Hannah Östlund

Hannah Östlund emerges from the Sigtuna school story first as both a participant in a degrading initiation and one of its targets. That double position shadows the later investigation: she is named among the students who were humiliated there, then becomes a suspect in murders connected to the same circle of former classmates.

Identity and School Years

During the first week of a new school year at Sigtuna College for the Humanities, Fredrika Grünewald and her followers selected three girls for an initiation. Wearing dark capes and homemade pig masks, the older girls took them to a tool shed and subjected them to a humiliating ordeal. Victoria Bergman was one of the three, alongside Hannah and Jessica Friberg. The account identifies Hannah not simply as a bystander but as one of the girls on the receiving end of the ritual.

The initiation also had a second side: Hannah and Jessica were among the students who participated in humiliating the three girls. Annette Lundström’s recollection identifies Fredrika, Henrietta Nordlund, and Charlotte Hansson as those initially blamed, but stresses that more girls were involved. As the investigation traces the school’s past, Jeanette Kihlberg learns that Hannah and Jessica were among the additional participants. A further recollection links the two directly to the ritual’s most degrading element, making their involvement more than an inference drawn from their school association.

The school episode helps explain why Hannah and Jessica later left Sigtuna, but it does not settle what their participation meant or how they understood it. The remembered scene places them on both sides of the school’s violence: they were among the girls subjected to the initiation, and they later took part in humiliating others. That reversal is central to the way Hannah’s past is disclosed, as the distinction between victim and perpetrator becomes difficult to hold in a single, uncomplicated account.

Identification and the Murder Investigation

The school history becomes part of a murder inquiry when Jeanette Kihlberg connects Hannah Östlund and Jessica Friberg to the former Sigtuna circle. After Annette Lundström identifies Hannah, Jeanette learns that both women are missing. She presents the evidence to Prosecutor Kenneth von Kwist, who authorizes warrants: the suspicion concerning Fredrika Grünewald’s murder is classified as reasonable, while the case concerning Per-Ola Silfverberg is described as less compelling. Jeanette nevertheless sees the old school network resolving into a pattern, with Hannah and Jessica among its former pupils.

A photograph supplies a specific link between Hannah and the investigation. In it, her right ring finger is missing, confirming Jeanette’s suspicion; Sofia Zetterlund knows that Hannah lost the finger after a dog bite and amputation. When Jeanette explains that Hannah and Jessica are suspected of killing Fredrika, Per-Ola, and a homeless woman in St Johannes Cavern, Sofia cannot reconcile the accusation with her own memory. Through Victoria Bergman, she remembers the two as apathetic girls who liked dogs, and feels an unsettling emptiness rather than the reaction Jeanette expects. She asks how Jeanette can be certain, while privately finding her explanation too rehearsed. The same distinguishing detail that strengthens the police case thus sharpens Sofia’s disbelief.

Jeanette later examines photographs of Hannah and notes her burned, sunken face, but treats identification as unfinished: DNA samples still need to confirm who the bodies are, and measuring carbon dioxide in their blood may help establish the cause of death. A vacuum-cleaner hose had conveyed exhaust gases from a car’s pipe; because the two women wore seat belts, Jeanette assumes they died by suicide together. The account presents this as her inference, not as a conclusively established reconstruction. Later, a colleague reports that Hannah is dead, confirming the outcome without supplying further circumstances in that exchange.

The Recorded School Past and Posthumous Evidence

Footage found on Hannah Östlund’s computer gives the school history a material record. One film shows masked figures and three girls in a shed; Jeanette Kihlberg and Jens Hurtig recognize Hannah and Jessica Friberg among the participants and connect the scene to the initiation that preceded their departure from Sigtuna. A second film shifts to a pigpen, where former classmates and adults sit around its edge. The recordings make the school’s remembered violence part of the murder inquiry’s evidence, while the latter film’s carefully arranged gathering suggests that Hannah’s files contain more than straightforward documentation. A colleague describes them as having something like a philosophy, though its full meaning is not established in the scene.

Hannah’s death is reported at Fagerstrand, without further circumstances in that exchange. The subsequent investigation also finds a deed among her possessions: she had assumed ownership of a house in the village of Ånge in Lapland and then donated it to Sihtunum i Diasporan, for the foundation to use as necessary. The discovery extends the case beyond the school circle and the murders; it leaves investigators asking why the transfer had not appeared in their earlier review of the foundation’s assets.

Hannah in a Fractured Recollection

During an attempt to speak honestly about what happened in Greece, Victoria Bergman struggles to keep to facts she knows may sound unbelievable. She recalls waking in Nikos’s home and entering the kitchen, where Hannah Östlund and Jessica Friberg sit at the table and criticize her appearance and behavior. The scene places Hannah within Victoria’s recollection not as a distant name from the Sigtuna investigation, but as a voice confronting her in an intimate domestic setting.

When asked whether the two women really said those things, Victoria first nods, then says that Hannah and Jessica are not really two people: there are three of them. The recognition arrives as if it has just become clear to her, but the recollection does not explain who the third is or establish how the scene should be understood. Its importance lies in the instability it introduces: Hannah appears inside a memory whose speaker is struggling to distinguish a coherent account from an experience that resists ordinary factual narration.