DNA traces offer hope to solve 2005 double murder

Why were the man and his housemate beaten to death on the farm outside Härnösand and who held the murder weapon? Almost 20 years later, the police are still looking for answers about the double murder in Brattås.

A DNA trace from a suspected perpetrator could be what finally solves the mysterious case, the police hope.

It is a daughter of the man who finds the couple on Thursday, June 2, 2005. She has become worried and has gone out to the remote farm in Brattås, to see that everything is okay. There, inside the barn, she finds her father’s idiosyncratic dead. Hours later, the man is also found, his body is hidden under a pile of clothes in the same building.

The couple, who were in their 70s, were killed with severe violence to the head, the police can state. The murder weapon, probably an axe, is gone.

One also discovers that the dwelling house has been searched, carefully. Cupboards and doors are ajar.

The strange thing is that the killer, or killers – two unknown shoe tracks have been found at the crime scene – ignored cash that was easily accessible in the home. They seem to have been looking for something else.

GW: No robbery

The fact that the money was left speaks against the fact that it was a derailed robbery. It is also something that criminology professor Leif GW Persson, who followed the case closely, pointed out.

– In an ordinary elderly robbery, they would never have missed it, he said in a feature about the murders in SVT’s “Crime of the Week” in 2010.

– What you know disappears is a folder with business documents. So in the background there is something financial that he (the perpetrator) wanted to talk about.

The woman’s bank card was the only thing that disappeared that could have had any real value. It got stuck in an ATM the next day, when the wrong code was entered several times. It happened at the only ATM in Härnösand without a camera, and one theory is that they tried to create a false trail.

A retake

But 19 years have passed and there is no answer. No one has been charged with the murders and over time the investigation has cooled. In several rounds they have tried again, without success.

The investigation is now being reviewed again.

– The hope is that we can really give this an honest chance, says Marie Kristiansson, police inspector at a group in the North region that investigates cold cases, with Brattås as priority one.

All material is reviewed again. It is done with an open mind and no theories are ruled out, not even that of a failed robbery attempt.

– It is a strange circumstance that they have left behind money that was quite available. But it is contradictory that you still take the ATM card.

She is sparing with details about what the police know, but based on the shoe tracks, two unknown people are believed to have been at the scene of the murder.

She does not want to comment on Leif GW Persson’s theory of the sequence of events, that the man was killed first and that the woman was assaulted when she saw what happened.

– It’s not something I want to comment on.

Lots of tips

Lots of tips have come in for the investigation, but Kristiansson is convinced that there are people sitting on crucial information and appeals to them to get in touch.

But perhaps she puts the most faith in the revolutionary method that solved the high-profile double murder in Linköping in 2004: genealogy. Namely, there is a DNA trace from the crime scene that is believed to be from a perpetrator.

In order to be able to use the method, however, a change in the law is required, something a government investigation has suggested should take place in January 2025.

– We have topped a large number of people before, without getting a match. But we hope for genealogy, says Kristiansson.

“Thousand drop of blood”

Genealogist Peter Sjölund, who found the killer in Linköping, believes that there are good conditions for moving forward in the Brattås case with the method.

– It only takes one thousandth of a drop of blood to extract good DNA, reasonably there should be something to work with.

Above all, there are good conditions if the person who left the trail has roots in northern Europe or the British Isles, he says.

When Peter Sjölund solved the Linköping case he was alone, now there are five people only in his group. In addition, there are several other teams in the country. Awaiting legal clearance, they refine their methods by finding unknown fathers.

– Previously we found maybe half of all fathers, now we find nine out of ten.

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