By Chris King • Updated: 11 Sep 2023 • 17:25
Image of Swedish police vehicle. Credit: Sundsvall/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
UPDATE: Monday, September 11 at 17:20 pm
A 57-year-old man in Värmland who kept his dead partner in a freezer has been sentenced to 3.5 years in prison.
Värmland’s district court convicted him this Monday, September 11 of breach of civil liberties, serious breach of civil liberties, serious fraud and falsification of records.
His partner’s body was kept hidden in the freezer for five years. Only when the now-convicted suspect suffered a stroke in March 2023 did he tell his brother in the hospital that his partner was dead in the freezer at home. His brother subsequently alerted the police, according to aftonbladet.se.
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July 7, 2022 at 0:51 am
A 55-year-old man was charged in Sweden this Thursday, July 6, with several different crimes in connection with keeping his dead partner in the freezer.
Prosecutor Linda Karlsson told svt.se that she feels the evidence against the suspect is good. ‘He has witnessed a great deal of the course of events’.
The crimes for which the man has been charged for are a breach of civil peace, a serious breach of civil peace, serious fraud, and falsification of documents.
Because of the length of time that the woman kept stored in the freezer and the fact that the man has used the freezer for other purposes, such as for example storing food, the breach of grave privacy is considered a serious charge.
‘Every time he opened and closed the freezer, it violated the deceased’s grave peace’, explained Karlsson.
The suspect has been in custody since mid-March this year after a dead woman was found in a home in the Värmland County town of Årjäng.
He is suspected of having access to the woman’s accounts and thereby proceeding to claim her pension. According to prosecutor Karlsson, this fraud is serious as it was systematic and involved approximately SEK 1.3 million.
Transactions were found by investigators to have taken place monthly for 62 months, from January 2018 to February 2023.
Initially, the preliminary investigation also included suspicion of murder, but these suspicions were dismissed in mid-June when the prosecutor found nothing in the investigation that could prove that the man allegedly killed the woman. However, the man himself claimed to have placed the woman in the freezer in 2018.
In mid-June, the Swedish Medical Examiner’s Office reached the conclusion that the suspect was not seriously mentally ill. As Karlsson pointed out to SVT: ‘That is something that affects what penalty he can receive’.
The man is also not suspected of having suffered from mental illness at the time of the suspected murder and can therefore be sentenced to prison.
His lawyer Stefan Liliebäck believed the result was surprising: ‘There has been a small mental examination in the past, where a doctor suspected that he might suffer from a serious mental disorder. Therefore, it is surprising that another doctor concluded that he does not’, he concluded.
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Originally from Wales, Chris spent years on the Costa del Sol before moving to the Algarve where he is a web reporter for The Euro Weekly News covering international and Spanish national news. Got a news story you want to share? Then get in touch at editorial@euroweeklynews.com
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