“The corpses are his self-portraits”

“The corpses are his self-portraits” is Sofia Zetterlund’s central formulation of the murderer’s possible motive. She interprets the preserved bodies not simply as concealed evidence, but as deliberate works through which the killer presents an image of himself: a series of artworks that preserve the boys’ childhood while expressing the maker’s shame about his own sexuality. The phrase gives Sofia and Jeanette Kihlberg a way to connect the handling of the bodies with a desire to be seen, while leaving the murderer’s identity and the theory itself uncertain.

The formulation and its context

Sofia introduces her theory during a meal with Jeanette, first saying that they may have missed important aspects of the perpetrator’s psyche. She has already decided not to begin with her theories about castration and cannibalism; instead, she opens with shame and the murderer’s desire for recognition. The tables nearby are empty, so the two can speak without someone overhearing. Jeanette listens with interest as Sofia develops her account.

The expression condenses a specific chain of interpretation. Sofia links castration with embalming, then reads mummification as a means of preserving a young boy’s childhood permanently. In her account, the preservation is not incidental: it is part of the murderer’s artistic conception. The body becomes both the material of the work and an image of the person who made it. “The corpses are his self-portraits” names that double role, joining the apparent subject of the artwork—the preserved child—to the maker’s self-representation.

Shame, gender, and artistic display

Sofia associates the supposed artwork with shame about the perpetrator’s sexuality. The absence of genitals, in her reading, is a mark through which the murderer communicates something about himself. The phrase therefore does not mean that the corpses resemble the killer in any literal or visual sense established by the scene. It describes Sofia’s interpretation of their symbolic function: the killer’s treatment of the bodies is imagined as a form of self-disclosure.

Sofia immediately recognizes a limit in the certainty of her explanation. Having spoken of the murderer as a man, she considers that the killer could instead be a woman, but admits to herself that it is easier to discuss the perpetrator as a man. That hesitation matters to the phrase: its masculine pronoun reflects the language of the theory, not a confirmed identification. The artistic reading is also presented as Sofia’s hypothesis, not as a fact established about the killer’s intention.

Jeanette extends the idea from authorship to audience. She asks whether the murderer might have wanted the bodies to be found, noting that they have not been hidden very effectively. She connects this possibility to an artist’s wish for attention and appreciation, drawing on her own experience of having been married to an artist. Her response helps Sofia see that the bodies might be arranged not only as private expressions but as a show intended for viewers.

Recognition, capture, and the unfinished work

Sofia agrees that the murderer wants to put on a show and be seen. She adds that he may not be finished and may continue until he is caught. Jeanette then proposes that the killer has something to tell the world and will eventually be unable to bear doing so in silence. In this exchange, discovery and capture become part of the same proposed logic: if the bodies are self-portraits, their visibility could be essential to the work’s purpose. The killer’s desire to communicate would make exposure less a failure of concealment than a desired outcome, though the conversation does not establish that this is actually the murderer’s motive.

The formulation also leads Sofia toward the possibility that the perpetrator documents the crimes. She mentions photographs, notes, and a compulsive collection, and asks whether Jeanette knows the concept of l’homme du petit papier. She thinks of an exhibition space of her own in her apartment as she raises the idea. This association broadens the discussion from the preserved bodies to the recording and collecting of material, but the scene offers no confirmation that the murderer keeps such an archive. The proposed self-portrait thus remains an interpretive key rather than a solved clue: it ties preservation, shame, display, and a possible wish for recognition together while retaining uncertainty about both the perpetrator’s identity and the theory’s accuracy.