User:Kronhjorten/Atlas Vampire

Apartment house Sankt Eriksplan 11.

Layout of flat and samples of evidence taken from the crime scene, on display at Stockholm's Police Museum

Vampyrmordet eller Atlasmordet kallades ett olöst svenskt mord som utfördes på 1930-talet.

Den 4 maj 1932 på valborgsmässoafton, hittades den 32-åriga prostituerade Lilly Lindeström brutalt mördad i sin etta på Sankt Eriksplan 11 i Atlasområdet i Stockholm.

Lindeström was being visited by a friend named Mimmi, when her telephone rang at about 18:30. An unfamiliar man's voice asked if she was Lilly Lindeström. The man wanted to come up, and said he was close by. Lilly went to meet him, and Mimmi went down to the ground floor of the building. Just after seven, Lilly went down to her friend, and asked to borrow a condom. A short while later, she came down again to borrow another. Mimmi saw that Lilly was naked beneath her coat. That was the last time Mimmi saw Lilly alive.

At 21:00, Mimmi rang Lilly's doorbell to ask if she wanted to come to Djurgården, an island in central Stockholm. She received no answer, and assumed that Lilly had gone with a customer instead. Mimmi later tried to reach Lilly but she was still not home, and on May 4 Mimmi went to the police. The police forcefully entered Lilly's apartment and found her lying dead on an ottoman. The apartment had been meticulously cleaned. Even Lilly's clothes were carefully folded on a chair. On top of the corpse, sofa cushions were neatly piled, with the bedspread beneath. Lilly's head was crushed by three strong blows.

In the apartment, the police found a blood-spattered ladle, which had likely been filled with blood. The ladle was however to light to have been the murder weapon. One of the policemen who investigated the case later told a crime reporter for the newspaper Aftonbladetthat this information led to suspicions that the murderer had drunk the victim's blood. This led to the attack being known as the "Vampire murder", as well as the "Atlas murder".

The police never solved the murder. No leads indicating a potential suspect were found. No fingerprints were discovered at the scene, and none of the victim's acquaintances or other relations were found to be the murderer.

18 years later, a crime reporter for Aftonbladet conducted an interview with the retired detective John Berg for a series of articles on unsolved crimes. Berg brought forth a paper box containing a dish towel with reddish-brown flecks, and the dented ladle with similar flecks on the bottom. The case was officially discarded in 1957, at which point the amount of time allotted law enforcement to close a case had expired.

On March 6 2012, the TV show Veckans brott (Crime weekly) discussed the "vampire murder". Leif G. W. Persson spoke of a used condom that was found placed between the vitim's legs, saying that the victim likely knew the murderer and the police could likely, with modern DNA methods, have apprehended him. Persson also pointed out that the flecks on the ladle were not confirmed to be blood, and that the crime was likely unrelated to cannibalism or vampirism.

References

• Heed, Börje (1989). Brottsplats Stockholm: kriminalhistorier från sena söndagskvällar i Radio Stockholm. [1] [Crime scene Stockholm: Criminal stories on late Sunday evenings on Radio Stockholm. [1]]. Stockholm: Sveriges Radio. p. 184-189. ISBN 91-522-1683-7.
• Veckans brott, SVT, 2012-03-06

[[Category:1932 in Sweden]]