Elvira's and Allmo's/Mollbeck's Attitude to Publicity

Elvira enjoyed publicity even before she left her parents. She in fact competed with a schoolmate. Elvira won the first round when a newspaper published an article about how it feels to have a deaf parent. But then the other girl saw the Virgin Mary. The Orthodox Church recognised this as a genuine miracle, and the 17-year-old girl was recognised as some kind of a saint.

Eva Lundgren, a professor of the sociology of religion, had for decades claimed that ritual child murders are frequent in Sweden. She was Allmo's/Mollbeck's friend a long time before the trial. She was also involved in the Södertälje case. Elvira told the police about the child murders for the first time on 1992-11-22. Note that professor Lundgren was interrogated by the police three days later, on 1992-11-25.

In 1994 Lundgren published a book in Norwegian. Its title means Let the Little Children Come to Me. Pp. 195-216 are devoted to a description of the Södertälje case. Elvira is given the pseudonym "Mathilde". Lundgren takes all Elvira's narratives about ritual murders at face value.

She made her own interviews with Elvira. But evidently she failed to check whether Elvira had said the same things to her as she did to the police. As I stated above, I have not yet met one single girl whose accusations were false (whether she was indoctrinated or had lied on her own initiative), and who has managed to recall what she had said from one occasion to the other.

(The girl with the [alleged] phenomenal memory was no exception. Whenever she got a question for which she had not prepared the answer in advance, she could not even recall what she had said a few minutes earlier.)

At a later date Jan Guillou (2002) wrote an excellent book on witchcraft. He had unearthed many facts that must have been unknown and surprising even to some scholars in the field. He also devoted one chapter to contemporary witch cases, viz. the many absurd trials concerning sexual abuse of children. He mentioned the case of Elvira.

On 2002-09-16 a large article of protest was published in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. It was signed "Södertäljeflickan" (The Södertälje Girl). But it was manifestly written by someone who had much greater academic proficiency than Elvira had. The text propagated the ideas Eva Lundgren is known to have, and even her style could be recognised.

On 2003-10-04, likewise in Dagens Nyheter, Nuri Kino wrote a large article about the Elvira case. The newspaper boasted of the great amount of research that had gone into writing this article. – But obviously the "research" did not involve checking whether what Elvira had told Kino agreed with what she had told the police.

Toward the end of the preceding chapter I mentioned the book by Kristina Hjertén von Gedda's (2005), in which 58 pages were devoted to a presentation and analysis of the Elvira case.



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Uppdaterad: 2009-11-19

Yakida