Murder of Yuri Krylov

The murder of Yuri Krylov makes the investigation of missing and undocumented children a case of repeated, deliberate violence: Yuri is the second young boy whose killing Jeanette Kihlberg investigates within two weeks, and the forensic findings suggest that the two murders are connected.

Discovery and identification

Jeanette is called to a crime scene on Svartsjölandet after an elderly couple find a boy’s body. Unlike the first victim, the boy can be identified: Yuri Krylov is Belarusian and had been reported missing in early March from an immigration centre outside Upplands Väsby. The migration authorities have no record of relatives for him in Sweden or in his home country. His identification gives the investigation a name and a point of departure, but not a family who can explain his disappearance or establish where he went after leaving the centre.

The difficulty echoes the search after the first boy’s death. The missing-children register yields no apparent match, while informal inquiries through church contacts and the Salvation Army produce no information about a child who fits the victim. A City Mission worker directs police toward children who gather beneath Central Bridge, but describes them as hard to reach: they may accept food and then disappear again. Against this background, Yuri’s recorded absence from an immigration centre is a rare trace in a case involving children whose lives can be poorly represented in the systems police usually consult.

Forensic findings and case linkage

A detailed forensic post-mortem was authorized in Yuri Krylov’s case, the most extensive type of examination used in Sweden for the gravest crimes. Ivo Andrić explained that the body’s condition was consistent with prolonged immersion, but the examination of the ribcage revealed too little water in the lungs to indicate drowning. Jeanette therefore concluded that Yuri had died before his body was placed in the water. The distinction established that the water was part of the handling of the body, not the cause of death.

The examination also found that Yuri’s genitals had been removed with the same precision as in the earlier boy’s case. Other findings indicated extreme violence, including extensive bleeding beneath the skin on his back, which suggested that he had been whipped. Andrić raised the possibility that the body might also contain high concentrations of Xylocain adrenalin, but that remained a hypothesis pending analysis by the forensic chemistry laboratory.

Taken together, the repeated precision and signs of violence led Jeanette to believe that the same perpetrator was responsible for both deaths. The investigation was consequently treated as a double murder, though the evidence available at the scene did not yet identify the killer. The findings tied Yuri’s case to the first boy’s without resolving how either child had been reached or why the bodies had been treated in the same way.

The wider pattern of disappearance

Yuri’s case also belongs to an investigation in which a child’s absence could be difficult to distinguish from a life that had never been securely recorded. One boy encountered in the inquiry had arrived in Europe from China with a rehearsed account of being orphaned and left without care; he carried a new, unused mobile phone and fifty dollars, while a contact number for use after escaping a camp was hidden in his shoe. The man who supplied the phone, money, and number claimed to have sent more than seventy children to different parts of Europe over four years. The evidence does not establish that Yuri followed this route or was connected to that man, but it sharpens the case’s central investigative difficulty: children could be moved across borders, lack relatives who would report them missing, and leave few reliable traces. Jeanette’s later observation that such children seemed to have appeared rather than vanished captures the reversal at the heart of the inquiry. Their deaths were visible; the circumstances that had brought them within reach of a killer remained obscure.

Subsequent discovery and the emerging pattern

Four weeks after the first boy was found, a third boy’s body was discovered at the boules club below Danvikstull. Experts described it as successfully embalmed, adding a new form of body treatment to an investigation already marked by repeated violence. The discovery widened the case beyond the two deaths Jeanette had initially treated as a double murder: Yuri’s killing was part of a continuing sequence, even as the evidence available in his own case had yet to identify who was responsible.