The (Possibly) Unsolved 1986 Assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme
On the evening of 28th February 1986, Sweden’s prime minister Olof Palme and his wife, Lisbet, were making their way home through central Stockholm. They had just been to the cinema, an impromptu outing, and, as they often did, they had decided against bringing bodyguards. Palme prided himself on living as close to an ordinary life as possible. He didn’t want his role as leader of the country to create a barrier between him and the people. “You saw him in the streets all the time,” recalled Swedish ethnologist Jonas Engman. “You could speak to him. There was an intimacy to it.”
At 11.21pm, as the couple walked down Sveavägen, one of Stockholm’s busiest streets, a tall man in a dark coat walked up behind them. The man put one hand on Palme’s shoulder, and with his other hand fired a single round from a gun into the prime minister’s back. He grazed Lisbet with a second bullet before fleeing up a flight of 89 steps that links the main street with a parallel road above.
It was a Friday, and Sveavägen was packed with people ambling between bars and restaurants. Bystanders rushed to try to revive Palme, who now lay on the pavement in an expanding pool of blood. Six minutes later, he was taken to the nearest hospital, where, shortly after midnight, he was officially declared dead. It was later determined that the bullet had severed his spinal cord and that he had died before hitting the ground.
Although more than 20 witnesses saw the gunman, these facts are still more or less everything that the public knows for certain about the killing of the most controversial leader in Sweden’s modern history.
To his fellow countrymen, Palme was more than a politician. For more than 16 years, he had led Sweden’s leftwing Social Democratic party, which was in power for much of the 20th century. The party was responsible for many of the policies that people typically associate with Sweden, including high taxes and a robust social welfare system. Palme had come to embody not only the party, but these values, too.
For this, Palme was loved by many – his predecessor Tage Erlander called him “the greatest political talent Sweden has seen this century” – and despised by others. He was distrusted by some on the left for being from aristocratic stock, and distrusted by aristocrats for being a class traitor. Paranoid corners of the Swedish right made wild allegations that he was a Soviet spy. Contra, a popular conservative magazine, sold dartboards featuring a caricature of his face.
From the moment when the first emergency call was made after the shooting, Sweden was thrown into chaos. Recordings of early conversations between police headquarters, officers at the scene of Palme’s shooting and staff at the hospital are mostly expressions of disbelief. “What? No! Our prime minister?” one police officer asks. “There’s total confusion here,” another person says. “Is it really Olof Palme who’s been shot?”
On Sveavägen, where the shooting occurred, shock seemed to have taken over. Police failed to cordon off the crime scene properly, covering too small an area. One of the bullets was not found until two days later, when it was picked up from the pavement by a passerby. Mourners arriving in the hours after Palme’s death slipped past the tape to place flowers near the pool of blood; by trampling the crime scene, they rendered future searches for the killer’s footprints useless. Key witnesses were allowed to leave the scene without being interviewed. Löfgren, the broadcast journalist, was out in the area that night and hailed a cab to take him home. The driver had witnessed the killing but had not been questioned, Löfgren recalled with disbelief. “I phoned the police and said: ‘This guy here claims that he was a witness to the murder, and he’s still out driving a cab?!’”
Other protocols were ignored or forgotten. The Stockholm police have a system for searching the inner city street by street, but it was never deployed. Squads of police tore around looking for the gunman, but had almost no information about what he might look like. Trains, ferries and flights continued as normal, while the roads and bridges out of the city remained open for hours after the murder. At that stage, it seemed as if nobody was really in charge. It was “sports week”, a holiday when many Stockholmers head for the mountains. Hans Holmér, the chief constable of Stockholm county police, was skiing in the north country with his mistress.
Holmér had never conducted a murder inquiry before, but when he got the news early the following morning, he rushed back to the city and took charge of the investigation. He looked the part, at least, with a craggy face, hard-boiled demeanour and a strong line in leather jackets. From his first television appearance, he played the role of the hero that the horrified nation could rely on. The public soon flooded his office with bouquets and chocolates, and newspapers hailed him as Sweden’s Clint Eastwood.
In the days and weeks that followed, the country struggled to come to terms with what had happened. The last murder of a Swedish government official was in 1792, when King Gustav III was shot by assassins at a masked ball. When the on-air DJ at the national radio broadcaster found out about Palme’s death, he was at a loss for what to do, the author Jan Bondeson writes in his book Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme. The only emergency protocol was to break open a small glass box in the studio marked KD for “the King is Dead”. It contained a cassette tape of sombre classical music.
But it soon became clear he was out of his depth. His first major step was releasing a sketch of a suspect seen running from the scene. Dubbed "the Phantom," the man had a long nose and thin lips—but with gaps in the timeline of sightings, no one could even be sure the suspect was the killer. Nevertheless, the sketch ran in every Swedish newspaper, prompting 8,000 tips from people convinced their neighbour or acquaintance was the Phantom.
Seventeen days after the murder, the first suspect was arrested—someone linked to far-right groups who believed Palme was a Soviet agent. He was soon released. Holmér then latched onto another theory: that the Kurdish militant group PKK had ordered the assassination. The PKK had been labelled a terrorist organisation by Palme’s government, and Holmér seemed convinced they were behind it, despite having almost no evidence. In early 1987, police raided a Stockholm bookshop tied to the PKK and arrested 50 members. The raid produced nothing useful.
The press, once enamoured with Holmér, turned on him. "Holmér must go!" screamed headlines. Some compared him to Inspector Clouseau from The Pink Panther. By March 1987, he resigned in disgrace. An official inquiry later described the first year of the investigation as "characterised by alarming aimlessness and confusion."
Things only got stranger. Holmér, now a private citizen, continued pursuing the PKK theory. In 1988, he was caught trying to smuggle illegal wiretapping equipment into Sweden. Even worse, it emerged that Sweden’s justice minister, Anna-Greta Leijon, was in on the plan.
Meanwhile, a new lead investigator turned his attention to Christer Pettersson, a violent alcoholic who had previously stabbed a man to death with a bayonet. He had no clear motive, but when Lisbet Palme picked him out of a line-up, he was convicted and sentenced to life in 1989. However, on appeal, it was revealed that police had told Lisbet beforehand that the suspect was an alcoholic. Pettersson was released later that year. In a now-iconic photo, he returned home clutching bottles of vodka and Bailey’s, as if to toast his freedom. Stockholm bars soon began serving a drink called "The Killer"—a mix of vodka and Bailey’s.
Pettersson didn’t disappear from public life. In the years after his release, he charged newspapers and TV stations large sums for interviews in which he was baited and bribed for a confession. He hinted at the possibility he was guilty, but never confessed. He died in 2004. If he did kill the prime minister – which many Swedes continued to believe – he took the secret to his grave.
By the start of the 1990s, so much time and money had been spent fruitlessly pursuing Pettersson and the PKK that basic questions about the night of the murder remained unanswered. Where was the murder weapon, which was believed to be a Smith & Wesson .357 magnum revolver? Why were witness reports of men with walkie talkies near the site of the killing not taken seriously? Was the police incompetence too extreme to be accidental?
Over the next two decades, the official investigation floundered. Although at least four different lead investigators took over the case between 1988 and 2013, not a single credible suspect was taken into custody.
Into the void opened up by the lack of official progress flowed a stream of amateur investigators pursuing their own solutions to the case. No detail about Palme’s life or death, no coincidence or inconsistency proved too small a foundation on which to build one conspiracy theory or another.
No theory was too outlandish: Palme’s wife killed him because of his serial infidelities. The people who killed Palme are the same ones who killed JFK. It was feminists in cahoots with Scientologists. It was a planned suicide and the trigger was pulled by Palme’s son Mårten. No, the entire murder was staged. Or maybe the gunman was the Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky, who had met with Palme in 1984 to ask for help getting his own son out of the USSR: Tarkovsky’s 1986 film The Sacrifice contains a scene shot at the corner where Palme was gunned down. “These are mostly made up by sick people,” Mårten told the New York Times in 1998, referring to the conspiracy theorists fixated on his father’s death. “I’ve had some of them call and apologise to me after they received medication and got better.”
Some theories, including several that appear more credible, came from committed Palme obsessives known as privatspanarna, or private detectives. These are people who have devoted significant chunks of their lives to finding a solution to the case. The first privatspanarna emerged in the wake of Holmér’s failed raid on the PKK, and were sometimes accused of harassing witnesses and interfering with the official investigation. Many used live re-enactments at the scene of the murder as an investigative tool. Månsson recently described these reenactments to a reporter as a “mix between seance and ceremony … one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced.” At one meeting of privatspanarna in 1998, Christer Pettersson reportedly showed up. He drank several rum and Cokes, claimed Palme was killed by a group of rightwing Italian freemasons with links to the mafia, told sex jokes and left.
Over the years, privatspanarna have ranged from serious investigative journalists to crackpots. Some have become professional conspiracy theorists, fuelling a cottage industry of Palme mania. The well-known journalist Sven Anér published five books about the case between 1988 and his death in 2018.
Solving the case is still of paramount importance to Sweden, Österberg said. A Sanningskommission press release rather bombastically claims that “this murder must be settled for the credibility and survival of our democratic society”. To other private investigators, however, the unsolved case is less of a pressing threat to Sweden’s democracy and more of an intellectual challenge. Louise Drangel, a long-time privatspanare, likens it to a complex Agatha Christie puzzle. “And you have to be sharp to get all the pieces together,” she said.
In recent years the work of some journalists and privatspanarna has begun to yield theories that are influencing the official police investigation. Last summer, a Swedish magazine called Filter published the results of a 12-year investigation that claimed the assassin was a witness in the case named Stig Engström (Swedish police are in agreement). Engström is better known in Sweden as the “Skandia man”, because he worked for the Swedish insurance giant, which had offices next to the murder site.
Politically, Engström was what is known in Sweden as a moderat – firmly to the right of Palme. Thomas Pettersson, the journalist who led the magazine investigation, discovered that Engström had previously served in the Swedish military. Pettersson alleges that Engström would have had weapons training and access, through a friend with a large firearms collection, to the sort of .357 magnum with which Palme was apparently shot. Records from the Skandia office show that Engström left the building at 11.19pm, two minutes before Palme was killed.
Engström killed himself in 2000. His wife, who he divorced the previous year, believes he was too much of a coward to assassinate Palme. But she recently told the Expressen newspaper that police questioned her twice in 2017. Expressen also reported that Thomas Pettersson, the journalist behind the investigation, has been questioned by police as an expert in the case.
Police are exploring a far more unsettling theory, too, which was developed in part by the most famous person to become a privatspanare, Stieg Larsson. In addition to writing the bestselling Millennium trilogy, Larsson had a long career as an investigative journalist. The theory he was working on when he died of a heart attack in 2004 is that the murder was carried out by an international conspiracy consisting of two groups with different motives but a shared belief that Palme should die.
The first group was made up of pro-apartheid members of South Africa’s security and intelligence services. Palme was an outspoken opponent of the apartheid regime, and his government had given millions in humanitarian aid to Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Theories about South African involvement in his murder have circulated since the earliest days of the case. They became particularly popular in 1996, when a former commander of a South African police hit squad alleged that Palme’s killing was part of Operation Long Reach, a top-secret programme to neutralise opposition to the apartheid government at home and abroad. In 1982, members of this operation had killed the anti-apartheid activist Ruth First in Mozambique and bombed the ANC’s London office.
The second group Larsson identified consisted of rightwing extremists within Sweden, whose networks Larsson had been investigating even before the Palme killing. One of the men Larsson believed was involved in the assassination plot was a Swedish mercenary, Bertil Wedin, who had allegedly worked for the South African spy in charge of Operation Long Reach. Larsson claimed that Wedin helped to recruit Palme’s assassin, a Swedish extremist. Wedin denies any involvement in the case and has never been charged. “I have nothing to lose from the truth coming out since, luckily enough, I am not the murderer and had nothing to do with it all,” Wedin said in an interview published in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in 2014. Swedish police investigators visited South Africa in October 1996 and said they were unable to uncover evidence of this conspiracy.
Both of these lines of inquiry – the Skandia man and the so-called “South Africa track” – were around in the earliest days of the investigation. So why is information previously unknown to the police still being discovered by journalists? Here, too, there are multiple theories. In the first 15 years after the murder, at least four official inquests were launched into Hans Holmér’s original investigation. The incompetence of that investigation gave rise to the popular theory that Palme was murdered by rightwing extremists within the police force, of which there were a good number. Holmér himself was in charge of one particularly fearsome group of plainclothes police officers who had a reputation for brutality and expressing support for Nazi ideology.
Others believe the problem was that Holmér and subsequent investigators were under enormous, although unofficial, pressure from the Social Democratic government to find a solution that would be easy for society to accept. First, the Kurdish separatists seemed best. Then Christer Pettersson, an alcoholic with a violent history – a figure, as the author Jan Bondeson puts it, “whom no one would have missed”.
Ultimately, the case remains closed but not necessarily solved. New evidence could reopen it. As for Palme’s son, Mårten, he believes in the "Skandia Man" theory. “I believe he’s guilty,” he said simply. But in Sweden, the debate continues.
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