What happened to Terje Johansen?
Dagbladet has met the three neighbors who were last in documented close contact with the 61-year-old from Nykirke in the forest between Horten and Tønsberg.
To them, the mystery and disappearance mystery of Terje is as great and inexplicable as when they learned over three months ago that he was gone without a trace.
It was at 10 o’clock on Tuesday 30 November last year that the handy handyman was wished a good trip by tenant Helge Martin Haugan (65) and drove from the small farm.
He drove alone in his fairly newly purchased car, a gray Isuzi pickup 2016 model with regular, Norwegian LJ signs.
NO PHYSICAL TRACKS: Terje Johansen (61) drove from home at Nykirke between Horten and Tønsberg at 10 o’clock on 30 November. The next day at 5 pm, his car got stuck on an island outside Stockholm. Photo: Private.
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1900 kilometer
The indisputable destination was Arnøy in Troms, 1900 kilometers away via Sweden.
There he had been awarded a house a few days before. Now the bank agreement on the purchase price was NOK 600,000 in order. Terje was going straight to Troms, looked over the house, signed the contract and paid.
– Had a large sum in the account
A couple of the big, unanswered questions almost three months later:
Who drove and left Terje Johansens’ partially battered car in an almost uninhabited area on a military island outside Stockholm, several hundred kilometers off the planned course?
And what has become of the at least 17,000 kroner he had with him in cash?
Both his two mobile phones, his PC and his empty wallet were left in the jammed and abandoned car – with the bank cards in place.
Since he drove out of the forest in Kjettorpveien this morning, November 30, in the direction of the Horten-Moss ferry and the border crossing on Ørje, no one known has seen Terje.
Swedish police have now extended an original missing person case to a possible murder investigation.
LAST STOP: Terje Johansen’s Isuzu pickup got stuck here on the island of Muskö outside Stockholm – 31 hours after leaving Vestfold. Photo: Wanted, TV3 / Viaplay Sweden.
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– Was excited
– Our good neighbor was here on Monday 29 November. He talked excitedly, yes almost upset in a positive sense, about the trip the next day to the holiday home he had come across around where he had intended, says Helge Johansen (83) and his wife Bjørg to Dagbladet.
The couple and the missing neighbor have been on several long car trips together, including in Sweden.
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It was with the greatest obviousness that they looked through the map of Sweden together the day before Terje Johansen was going on a long trip to Vestfold-Troms.
– Neither Bjørg nor Terje like tunnels. So rather a longer, tunnel-free trip through Sweden than Norwegian tunnels in a row, Helge Johansen explains.
Itinerary was ready: to Grums in Sweden and from there north on the E45.
JOYED: Disappeared Terje Johansen lives a few hundred meters further up the road than Helge Johansen (here). Terje was visiting Helge Johansen and his wife Bjørg the day before, and was looking forward to driving to their newly purchased house on Arnøy in Troms. Photo: Øystein Andersen / Dagbladet.
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Fear of murder
– Were there any signs that he had other thoughts about the trip than what he told you?
– No, by no means. We think it was not right that a Swedish police officer in public has mentioned suicidal thoughts as one of many possibilities. He was happy with the house purchase and very happy with the car he had bought for 250,000 kroner two or three months in advance.
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– What do you think may have happened?
– We have never heard that he has said anything about Stockholm or this island Muskö. We had to find out online what kind of place this is. And Terje himself had never driven through a barrier and ravaged like that with his new car, the couple says and adds:
– We do not know. One thought is that the wrong people have known that he had so much cash with him. Or that someone accidentally discovered it when he was shopping for food, smoke or diesel in Sweden. And killed him. Or that he has had a serious malaise along the way, says Helge Johansen.
HERE THE ROAD STOPS: Helge Martin Haugan and his son live in the house in the middle and Terje Johansen disappeared in the house next door to the left. To the right, the workshop and outbuilding on the small farm on the municipal border between Horten and Tønsberg. Photo: Øystein Andersen / Dagbladet.
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Terje drove from them and the meager kilometer home at 7 pm on Monday 29 November. There are two residential houses and a workshop / tool house on the small farm.
The 61-year-old lives alone in one of the houses. Helge Martin Haugan and his son rent the other. Johansen and Haugan also work together occasionally with trade and services.
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17,000 in cash
Haugan explains that Terje had received 11,000 kroner in cash as settlement for a machine just before he left. In addition, Haugan paid his friend 6,000 kroner.
– Could it have been many who knew that he carried this money with him?
– I do not believe. He had a large circle of acquaintances from trade and services. But he did not talk about such things. And no one else lived here.
Haugan describes the departure day on November 30 as follows:
– It had just settled with the house in Troms and with the bank. He was just waiting for two men he had agreed with earlier to work for us for a few days with metals. They arrived the night just before he left in the morning. Terje and I agreed to talk on the phone every day from now on about this job. The two guys stayed here for several days after we finished work to wait for Terje to come home.
New information about the disappearance mystery
– Creepy
– Could he have driven through the barrier on the island himself or been in the car as a hostage?
– He had never treated his own car like that. And he’s eerily fit. There is hardly anyone who had managed to keep him trapped in a small pickup. And he had future plans with fairly newly purchased machines and a fairly new caravan.
– In my head, this is a completely unexplained murder or a sudden and serious illness.
On the day of departure, the phone was tracked to Årjäng just across the Swedish-Norwegian border at 13.35 and to Grums 15.14. It was exactly according to the planned travel schedule with stops.
But then something happened. There are many indications that the phone – and the car – did not turn north on the E45 in Grums anyway. At 16.44 the mobile was in Karlskoga and at 19 in Västerås. Then it was without contact with the telecommunications network on the night of 1 December.
– May have had an errand
The police have previously informed Dagbladet that it is likely that Terje Johansen had an errand on Muskö.
– According to a guard at the navy’s facility on Muskö, Terje had made a mistake and ended up at one of their barriers. Terje said there that he was going to an address in Canada, an area north of the island. It was also in this area that his car was later found, said investigation leader Ulf Sundström to Dagbladet.
Despite the new information, the police have not planned new searches for the Norwegian. Searches have already been made with search dogs. In addition, sonar has been searched in the sea.
Dagbladet corrects: In the paper version of this article, Terje is mentioned with the wrong last name. His real last name is Johansen.
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