The duct tape binding the victims

The duct tape binding the victims is both a means of restraint and a recurring forensic clue in the investigation of murdered boys. Its use links the boy found at the Thorildsplan discovery site with a later victim, while an unusual impression on the tape complicates the expectation that contact with an object will yield identifying fingerprints. The tape therefore matters not as a complete answer to who committed the crimes, but as a physical trace whose recurrence and anomaly together shape the inquiry.

Appearance and Use

At the later crime scene, the boy’s feet are tied together with duct tape. Ivo Andrić notes that the same kind of binding had been used on the boy found at the Thorildsplan discovery site. The comparison is specific: the tape is described as binding the victims’ feet, and the investigators recognize its recurrence across the two scenes. The evidence does not establish that the same strip of tape was used in both cases, or that tape was found on every boy in the series.

That limit matters because the inquiry contains other repeated features, including evidence of violence and suspected drug traces, but an object’s recurrence does not by itself identify its user. The tape supplies a point of comparison between victims. It does not, on the available evidence, reveal who applied it, when it was applied, or whether the repeated method necessarily means a single perpetrator. Its significance lies in what investigators can compare, not in an identity it can independently prove.

Recurrence Across the Cases

The tape’s clearest connection is between the later boy and the Thorildsplan victim: Andrić explicitly says it was used in the earlier case as well. Jeanette Kihlberg has already been confronted with a sequence of murdered boys. After another boy’s body is found on Svartsjölandet, she concludes that the investigators are probably dealing with the same perpetrator and therefore with a double murder. The broader possibility of linked cases is thus already present in the investigation before the later comparison makes the tape’s recurrence explicit.

The tape adds a material parallel to that larger pattern, but the evidence does not say that it was the reason Jeanette reached her earlier conclusion. Nor does the account establish its presence on the third boy found at Danvikstull, whose body is described as successfully embalmed. Keeping those distinctions clear prevents a repeated clue from becoming an unsupported claim that every scene, every method, and every victim can be attributed to one identical procedure. In the narrative, the tape is a recurring detail within a developing comparison, not a universal signature confirmed at every crime scene.

The Fingerprint Anomaly

During examination of the later victim, Andrić finds fingerprints on the duct tape and draws Jeanette’s attention to what is unusual about them: they have no papillary ridge pattern. The finding is not simply an absence of all contact evidence. Andrić has recovered part of a palm impression, and he describes the visible palm as bare skin. At the ends of the fingers, however, the impressions are blank. His distinction makes the clue more precise than the shorthand idea that the tape has no fingerprints: there is evidence of a hand, but not the ordinary ridge detail expected at the fingertips.

Jeanette asks whether the person who bound the boy’s ankles was wearing gloves. Andrić rules that out. He mentions that perpetrators in other cases have rubbed silicon on their fingertips, but says that this is not what happened here. He does not yet know why the fingertips leave no prints. The tape therefore preserves evidence of bare-skin contact while withholding the ridge pattern that could make such contact conventionally identifying. The examination raises a question without resolving it, and the investigators have to hold the observed facts apart from possible explanations.

Investigative Significance

The discovery changes how the tape can be read. It is not merely a repeated restraint that can be placed beside a similar restraint at an earlier scene; it is also the surface on which an unexpected trace appears. Andrić’s examination narrows what can be said: the person was not wearing gloves, at least part of a bare palm left an impression, and the fingertips did not leave papillary ridges. It does not establish why that pattern occurred or provide an identity for the person responsible.

For Jeanette, the anomaly complicates an existing pattern of care and apparent carelessness. Earlier scenes had yielded no fingerprints, whereas this tape produces an impression that is both useful and incomplete. The contrast prompts her to consider the possibility that the absence of ordinary prints is itself meaningful, but that remains a question rather than a forensic conclusion. The clue also depends on specialist examination: Andrić identifies the missing ridge detail, explains what the palm impression does and does not show, and resists treating an unfamiliar result as an answer before he understands it.

As an object in the investigation, the duct tape joins two functions that pull in opposite directions. It physically binds the victim, and it retains a trace of contact; yet the trace fails to supply the standard identifying pattern investigators might seek. Its recurrence supports comparison between cases, while its blank fingertips preserve uncertainty about the person who handled it. The object’s evidentiary force is therefore real but bounded: it helps make a connection visible without, on its own, proving who committed the murders.