Thorildsplan Metro Station

Thorildsplan Metro Station is the setting of the first boy-murder crime scene investigated by Jeanette Kihlberg. The body was found in bushes only a few metres from the entrance on Kungsholmen, placing the investigation at the edge of a busy public transit site and establishing a location that would be understood in relation to later crimes against boys.

Setting and Discovery

When colleague Jens Hurtig called to report that something had happened at the station, Jeanette was driving through Stockholm and was told to get there at once. The crime-scene sequence identifies the site as Thorildsplan Metro Station. The precise position of the body sharpened the location’s significance: it lay in bushes close to the entrance, where Jeanette judged it could not have remained unseen for long.

The police screened and covered the scene, but the sloping ground meant that people at a higher vantage point could still see it. Photographers with telephoto lenses gathered beyond the cordon, waiting for a dramatic image; Jeanette saw no journalists at the scene. The place is thus presented not as a sealed-off wilderness but as an exposed urban edge, difficult to conceal from public view even as investigators tried to protect it.

The First Crime Scene

The victim was a young adolescent found naked inside a black garbage bag, with his hands bound by duct tape. Jeanette approached the bushes and examined the circumstances of the discovery with the investigators. The site’s proximity to the station made the discovery especially difficult to reconcile with the idea that the body had been left unnoticed for an extended period.

The station became the starting point for a wider investigation. A second young boy was later found at Svartsjölandet, and similarities in the violence led Jeanette to conclude that police were likely dealing with the same perpetrator and a double murder. Four weeks after the first boy was found, a third boy was discovered at the boules club below Danvikstull. Those later scenes are elsewhere; their connection to Thorildsplan is investigative, as the first discovery provides the initial case against which subsequent crimes are compared.

Narrative Significance

Thorildsplan Metro Station anchors the investigation in an identifiable public setting rather than an isolated landscape. The nearby entrance, the obstructed but not wholly hidden crime scene, and the photographers outside the cordon all underscore the tension between a place used in ordinary city life and the concealed violence uncovered there. As the case expands to other locations, the station remains the first point in the sequence through which Jeanette and her colleagues begin to recognize a pattern.