A Criminal History of Mankind (6 page)

In the early 1930s, the small town of Sala, near Stockholm, was struck by a minor crime wave. It began on 16 November 1930, when the body of a dairy worker, Sven Eriksson, was discovered in a half-frozen lake near Sala; Eriksson had vanished two days before, on his way home from work. He had been shot in the chest - apparently alter a fierce struggle, for his clothes were torn and his face bruised. He had been alive when thrown into the lake. The motive was clearly not robbery, since he was still carrying his week’s wages in his wallet. Mrs Eriksson said her husband had been suffering from a certain amount of nervous stress - he had even seen a doctor about it - but she could think of no reason why anyone should wish him dead. The police could not find a single clue to the murder.

During the next two years there was an unusual number of crimes in the Sala area, including three burglaries and two car thefts. Either the criminal was incredibly careful or he had incredible luck, for again the police could find no leads.

In the early hours of the morning of 15 September 1933, firemen were called to a house near the centre of Sala. It belonged to a wealthy mining official, Axel Kjellberg. The flames were already too fierce for any attempt at rescue. Two charred bodies - that of Kjellberg and his housekeeper - were recovered. Both had been shot in the head. The motive was robbery. Kjellberg had collected the wages for his mine on the previous day and had kept them in his safe overnight. Evidently the intruder, or intruders, had forced him to open the safe. A forced strongbox was found in the ruins.

During the next year there were a few more burglaries, but no serious crimes. Citizens formed vigilante groups to patrol the town at night. And on 12 October 1934, such a group observed that the house of Mrs Tilda Blomqvist was on fire. The vigilantes raised the alarm, as a result of which Mrs Blomqvist’s chauffeur and his wife escaped from the burning house. This time, it was possible to enter the house before it was seriously damaged. Mrs Blomqvist’s body was in her bedroom. She was dead, but there were no marks of violence. Medical examination failed to reveal cause of death. She had not inhaled smoke so it seemed conceivable that she had been suffocated before the fire began. Again, the motive was robbery. Mrs Blomqvist was a rich widow of sixty, and her cash and jewellery had vanished. Friends of the dead woman said she had been in poor health, and had been interested mainly in spiritualism and yoga. Once again, the police found themselves facing a blank wall.

Their luck began to change on 19 June 1936, when a quarry-worker named Elon Petterson was shot on the outskirts of Sala. He was bicycling back to the quarry with the week’s payroll. This time, there had been a witness. An elderly man was sunning himself on his lawn as Petterson rode past, and a few moments later, he heard the sound of shots. He walked to the road and saw two men dragging Petterson towards the ditch. They then climbed into a black American car and drove away. The man noted down the car’s number. A few hours later, Petterson died without recovering consciousness; he had been shot in the chest and stomach.

It soon became clear that the car’s number was not going to provide an easy solution. The car of that number was not American, and it had been in a garage all day; the owner had an unshakable alibi. But an American sedan with a very similar number had been stolen recently from another town. It was conceivable its licence plate had been altered. The police decided to attempt to alarm the thieves. They told the newspapers that they were looking for a black Chevrolet whose licence plate had recently been altered - giving the number - and announced that they intended to search all garages. The next day, the missing car was found parked by the roadside near Sala. The licence plate
had
been skilfully changed, obviously by a man who knew his job. That seemed to argue that he was not a professional criminal, since few criminals spend years becoming expert metal workers. The police began a slow, thorough check of all garages and metal-working shops. Finally, they discovered what they were looking for. A young worker admitted that it was he who had altered the plate. At the time, he had been working for a garage owner named Erik Hedstrom, who had a business in the nearby town of Köping. According to this witness, he had only been working for Hedstrom for a few days when he was asked to alter the plate. He did it without question. But shortly after that Hedstrom had asked him whether he was willing to take part in the robbery of a bank messenger. The man asked for time to think it over, and rang back the next day to say that he had found another job.

Questioned about all this, Hedstrom - a good-looking young man of excellent reputation - flatly denied everything. But the moment the police left his home, Hedstrom picked up the telephone and asked the operator for a Stockholm number. The police checked with the operator and discovered that it was the number of Dr Sigvard Thurneman, a doctor specialising in nervous disorders. The Sala constable who had investigated the first murder - of Sven Eriksson - recalled that
he
had been consulting a doctor about nervous tension shortly before his death. A call to Eriksson’s wife revealed that the doctor was Sigvard Thurneman.

A Stockholm detective called on Thurneman the next day, claiming that he was involved in a routine investigation about neurosis and crime. Thurneman proved to be a small, pale man with a thin, firm mouth, a receding chin and a receding hairline that made his high forehead seem immense. He was in his late twenties. With considerable reluctance, Thurneman allowed the detective to glance into his files, standing at his elbow. But the detective was able to confirm that Sven Eriksson had been a patient. So had Mrs Blomqvist.

Hedstrom was brought in for questioning, while police searched his house. He insisted that he only knew Thurneman slightly. They had been at college together, and he had occasionally consulted him since then. But while he was being questioned, a phone call revealed that the police had found a gun in his garage - of the calibre that had shot Eriksson. Hedstrom suddenly decided to confess. Thurneman, he said, was the man behind all the crimes. They had become acquainted at the University of Uppsala, when both had been interested in hypnotism. He had found Thurneman a fascinating and dominant character, a student of occultism, theosophy and philosophy. This had been in the mid-1920s. Thurneman was also fascinated by crime. One of his favourite pastimes was to devise ‘perfect crimes’. Hedstrom had joined in the game. Then, in 1929, Thurneman had proposed that it was time to try out one of the crimes they had planned so thoroughly in imagination. It was to be a robbery at the dairy where Eriksson worked. Eriksson was a patient of Thurneman’s, and Thurneman had been treating him through hypnosis. Erikson had agreed to be the ‘inside man’ in the robbery. Then, at the last minute, he had changed his mind. Thurneman was afraid he might go to the police, or at least tell his wife. So Hedstrom, together with two other men, was delegated to kill him. From then on, said Hedstrom, Thurneman had made them continue to commit crimes that he had planned in detail. Thurneman actually took part in the robbery and murder of Axel Kjellberg - he and Hedstrom wore policemen’s uniforms (which Thurneman had had made by a theatrical costumier) to persuade the old man to open his door in the early hours of the morning. Then Kjellberg and his wife were murdered in cold blood, and the house set on fire.

Tilda Blomqvist had been chosen because she had told Thurneman where she kept her jewels while under hypnosis. Her murder had been a masterpiece of planning. They had bored a hole in the wall of her bedroom (the house was made of wood, like so many in Scandinavia), inserted a rubber hose attached to the car’s exhaust and gassed her in her sleep. Then they had stolen the jewels and set fire to the house.

Faced with Hedstrom’s signed confession, Thurneman decided to tell everything. In fact, he wrote an autobiography while in prison. As a child, Thurneman had had an inferiority complex because of his small build and poor health. He was a solitary, deeply interested in mysticism and the occult. At thirteen - in 1921 - he had begun to experiment in hypnotism and thought-transference with schoolmates. He also read avidly about mysticism and occult lore. Then, at sixteen, he had met a mysterious Dane who was skilled in yoga. In 1929, he claimed, he had been to Copenhagen and joined an occult group run by the Dane. On his return to Stockholm he had started his own magic circle, gathering together all kinds of people and making them swear an oath of obedience and secrecy.

The position of cult-leader seems to have given Thurneman a taste of the kind of power he had always wanted. He used hypnosis to seduce under-age girls, and then - according to his confession - disposed of them through the white slave trade. Other gang members were also subjected to hypnosis and ‘occult training’ (whatever that meant). Thurneman was bisexual, and became closely involved with another gang member who was a lover as well as a close friend. When this man got into financial difficulties, Thurneman became worried in case he divulged their relationship - which, in 1930, was still a criminal offence. He claimed that, by means of hypnotic suggestion over the course of a week, he induced the man to commit suicide. In 1934, he placed another member of the gang in a deep trance and injected a dose of fatal poison.

Thurneman’s aim was to make himself a millionaire and then leave for South America. The two Sala murders - of Axel Kjellberg and Tilda Blomqvist - brought in large sums of money. But the ‘big job’ he was planning was the robbery of a bank housed in the same building as the Stockholm Central Post Office. The gang had stolen large quantities of dynamite - thirty-six kilos - and the plan was to blow up the post office with dynamite and rob the bank in the chaos that followed. Thurneman had also become involved in drug smuggling.

Thurneman was brought to trial in July 1936, together with Hedstrom and three accomplices who had helped in the killing of Eriksson and Petterson. All five were sentenced to life imprisonment; but after six months in prison, Thurneman slipped into unmistakable insanity and was transferred to a criminal mental asylum.

The Thurneman case throws a powerful light into the innermost recesses of the psychology of the self-esteem killer. He was the kind of criminal that Charles Manson and Ian Brady would have liked to be. His dominance over his ‘family’ was complete. Men accepted him as their unquestioned leader; women submitted to him and were discarded into prostitution. His life was a power-fantasy come true. He was indifferent to all human feeling. When his closest friend became a potential danger, he was induced to commit suicide; when a gang-member’s loyalty became suspect, he was killed with an injection like a sick dog. When the gang committed robbery, witnesses were simply destroyed, to eliminate all possibility of later recognition and identification. (Thurneman must have reflected with bitter irony that it was Hedstrom’s failure to observe this rule that led to discovery.) Thurneman had found his own way to the ‘heroic’, to a feeling of uniqueness; by the age of twenty-eight he had achieved his sense of ‘primary value’.

But why, if he was such a remarkable individual, did he choose crime? No doubt some deep resentment, some humiliation dating from childhood, played its part. Yet we can discern another reason. As a means of achieving uniqueness, crime can
guarantee
success. Thurneman might have aimed for ‘primacy’ in the medical field; he might have set himself up as a guru, a teacher of occult philosophy; he might have attempted to find self-expression through writing. But then, each of these possibilities carries a high risk of failure and demands an exhausting outlay of energy and time. It is far easier to commit a successful crime than to launch a successful theory or write a successful book. All this means that the ‘master criminal’ can achieve his sense of uniqueness at a fairly low cost. Society has refused to recognise his uniqueness; it has insisted on treating him as if he were just like everybody else. By committing a crime that makes headlines, he is administering a sharp rebuke. He is making society aware that, somewhere among its anonymous masses, there is someone who deserves fear and respect...

There is, of course, one major disadvantage that dawns on every master criminal sooner or later. He can never achieve public recognition - or at least, only at the cost of being caught. He must be content with the admiration of a very small circle - perhaps, as in the case of Leopold and Loeb, Brady and Hindley, just one other person. This explains why so many ‘master criminals’ seem to take a certain pleasure in being caught; they are at last losing their anonymity. Thurneman not only wrote a confession; he turned it into an autobiography, in which he explained with pride the details of his crimes. This is the irony of the career of a ‘master criminal’ in that unless he is caught; he feels at the end the same frustration, the same intolerable sense of non-recognition that drove him to crime in the first place. It may have been the recognition of this absurd paradox that finally undermined Thurneman’s sanity.

The Thurneman case illustrates in a particularly clear form the problem that came to fascinate me as I worked on the
Encyclopaedia of Murder
and its two successors. Thurneman was convinced he was acting out of free will, and thus demonstrating his ‘uniqueness’. But to see him as part of a ‘pattern’ of crime implies that he was neither unique nor free. Which is the truth? It only begs the question to point out that we can also see Shakespeare or Beethoven as part of the historical pattern of their time, for, as Shaw points out, we judge the artist by his highest moments, the criminal by his lowest. Creativeness involves a certain mental effort; destructiveness does not.

The question was raised in the 1890s by the sociologist Emile Durkheim in his study of suicide. Fellow sociologists were doubtful whether suicide
could
be treated scientifically, since every suicide has a different reason. Durkheim countered this by pointing out that the rates of suicide in individual countries are amazingly constant; therefore it cannot depend on individual choice. There must be hidden laws, underlying causes. Besides, there are quite recognisable patterns. ‘Loners’ kill themselves more often than people who feel they belong to a group. Free thinkers have a higher suicide rate than Protestants, Protestants than Catholics, and Catholics than Jews - who, at least in the 1880s, had the lowest suicide rate of all because Jews have such a powerful sense of social solidarity.