The Forest of Judarn is associated with the search for the man who had lived with Eli, as the investigation into the Vällingby murders enters public view. The forest’s significance lies less in any described physical features than in the way it becomes a named search area—and in the newspapers’ effort to give a face to a crime that had initially seemed to happen without explanation.

Setting and surrounding landscape

The story presents Blackeberg as a modern suburb with little sense of an inherited past. Children have no substantial local history to study: the old mill, tobacco king, and unusual buildings by the water belong to a distant past with little connection to the present. Before the apartment blocks, the site had been forest; the new settlement has no church despite its nine thousand inhabitants. This landscape of recent construction and apparent distance from history helps establish the contrast between everyday suburban life and the violence that unsettles it. The text does not, however, identify the earlier woods or the hollow where a boy’s body is found as the Forest of Judarn.

Woodland and public remembrance

The boy’s body is discovered in a hollow in the woods, with a large tree at its center. Police tape marks off the site, and Oskar recognizes the familiar pattern of candles and messages left in remembrance. His scrapbook already contains similar cases. The scene thus becomes both a place of investigation and a focus for public mourning, although the account names the location only as woods, not as the Forest of Judarn.

A later newspaper account revives public attention to the Vällingby murder after interest has begun to fade: flowers at the hollow have wilted, candles have burned down, and the police tape has been removed. The report supplies images of the boy and the hollow, but no photograph of the killer. Without a likeness of the perpetrator, the crime seems to have simply happened, leaving readers without a person on whom to fix their attention or fear.

The search and its significance

At a station, Oskar sees the front page of Expressen carrying a photograph of the old man who had lived with Eli. He finds that the paper devotes five pages to the search in the Forest of Judarn and the so-called ritual killer, including background material and a photograph of Hakan Bengtsson. The report says that Hakan had been in Karlstad and had been missing for eight months, and appeals to the public for information about his whereabouts. Oskar’s discovery changes the newspaper from a general account of the murders into a warning about someone personally connected to Eli; anxiety takes hold as he reads.

The Forest of Judarn therefore enters the story through the mediated geography of a manhunt. Newspaper pages connect the woods, the investigation, and Hakan’s image, while Oskar’s response gives that public search immediate personal stakes. The broader contrast remains with the suburb’s supposed lack of history: violence first appears as an unexplained event, then acquires a public record through photographs, reporting, and the search for a named suspect.