June Habersaat–Frank Brennan Affair

June Habersaat and Frank Brennan’s affair was brief, but its promises and abrupt ending shaped June’s hatred of Alberte Goldschmid and led directly to Alberte’s murder. June later described their relationship as a passionate love affair conducted in secret while she remained married to Christian Habersaat and lived with him and their son. Frank’s assurances that they would build a new life together made the breakup more than a private disappointment: June understood his choice of Alberte as the destruction of the future he had offered her.

The Affair and Its Promises

June told Carl Mørck and Assad that she had fallen in love with Frank and believed they would eventually be together. For a couple of months, they met at a secluded spot where they made love in the grass. The relationship was adulterous: June was still Christian’s wife, and the couple had a son and shared a home. June stressed that she would not otherwise have cheated on her husband, presenting the affair as a commitment she had made because she believed Frank’s promises.

Those promises included a new life away from Bornholm, and Frank had assured her that their age difference did not matter. June’s account makes the island a concrete part of what she thought she was being offered: leaving it with Frank meant escape into a different life, not simply continuing the affair elsewhere. Her belief in that future persisted even after Frank ended the relationship. She later acknowledged that she waited for years for him to return, describing that hope as naive.

Frank’s Rejection and the Discovery of Alberte

Frank broke up with June despite the promises she remembered. She said that she recognized he had found a younger woman from the perfume on him when he came to end their relationship. In retrospect, she believed she had noticed the scent on earlier occasions too, and concluded that Frank had been seeing the other woman while he was also seeing her. June described the overlap, rather than only the breakup, as the worst part of the betrayal.

She followed Frank to keep watch on what he was doing and saw that he and Alberte exchanged small notes beside a large boulder in front of the school. The discovery gave June a pointed comparison with her own affair: she and Frank had also left notes for each other, but at the place where they made love. The repeated practice of secret messages connected the two relationships while marking the difference between them. What June had taken as the private language of her intimacy with Frank was now visible in his courtship of Alberte.

June also went to the commune at Ølene, where Frank told her directly that he loved Alberte and intended to take her back with him to Copenhagen. June said that she hated both Frank and Alberte. His declaration made the choice explicit: he was not returning to the future he had promised June, but was leaving the island with someone else. Her resentment focused on Alberte as well as Frank, even though Frank was the person who had made and withdrawn the promises.

From Rejection to Violence

June’s account links her motive for attacking Alberte to the hope that Frank might then take her back. She said she wanted Alberte removed from his life, and imagined that damaging Alberte’s appearance might make that possible. She later recognized how long she continued to wait for Frank, but by the time she gave her account, she also described having tried to erase him from her life, refusing to hear about him from her former husband, her sister, or Carl. That attempted erasure did not undo the connection between the affair and her violence: June said Frank’s return to her awareness reopened a past she had tried to shut away.

Her preparation for the collision was deliberate. June borrowed her son’s car while he was working at the workshop in Aakirkeby. He ordinarily left it in front of her sister’s house because he ate lunch there. To keep the impact from leaving a mark on the car, June took the snowplow her son had welded himself from the garage at home in Listed. She put it in her own car, drove to Jernbanegade, and attached it to the Toyota’s fender, where it was designed to fit. The borrowed vehicle and adapted snowplow turned the family routine and her son’s handiwork into parts of a concealed plan.

June knew Alberte went out each morning before the others got up, whether or not there was anything there for her to do. She described the encounter as a staged deception: she made it appear that she was driving around Alberte, who smiled at the driver of a snowplow bearing an inscription despite the absence of snow and the fact that Christmas was still more than a month away. June then jerked the steering wheel into Alberte and hit her before striking the bicycle. She said it was very early and that nobody saw her apart from Alberte. The confession therefore resolves the affair’s decisive consequence: June’s rejected hope of a shared life with Frank became a motive for a planned attack on the woman he had chosen instead.