Hammer used in Lundberg's murder

The Hammer used in Lundberg's murder is both a weapon and a decisive piece of forensic evidence: its marks and fingerprints help reconstruct the attack on Johan Lundberg and test the competing accounts given by Sonja Hökberg and Eva Persson.

Identification and Forensic Findings

The hammer appears in the investigation alongside the knife used in the murder. When Nyberg showed Kurt Wallander the weapons in plastic evidence bags, he reported that fingerprint testing had found only Sonja Hökberg’s prints on the hammer. The knife, by contrast, bore two sets of prints, belonging to Hökberg and Persson. That distinction did not by itself establish who had wielded each weapon, but it made Persson’s account—that Hökberg was responsible—possible rather than automatically false.

Reconstruction of the Attack

The hammer’s significance lies not only in whose fingerprints it carried but in the order of violence it helped establish. At first, Wallander’s notes described Hökberg as the passenger who struck Lundberg on the head with the hammer, delivering many blows rather than one, as if in a blind rage. Later forensic analysis supplied a more precise sequence: Lundberg was struck with the hammer first and the knife afterward. The pathologists ruled out the reverse order and concluded that the weapons had not been used simultaneously.

Wallander inferred that Hökberg had changed weapons during the assault. According to the account under examination, Persson carried the knife in her bag and handed it to Hökberg when asked. The physical evidence therefore did not simply identify a weapon or confirm a single perpetrator; set beside the sequence of injuries and the two sets of fingerprints on the knife, it made the attack appear staged across successive acts, with Persson potentially supplying the second weapon while Hökberg wielded it. Nyberg cautioned that the evidence established a possibility rather than a verdict, leaving the hammer’s sole set of prints significant but not, by itself, a complete account of responsibility.

Evidentiary Reach and the Unanswered Motive

The hammer helps narrow the reconstruction of the attack, but it cannot answer the question that continues to trouble Wallander: why the two girls assaulted Johan Lundberg. Their initial explanation was that they needed money; Wallander considered that insufficient, and the weapon itself supplied no deeper motive. As Eva Persson later withdrew her confession and said that Hökberg acted alone, the hammer’s evidence remained concrete but limited: it connected Hökberg to the blows, without resolving Persson’s part in the murder or explaining what lay behind it.

Place in the Initial Account

In Wallander’s first outline of the case, the hammer belonged to an episode that seemed at first to have a straightforward, if brutal, explanation: after drinking beer, the two girls took a taxi to Rydsgård, attacked the driver, took his money, and then went their separate ways. The hammer was the concrete instrument associated with Hökberg’s repeated blows, but that apparent sequence did not settle why the attack happened or how far Persson had participated. As the investigation widened beyond the taxi murder, the weapon remained a sharply bounded piece of evidence: it helped clarify what happened to Lundberg without explaining the larger pattern surrounding the case.