Christian Habersaat's Suicide at His Retirement Farewell

Christian Habersaat's suicide at his retirement farewell in Listed makes a public ceremony into the final scene of a long, unresolved case. Before ten shocked witnesses, the retiring police sergeant apologized for the bitterness his pursuit of Alberte's death had brought into his life, condemned the institution he believed had failed her, and shot himself. The act forced Department Q to confront the case he had asked them to take up only the day before—and had made difficult to ignore by dying in front of his colleagues.

The farewell and its small audience

Habersaat seems to have expected more people at the reception than came. He had helped people through hard times, smoothed over injustices, and served a small community; he anticipated seeing retired colleagues from the uniformed police in Nexø and citizens he had assisted. Instead, the civic association's chair and substitute accountant, the police commissioner and his immediate subordinate, the police union representative, and the five or six people he had invited personally made up the gathering. Faced with the thin turnout, he abandoned his prepared long speech and let the occasion unfold.

He did the practical work himself, pouring white wine into plastic glasses and emptying peanuts and potato chips onto foil trays. His old near-neighbor Sam was there to film. Habersaat invited the guests to take a glass, then discreetly released the safety on the pistol in his pocket. The ordinary hospitality and the concealed preparation occupied the same brief moment: the reception was both an official farewell and a scene he had already decided would become something else.

An apology, then an indictment

Habersaat began by thanking those who had come and recalling the calm, quiet policeman he believed they might once have known: a man able to talk down an agitated fisherman holding a broken beer bottle. The response was muted. Sam gave the camera a thumbs-up, while only one other person nodded; some of the others showed agreement with downcast eyes. The contrast between his appeal to a shared past and the room's restrained reaction sharpened the isolation of the occasion.

He apologized for being remembered as the man who had pursued a hopeless case until it tore apart his family, friendships, and happiness. He also asked forgiveness for years of bitterness and said he should have stopped when he could. The apology did not lead to reconciliation with the institution. Turning toward his superiors, he distinguished them from older colleagues, whom he blamed for giving him too little backing and for indifference toward the young woman whose case he pursued. He condemned a police system concerned, in his view, with statistics rather than getting to the bottom of things. A union representative made a quiet protest; another attendee objected to his tone. Habersaat acknowledged that the speech was unsuitable, but he had decided that it was time to end matters and make an example his colleagues would remember.

The shooting and its immediate consequence

With his smile gone and his hand gripping the pistol inside his pocket, Habersaat pulled it out so violently that the people closest to him disappeared from his field of vision. He saw fear and horror spread across the faces of his superiors as he pointed it at them. The narration then states that he let it happen; Rose's later report to Carl Mørck supplies the explicit outcome: Habersaat had shot himself in the head in front of ten witnesses. The police commissioner had seen the event, and the reception's intended record, Sam's filming, gave the farewell a further witness behind the camera.

The death changed the status of Habersaat's appeal. The previous afternoon, he had spoken briefly with Carl Mørck and wanted to involve him in a case. Carl later admitted that he had probably not been receptive enough. After learning of the suicide, Carl went to Bornholm and asked the local police to let Department Q examine the matter. His initial impulse was not to investigate why Habersaat had killed himself, but to resist Rose's insistence that they take on the case; nevertheless, Habersaat's death and his request brought the old investigation within their reach.

The case behind the farewell

The case Habersaat called hopeless concerned Alberte, a popular young student at Bornholm Folk High School. November 20, 1997, had seemed an ordinary day to the roughly fifty students enrolled for the winter half-year, until they learned that Alberte had been killed in a car accident that morning. She was not found until more than a day later, thrown high into a roadside tree. The person who happened to look up as his car passed was a uniformed police officer from Nexø: Christian Habersaat.

Later accounts show how that discovery continued to shape his work. Inge Dalby recalled that Habersaat repeatedly asked her about the name of a man Alberte had been seeing, although she and others had already spoken to police in Rønne. She remembered him returning many times, apparently pressing the school community to identify someone who could have killed Alberte. Her account conveys both his persistence and its effect on those he questioned: she disliked him from the beginning and felt that he was trying to make them point to one of their own. She could not recover the man's name, only that it sounded unusual and began with something biblical.

Habersaat's pursuit had not secured the support he believed the case required, and at the reception he made that failure part of his accusation against the police. His account is his own, voiced in an emotionally charged public farewell rather than independently established as a complete explanation of the case. Still, the subsequent inquiry confirms the central connection between his death and Alberte: he had asked Department Q for help, and the people who later testified about the investigation remembered how insistently he returned to it. The farewell closes Habersaat's career, but not the question that had governed it.