by johan

Following Palme’s death, the country was cast first into turmoil and then into confusion. Over the past three decades, one chief investigator after another has failed to solve the case, and today the official inquiry remains open. In 2010, Sweden removed the statute of limitations on murders, specifically so that investigators could continue their search for Palme’s killer for as long as it takes. More than 10,000 people have been questioned in the case, whose files now take up more than 250 metres of shelf space in Sweden’s national police headquarters. It is the largest active murder investigation archive in the world.

The mystery of Palme’s death has become a national obsession. “One of my earliest memories is of my parents discussing who killed Palme,” a friend I met while living in Sweden for the past couple of years told me. “I can’t describe to you how deep this is in the Swedish soul.” The murder has inspired films, plays and music, and has even been cited as a factor in the worldwide explosion of Scandinavian crime fiction. A number of Swedish amateur detectives have devoted much of their lives to solving the case. Investigating it has led some of them to break the law and driven others to something approaching madness.

Some Swedes call this Palmesjukdom – “Palme sickness”. More than 130 people have falsely confessed to the crime. “Swedes are breastfed with the idea of this horrible trauma,” Måns Månsson, a director who made a film about the murder, said. “It’s genuinely hard to let go.”

The forum thread on Flashback.org, probably the biggest and longest-running discussion forum in Sweden, has over 113,000 posts. I read the Filter article and the book about "Skandia-mannen" that they mention in the article when it came out last year and the theory definitely seems plausible, but so do many of the others proposed throughout the years. I doubt we will ever know for sure, and even if the police investigation comes to a conclusion there will still be a lot of people that simply will not accept it. Too much time has passed and too many errors were made from the start.