Åkeshov is a setting for the widening public spectacle of the search in Judarn Forest: its stables and subway station bring police, reporters, local residents, and animals into the same anxious landscape. The search begins as an effort to find one disoriented man, but the high-profile case and a mistaken identification rapidly enlarge its scale, while the disturbance at the stables supplies an unexpectedly vivid counterpoint to official urgency.

Setting and the search

The stables near Åkeshov housed the King’s sheep for the winter. During a Sunday morning walk, an older woman saw a man in a hospital gown nearby and called the police because she feared the sheep might be in danger. The first patrol car arrived ten minutes later. Officers entered the stables with their guns ready, and the sheep grew restless as the search proceeded.

The man they sought was wounded and dazed, dressed only in a hospital gown, and believed to have no accomplices. Although the weather had softened, it remained only a few degrees above freezing; police expected that he could not stay hidden in the forest for long. The search was already under way when the woman’s call added the stables to the places officers had to check.

Public attention and mistaken certainty

The search drew exceptional resources: five police dogs, twenty officers, and a helicopter, an unusual deployment for a hunt of this kind. The case’s media profile was part of the reason. Reporters had crowded around Weibull’s nursery beside the Åkeshov subway station, and two officers were assigned solely to handle them. Police also wanted to demonstrate that they were making the fullest effort, even on a Sunday morning.

The urgency was heightened by the discovery of a man whom police assumed was Benke Edwards. A wedding band engraved with the name Gunilla supported that identification, but the narration makes clear that it remained an assumption. That uncertainty sits beneath the public confidence that the search would soon be resolved: at half past seven, with dawn creeping beneath dripping trees, officers believed they would find the fugitive before lunchtime.

The stables as spectacle

The police search disrupted the sheep pen. Several sheep escaped into the central walkway, and the building filled with a mass of anxious animals, loud bleating, and a piercing cry that drew still more police. After officers finally decided the stables were clear and left with their ears ringing, a ram slipped through the front door. An older officer with farming relatives tackled it, caught it by the horns, and dragged it back inside.

Only after coaxing the ram back did the officer realize that the bright flashes he had noticed during the scramble were press cameras. He had assumed the matter was too serious for journalists to want such a photograph. The image of a uniformed officer wrestling a ram thus becomes part of the very media spectacle the police were trying to manage. Soon afterward, a press base was established outside the search perimeter.

The search loses its certainty

The operation’s technology and manpower did not produce quick results. For another couple of hours, the helicopter’s infrared camera found nothing, and the dogs’ noses detected no trace. Only then did speculation begin that the man might no longer be alive—that the search was for a corpse rather than a living fugitive. Åkeshov’s ordinary landmarks, from the winter sheep stables to the subway station beside the nursery, are therefore caught between practical local concerns and a much larger, increasingly uncertain manhunt.

The surrounding narrative also follows local movement by train: a man’s monologue continues to Vällingby, where Yvonne and Tommy get off, while he remains aboard as the train prepares to turn back. Against the fixed perimeter and concentrated police search, this onward-and-returning journey gives the wider area a contrasting sense of everyday passage.