Johan Filip Nordlund

Johan Filip Nordlund (1896)

Illustration from the book Mälaredramat (1900)

“The mass murderer Nordlund. Sentenced to death! "

Johan Filip Nordlund (born March 23, 1875 in Säter , † December 10, 1900 in Västerås ) was a Swedish mass murderer . He killed five people in a robbery on the steamship Prins Carl . For this act he was sentenced to death. Before Alfred Ander, he was the penultimate murderer to be executed in Sweden and the last to be executed with an ax .

biography

Early years

Johan Filip Nordlund was born in Övre Stubbersbo, a village near Säter near Falun . He had two brothers. In 1882 the family moved to Falun. Nordlund ran away from home several times and dropped out of school. As he was tall and strong and looked older, he found a job as a sawmill employee in Korsnäs , which he later said was the only honest job he ever did. After a year and a half, he was fired for a forged bill.

In the following years Nordlund was sentenced to several prison terms for various offenses . He mainly committed theft , including from cattle, which he sometimes deliberately injured with a knife. In 1895 his civil rights were withdrawn for three years . He was most recently sentenced to four years in prison and released from Långholmen prison on April 20, 1900 . He returned to his parents, who were now living in Gävle . After trying in vain to find a job there, he decided - according to his own statements - to live from robbery in the future . From the ten crowns he received on his release from prison, he bought a revolver and stole another.

The raid

On the evening of May 16, 1900, Nordlund boarded the steamship Prins Carl in Arboga , which sailed to Stockholm on the Mälaren and carried around 20 passengers. In his luggage was a knife, the firearms and padlocks with which he wanted to lock his victims. His plan was to rob as many people as possible, take the ship's treasury, and then set the ship on fire. First he stabbed the captain Olof Rönngren, then a woman in front of her two children, whom he also seriously injured, then he shot a man. He shot the helmsman on the navigating bridge . A man shot injured later died in hospital. In the meantime the officer had warned the other passengers who were trying to hide. When the machinist stopped the machine, Nordlund threatened him with a revolver to keep him going. In total, he killed five people and injured eight others. The booty was 845 kroner from the captain's purse, a considerable sum for the time.

The passengers of the Prins Carl managed to alert the crew of the nearby ship Köping . As the Köping approached, Nordlund shot at the ship. He eventually escaped in a lifeboat and managed to go ashore unnoticed. He bought a new suit and shoes in Eskilstuna and had his hair cut. He was disarmed and arrested by three police officers at Skogstorp train station . He is said to have said: "That was my revenge on humanity" and that it was lucky for the police that he did not make it on the train because there would have been more deaths.

Trial and sentencing

On May 18, Johan Filip Nordlund wrote a letter to his brothers and parents. In it he confessed to the crime and wrote that he expected the death penalty . You shouldn't mourn for him and that he calmly await his end because he never felt part of society. The lives of many “good and noble people, beautiful women, even queens and kings” were said to have ended by the ax. His mother and a pastor visited him in prison several times.

During the trial, Nordlund is said to have shown no remorse but expressed his disappointment that he did not kill all of the passengers. In an unsuccessful attempt to escape, he hit two guards with a sharpened metal part of his bed, one of the two men was seriously injured. He was then charged with two further murder attempts in the process. Psychiatrist Frey Svensson examined Nordlund and found that he had an abnormal or psychopathic personality. On June 30, 1900, Nordlund was sentenced to death in Stockholm.

Nordlund did not take the opportunity to ask for mercy from King Oscar II . But he complained by letter to the Supreme Court that he had also been convicted of offenses that he had not committed. On November 13, 1900, the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence and set the date of execution.

On the morning of December 10, 1900, 25-year-old Johan Filip Nordlund was executed by executioner Albert Gustaf Dahlman . In his last letter to his parents on December 5th, he wrote that he had asked God for forgiveness for his sins. While he was strapped to the execution block , he is said to have sung the hymn Gud vare mig syndare nådig och trygg i min Jesu armar (God be gracious and entrust me to the poor of Jesus) . He was buried in the Västerås cemetery, which was only allowed for executed persons in Sweden since 1860, but was still unusual.

The prison guards, who feared the violent prisoner, were said to have been relieved to see Nordlund's execution.

reception

The act and the perpetrator led to a hitherto unknown media hype in Sweden . Several publications appeared on the subject, such as the brochure Mälaredramat with drastic drawings. The newspapers published numerous, sometimes false reports and called Nordlund, for example, Mordlund . So the Svenska Dagbladet exaggerated the number of victims. On May 14, 1938, the Norwegian newspaper Arbeiderbladet reported that Swedish newspapers compared a similar murder in Våler, Norway, to Nordlund's crime. Songs were also composed to popular melodies.

After the fact, there were debates in Sweden about how to end the “wilderness of the youth”. The then governor of Stockholm rejected requests to use the police more intensively. He feared that it would demoralize the police if they beat children. The social democratic politician Hjalmar Branting saw in Nordlund the proof that there are individuals who are born to be criminals. He concluded that criminal law must be changed to protect society from insane individuals. Part of a law passed in 1946 was called Lex Nordlund . It stipulated that persons sentenced to imprisonment could be taken into preventive custody after their prison sentence if they were viewed as a danger to the general public. The Lex Nordlund was never used.

The Nordlund case is mentioned in Last Station for Nine by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (1968) and in Henning Mankell's book The Chinese (2008).

Until 1994, when the gunman Mattias Flink killed seven people in Falun, Johan Filip Nordlund was considered the "worst mass murderer" in the history of Sweden.

literature

• Mälaredramat . Ol. Hansens, Stockholm 1900 ( stockholm.se [PDF; 11.4 MB ]).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Blodsdramat på ångaren Prins Carl och fastigheten övre Bergsgatan 11. In: Gävledraget. Retrieved March 3, 2020 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} Dick Sundevall: Mass murderers Johan Filip Nordlund. In: magasinetparagraf.se. November 6, 2015, accessed March 3, 2020 (Swedish). 
3. ^ Sveriges Radio: Historiska mord: Fasan på Mälaren. In: sverigesradio.se. September 27, 1900; Retrieved March 4, 2020 (Swedish). 
4. ↑ ^{a b} Filip Nordlund, 25, ville bli rik - mördade fem på båt i Stockholm. In: expressen.se. Retrieved March 3, 2020 (Swedish). 
5. ↑ ^{a b} Annika Berg: De obotligt störda begreppet psykopati. P. 82 , accessed March 7, 2020 (Swedish). 
6. ↑ The mass murderer Nordlund. In:  Grazer Volksblatt , July 4, 1900, p. 7 (online at ANNO ). , Middle of the right column.
7. ↑ Massmördaren. In: bispberg.se. November 13, 1900. Retrieved March 4, 2020 (Swedish). 
8. ↑ mass Mordet på Prins Carl . In: Arbeiderbladet . Oslo May 14, 1938, p. 8 ( nb.no ).
9. ↑ Øiebliks-Folkevise . T. Lie, 1900 ( nb.no ).
10. ↑ John Chrispinsson: Stockholm 1900. Popular Historia, Jan. 9, 2002, accessed March 7, 2020 (Swedish). 
11. ↑ Om interneringspåföljdens avskaffande och straffet för grovt narcotic bread mm | lagen.nu. In: lagen.nu. Retrieved March 7, 2020 (Swedish). 
12. ↑ Svennerlind, Christer: Philosophical Motives For the Swedish Criminal Code of 1965. (PDF): University of Gothenburg. P. 6 , accessed on March 6, 2020 (English). 
13. ↑ The Chinese. ( limited preview in Google Book search).