Kigali Postcard

The Kigali Postcard is a manufactured trace of Adele Vetlesen’s supposed journey, created to make her disappearance look like a departure rather than a murder. Tony Leike first forces Adele to write on a blank postcard; later, Juliana Verni travels under Adele’s name and sends a postcard from Kigali, turning the message into part of a false itinerary and a larger criminal plan.

Creation Under Duress

While watching Tony and Adele meet, Sigurd Altman sees Tony approach her with a knife and force her toward his car, whose seats are covered in plastic. Tony hands Adele a pen and dictates a text for her to write on a card. From his hiding place, Altman cannot hear what Tony says, but he photographs the encounter. Mikael Bellman identifies the card as the postcard from Kigali and recognizes that Tony has planned Adele’s disappearance in advance.

Tony later confirms the coercion in his account to Lene Galtung. He says he brought an unwritten postcard from Congo and made Adele write a text explaining her disappearance before stabbing her in the throat. The card’s apparent message is therefore not Adele’s free account of where she has gone: it is a statement composed under threat and intended to support Tony’s deception.

A False African Trail

Tony’s plan for the postcard changes. He says he had originally intended to take Adele’s postcard with him on a later trip to Africa, but devised another scheme instead: he contacted Juliana and sent her to Görna. Juliana travelled in Adele’s name and mailed the postcard from Kigali, giving the message an apparent origin consistent with Adele’s supposed journey.

The postcard thus joins a coerced text to a false identity and a fabricated location. Its dispatch from Kigali makes Adele seem to have left a trace of her whereabouts, while the person who actually sends it is Juliana, acting under Adele’s name. Tony’s confession links this deception to the scheme around Borgny Stem-Myhre: Juliana also went to Eddie van Boorst to obtain the apple Tony intended for Borgny. After Juliana returned, Tony met her in Leipzig, where she became the first person to taste it.

Evidence and Significance

The postcard’s evidentiary force depends on the gap between what it appears to establish and what actually happened. Its message seems to account for Adele’s absence, and its Kigali origin suggests travel; in reality, Tony dictated the text after abducting her, and Juliana supplied the travel trace by sending it under Adele’s identity. The object is not merely a message but a prop in a staged disappearance.

Its role also exposes the reach of Tony’s planning. The same false Adele identity that gives the postcard its apparent credibility is used in Juliana’s trip, while the journey connects the deception to the acquisition of the apple intended for Borgny. Bellman’s recognition of the postcard helps reveal the plan behind Adele’s disappearance; Tony’s later confession supplies the sequence that makes its manufacture and use intelligible.