ULSBERG (VG) Among scattered furniture, used tires and old appliances, all the traces of the Ronny Melby stop (46). After two weeks of intense investigation, the police still don’t know what happened to him.
Updated only now
Ulsberg, a place along the E6 in Rennebu where you have to choose whether to drive to Østerdalen or to Oppdal if you are coming from the north.
A place you drive.
And here, right on the road, on a property covered with greenery and surrounded by forest, the police believe that Ronny Melby (46) was subjected to fatal violence.
All its traces end here, during the evening and the night between 23 and 24 September.
But the violent episode is not familiar to the accused who lives there.
– He has explained himself to an episode, but does not want to characterize it as violence, says his defender Kjell Myrland.
– What did you explain about the episode?
– I can’t say much about what he explained, but the police are concerned about the kind of environment my client is in and the environment Ronny Melby is in.
A “drug-laden environment,” says Myrland.
– How charged?
– It was a drug environment, mostly hashish, I think. Not with really heavy addicts.
The police are contacted
Five days after this episode, someone worried about Ronny contacts the police.
It will be the start of intense police work on a scale rarely seen in Trøndelag.
But Ronny Melby is still missing. And the police don’t know for sure what happened to him.
Scanned the area for a week
The forest is dense for kilometers around the green-covered square. There are no neighbors and it is difficult to locate the place when you rush by on the E6.
Near the Orkla gutters.
Starting from the property, the police searched the area around the buildings three times in a circle. First with the dogs, then with the people who walked in chains.
In the river they searched with a drone and the crews who walked along the river. They checked with Trønder-Energi, which has a power plant further down, about where you end up if you flow downstream.
– How to search blindly
No sign of the missing 46-year-old. On Friday 7 October the in-depth research ended here. It was challenging terrain to look for.
– We didn’t go any further. We could go on forever, there are high valleys and cliffs. At some point you have to stop, when you have no more information. Then it really becomes like searching blindly, because we don’t know which way it’s going, says police investigator Eivind Guldseth in Trøndelag police.
Extending the circle just a little would have meant another week of searching when the police were as deep into the ground as they were.
The barricades have now been pulled down. The place is abandoned. All windows are covered.
The man who has an address here was jailed and charged with exposing Ronny Melby (46) to fatal violence. He denies having anything to do with the matter.
What happened here in Ulsberg?
He should live there
Ronny Melby (46) has lived in Selbu for several years. Before Christmas last year, he bought a house in Budal, another small place in Sør-Trøndelag, about eight kilometers from Ulsberg. He recently lived in Lundamo in Melhus, his mother told the Sør-Trøndelag newspaper.
It is located along the E6 between Trondheim and Ulsberg.
But in the time before his disappearance, he had remained here, according to the police:
In the messy property that houses, among other things, a tired wooden barracks and a brick building with broken windows.
– We know that Ronny has been on and off for some time. But it’s not a question of weeks or months after all. It’s been days, as far as we know, says police investigator Eivind Guldseth in Trøndelag police.
According to the defendant’s defender, Kjell Myrland, Ronny Melby should now be able to live here with the defendant. The two were more acquaintances than friends and had known each other for a few years.
– Should you be nice to Ronny and let him live there?
– It was kind of friendly service, I think.
– In exchange for something?
– Not that I know.
– Constantly happy
On the way between Trondheim and Ulsberg, we stop at several places to talk to people. Nobody we meet has seen it.
Nobody knew him now.
But someone knows who he is. In a car workshop in Ler, Jon Are Svardal recalls 25 years back in time, when everyone knew who they were and met at village parties.
– Ronny was cheerful, funny. He was always happy. I can’t say I saw him angry.
But she hasn’t spoken to him for probably 25 years. Now he wonders what could have happened.
– And who can be so horrible to do these things, if something criminal happened then. It has not been proven. Or if he has simply sunk into the earth, to escape himself. Nobody knows anything about it.
Sigrun Dybvad is a legal aid attorney for Ronny Melby’s family, who has no answers on what happened to him.
– The family is going through a terrible time and has normal reactions to a completely inhumane situation, he says.
– Do everything possible
The police have not yet progressed to the point where they can rule out the obvious assumptions they started with two weeks ago:
- Did Ronny have an accident?
- Did he want to disappear himself?
- Ronny is alive but is he being held captive somewhere against his will?
– The more time passes, the more likely we are to think he is not alive. We have been completely open about this, says Detective Officer Bente Bøklepp.
He says that when you examine the tracks, you will often find signs that someone is alive. They didn’t do it in this case.
Although no doors are closed, the police still believe that it is very likely that he is a victim of violence, as they have been since then he requested the pre-trial detention of the accused Wednesday of last week.
– The suspicion has neither weakened nor strengthened since then, I would say. But we’re doing everything we can to get clarity on this and other assumptions, says Bøklepp.
– How common is it that it takes so long for someone to be found?
– We actually have too many examples of this, says colleague Eivind Guldseth.
– By the way, that people never meet again. We think these thoughts too. We sincerely hope that we will be able to go all the way and do everything we can to make it happen.
