Jessica Friberg

Jessica Friberg is a former student at Sigtuna College for the Humanities, Hannah Östlund’s friend, and one of the girls caught between a degrading school initiation and the violence that resurfaces years later. Investigators eventually identify her and Hannah as murderers, while the story’s fractured recollections make Jessica both a trace of Victoria Bergman’s past and a figure Sofia Zetterlund struggles to reconcile with that past.

Identity and school background

Jessica belongs to a group of girls whose lives intersected at Sigtuna College for the Humanities. The school’s former students include Victoria Bergman, Hannah Östlund, Fredrika Grünewald, Charlotte Silfverberg, Henrietta Dürer, and Annette Lundström. Jessica is not presented through a detailed independent biography; instead, her identity emerges through this school network and through the later investigation into what happened among its members.

Annette Lundström’s account connects Jessica to an initiation ritual during the first week of a new school year. Fredrika Grünewald and girls around her selected three students for especially humiliating treatment. Wearing dark capes and homemade pig masks, the group took the girls to a tool shed and poured ice-cold water over them. Annette says that two of the selected girls fainted and that the third swallowed something and vomited, but the account does not identify which outcome belonged to Jessica. It does, however, establish that Jessica was among the three targets, alongside Hannah and Victoria.

The ritual involved more than a small, clearly bounded group. Fredrika, Henrietta Dürer, and Charlotte Silfverberg were blamed, but Annette stresses that other girls had taken part. She identifies Fredrika as the person who proposed what followed the initial humiliation, and later recollection connects the ordeal with the girls being served dog waste. The episodes make Jessica’s school history one of collective participation and blame: the surviving account names particular instigators but also points to a larger group whose involvement was not fully acknowledged.

The initiation and its surviving record

The school incident is recalled in two forms: as Annette’s retrospective testimony and as footage viewed by investigators. In the film, people wearing capes and homemade pig masks appear, followed by three girls kneeling behind a large plate. Jeanette Kihlberg recognizes Hannah and Jessica from a school yearbook; she identifies the thin, fair-haired girl beside them as Victoria. The footage gives the old account a visible record, but it does not make Jessica’s individual actions or reactions clear. Her place in the scene is established by recognition and proximity, not by a detailed account of what she did.

Annette’s evidence also helps connect the ritual to Jessica and Hannah’s departure from the school. Jeanette understands the film as recording the initiation that got out of hand and led to both girls leaving. Their absence from later school life thus becomes part of the investigation’s chronology: the humiliating episode is not merely a remembered cruelty but a turning point after which the two friends disappear from the community being examined.

Jessica’s relation to Victoria is complicated by the way memory surfaces. During a recollection of Greece, Victoria describes Hannah and Jessica as present together at a kitchen table, criticizing her; she then arrives at the confused recognition that the two are not really two people and that there are three. Later, Sofia hears Jeanette name Hannah and Jessica as killers. Her immediate inward response resists the accusation, holding onto an image of them as apathetic schoolgirls who liked dogs. These passages do not establish that Jessica was literally a component of Victoria’s identity. Rather, they show how Jessica’s remembered schoolgirl image persists within a fractured account even as the investigation assigns her a radically different role.

The investigation and the murders

The police trace Jessica through the school’s former students and through evidence linking her to Hannah. When Jens Hurtig reports that their names have been identified and their personal details are expected, Jeanette Kihlberg asks whether one of the women may be missing a ring finger, placing Jessica, Hannah, Victoria, and Madeleine Silfverberg within the investigative possibilities. The clue does not itself establish Jessica’s identity or guilt; it shows how the inquiry is testing links among women whose pasts overlap.

Jeanette later learns that Jessica and Hannah are both missing. After she presents evidence to Prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist, he agrees to issue arrest warrants: the grounds are reasonable in connection with Fredrika Grünewald’s murder and stronger in the case concerning Per-Ola Silfverberg. The distinction matters. At that stage, the evidence does not support treating every suspected killing as equally established. Later, Jeanette tells Sofia Zetterlund that Jessica and Hannah killed Karl Lundström and Per-Ola Silfverberg and were also responsible for the death of a homeless woman in the cavern.

The investigation’s account of Jessica is inseparable from Hannah’s. A film from Hannah’s collection shows the school ritual, while another recording depicts former members of the Sigtuna group gathered around a pigpen. Jeanette recognizes Per-Ola and Charlotte Silfverberg, Madeleine, Hannah, Jessica, and Fredrika among those present. Jessica is visible within the group, but the footage is not presented as a complete explanation of the later murders. Its force lies in assembling people from the school’s past in one frame and giving the investigators another connection to examine.

Hannah Östlund and the shared ending

Jessica is repeatedly identified as Hannah’s friend. In the account of the killings, their names are paired, and the evidence does not determine which woman directed or dominated the other. Jeanette considers the possibility that the two shared delusions and a persecution complex, describing the pattern as shared psychosis; she also recognizes that the available information cannot tell her which woman was the driving force. The novel therefore gives their partnership a consequential but unresolved shape: they act together in the police account, yet their individual motives and relative responsibility remain indistinct.

The two women are eventually found dead in a car, their bodies burned beyond recognition. A hose had carried exhaust gases from the car’s tailpipe into the interior, and both women were wearing seat belts. On that evidence Jeanette infers that they died by suicide together; subsequent dialogue treats their deaths as a suicide. The initial forensic work still requires DNA confirmation of the bodies’ identities and measurement of carbon dioxide in their blood to help establish the cause of death. Jessica’s end is thus both a conclusion to the active search for the missing women and a case whose identification and precise medical findings require forensic confirmation.

Narrative significance

Jessica’s characterization rests on a stark reversal. In the school recollections, she is one of three girls subjected to an initiation and one of the students who leave after it. In the later police investigation, she is named as a participant in killings, including those of former members of the same school world. The novel does not supply a continuous account that explains every step between those roles. Instead, school testimony, old footage, missing-person inquiries, and Sofia’s divided recollections gradually place Jessica’s name in different and difficult-to-reconcile contexts.

That structure also limits what can be claimed about Jessica herself. The evidence firmly establishes her friendship with Hannah, her presence among the targeted girls at Sigtuna, her recognition in recordings, her disappearance, her identification by Jeanette as a killer, and her death alongside Hannah. It gives much less access to her private motives or to the precise development of her relationship with the other people involved. Jessica’s narrative importance lies in that contrast: an apparently fixed school memory becomes part of a present-day murder investigation, while the past returns not as a complete explanation but as fragments that alter the meaning of who survived, who was harmed, and who later became a perpetrator.