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Welcome to the Serial Killer podcast, the podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weiburg Thun. Several months ago, I made a promise regarding covering a Nordic serial killer.
Well, the show has far more downloads than a Norwegian and Swedish citizens combined. So, it's high time I took you on a journey to the frozen lands of the north, the Nordic region, Scandinavia. In other words, join me in the land of IKEA, Long Winter Nights, Long Summer Nights, Blonde Beautiful People, and the Bastion of Social Democracy. I am, of course, talking about my homeland's biggest competitor, the land of Sweden.
In the hardship years of the 1930s, things were rough in Sweden, as in most of the West. To make matters worse, there was a string of murders being committed under mysterious circumstances. When the man responsible was caught, five human beings had been murdered. The man called himself Tülne Mann, an anagram formed by the English word Manhunter.
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It was a dark and freezing night near Westeros, Sweden. It's located on the shore of Lake Meerleren in the province Vestmanlan, some 100km west of Stockholm. Taxi drivers then Erichson did not like the trip he had just accepted. The person who had called to order the taxi had hesitated when asked for his name, and only reluctantly gave Gottfried Erichson for a name.
In this area in Sweden, this sounded very much like a fake name. There was a bakery near the Vestanos town square, where the client was calling from, and its name was Gottfried's bakery. As Swen was walking to his car, the dispatcher Ivar Björman jokingly called after him. You can always hope it turns out to be a no-show ride.
Those were the last words Ivar ever said to him, as no one saws van Erichson alive ever again. The body was discovered on the morning of the 15th of November 1930, under the Serbo Bridge just outside the small town of Salah. Swen Erichson was shot in the neck with two bullets, execution style. I feel I need to explain something regarding this as I so often end up explaining how mothers are even more painful than one might imagine.
Being shot is, naturally, for the most part extremely painful. If the bullet strikes anywhere other than the heart or the brain, death is a slow process where one usually bleeds out or drown in one's own blood. In this case, Erichson was shot twice in the back near his neck, while the killer was sitting behind the taxi driver in the back seat. Since Erichson was shot in the back, he was rendered immobile immediately from a severed vertebrae, however he did not die.
The killer had dragged Erichson out of the car and dumped him into the river. It was later determined that the cause of death was neither blood loss nor trauma, but drowning. The local police was at a complete loss. There was no apparent motive.
The police actually found, in today's value, several thousands of cronur, the Swedish currency on the victim. Thus it was no murder for profit. It was highly unlikely the killing was an act of revenge or other personal issues, since no one knew that it was Erichson that would end up getting the order for that particular taxi trip. The local newspaper, the Salah Alejonda, wrote that either the killer was insane, or he must have had an unexplainable motive for the misdeeds.
On both counts, it turns out, was the paper fairly close to the truth. However, no one suspected a pale, skinny and asthmatic shop clerk from Salah named Sven Emil Sigvard Nilson, or Thür in the Man, as he later changed his name to, an anagram, perhaps made from the English word manhunter. Some scholars argue that this is pure speculation, however, and that even though Nilson could speak English, he was far more fluent in German, and he simply liked the German sounding Thür in the Man, better than his own rather common Nilson. While growing up, his teacher, Ingeberg Ulsson, barely remembered young Sigvard.
She described the boy as slow, lax, and an introverted child. He was pale and rather pathetic looking. When asked questions in class, the teacher struggled to get a word of reply from the boy. During recess, he never participated in the other children's games, referring to Simblin Lokan, with a sarcastic sneer on his face.
Even though Ingeberg Ulsson did not remember much about Sigvard, he remembered her very well. In later interviews, he talked of how she had been his teacher in Swedish and history. She had used to read his essays aloud to the whole class, berating him and encouraging the class to laugh at how poorly written they were. This was, according to him, how he started to resent school, withdrew into himself, and spent more time daydreaming than actually paying attention.
The young Sigvard sought refuge in the supernatural. He invited the few friends he had to join in on experiments involving hypnosis and telepathy. In his attic room, he had a crystal ball, and he covered the lamps with red scarves to create a proper mystic mood. To complete the scene, he burned incense, made from caramel candy, sandalwood, and the herb, henbane.
Hinduism, yoga, and everything Indian was high fashioned in Sweden in the 1920s. A few years before, in 1913, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in literature to Ranranath Tagore from India. The summer of 1924 turned out to be a pivotal moment in Sigvard's life. He said in a later interview, and I quote, that summer I got to know a Danish magician by the name of Anderson at the Exhibition Restaurant in Salah.
Anderson had come very far in his training and knowledge of India's ancient yoga systems. It would prove an important turning point in my view on what results you can achieve from hypnosis, end quote. Again, according to Thurn the Man himself, Anderson thought he was a natural talent for the supernatural and mystical. Thurn the Man said the Danish magician gave him money to buy books on yoga hypnosis and magic.
Thurn the Man explained that he who mastered the art of yoga could transcend the material, leave the body and travel the universe. You did not need food. A few co-ordance of rice a day was more than enough. Anderson said that Thurn the Man was living proof of that.
The soul was immortal. Death was nothing to fear. Killing people was not wrong, according to Thurn the Man, because you actually did them a favor by freeing their souls from the material plane. Stealing was also not wrong as you simply redistributed something material, which was an illusion anyway.
And so began the murderous gang known simply as the Salah Gang. Thurn the Man recruited members to what he called the magic circle. They were outsiders, just like him. Two of them were the lame electrician Eric Hedstrom, and the one-eyed radio operator Rulan Abrahamson.
They signed contracts and swore oaths of silence and obedience to Thurn the Man. If they refused, Thurn the Man said he would hypnotize them to commit suicide. He told them that the Dane Anderson was one of the circle's leaders, and that the circle's methods were infernal. To cultivate a sense of immorality and crime, the young men watched gangster movies, such as Nitride, or Movies About the Mafia in Chicago.
But it was not just Indian mysticism, hypnotism, dark arts and yoga that influenced the young men. The whole western world, and Sweden, had entered the Great Depression by the late 1920s, and by 1933, one in every eight citizens in Salah got aid from the local poorhouse. A job was suddenly the most sought-after thing in the world, or money anyway, no matter how you came about it. The gang idolized outlaws, such as Al Capone, and according to Thurn the Man's own warped yoga teachings, murder and robbery were no sin.
The new members of the Magic Circle never saw Anderson or the other supposed leaders. But Thurn the Man reassured them that he did indeed receive orders from them. The killing of the taxi driver, Sven Erickson, was only a test, and the upper management now demanded a bigger score. The 6th of September 1933, the local Salah newspaper wrote, and I quote, A terrible fire tragedy occurred on Tuesday morning in Curlefoch at the Labor Office Roadworks, a two-story building that served as office and residence for the construction manager and his housekeeper, burned down to the ground, whereby construction manager Aksil Bergh and his 20-year-old housekeeper Karin Holmburg died in the flames.
End quote. The fire occurred the day before payday. When the police opened the money safe, they found remains of charred paper. They thought the amount of ashes were little, considering the amount of bills that were supposed to have been there.
The autopsy of the two victims confirmed the police suspicions. The local newspaper could three days later report that a terrible crime had occurred, and that the construction manager had been shot from behind. The police stated to the Swedish nationwide newspaper, Dagen's Niheter, that the double homicide was one of the worst crimes in Swedish criminal history, and that the police unfortunately did not have any clues or suspects. Meanwhile, Sigweide Thirnaman did not rest on his latest success.
He dreamt of robbing the National Trade Bank's main office in the center of Stockholm, Sweden's capital city. However, as with many other things in his life, it never came to fruition. Just after New Year in 1934, the police in Salah got an anonymous letter. It suggested that Sigweide Thirnaman and Erulan Abrahamson was behind the double homicide in Köhlwösh.
The author, one year at the headlin, knew many in the gang following Thirnaman, and he warned the wife of Eric Härdstren, a member of said gang, by saying, and I quote, try to keep Eric away from Sigweide as much as possible. Sigweide has a lot of devilry in him, end quote. The police, unfortunately, did not take the letter seriously. It was probably carelessly lost during the investigation as the police were unable to retrieve it later on.
This gave Thirnaman and his Salah gang the opportunity to plan something they hoped would be the perfect crime. Matilda Blomquist was known as an oddball. In her small house, just outside of Westerf Härenebu, she collected everything. In today's society, she would probably have been known as a hoarder.
Every room in her house was full of cardboard, boxes and various bags filled with trash. Among all the mess and trash, it was rumored that Matilda had a lot of money, at least 10 to 15,000 crunals. In today's value, at least half a million crunals were around $65,000. On the evening of the 11th of October 1934, Thirnaman got his gang together.
In his car, he had a drill, a red rubber hose, flashlights, handguns and fake license plates. They set their headlights towards Westerf Härenebu, and Thirnaman casually said they would, and I quote, give the bitch some gas. When they arrived at her little house, they drilled a hole in her wall, pushed in the red rubber hose, attached the other end to the car's exhaust pipe, and started the engine. A couple of hours later, they shone a light through the window.
Everything seemed quiet. They then broke in and ransacked the house. They found two bank books and a wallet. Before they left the cabin, they set it ablaze, by lighting the curtains and the wallpaper.
When Thirnaman, as the last to leave, left the living room, he threw a glance towards the cot where Matilda was sleeping. She was lying there, with her eyes wide open and looking right at him. Later, he stated that this image haunted him for many years. The autopsy of Matilda's charred corpse concluded that she had died from carbon monoxide poisoning.
This is actually not a very painful way to die. The victim, especially if sleeping, breathes carbon monoxide instead of air, and simply dies in their sleep without ever waking up. This way of dying is very common among people dying in fires, and the Swedish local pathologist concluded that nothing indicated that a crime had taken place. Thirnaman had the penalty committees perfect crime, except for one, Thirnaman, very important thing.
The wallet they had taken from Matilda had only contained 6 crunoor, about $26 in today's value. In 1935, Thirnaman's father's clothing store went bankrupt. The family villa in Salah, with all its household goods, was sold at the foreclosure auction. Thirnaman and his family all moved to a small apartment in Greergatan, 30, in Stockholm.
Thirnaman actually tried to show some responsibility by starting a business to support them, but the business was a homeopathy store, and far from a success. Soon, the family was kicked out again. His growing financial troubles did not lessen his dreams of making a big criminal score. Especially his dream of hitting the National Trade Bank's main office on Basagatan in the city center, it was supposed to start with a diversionary action against the city's main post office.
The plan was to plant bombs inside the post office. Some house set the fuse and leave anonymously without anyone noticing. After the bombs going off in the main post office, the gang would then use the ensuing chaos to head over to the bank, kill all the employees there, and grab all the money they could before leaving. It was truly an ambitious and brutal plan.
None of it came to fruition. The Salah gang managed to still get away cars, two of them. Before heading to Stockholm for their big score, they had some unknown business in the small town of Strah, 244km to the south of Salah. Along the way, they stopped the bank courier named Elon Pettershon with a money shipment and tried to take the money.
Elon, the courier, thought otherwise, grabbed the bag of money and started to flee over the nearby field. This was in broad daylight with several witnesses not far away. This did not seem to matter to the man, as he simply shot the courier in the back as he was fleeing. He grabbed the bag of money and actually did manage, till this time, take away a substantial amount, about 20,500 cruners, almost 90,000 US dollars in today's value.
Neither to the man nor his gang, ever got to use much of their loot. By now, to the man had killed five people. Six people had witnessed to the man killed the courier in cold blood on the summer field. Just before this latest murder, to the man had recruited a young man called Orkividlin to join his gang, with promises of making him rich as long as he and, er, I quote, did not mind offing some people.
Viedlin had thought joining the gang was interesting, but he said he didn't want to kill anyone, so he passed on the offer. When Viedlin read about the murder in the field, he realized what a terrible mistake he had made associating with Turnaman and turned himself in to the police. And so it was that on Midsomer Night's Eve in New Year, 1936, Turnaman and four of the other members of the Salah Gang was arrested. The four gangsters were sentenced to life imprisonment doing hard labor.
It's important to keep in mind that this is Sweden, and even though the criminal justice system sometimes was a bit stricter back in 1936, life in prison did not mean an actual whole life tariff. The four gang members that were convicted only served between six and ten years, doing hard labor in prison. Turnaman, it was another story. Due to his depraved actions, his nonchalant talk of how killing was nothing much, but certainly not immoral, and his many claims to know black magic and mysticism, he was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial, and thus criminally insane.
He was sentenced to forced psychiatric treatment, with the judge writing that to protect society, Turnaman should never be released from psychiatric care. However, again, this is ultra-liberal Sweden, even back then a radically more lenient country concerning criminal justice than most other countries in the world. After thirty years in psychiatric care had set it in Saines Island, yes, that is what it was called back then, he was deemed cured and ready to rejoin society. He never gave a good reason for the five people he killed while receiving treatment.
In one of the journals from the Insane Asylum dating from the 22nd of July, 1958, one can read as follows. The patient does not consider himself to be dangerous. He considers the murders he committed as the sort of youthful mischief that are akin to boosting a car or reckless driving. Turnaman did confess to two additional murders, but most scholars considered this to be lies and boasts in order for him to feel important again.
The Swedish police spent considerable effort in tracking down the mysterious Danish magician Anderson, the man Turnaman called the leader of the magic circle that had started the whole criminal affair. The closest they got was the Danish magician Karl M. Andreasen. He had performed in Sallar in the 1920s.
He could vaguely remember a young man approaching him after his show asking several questions. He said he had told the youth that he could indeed have the talent to become a hypnotist, but that was the first and last time Andreasen ever talked to or saw the young man. During the last decade of his life, Turnaman lived and worked using his childhood name Nilsen as a translator in the Stockholm suburb of Abrahamsbury. He also died shortly after his 70th birthday.
He had been very skilled in Sanskrit and had already collaborated with academic researchers during his time locked up in the insane asylum. Officially he was to be buried at the northern churchyard in Stockholm, but he was instead secretly buried in his birthplace of Sallar in accordance with his last will. Turnaman's ashes was scattered in the memorial grove at Sallar's new cemetery, and so ends the saga of Turnaman, the serial killer behind the Swedish Sallar murders. The next week I will bring you another tale from the world of serial killers, maybe even someone you might have waited to help me talk about for some time.
So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. I have been your host, Thomas Viborg Thun, and this podcast would not be possible if it had not been for my dear patrons, pledged their hard earned money every month. There are a specialty of those patrons I would like to thank in person. These patrons are my 17 most loyal patrons.
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