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full screen A 50-year-old man is accused of murdering his wife in the couple’s shared home. Archive image. Photo: Johan Nilsson/TT
A 50-year-old man is accused of murdering his wife in the couple’s shared home in Vagnhärad in Trosa municipality.
He has been convicted several times for abusing her – and at the time of the murder would be charged again.
The man is sentenced for the first time in 2018, two weeks after the couple’s wedding. Then there will be a suspended sentence and daily fines.
He confesses and explains at the trial that he just wanted to keep her quiet. She takes back what she said in previous interrogations. The fact that he threw her to the floor several times may have been a misunderstanding on the part of the police.
When he is sentenced again in 2019, the wife describes in police interviews how he wears her down on the floor and starts hitting, hitting and hitting. Clenched fists in the head, neck, face. At the trial, she does not remember the beatings, explains that she bruises easily.
Neighbors who called the police described thumps and a crying woman screaming in pain. The penalty: two months in prison.
The third time, in 2020, he gets four months. According to the verdict, she says he pulls her out of bed, stomps on her head and throws furniture at her. Then she interrupts the interrogation.
– I can’t bear it, he will still be released in the morning, she says.
At the trial, she again declines to answer questions.
Threatened ex-girlfriend
Six months after the first conviction for assault, the man is sentenced for unlawful threats and damage to his ex-girlfriend, with whom he has a son. The day before the son’s birthday, he went to her house armed with a baton and tried to get in by breaking the front door in front of the son.
The ex-girlfriend, he explains in questioning, is “an expert at provoking him”.
The probation service, which is investigating the man due to the conditional assault sentence, assesses that the risk of recidivism is high and advises against probation.
Serious crime with a penalty equivalent to a couple of months in prison, considers the court, which nevertheless settles for probation.
Arrested for murder
In September 2023, it’s time again. The man is arrested and detained on suspicion of once again abusing his wife. He is released pending an indictment that never has time to be brought.
When the man is arrested one evening in January this year, he is not suspected of another assault, but of murder.
Now he is charged at the Nyköping district court with murder.
– I was the one who made the assessment that the suspect should be set free in September. Today I think about whether there was something that could have been done differently, said prosecutor Martina Valentin Lane to Södermanland Nyheter in the days after the murder.
The man denies any crime and claims through his lawyer that the woman died as a result of an accident.