Footage of Habersaat's suicide

Footage of Habersaat’s suicide is a recording of Christian Habersaat’s death at his retirement reception, filmed by his acquaintance Villy Kure, known on Bornholm as Uncle Sam. The DVD is given to Carl Mørck’s team by a police superintendent as a way to show them roughly what happened. It makes the suicide impossible to treat as rumor or second-hand recollection: the camera records the farewell, the pistol, and the fatal shot. But it offers no explanation for Habersaat’s death, and its stark record of the act does not settle the separate case that had consumed him.

The DVD and its provenance

The recording reaches Carl Mørck, Assad, and Rose as part of their work on Alberte Goldschmid’s death. The superintendent slides a plastic case across the table, explaining that a friend invited to the reception filmed it. Villy Kure used Habersaat’s own camera; his unfamiliarity with it is apparent in the opening minutes. The DVD is not presented as a polished account, but as a rough document that the investigators can play on their own computers and use to understand the circumstances of the suicide.

Before viewing, Carl Mørck warns his colleagues that the recording may be unpleasant. Rose objects to the suggestion that she needs protecting, and he eventually presses play. The exchange establishes the viewing as a conscious choice rather than an incidental discovery: the team knows it is about to encounter a death on camera, but the recording has been offered as relevant context for an investigation that has brought them to Bornholm. The video’s purpose is practical, though its effect on the room is unmistakably personal.

What the camera records

At first, the camera moves around too quickly and unsteadily to provide a clear account of the room. After several minutes, and after Habersaat has poured white wine, Villy Kure gets the camera under control. It slowly takes in a lofty, run-down hall, doors leading to smaller rooms, a serving hatch in the wall, and paintings of varying sizes and quality. These details place the act within an actual reception, not an isolated or private scene: the recording shows a gathering space and people present for Habersaat’s farewell.

Habersaat stands at the far end of the hall, in formal dress, before windows overlooking a road Carl Mørck takes to be Hans Thygesens Vej, with the sea somewhere behind them. He thanks those who have come. On the recording, he seems calm, as though he has not given thought to what he is about to do. The camera does not supply access to his reasons; it records his manner and the sequence of visible actions, leaving any claim about his inner state beyond what the images show.

Protests from a man identified in the report as the police union representative prompt Villy Kure to zoom out. Habersaat and the wall behind him come into full view. Habersaat draws a pistol and points it at two superior officers standing in front of the cameraman. Both men immediately roll away. Their movement makes visible the danger in the room and contradicts the earlier claim that the pistol had been checked as a dummy. Habersaat then puts the pistol to his temple and fires without hesitation. The camera catches his head being thrown aside; the image records the violence abruptly, and the camera falls to the floor as Habersaat collapses.

The viewing and its aftermath

The recording affects the investigators differently. Rose is gone by the time Carl Mørck turns to her; Assad indicates that she has gone up the staircase. Her departure marks the point at which the footage becomes more than a piece of case material: watching the recorded death has exceeded what she can bear in the room. Assad, by contrast, responds with an analytical observation about the image. He notes that Habersaat was left-handed. The detail is concrete, but the scene does not make it an explanation for the suicide or a resolution of Alberte’s case.

That contrast—Rose’s abrupt withdrawal and Assad’s cool attention to handedness—preserves the recording’s divided function. It is at once an exceptionally direct witness to Habersaat’s death and a limited source: it shows what he did, not why he did it, and it cannot by itself establish what he had discovered about Alberte. The superintendent has supplied it so the investigators can understand the death of a man whose pursuit of the case had become an obsession. Its images clarify the event while leaving the larger investigation open.

Place in the investigation

The team’s journey to Bornholm is not, in Carl Mørck’s view, principally about finding out why Habersaat killed himself. Their immediate concern is Alberte’s death and Rose’s belief that they should have taken up Habersaat’s case earlier. The DVD therefore enters a story already concerned with the difference between an official account and an unresolved suspicion. Habersaat had regarded Alberte’s death not merely as negligent manslaughter and a hit-and-run, but as murder, and had tried to identify the person responsible. The recording confirms the end of his pursuit, not the truth of his theory.

Its evidentiary force is also distinct from the later materials Habersaat left concerning the collision. His notes include a small splinter found along the line between Alberte’s recovered bicycle and the apparent impact site; later technical examination identifies it as plywood, while questioning whether a board recovered from the water could have caused the collision. A plan of the tree, road, and bicycle likewise belongs to the investigation of Alberte’s death, not to the footage of the reception. Read alongside those traces, the DVD marks the cost of Habersaat’s unresolved inquiry without turning his suicide into proof that he was right. The camera closes one visible sequence—the farewell and the fatal shot—while the case that defined his final years remains to be tested through other evidence.