Murder of Katarina Jakobsson

Ebba Katarina Jakobsson was born on 29 October 1950 in the town of Lund in Scania, Sweden. In 1969, Jakobsson started experiencing symptoms of schizophrenia. As a direct consequence, she was admitted to the Malmö Östra psychiatric hospital in Segevång, where she received pills and injections of antipsychotics to combat her illness. For most of the 1970s, Jakobsson remained intermittedly admitted to the psychiatric hospital. From an early age, she expressed interest in Indian mythology, and as such engaged on two failed pilgrimages to India. On the first trip following graduation from her gymnasium in 1970, she was accompanied by her then boyfriend Patrik Nilsson. However, due to a gastroenteritis inflammation, the pair were forced to abandon their plans after reaching Pakistan. According to Nilsson, it was during the aftermath of this pilgrimage that Jakobsson first was admitted to the psychiatric hospital. Jakobsson was similarly also forced to cancel a later solo pilgrimage in Pakistan during a later part of the 1970s, choosing to not leave Sweden again. By the mid-1970s, Jakobsson and Nilsson were avid cannabis smokers, hanging out on Gustav Adolfs torg on a regular basis. In 1974, Nilsson was sentenced to two years imprisonment by the Malmö District Court for drug possession; shortly after his release in 1976, Jakobsson gave birth to their child, a son who they named after a Hindu God. However, Jakobsson descended further into her mental illnesses, having outbursts and started getting hygienic issues; as such, Nilsson filed divorce and was granted custody of their son. The two remained friends despite this. By the summer of 1979, Jakobsson was granted parole from the Malmö Östra hospital and moved into a two-room apartment on Almbacksgatan 14B in Möllevången, an apartment which was regularly visited by a home care assistant. By this point, Jakobsson was on disability pension and didn't hold a job. Jakobsson first met Bengt Hjalmarsson by chance on 26 July 1979 in the cafeteria of a Tempo in central Malmö. After being asked to guard her belongings whilst going to the toilet, Hjalmarsson became intrigued with her Indian literature and struck up conversation with her once she returned. Over the following ten days, Hjalmarsson would visit Jakobsson's apartment almost every day, often bringing a camera along with him as he had a desire to photograph Jakobsson. In early November 1979, Jakobsson moved into Hjalmarsson's apartment on Kornettsgatan 20B in central Malmö. She was last seen alive at roughly 19:00 on the evening of 7 November on Evagatan in Eriksfält after visiting her parents, who noted that she was "unusually meager and depressed". Jakobsson had told her parents she was awaiting unspecified guests at her apartment, and needed to prepare for their arrival. ==Murder and cannibalism==

Katarina Jakobsson returned home to her and Bengt Hjalmarsson's shared apartment on Kornettsgatan 20B during the evening of 7 November 1979. According to Hjalmarsson, the two shared a dinner before he retreated into the apartment's bedroom to read. According to his later testimony, Jakobsson proposed sexual intercourse and cuddling to Hjalmarsson, something which prompted him to retrieve a pair of recently purchased handcuffs, He subsequently entered the bathroom, filling his bathtub with water. When Jakobsson followed Hjalmarsson into the bathroom, he allegedly pointed at the bathtub and exclaimed "shut up, or I'll drown you". Following this, Hjalmarsson "grabbed hold of her chest, throwing an arm around her shoulder" before forcing her head into the bathtub. He continued pushing her chest downwards until her body eventually "stopped moving" and he was certain she was dead. He flayed the skin on her skull after decapitating it because he "was curious how it looked like", comparing it to images and drawings in anatomical books he possessed. Jakobsson's hair was kept in plastic bags in his wardrobe. He poured the contents of the plastic bags over the wharf edges in hopes that the organisms living in the water alongside the heavy Maritime traffic in the area would destroy the evidence. What brought attention to the already "macabre" case was the cannibalism involved during the disposal of Jakobsson's body. According to sources, Hjalmarsson kept 44 kilograms (97 pounds) of Jakobsson's flesh, including her liver and heart, which he partially consumed over the course of several meals between 10 and 17 November 1979. During police questioning, Hjalmarsson admitted that he consumed her flesh by initially frying it, but opted to boil it as "frying it made the meat chewy and rubbery", as opposed to boiling it which "softened it". He served the flesh with portions of rice, macaroni and potato alongside glasses of red wine. Eventually, Hjalmarsson "got tired" of consuming Jakobsson, and left between 17 and 20 kilograms (37,5 and 44 pounds) of her meat in the freezer-fridge to rot. In the opinion of journalist Joakim Palmkvist, cannibalism was the solution to two of Hjalmarsson's issues; he could dispose of Jakobsson's body discreetly at the same time he saved money by not having to purchase items in the grocery store. ==Investigation and trial==

Early arrests By coincidence, Bengt Hjalmarsson was arrested by the Malmö Police Authority for a separate crime on the afternoon of 8 January 1980, two months after the murder. Hjalmarsson's mother had reported her son to the Helsingborg police regarding a burglary that occurred in her house on Bogesundgatan in Ramlösa on Christmas Eve 1979. Hjalmarsson had stolen valuable books, an older mortar and pestle and flint axes. Due to Hjalmarsson's uncooperative nature during the arrest, the police obtained a search warrant to his apartment on Kornettsgatan on 9 January. During their initial search of the apartment, police found it "cluttered" with boxes stacked on top of each other. In addition to Hjalmarsson's mother's belongings, the police also found roughly 400 books belonging to the Malmö City Library worth over 100,000 Swedish kronor. Hjalmarsson spent two nights in the police station's jail cell, but was released on the afternoon of 10 January due to a lack of reason to keep him detained over his crimes. On 10 November 1979, Katarina Jakobsson's parents reported her missing to the Malmö Police as she had not met Nilsson or their son, which was scheduled to have occurred on 8 November. Police officers visited her Almbacksgatan apartment for routine checkups in both November and December 1979. During both visits, the responding officers noticed subtle changes, such as a changed door lock, that suggested Jakobsson was still alive. Together with the help of a locksmith and Jakobsson's father, the police forcibly entered her apartment once more on 16 January 1980, upon which they discovered Hjalmarsson hiding in the bedroom closet. When several paper notes in Hjalmarsson's apartment were analyzed, the police found a train ticket which linked him to the burglary of his mother's house, alongside several postcards referencing Jakobsson and her pension, which Hjalmarsson had claimed. Bengt Hjalmarsson's trial started on 18 June 1980, where he was represented by criminal defense lawyer Börje Svedberg, who, due to a certification issued by a psychiatric doctor, requested that "Hjalmarsson did not need to be present during the rest of his own hearing", as there was a "serious risk Hjalmarsson would become aggressive" or suffer from other mental issues if he were to be interrogated in court. Although Prosecutor Ragnar Emanuelsson argued against this, Judge Ivar Adell relented and transferred Hjalmarsson back to his psychiatric care for the remainder of his hearing as "Hjalmarsson did not verbally respond to anybody in court". The rest of the trial in absentia lasted roughly five hours, during which both the prosecutors and Svedberg argued for psychiatric care as a penalty. On 25 June 1980, the final verdict was announced; Hjalmarsson was sentenced to indefinitive closed psychiatric care at St. Lars hospital. Hjalmarsson did not appeal his sentence. == Perpetrator ==

Early life Bengt Erik Hjalmarsson was born on 18 March 1949 in the Scanian town of Helsingborg, Sweden. His parents divorced fairly early during his childhood, and he did not keep in close contact with his two younger siblings, as they did not share his interest in philosophy and books. As a child, Hjalmarsson was described as intelligent, and he skipped a class in elementary school. At pre-school, he was determined to be aggressive in playing to the extent that he was sent to a psychiatric evaluation in Borås. He was later examined by nationally famous doctor Bertil Söderling in 1956, who suggested skull trauma to be present, even though x-ray scans did not show anything wrong. He left school with relatively high grades, despite frequent bouts of truancy during his later time at secondary gymnasium school. In 1971, Hjalmarsson started serving his military training as part of Sweden's mandatory conscription at the Norrbotten Regiment in Boden, where he was stationed as a Jäger soldier. However, Hjalmarsson deserted after failing to return home from a leave, as he was not comfortable with his stationing. By the time of his arrest for burglary in 1980, the crime of deserting had been prescripted due to a 1975 discharge issued by a psychiatric doctor in Lund at the request of Hjalmarsson's father. At the time, Hjalmarsson was living off of student welfare fraud, falsifying signatures claiming that he succeeded in several courses at Lund University. By 1975 he was earning 10,000 Swedish kronor annually through fraud, a figured which had doubled by 1979. In 1976, Hjalmarsson moved to Malmö into an apartment from which he eventually got evicted during the spring of 1979 for failure to pay rent. With the help of his father, Hjalmarsson moved into his new apartment on Kornettsgatan 20B in June 1979. Time in psychiatric care and death Bengt Hjalmarsson legally changed his name to Erik Ludvig Gyllenfjäder, which was approved by the Swedish Intellectual Property Office on 6 November 1986. Gyllenfjäder received several permissions from the psychiatric hospital in St. Lars to continue his studies at Lund University, where he studied Latin. The following month, his leaves were withdrawn and he was once more institutionalized after he broke Lund University's restraining order against him. Palmkvist interpreted it as a death threat. After the year 2010, Gyllenfjäder was "essentially a free man", living anonymously in an apartment in Kroksbäck, Malmö, where he died on 12 January 2015 at the age of 65. His cause of death was not released to the general public, but it did not include criminal intent, causing Palmkvist to speculate that it was either illness or suicide. ==See also==