He is convicted and later acquitted of the murder of Sweden’s Prime Minister Olof Palme. In a new documentary, Christer Pettersson is dragged into the crime scene again. But not as a killer.
On Tuesday it is 37 years since Olof Palme was shot and killed on an open street in Stockholm. In 2020, the entire investigation was closed after the prosecutors singled out the deceased “Scandiaman” Stig Engström as the main suspect.
No conclusive evidence was presented against the former office worker, and far from everyone was satisfied that the great Swedish trauma had been answered.
Long before the Skandian man was singled out, another suspect was in the spotlight. In 1989, the eloquent mixed drug addict Christer Pettersson was convicted of the murder of the prime minister in the district court, but acquitted in the court of appeal the same year. In retrospect, it has emerged that the police officer Thure Nässén used very questionable working methods to get hold of Christer Pettersson.
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The Palm murder: The unanswered questions
The investigation into the Palm murder is closed after Stig Engström has been singled out as the perpetrator.
The last man to lead an investigation into the Palme murder, Krister Peterson, stated that Christer Pettersson was no longer interesting, and is the only person acquitted of the murder.
The most important evidence against Christer Pettersson was the identification of him made by Olof Palme’s wife Lisbeth, who was by his side when he was shot, and who herself was hit in the back.
It has been a bit of a mystery for many years how she could so boldly name Pettersson, and many have believed that Palme’s wife has confused Pettersson with someone else. In a new documentary on SVT, her claims up to her death are vindicated again, and it is argued that she most likely saw Christer Pettersson anyway. But it was seconds after the real killer had run from the scene.
The documentary takes a closer look at the 30 seconds after the first shot that kills the prime minister. The crime scene was at an intersection, and the “new” thing in the documentary is that it analyzes when the traffic lights change from red to green, and how that affects what the witnesses get. Lisbeth Palme turns around and has explained that she sees a person straight in the face.
She believed this until she died that Christer Pettersson was. In the documentary, it is believed, almost by counting seconds and adding up other testimonies, that the perpetrator has disappeared before Lisbeth Palme manages to turn around and look straight at another person – and this person is believed to be Christer Pettersson. He does not want to help Lisbeth Palme for fear of being suspected himself, but instead disappears in the same way as the perpetrator a few seconds before.
A major point of appeal against this theory is that the two perhaps most important witnesses to the crime scene have not mentioned such a scenario with two running men. Lars Jeppson is standing in the alley where the perpetrator ran, and also knew Christer Pettersson from earlier. In 37 years, he has not appointed Christer Pettersson. Nor has perhaps the most important witness, Anders Björkman, who was slightly drunk and was only a few meters behind the couple Palme and the man he shot.
What about the main suspect “the Skandian man”? He is not approached in the documentary in any other way with a text which states that he probably arrived at the crime scene after the 30 seconds, after both the perpetrator and Christer Pettersson have left the crime scene.
There is thus little indication that the speculation will stop as to who actually shot Olof Palme on Sveavägen on 28 February 1986.
Christer Pettersson died in 2004. The Scandian man Stig Engstrøm died in 2000.
