Stensparken is where Oliver Jovic, a Kosovo Serb drug dealer, was found murdered with a Coca-Cola bottle forced into his throat. The site becomes central to a question of whether Sonny Lofthus’s confession explained the crime or helped conceal who was responsible: a fingerprint recovered from the bottle did not belong to him, and its position suggested it may have been left during the killing rather than ordinary drinking.

The Jovic murder

Jovic was trying to enter the cocaine market when he was found in Stensparken. The police understood the killing as a warning to potential competitors, an interpretation that gave the crime a place in the struggle over the drug trade. Although an investigation was opened, it made little progress, and the case remained unresolved for a time.

The murder later became one of the convictions attached to Sonny. After his arrest for the death of an unidentified girl, Sonny also confessed to killing Jovic. In his interview account, he said that he and Jovic had met in the park to settle a debt; Sonny lacked the money, Jovic threatened him with a gun, and Sonny knocked him down. The police found the account plausible in light of Sonny’s wrestling background.

The fingerprint and the confession

The physical evidence complicated that explanation. Police had lifted a fingerprint from the bottle, but it was not Sonny’s. The print was a thumbprint taken from the bottom of the bottle. Kari reasoned that someone drinking normally would not put a thumb there, whereas a person forcing a bottle into someone’s throat might do so. Her reading turned an overlooked forensic detail into a challenge to the confession’s apparent plausibility.

The police had not found a match for the print in their database, and the case had received little attention while it remained open. Kari suggests that once Sonny supplied a confession to an old, stalled investigation, the police accepted it without giving the fingerprint clue adequate priority. Stensparken thus marks not only the crime scene but also a failure of inquiry: a confession closed the case in practice even though the available evidence did not simply confirm it.

Criminal networks and institutional failure

The novel places the park case within a wider system of drug dealing, trafficking, and police corruption. Simon recalls old rumors of a police mole passing information to the person controlling much of Oslo’s drug and sex-trafficking activity; that figure was known as the Twin. The rumors had never been publicly proved at the time, but later revelations give them substance.

In a diary entry, Ab Lofthus describes two corrupt officers working together under the Twin’s influence. Their partnership defeats the simple assumption that a single police traitor must be responsible: each can provide an alibi for the other, while both turn a blind eye to drug dealing, trafficking, and murder. Simon separately confronts Iver Iversen over Iversen Property’s business with the Twin, alleging that the company laundered proceeds from drugs and trafficking in exchange for fictitious losses worth hundreds of millions of kroner. These disclosures widen the significance of the Stensparken murder: its unresolved fingerprint and convenient confession belong to a story in which criminal power can operate through compromised institutions as well as street violence.