Castration as a ritual of lost sexual identity

Castration as a ritual of lost sexual identity is the theory Sofia Zetterlund offers to explain why the murdered boys were both castrated and embalmed. She reads the combination as symbolic rather than incidental: in her account, the preserved bodies express the perpetrator’s shame and a perceived loss of sexual belonging. The theory shifts the investigation from the acts alone to the meaning Sofia thinks the killer assigns to them, while her own qualifications leave that meaning uncertain.

The Interpretation and Its Evidence

Sofia presents the theory in conversation with Jeanette Kihlberg as an explanation of how castration and embalming might fit together within the perpetrator’s logic. Mummification, she suggests, permanently preserves the boys’ childhood. She imagines the killer as an artist whose works are also self-portraits: the preserved bodies communicate something about the maker, while the absence of genitals marks shame concerning sexuality. In this reading, embalming is not simply a means of preserving the dead; it is part of the message Sofia believes the perpetrator is making.

Her account depends on a symbolic chain. The boys’ childhood is held in place through preservation; castration signifies a loss connected to sexuality; and the resulting figures become images through which the killer represents himself. Sofia later sharpens the last point: the self-portrait is not only about shame but about a loss of sexual belonging. She compares the imagined process to painting, except that the artist works with formalin and embalming fluid rather than oils. The comparison makes the preserved bodies legible, in her hypothesis, as constructed works rather than merely evidence of a crime.

Childhood and the Perpetrator’s Identity

Sofia connects the symbolic reading to an account of an offender who, she says, claimed a female gender identity and understood abusive games introduced to his daughters as normal parent-child interaction. As Sofia interprets that account, those games allowed the offender to revisit and sustain his own childhood, along with what he perceived as his true sexual identity. She therefore treats the castration of the boys as a ritual of return: an act that might repeat or revive an earlier experience of sexual identity and its loss.

This connection is presented as a possible route into the killer’s psychology, not as proof that the offender in the boys’ murders is the same person described in Sofia’s example or has the same history. Her proposal is that the murders are extreme enough to warrant searching for an equally extreme offender, and that an early change in sexual identity might help explain the symbolism. When Jeanette asks whether she means a physical sex change, Sofia leaves the possibility open but says the change could instead have been mental. Her formulation thus makes the theory broader than a claim about bodily transition: it concerns an identity altered or experienced as lost, whether voluntarily or involuntarily.

A Hypothesis, Not a Solved Motive

Jeanette understands the proposed connection between castration and reliving something, but her response does not establish that Sofia’s interpretation is correct. She finds the account logical while remaining dubious, and she still wonders why Sofia began by discussing cannibalism. The conversation preserves this gap between an arresting psychological explanation and the unresolved details of the case. Sofia’s ability to make the acts cohere into a single theory does not itself confirm the theory’s accuracy.

Sofia also catches herself speaking too categorically about the perpetrator as a man. Although she has been describing a male offender, she recognizes that the killer could be a woman and that using a male pronoun is simply easier in the conversation. That qualification matters to the theory’s status: the explanation is built partly through Sofia’s provisional image of who the perpetrator might be, and she acknowledges that the image may not fit. Her account offers investigators a possible direction, not an identified person or a demonstrated motive.

Meaning and Limits

The concept gives the missing genitals a place within Sofia’s reading of the crime: castration becomes a sign of lost sexual identity, while embalming preserves the childhood body that the imagined artist turns into a self-portrait. Together, the acts form a proposed ritual in which preservation and loss operate at once. The boys are, in Sofia’s interpretation, made into lasting images of a history the perpetrator cannot otherwise express.

At the same time, the explanation relies on interpreting a person’s claimed gender identity and childhood experience as keys to violence. The evidence here records Sofia’s criminological speculation; it does not establish that gender transition, gender identity, or a particular childhood history causes the murders. Keeping that distinction clear is essential to understanding the concept: its narrative force lies in how Sofia attempts to decode the crimes, while its uncertainty remains visible in her corrections, Jeanette’s reservations, and the unresolved question of who the perpetrator is.