The 55-year-old rapist attacked several of his victims wearing a white hood with holes for the eyes and earned the epithet “The Ghost Man” after assaulting a large number of women in Stockholm approximately forty years ago.
He has since been convicted several times for assault and rape.
Released – despite the risk of recidivism
No later than 2020, when he was convicted of another rape against a woman. He then locked a woman in a bathroom in Kållered, south of Gothenburg, and exposed her for almost two hours. After serving a four-year prison sentence for the assault, he was released in June this year. This is despite the fact that the Correctional Service has assessed the risk of recidivism in sexual crimes as high.
It was not long before, according to the suspects, he would find his way back to his criminal path after he was released. On Sunday, about four months after his release, he was again arrested on suspicion of rape in Kållered. He was later taken into custody on probable cause. The plaintiff is a 25-year-old woman.
– The police are ordered to a location in Kållered after a witness, an acquaintance of the plaintiff, called the police. Suspect and plaintiff met at this location. Fairly shortly thereafter, the rape must have occurred, says prosecutor Mikael Sjöholm.
– I consider the state of evidence to be good. It is witness information at the scene that causes the suspicions to be directed at him and then he is arrested in the vicinity of this incident.
Has the suspect had a similar approach as he had in his previous criminal history?
– I don’t want to go into it. I know what his approach has been at the last two judgments. But I don’t want to comment on that right now.
Convicted for decades for rape
The 55-year-old was due to be paroled in April this year. But due to mismanagement it was postponed by 60 days. He had also refused to participate in the Correctional Service’s treatment program for sex offenders.
Since 2010, the 55-year-old appears with five episodes in the charge register. But his criminal history goes back much further than that.
In 1988 he was arrested on Järvafältet in Stockholm after a large number of women reported that they had been assaulted by an unknown knife-armed man wearing a white hood with holes for the eyes.
He was later sentenced to four years in prison. But well over a year later, he escaped and assaulted two women in an industrial area in Lund.
In 1992, he is sentenced again for new assaults and rapes to 2.5 years in prison. But the repeat offender fled to Greece where he managed to avoid punishment for ten years until the crime he was convicted of ran out of time. Something The Express reported on.
It was only in the mid-2000s that he moved with his family back to Sweden. But the “Ghost Man” was again convicted of new crimes. In 2017, he was convicted of rape and robbery and received 4.5 years in prison. Just months after his release, he was arrested for the rape in Kållered in 2020.
“Very cut”
The prosecutor leading the new ongoing rape investigation reacts to the case.
– I think it is remarkable that this person is again suspected of this type of crime and has committed so many acts of this type. It is noteworthy that he is a suspect once again. Completely remarkable, says Mikael Sjöholm.
Even the victimized woman’s lawyer, Camilla Wikland, thinks it is startling that the “Ghost Man” is suspected of wreaking havoc again. Wikland says that her client was subjected to threats in connection with her coming into contact with the 55-year-old repeat offender.
– It’s terrible. It is clear that people react strongly to this. My client is very cut and feels very bad, both physically and mentally. It feels very difficult for her to read about this in the newspaper and to understand that it is this man who subjected her to rape, says Wikland.