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full screen Catrine da Costa circa 1975. From SVT’s documentary “Document from the inside: The Swedish assassination”. Photo: Private
Hair from a towel found near Catrine da Costa was analyzed over twenty years ago.
Parts of the material are preserved in freezers and could shed new light on the unsolved murder.
– Today, you can get significantly more information so that you can make more comprehensive comparisons with more genetic data than you could before, says Professor Marie Allen.
The towel was found half a meter from Catrine da Costa’s remains and was seized by the police in 1984. Only two decades later, when methods for DNA analysis were developed, was it clear that it was explosives in the extensive murder investigation.
The towel contained hairs that were sent for analysis. One of them came from Catrine da Costa herself.
In total, DNA traces were found from another five people. Who they were was never determined. The only thing that is known is that none of them belonged to the general practitioner and the coroner, the two men who were long the main suspects in the case and whose DNA was compared to the hairs on the towel.
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full screen Marie Allen, professor of forensic genetics in Uppsala. Photo: Patrik Lundin
The DNA analysis was carried out by researcher Marie Allen, today professor of forensic genetics at Uppsala University.
– I received a request from the police if we could analyze several strands of hair. It was about performing a special analysis where we use mitochondrial DNA. It can give useful results, but there is not enough nuclear DNA to do a routine analysis, she says.
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full screen Police forensics examines the site where Catrine da Costa’s body was found. Photo: Ulf Karlsson
More genetic information
Samples from a large number of police investigations are still kept at her institution in Uppsala.
The material is in freezers and is difficult to access – only Marie Allen herself knows which test tube contains the extracts from the Catrine da Costa case.
If there is enough extract left, a new analysis could provide significantly more information today.
– It would be possible to obtain a larger part of the mitochondrial genetic mass today and thus obtain a higher evidentiary value for the DNA analysis. I don’t think there will be enough DNA to do a complete nuclear DNA profile. These are analyzes from hair without a root, which often contains small amounts of DNA.
Marie Allen adds that she does not know how much DNA remains in the test tubes with the saved extracts.
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full screen Samples from a large number of police investigations are still stored at the institution in Uppsala. Photo: Patrik Lundin
Will investigate in the archives
But since the case has now been noticed in a new television documentary, she intends to try to clarify it by going through the archive material.
– But the case is time-barred, so I assume that strong reasons are needed to carry out further analyses.
Do you think the extracts can provide answers to who murdered Catrine da Costa?
– I don’t know that. It depends on whether there is DNA left in the test tubes and if so how much DNA there is.
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full screen Photos of the towel in question. Photo: The police
The terry towel from which the hairs were secured has been shrouded in mystery.
The author Per Lindeberg, who wrote the attention-grabbing review “Death is a man”, says that the towel was purchased from Ditzingers, a home textile company with a slightly more exclusive range that had a store at Norrmalmstorg in Stockholm, among other things.
The terry towel was found folded in half about half a meter from one of the bags containing da Costa’s remains at the first find. There was a stain on the towel, possibly saliva and similar traces from the perpetrator.
Since there were hairs with DNA from at least five different people, in addition to da Costa, it is not unlikely that it could have hung in a toilet or a shower area at, for example, a workplace, Lindeberg believes.
The towel was carelessly thrown away
“There was a moving company just a few hundred meters from find location number two and Catrine da Costa knew a person there. However, the police were never particularly interested in checking him out,” writes Lindeberg in an email to Aftonbladet.
Unfortunately, the towel was later neglected by the police, adds Lindeberg. This means that it could not be re-examined with today’s refined technology.
It is also uncertain whether the hairs that were analyzed are still preserved. Marie Allen does not have them in her archives but adds that they could be with the police.
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full screen Peter Sjölund helped the police solve the double murder in Linköping. Photo: Lotte Fernvall
The expert: Should be re-examined
Regardless of whether the hairs remain or not, DNA extracts with today’s technology could bring more clarity to the case. This is the opinion of DNA expert Peter Sjölund, who helped the police solve the double murder in Linköping.
– If you have a person with whom you can compare, you can see if it is absolutely not that person, or if it is actually likely to be that person, he says.
If hair strands and not just extracts are preserved, completely new possibilities open up. Then you could use the same method that solved the double murder in Linköping.
– Then you can extract a complete DNA and make genealogy profiles. When my team and I try to find unknown fathers using that method, we find nine out of ten. It is an incredibly powerful method.
Do you think the material should be analyzed again?
– Yes, I think so. If there are hairs, you should definitely go to the bottom with the tracks that are there.
The lawyer: Maybe the time is right
The documentary “Det Swedish Styckmordet” contains four parts. At the time of writing, there are two to watch on SVT Play. The two men, the general practitioner and the autopsy, whose real names are Thomas Allgén and Teet Härm, are interviewed in the program about their struggle to get clean. They were acquitted by the district court but were convicted in the eyes of the public for the crime and have since been unable to work as doctors.
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full screenThomas Olsson believes that the time may be ripe for lifting the sentence. Photo: Pontus Orre
Lawyer Thomas Olsson is one of many who got involved in the case. According to him, there are still two legal ways to get the men washed clean, something he developed in SVT’s Aktuellt this week. One is to try to get an appeal regarding the court of appeals judgment where the men’s medical credentials were revoked. In that judgment, the question of the dismemberment of Catrine da Costa’s body was also examined. The court wrote in the judgment that it was beyond all reasonable doubt that the doctors had dismembered her body.
The other way is to turn to the government with an application for compensation ex gratia.
– There are such major flaws in the Court of Appeal’s assessment that it shouldn’t take very much to get permission to lift that judgment. Perhaps the time is ripe for that now, says Olsson to Aktuellt.
Aftonbladet has unsuccessfully sought Minister of Justice Gunnar Strömmer for a comment on the government’s possibility of granting the men redress.