75 % of the students chose  Pettersson.  Lisbet Palme´s spontaneous comment when she saw the line-up was: ”One can immediately see who is an alcoholic.”

In spite of both the legal and the scientific reservations concerning the value of Lisbet Palme´s testimony, the police investigators, the media and the general public seem to keep to their gut feeling that her identification of Pettersson was after all correct. An explanation for this may be that when a crime victim is confronted with a possible perpetrator, the victim can become easily overwhelmed by the feelings she experienced at the time of the crime. These feelings become then transformed into a certainty that the suspect must be the perpetrator, and the feelings are passed on to those who hear the witness if they are unaware of these psychological mechanisms.

If Christer Pettersson was not the murderer, then who was? The former police inspector Börje Wingren led some of the very first interrogations that were carried out during the weeks immediately following the murder in 1986. It is the results of this investigation which provide the basis for his claim to know who the murderer was. Wingren argues in his book He shot Olof Palme (from 1993, which is still only available in Swedish) that the true murderer was actually the very first suspect, the so-called ”33 year old man”, who was arrested twelve days after the murder, but who became later eliminated from the investigation. Wingren´s account of the facts in this case seems not just plausible but convincing, which makes it all the more curious that his book, even in Sweden, is virtually unknown.  But then there is probably a simple all too human reason for this:  Wingren´s conclusion is seen to be at variance with the popular and perhaps now convenient opinion that Pettersson was the murderer.

Let me briefly summarize Börje Wingren´s account of facts. Olof Palme was murdered at 23.21, on February 28, 1986, on the street Sveavägen in Stockholm. Earlier in the same evening the ”33 year old man”, who we will call by his initials, VG, was observed in a café a few hundred meters away. It is established that VG talked at length to three women in the café who described his appearance, his clothes and his shoulder bag. The witnesses told the investigators that VG had been rather belligerent in expressing his hatred for Olof Palme (which other witnesses also testified to). They had remarked that he was not drunk but he ”smelled of garlic”. The three women  left the café at 22.35 with VG still there , about 45 minutes before the murder. About 15-20 minutes after the murder, two other witnesses observed a person who closely matched VG´s description and clothing when he sneaked into a cinema. Wingren calls this a ”classical hiding place” for a person like VG who loved Hollywood movies. Wingren then gives the reader a coherent chain of evidence about what happened.

VG was dressed in a green knee-length pilot jacket with a hood, tight jeans and high boots. The original first statements – and it is these which are of course of prime value – from various witnesses who saw the murderer running away, correspond well to the description of VG and his clothes (but not with those of Pettersson and his clothes). A witness (AH), who tried to give first aid to Olof Palme after he was shot, described how the murderer ran away with fast, vigorous steps and that he was dressed in a knee-length jacket, probably with a hood. Another witness (LJ) who was in an adjoining street, saw the murderer run past this street toward a long flight of stairs (in total 89 steps) and then observed how he ran fast up the stairs with 2-3 steps at a time.  This would imply that the murderer was vigorous and in good physical condition (which is inconsistent with that of Pettersson who was an overweight alcoholic).  This witness then followed after the murderer up the stairs and observed another witness, witness N, who later described that the running man’s knee-long jacket was at that time unbuttoned and that he was trying to close or open a little bag. Winberg believes that the murderer was then hiding the bag with the weapon in it under his jacket. Shortly after the witness N´s observation, yet another witness, witness S, observed a running man with a half long jacket. S later identified the suspect VG from a witness parade, although he did hesitate in his choice between VG and another person in the line-up. About ten minutes after the murder, further down the street which ran from the top of the stairs,, another witness, ID, was stopped in his car by a man who was insistent on wanting the witness to drive him from there. This man was described as having a hood over his head, and something hidden under his jacket, and had only one glove; when the police took in VG for interrogation, he had only one glove. The witness also spontaneously remarked that the man smelled of garlic. When ID refused to drive him, the man ran into a cemetery from where it is only a short distance to the cinema where VG was observed. The witness ID was furthermore able to pick out VG from a witness line-up, but the value of this testimony was questioned and VG was released and never tried in court.

Winberg used VG´s jacket as a source of more incriminating evidence. One witness, JA, from the vantage point of his car in its stopping position at a red light, had seen the murder run away. When JA was shown VG´s jacket along with six other jackets he pointed out VG´s jacket as that of the murderer. According to JA, the murderer had tight jeans, and ran with long, vigorous steps ”like an elk”. Another witness, LL (who first called the alarm number) remembered that the murderer had jeans that did not reach the feet, and he, too, selected VG´s jacket as that of the murderer. The witness AH (the one mentioned above who tried to give first aid to Olof Palme) was shown the pictures of the jackets and also pointed out the same jacket as the other witnesses. She had not seen the face of the murderer, and she was shown photos of VG and the others in the identification parade with the upper parts covered so she only saw the men from the knees and down. Under these conditions, she immediately pointed out VG. As it happened VG had actually kept this pilot jacket stored during the winter until the day before the murder. There were some small traces of detonating composition on the jacket, but quantities were considered to be too small to be used as certain incriminating evidence.

An interesting detail is that VG although he otherwise normally had a moustache, shaved this off shortly before the day of the murder.. Winberg calls this ”the moustache trick”, that is a perpetrator changes his appearance at the time of a crime, so that it will later be difficult to recognize him, when the moustache has grown again. The witnesses who saw him on the days before the murder all agreed that he did not have a moustache, but VG flatly denied having shaved it off. Again, the moustache trick seems also have been inspired by American action movies.

Winberg mentions many other interesting circumstances. VG was a regular guest at a restaurant, which was situated only 60 meters from Olof Palme´s entrance door to his home in the Old Town of Stockholm. VG would often stay there for hours. He also had delivered newspapers on the same street (but on the other side of the street from Palme´s home). VG claimed that he never used a fire-arm, yet in a photo taken in California, he is seen standing on a shooting-range holding a revolver of a similar type to the murder weapon. VG even applied for permission to carry a weapon for a security company (an application which was declined).

If there was so much in the way of circumstantial evidence, why was VG released? Two things seem to have been decisive: First, the key witness ID had been shown pictures of VG and some others before the proper identification parade and did not identify VG from the photo. This is of course a serious procedural mistake, but it does not diminish the value of the testimonies from the other witnesses. Second, two and a half months after the murder, VG was able to provide a possible alibi for the critical time 22.35-23.35 of the murder. He claimed to have met two boys at the café, and these boys confirmed that they had met him. Nevertheless, there appears to be some uncertainty about his alibi. How can the boys, so long afterwards, remember that it was exactly this night and this time they met him? Winberg believes that it could easily have been on another occasion, because they say that VG had showed them his camera, and VG himself had said that he did not bring his camera with him on the night of the Palme murder.

Winberg refrains from speculations about any possible international contacts that VG may have had. He is only interested in who fired the revolver. Speculations about collaborators easily lead to wild conspirational theories that are difficult to investigate without the help of the perpetrator himself. Winberg, however, mentions that in VG´s address book there were 2,293 names, and among these was the witness IB, who two weeks before the murder had contacted a politician warning her that Olof Palme was about to be murdered; an American man was said to have offered two million Swedish crowns for Palme´s murder. The name of this man was also included among the names in VG´s address book.

If then there is good reason to believe that VG was the actual murderer, it was a crucial mistake to eliminate him from the investigation. Winberg does not conceal his disappointment with the prosecutor for this decision, and unfortunately it is this, his emotional attacks on the prosecutor, which makes the book somewhat difficult to read. Winberg is not a professional writer, and it is left to the reader of the book to separate all the facts he presents from the emotional attacks, but as far as the facts are concerned, we have been unable to find any mistakes. Winberg – in agreement with witness psychology – stresses that the very first statements from the witnesses are the most important and that the first few days of an investigation often are decisive for the outcome.

Winberg´s book was published in August 1993. A few months later, on December 3, VG vanished without a trace from his home in the U.S.A., where he had moved. He was found murdered a few weeks later, on January 7, 1994. He had been shot in the head, left without clothes and identification papers, and was identified merely from his watch and his ring. Since he had been eliminated from the Palme investigation, there would seem to be uncertainty as to whether a final confirmation of his identity was ever made. A man was later convicted of this murder, but an American citizen group has taken up the case in supporting the innocence of the convicted man ..

Assuming VG is dead, a fate which now has also befallen the other major suspect, Christer Pettersson, neither of them can be brought to court, since courts cannot decide the guilt of a deceased person. Nevertheless, there are other methods to arrive at the truth about past events. The murder of a Prime Minister is not just a crime; it is also an important historical event. As such any attempt at providing as accurate and true an account as possible of this event is clearly justified.  The suggestion proposed here is that future research into the identity of the murderer could be authorised to be carried out by scientists possessing the appropriate competence. Researchers with competence in law, historical methods, statement validity analyses and other disciplines could then collaborate in a joint attempt to clarify what actually happened. A scientific commission with broad scientific competence ought to be created with its mission to look at the forensic evidence that can help us answer the question, who killed the Prime Minister. The suggestion may come at an appropriate time. By all accounts the police investigations have come to a standstill, and a scientific re-analysis may well provide the concrete leads to give a new impetus to the police investigation in order to solve the crime before the period for prosecution expires, which will be in 2011.

Nils Wiklund, Assoc. Professor in Forensic Psychology

Adrian Parker, Assoc. Professor in Psychology