The murder of taxi driver Johan Lundberg first appeared to be a robbery committed by Sonja Hökberg and Eva Persson for money. The women confessed together, but later forensic findings separated their actions within the attack and raised new questions about how responsibility had been shared. What seemed like a simple explanation thus became one of the case’s first tests of the difference between an admission and a fully understood sequence of events.

Background and Journey

Earlier that evening, Hökberg and Persson went out for beers. Wallander’s reconstruction noted that one was so young she should not have been served. At some point the women changed places, around the time an Asian man entered the restaurant and paid with a counterfeit credit card in the name of Fu Cheng, bearing a Hong Kong address. The account establishes the timing of these details, but not that the man was involved in the attack on Lundberg.

After a couple of hours, the women ordered a taxi and asked to be driven to Rydsgård. During the journey they attacked Lundberg. They took his money and left, going to their separate homes. Their return to ordinary routines after the killing contrasts with the violence of the assault, which Wallander’s notes describe as involving many hammer blows rather than a single strike.

Confession and Forensic Findings

When police took Hökberg and Persson in, both immediately admitted involvement, shared the blame, and said that money had been their motive. That account offered investigators a clear starting point, but the physical evidence gave the attack a more specific sequence. Fingerprints on the knife belonged to both women, while the hammer bore only Hökberg’s prints.

The pathologists determined that Lundberg had first been struck with the hammer and then attacked with the knife; the injuries had not been inflicted in the reverse order or simultaneously. Wallander inferred that Hökberg changed weapons during the assault, while Persson had the knife in her bag and gave it to Hökberg when asked. The evidence therefore distinguished Hökberg’s use of the hammer from the shared presence of the women’s prints on the knife, without by itself resolving every question of intent or responsibility.

Changing Accounts and Significance

The women’s initial shared confession framed the killing as a financially motivated attack. Later, Persson retracted her confession and changed her story, saying that Hökberg had acted alone. The forensic findings made that revised account a possibility Wallander could not dismiss: the hammer carried only Hökberg’s prints, while the knife connected both women to the weapon. At the same time, the sequence of wounds indicated that the knife was used after the hammer, not as part of one indistinguishable assault.

In Wallander’s developing timeline, Lundberg’s murder sat alongside a second, initially separate thread: the death of computer consultant Tynnes Falk, whose body was later stolen from the morgue and replaced with an electrical relay from the Ystad substation. Wallander did not treat the taxi killing’s apparent motive as an explanation for that parallel case. Instead, he recorded the attack as one strand in a growing pattern whose connections were not yet clear. Its significance lies both in the brutality concealed by the first account of a money-driven robbery and in the way the women’s changing statements forced the investigation to distinguish what they had admitted from what the evidence could establish.