Dead children with no papers are worth less than dead Swedes with careers and money in the bank

Dead children with no papers are worth less than dead Swedes with careers and money in the bank is Jeanette Kihlberg’s indictment of the unequal value assigned to victims by the institutions meant to investigate their deaths. The thought crystallizes when a well-funded case concerning Per-Ola Silfverberg is set against Jeanette’s work on the murdered boys: the contrast is not abstract but measured in police budgets, delayed resources, and the unrecognized labor needed to make an investigation possible.

The thought and its immediate cause

Before Jeanette leaves police headquarters, Dennis Billing tells her the budget allocated to the Silfverberg case. As she drives past Rådhuset, she realizes that even this preliminary sum is more than ten times the budget she received for investigating the murdered boys. The disparity gives the expression its force. A victim’s worth, in practice, appears to be reflected in how much the police are prepared to spend pursuing the case.

Jeanette’s comparison is sharpened by what that earlier shortage demanded of her. Four months before, when the first two bodies were found, she had not been given enough money to commission a decent perpetrator profile. She had to organize one herself. Her thought therefore measures not only the money now available for another case, but also what the boys’ investigation lacked at a crucial earlier stage: professional resources that could have supported the search for whoever killed them.

Budgets, work, and recognition

The difference extends beyond the official allocation. Sofia Zetterlund would now have to do the work without payment or recognition, and Jeanette finds that prospect embarrassing. She decides not to put pressure on Sofia and to give her the time she needs. Her response recognizes a further inequality concealed by the budget figures: an investigation can draw on expertise while leaving the person who supplies it uncompensated and unacknowledged. Jeanette’s restraint is personal, but it cannot repair the institutional shortfall that has made unpaid work necessary.

The episode makes the investigation budget a practical measure of attention. Money determines whether Jeanette can obtain an adequate profile, while the absence of money transfers work onto her and Sofia. The boys’ case is thus disadvantaged twice: it receives fewer formal resources, and the effort needed to compensate for that lack is treated as something individuals must absorb. Jeanette’s sentence compresses those consequences into a comparison between children without papers and Swedish victims associated with careers and money in the bank.

What counts as a life worth investigating

Jeanette turns the comparison into a series of possible measures. Is a person’s value indicated by how many mourners attend the funeral, the value of the estate, media interest in the death, or the deceased’s social influence? Does it depend on country of origin or skin colour? Or can it be read in the resources allocated to a murder investigation? The questions widen her observation from a single budget decision to the criteria by which institutions and the public distribute attention. No one measure is offered as a final answer; the sequence shows how readily status, wealth, publicity, and origin can become proxies for whose death matters.

She recalls the sums spent investigating the deaths of prominent public figures: fifteen million kronor for Anna Lindh’s murder by the time the Court of Appeal upheld Mijailo Mijailović’s sentence, and, by then, three hundred and fifty million kronor on the investigation into Prime Minister Olof Palme’s death. Within the police, the first amount was widely regarded as cheap in comparison with the second. These figures make Jeanette’s unease more pointed. Large expenditures on highly visible cases can be treated as understandable or even economical, while the murdered boys’ investigation had not received enough for a basic perpetrator profile.

A wider pattern of unequal credibility

Elsewhere in the investigation, Jeanette encounters other circumstances in which influence and the credibility granted to a complainant matter. Ulrika Wendin had reported Karl Lundström for rape seven years earlier. Jeanette tells her that the case could be reopened and that the evidence against Lundström is strong enough to give her a good chance of winning. Ulrika does not want to begin the process again. The exchange does not resolve the earlier case, but it places the possibility of legal recognition beside the personal cost of pursuing it: the existence of a potential route to justice does not mean that a victim wishes, or is able, to take it.

Jeanette also hears that an initiation ceremony at Sigtuna boarding school was hushed up. Annette Lundström says that Fredrika Grünewald’s father was a close friend of the headmistress and one of the school’s largest donors, and presumes this was why. The account concerns a different setting and does not establish a direct link to police budgeting. It nevertheless resonates with Jeanette’s question about the value assigned to lives: money and connections can shape which incidents receive attention and which are suppressed.

The expression is therefore both a condemnation of a measurable disparity and a question about the system that produces it. By setting the boys’ restricted investigative budget against the far greater sums attached to other deaths, Jeanette makes resource allocation visible as a judgment about whose loss merits sustained public effort. Her concern also reaches the labor and testimony that figures cannot capture: who must work without recognition, who is believed, and who is left to decide whether seeking justice is worth beginning again.