Man sentenced for the murder of Ellinor, 51 – the sister tells of the shock

Ellinor was happy with life. She loved her nieces and nephews and traveling.

One day she stopped answering the phone – now she is one of 355 women killed by a man she once loved.

Today, Ellinor’s partner was sentenced to 18 years in prison for the murder.

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On September 13, 2023, Johanna’s phone rings at home in Enköping.

It is her older sister’s boss who is worried. 51-year-old Ellinor has not come to work and she does not answer the phone.

– That she doesn’t get in touch if she can’t come to work, that just doesn’t happen, says Johanna.

Johanna starts calling her older sister but gets no answer. A lump of worry begins to grow in her stomach, this is nothing like her sister.

But then the sister’s partner suddenly calls Johanna. He says that he and Ellinor have had a stomach bug and that Ellinor is now lying down and sleeping.

– I thought that; ah, then she’ll probably hear from you.

But the evening passes and all the messages Johanna sends via Messenger remain unread.

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Ellinor chose not to have children of her own. Instead, she spent a lot of time with her nieces and nephews and traveling.

Most of all, she traveled to Turkey and Thailand.

On weekdays, she worked as a registrar in the city of Solna.

– She was a super lovely person, so positive, joyful, loving and colorful, says Johanna.

She met the 42-year-old partner in the summer of 2021 through mutual acquaintances. In questioning, the partner describes the relationship as loving and nice, almost completely without arguments.

Even those around Ellinor initially perceived the relationship as positive, love “deluxe” as a friend describes it in questioning.

– She said she had never been so happy and in love. We thought it sounded good, says Johanna.

For Ellinor’s family, the relationship appeared to be normal.

– He was never rude and such. But we hung out less when she met him. Before, she often came to our house and slept over a weekend, our children were almost like her children, but it became less of that when she met him.

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The next day Ellinor’s boss calls Johanna again. The roommate has called in and reported Ellinor sick, but he sounds affected by something, maybe alcohol. The manager thinks something feels wrong and she is very worried about Ellinor.

Johanna calls her partner and her brother and they get in the car and drive from Enköping to Ellinor’s apartment on Lidingö in Stockholm.

Johanna feels stressed. Ellinor is still not answering the phone, what will meet them when they arrive?

When they swing by a friend of Ellinor’s to pick up a key to the apartment, Johanna becomes even more worried.

– The friend says that during her last meeting with Ellinor, there was a bad atmosphere between Ellinor and her partner. Ellinor had spoken in the first person, something she had never done before.

Johanna now calls the police and tells about her concern about entering the apartment. What if the partner is there? What if something happened sister?

She is advised to wait outside, a patrol is on the way and she should not go in alone.

A patrol comes to the scene, but no one opens Ellinor’s apartment when Johanna knocks, so the police decide to go inside.

Johanna and her partner and brother go downstairs and wait at the gate.

And waiting.

Two more patrol cars are coming.

Johanna asks several times when the police pass by: “Is she alive? I just want to know if my sister is alive?”

Finally, she learns that a deceased woman has been found in her sister’s apartment. She has not yet been identified but the probability that it would be someone other than Ellinor is close to zero.

Johanna hardly remembers the drive home. They stop to eat but no one eats anything.

The whole weekend goes by without anyone from the police calling. Finally, on Monday, Johanna calls 114 14 to get an answer.

– Before I learned that it was confirmed that it was Ellinor in the apartment, there was a small, admittedly tiny, hope that she was not dead. It feels so bad that we weren’t called by anyone, that you don’t get a contact number to call in a situation like this. No one asked on the spot how we were doing, whether we managed to get ourselves back to Enköping.

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When the police come into the living room of the apartment on Lidingö on September 14, the roommate is lying on the sofa and staring at the ceiling.

He is perceived as apathetic and affected but finally says that Ellinor is in the bedroom.

It turns out that Ellinor has been dead for almost two days, while the roommate pretended to her boss and sister that she is sick. In the meantime, he has numbed himself with alcohol.

In questioning, the partner denies any crime and claims to have no recollection of what happened. He doesn’t remember a fight, he doesn’t remember strangling Ellinor as the autopsy later shows. He only says that at one point he went into the bedroom and found Ellinor dead.

– That’s where it gets dark and I act irrationally. I would have called the police and an ambulance at once, of course, he says in questioning.

Only after Ellinor died has her family learned that maybe things weren’t so good in the relationship after all.

That Ellinor has at some point been seen with a blue tira. That the partner had debts and was jealous and never seemed to want to leave Ellinor’s side. Ellinor’s engagement ring was found on the bedside table, a ring she almost never took off.

In questioning, a friend tells of a meeting with Ellinor two weeks before she was killed.

Ellinor said: “So much has happened, so I’m thinking of breaking up.”

– I think that she said that day that she wanted it to be over and that it was completely derailing for him, says Johanna.

Johanna says that after the murder she wrestled with feelings of guilt.

Should she have guessed? Could she have done something?

– At the same time, Ellinor was a person who did not want to show the bad, who did not want to worry anyone. So I’m trying to think about it, that maybe we just couldn’t have guessed.

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Ellinor was buried on 27 October in the same church where she was confirmed 37 years earlier.

The pews were packed with all the many friends she made during her life. It was a bright and nice funeral with lots of music, says Johanna.

Johanna and her parents decorated the coffin with the theme of autumn. Mushrooms from the forest, apples from Johanna’s garden, spruce rice, autumn leaves and a stuffed squirrel. Ellinor loved to go in the forest and pick mushrooms.

There were only two years between Ellinor and Johanna and they had a close relationship throughout their lives.

Johanna will miss her sister so much. Everything they did together, like solving the Melodikrysset on Saturdays via video link, weekend trips, picking mushrooms, concerts or just being together. The close aunt that Ellinor was to Johanna’s children.

– It is impossible to describe the shock of losing your sister in this way. He has robbed us of Ellinor, my parents their daughter, my children their beloved aunt, my brother’s children their aunt. I am both pissed off and disappointed. We will never get our beloved Ellinor back.

– If you’re angry, break things. Don’t kill another human being, how can anyone think they have the right to do that? For us Ellinor was someone and we don’t want her to become just another number in the statistics of women who were taken by someone they lived with. We want Ellinor to be remembered as the fine person she was.

The partner was sentenced on Friday to 18 years in prison for the murder of Ellinor.