Chapter 3

A General Survey of the Scandinavian Case

As I stated in chapter 1, in the case of Elvira I have obtained and used all pre-trial information (documents, videos, audio-recording) that were sent to the court and the defence counsels. Over and above that, I have also found and used a small amount of additional information.

Many aspects of the Elvira case are exceptional from an international point of view. Other aspects are exceptional in comparison with other Swedish cases. Some aspects of both kinds have already been mentioned. At the time of the trials recovered memory cases were uncommon in Sweden. But a much more important feature of "the Södertälje case", as it is usually called in Sweden, is the enormous amount of documents and tapes. There are 40 police interrogations of the injured party. Twenty-eight of these are audio- and video-recorded dialogue interrogations, which have been transcribed word for word by the police. The 28 dialogue interrogations contain 13 579 lines or statements.

The 40 interrogations of Elvira constitute about half the total body of pre-trial interrogations and other pre-trial documents. The case appears to be the largest recovered memory case ever handled by a Swedish court.

In order to protect anonymity, pseudonyms have been invented for almost all persons involved. The biological parents have been given the aliases Oswald and Helena. Helena is deaf. Oswald is a bisexual immigrant with little schooling. They have two daughters, Elvira and Ingrid, who were 15 and 13 at the time of the police report. Oswald has an aggressive temper, but all the family members agree that he has not physically punished the daughters since they were very young.

I shall ask the reader to pay strong attention to all temporal relations.

The family atmosphere deteriorated even more when Oswald was unemployed for a longer period. On one Sunday evening in September 1991 when things were particularly tumultuous, the mother and the two daughters left the father and moved to the home of one of Elviras schoolmates. The mother of this family will be referred to as Fanny Mollbeck. The Mollbecks are members of a religious sect which strongly believes in the palpable existence of the devil in this world. In addition, Fanny Mollbeck had for many years been deeply interested in the sexual abuse of children. She was well acquainted with the female professor Eva Lundgren (1994), who maintains that ritual child murders are frequent in Sweden. Hence, it should not come as a surprise that Mollbeck already in October 1991 told the social services that Elvira had probably been sexually abused by her father. The only support for this suspicion was that Elvira suffered from anorexia. And the first person who is known to have asked Elvira about abuse, was indeed her anorexia therapist.

In legal trials anorexia has often - and quite erroneously - been invoked as proof of sexual abuse. It was therefore embarrassing when it became general knowledge that the crown princess of Sweden suffered from anorexia. Who might be suspected of being the perpetrator

Mollbecks house was not large enough for so many people. Over the next four months several movements, mostly by single persons, followed each other. But then a new pattern settled. Oswald lived alone in his house; Helena got her own apartment; Ingrid lived with another foster family; and Elvira had returned to the Mollbeck family. She would eventually call the parents of the Mollbeck family "Mummy" and "Daddy", and would refer to her biological parents by their first names.

Elviras psychic state deteriorated seriously, when she began to live alone with the Mollbeck family. But this was not the reason why Fanny found a psychotherapist for her - indeed one who was widely known to be an incest therapist. Although Mollbeck was a layman, she "informed" the licensed psychologist that Elvira had shown signs of having been sexually abused.

We may wonder what an incest therapist was supposed to do for a girl who had no recollections of sexual assaults. We may also wonder about the ethics of a therapist who accepted such a girl for this kind of therapy.

Elvira finally ended up with four therapists: one anorexia therapist, one incest therapist, the school psychologist, and Steve Harvey (not a pseudonym). Harvey propagates that ritual child murder occurs frequently in the United States (although the FBI have found no instance at all). He happened to be in Sweden at the appropriate time, and the incest therapist arranged for Elvira to undergo five treatment sessions with him. The case was also handled by three social workers (SW-1, SW-2 and SW-3) and by a general practitioner who had treated both sisters for minor physical ailments for many years. The incest therapist and the school psychologist had collaborated closely with the prosecutor in previous cases. - It is impossible to estimate the nature of and considerable time spent on informal contacts between these many professionals and, in particular, between them and Mollbeck.

The form of Elviras narratives developed according to a well-known pattern of recovered memory cases. In the beginning she had neither any recollections nor any fantasies. Eventually some cloudy "images" emerged, but she attributed no reality to them. Still later she was torn between doubt and belief. Finally she surrendered to the indoctrinator.

The content of the narratives also developed along a route that can be recognised from numerous other cases. At first Elvira accused her father of genital intercourse, and then likewise of oral and anal sex. Later, her mother had performed Lesbian intercourse. Still later, first the father and then both parents had hired her out as a prostitute at ordinary sex clubs, and this prostitution had started during preschool age. Both parents were convicted on the basis of these accusations. The father got a 10-year sentence (which at that time was the maximum punishment in Sweden for this crime), while the mother got a 5-year sentence.

Until the case was re-opened, Oswald and Helena stood separate trials. Consequently, there are a total of five judgments: two judgments by the district court; the first two judgments by the court of appeal; and the final judgment by the court of appeal, because both parents stood trial together after the case was re-opened. In the court of appeal cases will invariably be handled by three judicial and two lay judges. The rules for the district court are more complex, but in the present cases all verdicts and sentences were decided by one judicial and five lay judges.

Who paid for the expensive incest therapy It was Helena, despite her great economic difficulties after the divorce. She was probably kept in ignorance of the nature of the therapy. Elvira stated in a police interrogation that Mollbeck had told her not to inform Ingrid about the kind of therapy she was undergoing, and neither of presence nor the nature of the criminal suspicion involved.

Elvira would eventually accuse Helena of Lesbian assault and of hiring out her as a prostitute. - If Helena were guilty of these crimes, she could not have been unaware of the risk that Elvira would inform her therapist. Helena did not have such a low intelligence that she could have overlooked such a risk. Her willingness to pay for the treatment must therefore constitute some evidence that she was innocent.



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Uppdaterad: 2009-11-19

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